Word: cabezon
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...With Cabezon the reader roams Madrid's narrow streets and the back alleys where chamber pots are emptied, enters an apothecary's shop where the contents of every vial are itemized, and loiters in the city squares-always with an ear to the edicts pronounced by the town criers...
...action begins when Cabezon, now a young man with considerable experience on the streets, puts his life at risk to shelter and then marry Isabel, a Jew fleeing the Inquisition that has already taken her parents. Condemned a heretic for harboring a Jew, Cabezon wanders Madrid only at the deadest hours. When he returns one morning to find his pregnant wife missing, Cabezon undertakes the journey that constitutes the second half of the novel...
Drawing on chronicles, annals, travelogues and other historical documents of the period (from which he quotes liberally), Aridjis masterfully reconstructs the life on the highways, attending to the peculiarities of every town that Cabezon visits. Following tips that he receives in the various Jewish quarters through which he passes, Cabezon traverses a Spain of madness and leprosy, wanton torture and gruesome auto-da-fe's. Ironically, Cabezon intersects the paths of Torquemada himself in Avila...
...highways in the summer of 1492, Cabezon witnesses the horrific mass-expulsion of the Jews-their lives and possessions are now prey to roadside thieves as they march to the southern ports. Finding his wife and child in Puerto de Santa Maria as they prepare to embark, and unable to detain them, Cabezon promises to make his fortune and find them in Flanders. He then takes the road to Palos in search of a man he has heard of named Columbus. The novel closes, "We left port by way of the Saltes River, half an hour before sunup, on Friday...
...Cabezon is a complex narrator who describes what he sees with microscopic precision, but who generally withholds his own feelings. Aridjis employs a stilted language of stylized historical resonances, slipping only on occasion into the passionate lyricism the reader expects of one of Mexico's foremost poets...