Under the Spanish Volcano
In Spain, the centuries have tended to overlap rather than to glide past in smooth succession. The subject of Velázquez’s Old Woman Frying Eggs, painted in 1618, would hardly have changed her dress or used different utensils had she lived two or three hundred years later. In the 1950s, at a construction site in Leon, the engineer and novelist Juan Benet recalled a horse trader teaching him the old trick of pouring oil into a recalcitrant donkey’s ear to drive it uphill with its burden. As late as the early twentieth century, modernization remained out of reach for most Spanish citizens.… Seguir leyendo »
