A torrent of tears
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cahio de joelhos e debruçando-se sobre o tamborete, em que fiava, desatou uma torrente de lagrimas.
she fell to her knees and, leaning over the stool on which she spun, loosed a torrent of tears.
The detail that breaks the heart is 'o tamborete, em que fiava' — the little stool on which she was spinning. Isaura falls not onto a symbolic altar but onto the humble seat of her daily labour, the workroom furniture of an enslaved woman's ordinary day. Grandeur and squalor collapse together: the heroine of sensibility, weeping like a tragic queen, does so over a spinning-stool. Guimarães keeps the scene rooted in the real texture of the senzala even at its most operatic, so the reader never forgets that this anguish is happening to a working woman among her tools, not to an abstraction of virtue.
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