Spanish Loyalist Returns

France Spain in the villain of the piece, and the reader is expected to recognize him and bias his appearance. Arturo Bares has a lot of bad things to gay about France Spain, and be says them in a matter of face way for most of his novel. Not until the book is almost over does it begin to speak for itself, and not until then is it truly a novel.

Barea, a non-Communist Loyalist who fled to England when Franco won the Civil War, writes of a non-Communist Loyalist's return to Madrid from England in 1949. Don Antolin Moreno bad abandoned his wife, two sons, and daughter in fleeing for his life. Armed with British naturalization papers and passport, he dares return to try to take charge of his family and to discharge his responsibilities to it.

He finds it in an impoverished and degenerate state. His wife, Luisa, is a spiritualist; Amelia, his young daughter, is a Catholic bigot; his elder son, Pedro, is a black marketeer, pimp, and Falangist; and his younger son, Juan, is a Communist. Don Antolin is a socialist and a liberal, which makes it difficult for him to fit into the surly, squabbling family which has resented his absence for the past dozen years. All four feel that things would have gene much better had he not fled. Each sees his return only as a means to exploit him for a selfish end. His wife wants to be a fine lady in a fine house, with a special room for seances. Amelia wants a dowry so that she can enter a convent. Pedro wants capital for a rice swindle. And Juan wants enough money to support a wife.

The setup is plain to everybody--characters, readers, and author. Clearly Don Antolin cannot resume his position as head of the family. Nor will he be outsmarted by his relatives' greedy efforts to get his modest savings, which he earned as a London waiter. Crooks, brothel keepers, Falange bullies, Communist organizers, father confessors, mediums, and honest workers appear in the proper places doing predictable deeds.

The good people, it turns out, are Consuela the medium, kind of heart and willing to make a fast peso; Rufo the metalworker, who dares to be loyal to Juan and brave before the Falange; and Lucia, Juan's flancee, who is the only one Don Antolin can feel affection for.

When Luisa becomes ill and insane, and Amelia enters her convent, and Pedro denounces Juan to the Falange, Which shoots him down in the street, Don Antolin decides to take Lucia with him back to England. The book ends as he leads her to the airport, impelled by a desire to build for her the life he could not give his real children.

Despite the unyielding sordidness of most of the characters, despite the poor translation by Barea's wife, despite the lack of political or social subtlety, the book begins to show life near the end. The off repeated patterns finally assume the air of intense reality for which Barea has striven all the way.

Barea speaks with the voice of experience as he describes the viciousness of the Franco regime. But not until the end does he convince, for not until then are the relationships of the characters graced with humanity and the corruption and debasement of the Falange invested with reality