'A very bad sign'
Read the full text in our reader
Tanto peór para elles, retorquio o doutor; eis ahi um indicio bem máo, e que mais me confirma em minhas desconfianças.
So much the worse for them, retorted the doctor; there you have a very bad sign, and one that confirms me the more in my misgivings.
Geraldo turns even the ruse against them: that they could be talked into appearing is, to him, 'um indicio bem máo', a very bad sign. His suspicion has become unfalsifiable — hiding is suspicious, and so is coming out of hiding. There is no move Isaura can make that the doctor's cast of mind will read as innocent. Guimarády sketches, in this small figure, the closed circle of prejudice: once a person is suspected, every action confirms the suspicion, and the accused can prove nothing. It is the predicament of the powerless before the powerful gaze, and it foreshadows the graver version to come, when Isaura will face not a dinner-party sceptic but the law itself, before which her every quality — her beauty, her refinement, her very innocence — will be turned into evidence of what she is accused of being.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open A Escrava Isaura 10.64 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the A Escrava Isaura — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
A Escrava Isaura 10.64 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/escravaisaura/10.64/