Word: madrid
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...novel is narrated by Juan Cabezon, descendent of converted Jews. Orphaned as a child, witness to his mother's violent murder, the protagonist has survived in the Medieval town of Madrid by his wits, with the guidance of some of Castile's most suspicious characters. These include the blind and bumbling beggar Pero Menaque, an accidental prophet who reappears throughout the novel to inflect the protagonist's course. He leads Cabezon through the darkest, dirtiest quarters of Madrid, introducing him to the beggars, scoundrels, prostitutes and pariahs that constitute Madrid's other life...
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...
...talks with Qian, President Yang Shangkun, Premier Li and party chief Jiang Zemin, ticking off U.S. concerns about political repression, arms sales, the trade imbalance, North Korea. A senior State Department official, recalling Baker's eight months of shuttle diplomacy that led to the Middle East peace talks in Madrid, called the discussions in Beijing "every bit as tough and difficult, if not tougher." At one point President Yang told the secretary that some problems "cannot be solved for the time being, and the two sides may well leave them aside." On the eve of his departure Sunday, the Chinese...
...Victims' relatives in both the U.S. and Britain last week voiced suspicion that Damascus was in fact involved but that its complicity has been overlooked as a reward for Syrian participation in the gulf war against Iraq and in the Arab-Israeli peace conference that started last month in Madrid. U.S. officials make a persuasive case, however, that Libya is solely responsible...