Through the gate
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Isaura cosendo-se com a sombra do muro, que rodeava o pateo, abrio o portão, que dava para o quintal, e desappareceo.
Isaura, hugging the shadow of the wall that ringed the yard, opened the gate that gave onto the garden, and disappeared.
The escape becomes silent motion. 'Cosendo-se com a sombra do muro' — sewing herself to the shadow of the wall — is a magnificent verb, coser, to stitch or sew, as if Isaura made herself part of the shade, a seam in the darkness. After a whole chapter of speech, she acts without a word, and the prose contracts to match: three verbs, a wall, a gate, and 'desappareceo', she disappeared. The vanishing is the chapter's last gift to her — invisibility, the fugitive's first freedom. The gate that 'dava para o quintal' opens onto the river and the boat, and Isaura passes through it out of the house that owned her, for the first time moving of her own will toward a life she has chosen.
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A Escrava Isaura 9.144 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/escravaisaura/9.144/