Pedro Antonio de Alarcón

Soldier, duellist, war correspondent, deputy, diplomat, academician — and then, when he had used up the rest, a novelist. He came out of Guadix too loud for one career. Morocco as a witness. A swing from anticlerical firebrand to Catholic conservative, with the argument dumped into fiction instead of speeches: El Escándalo, El Niño de la Bola, the Andalusian farce that became Falla’s ballet. El Capitán Veneno is one mood among many — pride, ridicule, a Spain that will not sit still. Do not file him under a single officer. He had more lives than that.