A Escrava Isaura 10.67 · 10.67

The scene pivots on 'eil-os, que chegão' — here they are, arriving — the storyteller's flourish that ends the talk and produces the woman herself. Álvaro's confident 'convenção-se com seos proprios olhos', be convinced with your own eyes, invites the whole group to look, and the reader flinches at the invitation. To be looked at, by everyone at once, is the precise catastrophe Isaura's life has been arranged to prevent, and here the man who loves her throws open the curtain and displays her to a room of appraising strangers. The theatrical staging is deliberate: Guimarády has us watch the watchers, the three sceptics turning as one to see. Everything the chapter has built — the disguise, the caution, the dread — now hangs on how a crowded ballroom reads the face of Isaura, and on whether, among all these eyes, there is one that will see too well.

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