By the wounds of your Divine Son
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E’ uma humilde escrava, que com as lagrimas nos olhos, e a dor no coração vos roga pelas vossas dores sacrosantas, pelas chagas de vosso Divino Filho: valei-me por piedade.
It is a humble slave who, with tears in her eyes and grief in her heart, beseeches you by your most sacred sorrows, by the wounds of your Divine Son: help me, for pity's sake.
Isaura ends by placing her suffering inside the Virgin's own. She pleads 'pelas vossas dores sacrosantas, pelas chagas de vosso Divino Filho' — by your sacred sorrows, by the wounds of your Son — appealing to Mary as the Mater Dolorosa, the mother who watched her child tortured to death. The kinship is exact and pointed: an innocent handed over to cruelty, a body threatened with the whip and the wound. Isaura, herself about to be shackled, asks the one mother in heaven who knows what it is to watch innocence broken. And she signs the prayer with her lowest title, 'uma humilde escrava' — a humble slave — the same word Leôncio spat as an insult, offered here to God as the whole of her standing and enough.
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