Word: viejo
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...which Miss Warner is as passionately sincere as Don Juan is insincerely passionate. Last year Miss Warner saw Spain first-hand-as a Loyalist nurse. Without being either obvious or partisan, she plants in her 18th-Century story seeds of 20th-Century violence. She pits the peasants of Tenorio Viejo, who want irrigation for their lands, against the Don, who wants lace for his coats and whose income is peasants' rents. The peasants are lovable, clumsily funny, tragically simple. But there is nothing lovable about Miss Warner's Juan, imperious, selfish, ruthless, clever...
...peasants, of course, are worsted, and the novel ends in a gush of bloodshed. A dying peasant gazes at a map. "So large a country," he says. "And there in the middle of it, like a heart, is Madrid. But our Tenorio Viejo is not marked. I have often looked for it. It is not there, though. It is too small, I suppose. We have lived in a very small place, Diego...