Álvaro the eccentric
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Aquelle senhor Alvaro sempre é um excentrico, um exquisito; tudo quanto é novidade o seduz. E onde iria elle excavar aquella pérola, que tanto o traz embasbacado?...
That Senhor Álvaro is always an eccentric, an odd one; everything that is novel seduces him. And where might he have dug up that pearl who leaves him so goggle-eyed?
The ladies redirect their fire at Álvaro, dismissing his taste as mere love of novelty — 'tudo quanto é novidade o seduz', everything new seduces him — and picturing him 'embasbacado', gaping, goggle-eyed, over his find. There is wounded vanity in it: these are women accustomed to being the objects of young men's admiration, and Álvaro's rapture over an unknown has cost them their audience. The crude verb 'excavar', to dig up, is contemptuous — as if Isaura were a curiosity unearthed from nowhere — and it unknowingly touches the truth that she did come from nowhere they can trace. Guimarády keeps the comedy sharp and the pathos underneath: the woman being sneered at as Álvaro's exotic novelty is a person in hiding for her life, and the ladies' petty resentment of losing the room's attention is played against the reader's knowledge of what that attention could cost her.
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