Ramón J. Sender’s 1949 novel The King and the Queen (El rey y la reina) demonstrates great big subjects are sometimes best dealt with through very small situations. In this case, Sender condenses the Spanish Civil War into a battle of wills between the Duchess of Arlanza and Rómulo, her gardener.
One day in 1936, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, Rómulo is enlisted, in the butler’s momentary absence, to take a message to the Duchess. A woman whose very being is imbued with entitlement, the Duchess is in the daily habit of swimming nude in her palace’s indoor pool. The Duchess’s maid stops him outside the entrance to the pool, then goes inside to warn her. Dismissively, the Duchess tells her to bring him in.
“My Lady, it’s a man,” the maid cautions.
“Rómulo a man?” the Duchess replies. She listens to the message while slowing swimming on her back in front of him. A peasant from Andalusia, Rómulo has been subservient all his life. Working in the garden of a large palace in Madrid has only introduced certain nuances to that attitude.
But this brief incident plays on his mind in the days afterward. He comes to understand the Duchess’s response as more than just the treatment of an subordinate by a superior. “Rómulo a man?” questions his very existence as anything but a mindless, soulless beast of burden.
Soon, however, the Duke is called away to lead his troops in support of Franco and the Nationalists. He is captured by the Republicans, who also commandeer the palace as a barracks and training center. The Duchess is assumed to have escaped, but Rómulo discovers her hiding in a remote part of the palace accessible through a passageway known by few of the servants.
Seeing his duty as that of protecting the Duchess, Rómulo gradually recognizes that the balance of power has shifted. With just a word to one of the Republican officers quartered in the palace, he could send her to prison, perhaps even the firing squad. But the Duchess’s sense of superiority is too strong to give in to what might only be a temporary inconvenience. Thus, Sender plays out the bloody conflict between the Nationalists and the Republicans in the cat-and-mouse game between the noble captive and her humble — but increasingly cunning — servant.
The King and the Queen is short — just over 200 pages — tight, and strong as a sinew. Written while Sender was living in the United States after the fall of the Republic in 1939, it reduces the atmosphere and complexities of the Spanish Civil War to their essences, resulting in a story that could well be read as a fable or surrealist tale, something along the lines of Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore or Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.
Sender began writing in this vein with The Sphere (1947) (La esfera), which starts as the tale of a refugee from the Spanish Civil War — not unlike Sender’s — and evolves into an Animal Farm-like story of fascism played on the small set of a passenger ship on its way to an unspecified destination. This abstraction actually makes The King and the Queen less an artifact of the Civil War and more a lasting story about the tensions between the weak and the powerful — the same topic that Elizabeth Janeway dealt with so well in her Powers of the Weak.