How beautiful in her anguish
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Quanto Isaura era formosa naquella supplicante e angustiosa attitude! oh! muito mais bella do que em seos momentos de serenidade e prazer!.. se a visse então Leoncio talvez sentisse abrandar-se o ferreo e obcecado coração.
How beautiful was Isaura in that suppliant and anguished attitude! Oh, far lovelier than in her moments of serenity and pleasure! Had Leôncio seen her then, perhaps his iron, blinded heart would have softened.
The narrator steps forward to gaze, and the gaze is double-edged. Isaura is 'muito mais bella' in suffering than in peace — a Romantic commonplace, that anguish ennobles beauty, and the reader should feel its ambivalence: there is something uneasy in a scene that makes a tortured woman's pain into an object of aesthetic admiration. But Guimarães turns the convention to a moral purpose. The whole force of the tableau is a counterfactual — 'se a visse então Leoncio' — if only he had seen her, his 'ferreo e obcecado coração', his iron and wilfully blind heart, might have melted. The beauty is offered not to the reader's appetite but as a measure of Leôncio's blindness: the one man who should look is precisely the one who has left the room.
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