Word: aguado
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Author Suárez' soberly bitter story centers on three characters and is concentrated in one night. Carmen is the young daughter of middle-class parents who has turned prostitute to help pay the bills. Angel Aguado is middleaged, rich and impotent. He seeks "a purity based on frustrated sexuality," and Carmen is the girl he has "elected for his despair." Manolo is a street boy possessed of enormous dignity, though he lives on petty chores and thievery. He is deeply attracted to Carmen, though he has seen her only at a distance...
...world: beggars, thieves, drunkards, street vendors. For them the naked problem of life is survival; the eternal lesson: "All of us are like beasts . . . because nobody loves anybody; because between men there isn't anything but deception, hate and suffering." For Carmen and the wealthy Angel Aguado, who spend the night going from bar to bar together, the problem is different. Aguado's case is insoluble, since his sickness consists in being a man incapable of functioning as a man. Unlike Aguado, who torments himself, Carmen has found serenity in "the very hugeness of her misfortune...
...final hours of the night, Carmen and Aguado meet Manolo, the street boy, in a bar, and as Manolo looks at the girl, there shines in his eyes "something innocent, hopeless and impossible." Aguado takes them for a drive in his car. In the sierra above Madrid, he smashes the car against the rock wall of the mountain and kills Carmen and himself. As he dies, he thinks, "Everything is useless, absolutely everything in this world." Manolo survives. He robs Aguado's corpse of 12,000 pesetas and starts back toward Madrid on foot, thinking, "I have to live...