Two stories by José María Blanco White

Our edition Two stories by José María Blanco White includes the following narratives: Hungarian Customs and The Alcazar of Seville.

• Hungarian customs begins with a tour of the Thames by boat. Blanco White’s story delights in the landscape and evokes Spain with nostalgia. Then among the landscape emerges the character that will serve as an alibi for the story and the various adventures that will happen. The narrator and the protagonist go to the latter’s house and there a painting redirects the story to Vienna, where the protagonist has spent his youth.
  It is then the moment when the main character narrates a dramatic love story passed during a youth trip to Hungary. And it seems that the Hungarian Customs end up being dramatic in the extreme…
• The Alcazar of Seville is a story in which different Sevillian stories are interwoven. Two characters catch us in a dialogue in which stories are told about María Padilla, Pedro or the Cruel, the Romancero and the city of Seville. The end surprises us with a story of Moors who secretly return to the city of their dreams:

“Among the hapless families of Spanish Moors who were forced to leave Spain in the 1610s, there was that of a rich farmer, owner of that same house of which we have spoken. As the main object of the government in the expulsion of the Moors was to prevent them from taking their riches with them, many of them buried them, waiting in better times for permission to return from Africa to their former homes. Mulei Hasem had a vault built under the wide hallway of his house. He took his precautions so that nothing would be missed by his neighbors; He deposited in the vault a large quantity of pearls and gold, and had the site conjured by another Moor, skilled in diabolical art.”