'You have one too'
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Ah! perdão, minha amiga; não me lembrava, que você tambem tem na face um signalsinho semelhante; esse devéras fica-te muito bem, e dá-te muita graça;
Ah, forgive me, my dear; I forgot that you too have a similar little mark on your cheek; that one really does suit you well and gives you much grace;
The comedy sharpens into pure catty theatre. Reminded that her interlocutor bears 'um signalsinho semelhante', a similar little mark, the speaker executes the classic manoeuvre — a lavish compliment to the friend's spot, laid down as the platform for the demolition of Isaura's, which is coming in the next breath. 'Esse fica-te muito bem', that one suits you beautifully; the flattery is a loaded gun. Guimarády keeps the beauty-mark at the exact centre of the scene, now the pivot of a small social duel between women. The whole chapter has narrowed, by the end, to this one point on Isaura's face, discussed and compared and weighed by a roomful of strangers. The reader, who alone knows the mark's future as an instrument of capture, watches it become the most talked-about thing in Recife — the disguise's single fatal particular, hidden in plain sight and endlessly remarked.
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