When I first came to live in this house at Vera del Bidasoa, I found
that the children of the district had taken possession of the entryway
and the garden, where they misbehaved generally. It was necessary to
drive them away little by little, until they flew off like a flock of
sparrows.
My family and I must have seemed somewhat peculiar to these children,
for one day, when one little fellow caught sight of me, he took refuge
in the portal of his house and cried out:
"Here comes the bad man of Itzea!"
And the bad man of Itzea was I.
Perhaps this child had heard from his sister, and his sister had heard
from her mother, and her mother had heard from the sexton's wife, and
the sexton's wife from the parish priest, that men who have little
religion are very bad; perhaps this opinion did not derive from the
priest, but from the president of the Daughters of Mary, or from the
secretary of the Enthronization of the Sacred Heart of Jesus; perhaps
some of them had read a little book by Father Ladrón de Guevara
entitled, _Novelists, Good and Bad_, which was distributed in the
village the day that I arrived, and which states that I am irreligious,
a clerophobe, and quite shameless. Whether from one source or another,
the important consideration to me was that there was a bad man in Itzea,
and that that bad man was I.
To study and make clear the instincts, pride, and vanities of the bad
man of Itzea is the purpose of this book.