Word: juanito
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This first novel is an attempt to get inside the mind of Juanito, an illiterate village Indian from the mountains of Mexico. Every tourist there has seen his like: thin-headed, with a mop of coarse black hair, large-eyed, flat-nosed, full-lipped, looking with impassive dignity from beneath a frayed straw hat. Juanito is the stuff of revolutions, but his private revolutions fail, and he has learned only one thing in life: how to die well...
...series of accidents propel Juanito from Naolinco, his native village, into the outside world. He becomes a fisherman, a night clerk in a hotel, a hired pistolero, and finally returns home to take over Naolinco as its all-powerful cacique, or village chief. He goes from faded canvas pants to the garish socks, yellow shoes, felt hat and necktie that for him are the power symbols of the ruling señores. Juanito kills his first man from passion, his second for self-preservation, his third and fourth from pride. Yet when a lethargic justice at last executes...
...drawn by Author Clément, a Frenchman who has lived in Mexico and Colombia, Juanito has animal strength and animal cunning. In a time of trouble he might have become another Pancho Villa. In a time of peace he is simply an anachronism, tolerated by the señores because he keeps his village quiet, but readily expendable when he grows too big and too troublesome. Sitting in his death cell, Juanito reflects that of all his crimes the most serious was the driving of the schoolteacher from Naolinco. Too late he recognizes that "the schoolmaster had been right...
Royal Waiting. The only issue that Don Juan balked at was the extensive theological training which Franco had planned for Juanito. But at the commodious villa in the fashionable Madrid suburb of Chamartin where Juanito and his retinue will take up residence some time in January, there will be a chaplain to guide the princeling's spiritual life...
...kingmaking takes time. Under Franco's 1947 Law of Succession, the prince must be 30 before he takes the throne. Presumably, therefore, another 13 years will elapse before Juanito, even if his education is found to be satisfactory, is eligible to step into the shoes of a 75-year-old Franco...