A Escrava Isaura 3.82 · 3.82

Here the offer shows its price. 'Quanto eu daria para obter a tua liberdade' — what I would give to win your freedom — sounds like generosity until the condition arrives: 'se com ella pudesse obter também o teo amor', if with it I could win your love as well. Freedom is not offered; it is proposed as a trade, her liberty for her affection, and the same verb, 'obter', to obtain, governs both — as if a woman's love could be acquired on the same terms as her manumission. In this book 'liberdade' is the holy word, the thing the breeze and the bird have and the captive does not. To hear it dangled as the down payment on a seduction is to see exactly how power talks when it wants to seem kind.

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