Places: The Family of Pascual Duarte

Duarte Family of Pascual Duarte, Thehome. Modest house in the village of western Spain’s Torremejía region, where Duarte grows up and twice marries. His home receives a more extensive description than any other location in the novel. His account is both apologetic and nostalgic. Although Duarte portrays his home as generally cramped, unclean, and poorly constructed, he also conveys many positive memories of the warmth and comfort of its kitchen. These conflicting images effectively represent his uncertainty as to whether or not his upbringing is primarily responsible for his subsequent crimes.

The environs of the house are unwholesome. The well is polluted, the stench from the adjacent stable is noxious, and ravines in the vicinity are full of dead animals. The creek that flows past the house is downstream from the estate of a wealthy landowner, and its filthy, odorous water symbolizes the relative social position of the Duartes, as well as the extent to which they see society as caring about their well-being.

*Torremejía (toh-RAY-may-hee-zha). Spanish village located in the province of Badajoz near the border with Portugal. Whereas the Duarte’s water is polluted, the village’s fountain has been dry for years, and communal life is correspondingly desolate. The clock in the town hall’s tower has stopped, the road through the village is barren of traffic, and one of the town’s few social amenities is a raucous tavern in which drunken arguments lead to deadly knife fights. The village’s cemetery is, ironically, one of its liveliest locations. Death is a frequent occurrence in the village, and the funerals of five of Pascual’s family members, as well as his first murder victim, all take place here. The cemetery is also the site of his seduction of his first wife, in a scene that graphically links the physical consummation of desire with the survivors’ need to affirm life in the midst of death.

*Almendralejo (ahl-mehn-drah-LAY-hoh). Town about six miles from Torremejía. Although its lights are visible from the Duarte home, they are to Pascual a symbol of the indifference with which the rest of the world regards him and his kind. As he sees it, the residents of Almendralejo–and by implication Spain as a whole–have turned their backs on the likes of the Duartes, with the latter remaining outsiders looking on enviously at the places where more fulfilling lives can be pursued.

*Merida (meh-REE-dah). City where Pascual and his first wife spend their honeymoon. This is the only joyous episode in the novel, and it is a short but compelling one. The young couple glimpse the possibility of a better life in the spacious atmosphere and pleasant furnishings of their hotel room, which Pascual states has subsequently remained with him like the memory of a faithful friend. This idyll is unfortunately cut short by a misunderstanding with the local police, as society once again makes it clear to the Duartes that fate has something other than happiness in store for them.

*Chinchilla prison (chihn-CHEE-yah). Institution in which Duarte serves the sentences for his crimes. Although the penitentiary is represented as a gloomy and depressing place, after he is released Pascual finds the outside world just as repressive and prisonlike.

*Madrid. Spanish capital. After receiving an early release from his first term of imprisonment, Pascual spends a year and a half in Madrid attempting to make enough money to pay for his passage overseas. His inability to obtain anything better than menial jobs, and thus barely earn enough to support himself, serves as further evidence of society’s prisonlike character.