'The hairs of his head'
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principalmente agora em que de certo empenhou os cabellos da cabeça para arranjar a alforria da filha,
especially now, when he surely pawned the very hairs of his head to arrange his daughter's manumission,
'Empenhou os cabellos da cabeça' — pawned the very hairs of his head — is a vivid idiom for beggaring oneself utterly, staking everything down to the last thing one owns. Leôncio uses it to belittle: Miguel is now stripped bare, so how could he provide? He turns the father's supreme sacrifice into evidence of the father's uselessness.
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