A Escrava Isaura 10.89 · 10.89

The little turn to Dona Emília keeps the danger circulating: perhaps she 'saiba quem ella é', knows who she is. Every few lines the chapter returns to this refrain — who is she, does anyone know — because the whole suspense of Isaura's situation lives in that question. Each time it is asked and left unanswered, the disguise holds; but the reader is made to feel how many people are idly turning the question over, and that it needs only one to hold the true answer. Guimarády keeps the possibility of exposure hovering, passed from mouth to mouth like a lit taper in a room full of tinder. The ladies mean only gossip; the structure of the scene means dread. Dona Emília, it turns out, knows no more than the rest — but the question has been asked once more, and the reader's nerves tighten each time.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear 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:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I
• Dom Casmurro — Brazilian Portuguese