A Escrava Isaura 3.47 · 3.47

The teasing rounds off — 'até que em fim sempre se levantárão!', so you've finally got up at last! — the affectionate mock-reproach of a wife who has been up for hours (she has already, we know, dusted and tidied is Isaura's chore, but Malvina has been about the house) and finds the men only now appearing. It is a small, warm, ordinary line, and its ordinariness is exactly what the scene is built on. Guimarães lets the domestic comedy run — the late risers, the cheerful scolding — so that the darkness underneath it is felt as darkness. Malvina's morning is genuinely happy; she has, we will learn in a moment, a joyful purpose in coming to find her husband. The reader alone carries the weight of what she cannot see.

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