'Not from these parts'
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Não, D. Laura; é a primeira vez que a vejo, parece-me que não é desta terra.
No, Dona Laura; it is the first time I have seen her; it seems to me she is not from these parts.
'Não é desta terra' — she is not from these parts — is truer than Dona Adelaide knows, and doubly so. Literally, Isaura is a stranger to Recife, come from far south; more deeply, she does not belong to the world of these ladies at all, being of the enslaved caste that their comfort rests upon. The phrase also carries the faint sense 'not of this earth', which the men used admiringly of a celestial apparition and the women use to mark her as foreign, other, not one of us. The same otherness reads as divine to the enchanted and as suspect to the envious. Guimarády lets the innocent remark hold all three meanings at once, and the reader feels the ground of the disguise, always, just beneath the small talk.
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