Word: madrid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Madrid society was all aflutter over the gala season that lay just ahead. Balenciaga, Rodriguez and other select dressmakers had fallen two months behind in deliveries. Printers had run short of cards for engraved invitations. Property owners had jammed the classified ads with offers of "apartments suitable for diplomats." After four years of boycott, some Western nations had sent ambassadors to the government of Dictator Francisco Franco...
...diplomatic complications were added spice for society's new season in Madrid. Plain Madrileños kept their eyes on the main course. "All this gilt and polish is very fine," observed one citizen. "But let's hope that something more substantial and necessary will come afterwards : good green American dollars...
...country. He admired English life and especially English regard for individual liberty. He became a British subject, found himself an English girl. But like many a refugee, he thought frequently of the sights & sounds of home. Antolin at 50 was an honest and troubled man. His visit to Madrid, under the Franco amnesty, was to help him decide once for all if he could roll back ten years, give up England and return to Spain and his family...
...Antolin finds Madrid a city swamped in extremes of poverty and black-market corruption, ruled by ubiquitous police, in & out of uniform. His own family drives him to alternating spells of despair and disgust. Señora Luisa, his wife, has become a stranger, ugly, shrewish, and a convert to the rage for spiritualism in which many of the poor seek a solace they cannot find in the church. Juan, the younger son, is an underpaid factory worker and a Communist. Daughter Amelia, frightened, hypocritical and ill, wants only enough money to buy her way into a convent and escape...
Spain's civil war drove Lazaro to Paris. He stayed at the Ritz, filled his suite there with treasures. Victorious Franco liked Royalist Lazaro no better than had the Republicans, used his Madrid house as a police headquarters. Lazaro spent World War II in Manhattan. Art dealers got to know the trim little man with the beard of a Biblical patriarch. He was still voraciously snapping up old masters...