A Escrava Isaura 10.75 · 10.75

The catalogue of praise moves down from eyes to hair, the blazon of the beloved's features that Renaissance and Romantic poetry alike delighted in. Isaura's abundant dark hair — the 'negras e opulentas madeixas' the narrator praised in Cap IX's Mater Dolorosa tableau — is here reduced to a ballroom's admiring gasp. The same hair that framed her grief on the workroom floor now draws the covetous delight of strangers. Guimarády lets the reader feel the strange distance travelled: the features anatomized here in the language of gallantry are the very ones described, weeks and a chapter ago, in the pose of a tortured saint. The body that was nearly shackled is now the object of a connoisseur's approval, and both, in their way, refuse to see the whole person.

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