Her tresses on her shoulders
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atiradas em desordem pelas espaduas as negras e opulentas madeixas, voltando para o céo o busto mavioso plantado sobre um collo escultural,
her black and opulent tresses flung in disorder across her shoulders, turning to heaven the tender bust set upon a sculptural neck,
The portrait completes itself in marble and disorder. 'As negras e opulentas madeixas' — the black, abundant tresses, loosed and thrown across her shoulders — and the throat 'escultural', sculptural, as if she were already the statue she is about to be compared to. The word 'negras' does its quiet double duty, as it does throughout the book: here descriptive, the colour of her hair, and yet never able to shed, in 1875 Brazil, the other weight the word carries. Guimarães praises the beauty of a woman the law calls black and property in the same breath, and the reader is meant to feel the contradiction the whole novel exists to expose: this sculptural loveliness is, by statute, a thing that can be shackled.
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