Word: fernando
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mann's Death in Venice: an aging writer goes down to the Italian seaside to rest in the sun. Tabori takes this theme, twists it around to fit a modern situation and his own ends. The aging writer is Stefan Farkas, noted Hungarian dramatist. His train reaches San Fernando one day in the summer of 1943. He has been told that San Fernando will be "safe" for months to come. He wants a vacation and a rest. The war has made him nervous...
...Communists, either. He meets an Italian in San Fernando who talks like a Communist. "I knew Trotsky in Vienna," Farkas tells him; "I didn't like his accent and the way he played chess. I regard Communists with the same suspicion as Jesuits." Farkas laughs, takes off his monocle and wipes it with his silk handkerchief. The Italian seems to be a friendly, good-humored fellow. All Farkas wants is the friendly, good-humored world he has always known. The Italian reminds him that such a world no longer exists, that for some people it never existed. Farkas shrugs...
When the news of Italy's surrender finally comes, San Fernando celebrates. Farkas' Italian friend is in fact a Communist, and sets up shop as the local commissar. Rumors fly fast: Mussolini has killed himself; Hitler has taken poison; the British will arrive any minute, accompanied by the Chief Rabbi of London and the entire Navy. San Fernando strings up a few Fascists, hangs out homemade Allied flags, dances in the streets...
...Burbank, Calif, one day last week, a big shark-bodied plane rose from the Lockheed Air Terminal, circled out across the San Fernando Valley and headed east over the mountains. It was a notable event and a red-letter day for Pan American Airways: that was the first of the fleet of Lockheed Constellations for Pan Am's globe-girdling routes...
...When Don Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, third Duke of Alba, was dying, the priest asked him if he had forgiven his enemies. The 16th-Century tyrant answered: "I have no enemies; I have hanged them...