A passion that feeds and dies
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Casára-se por especulação, e como sua mulher era moça e bonita, sentira apenas por ella essa paixão, que se ceva no gozo dos prazeres sensuaes, e com elles se extingue.
He had married as a speculation, and since his wife was young and pretty, he felt for her only that passion which gluts itself on sensual pleasures and is spent along with them.
He had married as a speculation, and since his wife was young and pretty, he felt for her only that passion which gluts itself on sensual pleasures and is spent along with them.
The anatomy grows colder and more exact. 'Casára-se por especulação' — he married as a speculation, a financial move (Chapter II showed us the marriage was the lure that fetched him home from Paris). For Malvina, young and pretty, he felt 'apenas', merely, an appetite — and the verb Guimarães chooses for it is savage: 'que se ceva', which fattens itself, 'cevar' being what one does to livestock at the trough. His passion feeds like a penned animal and, once fed, 'com elles se extingue', goes out with the pleasure that fed it. This is the portrait of a man who can want a body and never love a person, in whom desire is a hunger with no afterlife. The reader is being shown the machinery precisely so that, when the same machinery turns on Isaura, we understand it is not love pursuing her but a beast that has caught a new scent.
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