Blood Hatred

THE FAMILY OF PASCUAL DUARTE by Camilo Jose Cela, translated and with an introduction by Anthony Kerrigan. 166 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $4.50.

Spain's centuries of in-and overbreeding have produced bravery as well as hemophilia--and an anti-hero like Pascual Duarte. He is a rogue in the sense of being, like the fighting bull, specially bred, running separate from the herd, amuck, savage and destructive. He is a basic black part of the Spanish conscience.

His family is what the Spanish call olla podrida, or rotten pot, a mess. His brutal father dies, literally, rabid. His imbecile brother, whose ears were chewed off by a hog, drowns in an oil vat. Rosario, his sister, is the only one Pascual even begins to love. She is a whore practically from puberty. His feelings for her are more than slightly incestuous. When her lover seduces Pascual's wife, Pascual kills him.

Pascual's cuckold horns become the horns of the sacrificial Spanish bull. Having drawn blood, he charges on till he gores the very flesh that made him: his mother, whom he guiltily loves and hates, who symbolizes Spain. "There is no deeper hatred than blood hatred, hatred for one's own blood," reflects Pascual. He hates his mother for her blasphemy, sluttishness, ignorance and indifference. She cannot even produce tears at the funeral of her younger son. Unconsciously, Pascual decides she will weep blood.

Knife in hand, he finds himself standing over the mother's bed, but he cannot kill her in her sleep. When she wakes, shrieking, he jumps on her and they fight, tearing one another's clothes until "her mouth found my nipple, my left nipple, and tore it away. That was the moment I sank the blade into her throat . . . Her blood spurted all over my face. It was warm as a soft belly and tasted like the blood of a lamb."

Though it has appeared in 13 Spanish editions and 16 translations (including one in England in 1946), this novel has waited 22 years for U.S. readership, in part because it is short in length, and certainly not sweet. Deep in the classic Spanish vein, it is a tragedy of blood, relentless as a corrida, cruel as an auto-da-fe.

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