A Escrava Isaura 3.72 · 3.72

Her paralysis has a small, poignant logic to it: she waits. 'Esperando em vão, que lhe dissesse o que queria' — waiting in vain for him to say what he wanted. She takes his claim at face value — he said he had something to tell her — and so she stands, obediently, expecting words, giving him the benefit of the doubt her position all but requires. The 'em vão', in vain, is the quiet knife: the words never come, because there were none; the only thing he 'wanted' was the looking itself, and perhaps what the looking is building toward. Her patient waiting for an explanation that does not exist measures the gap between them exactly — she is still inside the fiction of a normal exchange, a servant awaiting an instruction, while he has already left that fiction behind for pure appetite. She is being decent in a situation that has stopped being decent, and does not yet know it.

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