By the ashes of her father
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pelas cinzas ainda quentes de seo pae, ha poucos dias fallecido, pela alma de sua mãe, que tanto lhe queria, não martyrize a sua infeliz escrava.
by the still-warm ashes of your father, dead but a few days, by the soul of your mother who loved you so, do not torture your unhappy slave.
Isaura pleads by the two graves that should bind Leôncio to mercy — his father, dead only days (the Commendador of Cap VI), and his mother, the old mistress who raised Isaura like a daughter. 'Pelas cinzas ainda quentes de seo pae' — by the still-warm ashes of your father: the appeal reaches for the one lever that ought to move him, filial piety and his dead mother's love. It is exactly the bond he perverted a few passages back, when he claimed his mother's affection as licence to keep Isaura. She turns the same dead woman into a plea for mercy that he had turned into a title of possession. The reader hears both uses at once, and sees how far he has fallen from what his mother wished.
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