Who is Senhora Pimentel in the novel, The Air You Breathe?

Senhora Pimentel is Graça’s mother and Senhor Pimentel’s wife. She is the spouse who financially supports Riacho Doce, but her gender bars her from running it. She has white skin and “a halo of red curls” (13). Dores believes that now Senhora Pimentel could be diagnosed with “anxiety or depression” (19). She had “frail health,” which Dores attributes to the expectation of her “to be two women at once”—both “meek and decorous” and “forceful and self-assured” (19, 18). She pours herself into grooming Graça into a respectable woman worthy of becoming a lady of any high-society city or country home. Senhora Pimentel shows Dores compassion early on and allows her to join Graça’s lessons, even if only to groom her into a head servant. She insists upon exposing the girls to music in the city, which ignites their shared passion for music and shapes the courses of their lives. Her early encouragement of Dores and Graça’s learning and singing is significant, and they feel her loss after her death in childbirth.