Please enable javascript to see: All 60 uses | Because when it comes right down to it, those poor peasants are a lot worse off today than they were fifty years ago. – peasants = used histo...

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All 50 Uses of

peasant

in

The House of the Spirits

Nana scratched his back, patted him gently, spoke to him in the half-language that she used to put the littlest ones to sleep, and sang him one of her peasant ballads until he had calmed down.†
Chpt 1

It was a peasant, with a team of mules, who had brought a telegram from town, sent by my sister Ferula, telling me of Rosa's death.†
Chpt 1

Trueba took two steps toward them and noticed a slight backward movement in the tiny cluster; he let his eyes wander over the shabby peasants and tried to force a friendly smile to the runny-nosed children, the bleary-eyed old people, and the women without hope, but it came out like a grimace.†
Chpt 2

Because when it comes right down to it, those poor peasants are a lot worse off today than they were fifty years ago.†
Chpt 2 *

The peasants went to an Indian curandem who knew all about the power of herbs and suggestion, and in whom they had great confidence.†
Chpt 2

He had watched her washing clothes, squatting on the flat stones of the river, her dark legs polished by the water, as she rubbed the faded rags with her rough peasant hands.†
Chpt 2

He had a tantrum whenever he saw any of the peasants giving their children only bread and feeding milk and eggs to the pigs.†
Chpt 2

Trueba knew that this unformed peasant was more intelligent than the others.†
Chpt 2

The peasants hid their daughters and clenched their fists helplessly because they could not confront him.†
Chpt 2

Twice the bullet-riddled bodies of peasants from other haciendas were discovered.†
Chpt 2

The peasants were still living exactly as they had in colonial times, and had not heard of unions, or Sundays off, or the minimum wage; but now delegates from the new-formed parties of the left, disguised as evangelicals, were beginning to infiltrate the haciendas, with a Bible tucked under one armpit and Marxist pamphlets under the other, simultaneously preaching the abstemious life and revolution or death.†
Chpt 2

The immense meals in the club, the cockfights, and the afternoons in the brothel all culminated in a clever, although by no means original, plan for making sure that the peasants exercised their right to vote.†
Chpt 2

At the end of the party they piled the peasants onto wooden carts and hauled them off to vote, under careful observation, amidst much joking and laughter.†
Chpt 2

It was the one time in their lives they showed the peasants a trace of intimacy: pal this and pal that, don't worry, patron, I'm on your team, you can count on me, that's the way I like it, pal, it's nice to see you have a patriotic conscience, you know the liberals and radicals are all a bunch of morons and the Communists are atheist bastards who eat little children.†
Chpt 2

As he watched the expressionless cows chewing their cuds, the sluggish labors of the peasants repeating the same motions day after day throughout their lives, the unchanging background of the snowy cordillera, and the frail column of smoke rising from the volcano, he felt like a prisoner.†
Chpt 3

At sundown, before the men came in from the fields, Ferula gathered all the peasant women and children to say the rosary.†
Chpt 4

In a rage, Trueba sometimes reverted to his former sins, rolling with some robust peasant woman in the tall rushes of the river-bank while Clara stayed behind with the children in the city and he had to tend to the hacienda in the country, but instead of relieving him these episodes only left a bitter taste in his mouth.†
Chpt 4

That was the year Esteban whipped him before his father because he brought the tenants the new ideas that were circulating among the unionists in town—ideas like Sundays off, a minimum wage, retirement and health plans, maternity leave for women, elections without coercion, and, most serious of all, a peasant organization that would confront the owners.†
Chpt 5

She saw the peasants running out of their houses terrified, imploring heaven, throwing their arms around each other, pulling their children, kicking their dogs, pushing their old people, and trying to salvage their few poor belongings in that din of brick and tile flying from the very bowels of the earth, like an interminable noise of the end of the world.†
Chpt 5

Eivery time she stood beside him, he grabbed at her, confusing her, in his invalid's disturbed state of mind, with the robust peasant women who in his early days had served him in both kitchen and bed.†
Chpt 5

Esteban said that as soon as he could stand on his two feet he would go in person to the city to buy better, more refined furnishings for the new house; he was sick and tired of living like a peasant just because of the wild hysterical character of this godforsaken country of theirs.†
Chpt 5

The peasants are always the last to understand.†
Chpt 5

Nor was she the only one; the tenants at Tres Marias and many peasants from haciendas across the region also waited for him.†
Chpt 5

He never spoke of his son except within the privacy of his own family, but he was proud of him and preferred to see him as a fugitive than as one more of the peasants, planting potatoes and harvesting poverty like everybody else.†
Chpt 5

To hurt her feelings, I pretended I was going to the Red Lantern, but all she said was that it was a lot better than raping peasant girls, which surprised me, because I didn't think she knew about that.†
Chpt 6

I no longer had the strength to grab a sturdy peasant girl by the waist and swing her up onto my saddle, much less rip her clothes off and enter her against her will.†
Chpt 6

They talked of justice, of equality, of the peasant movement and of Socialism, while Blanca listened with impatience, wishing they would hurry up and finish their discussion so she could be alone with her lover.†
Chpt 6

He hated Esteban Trueba, his seduced grandmother, his bastard father, and his own inexorable peasant fate.†
Chpt 6

The wake was attended by peasants from throughout the region, because over the course of his centurylong lifetime Pedro Garcia had become related to many of the local farmers.†
Chpt 6

He was just about to forbid him to set foot on the property when Clara convinced him that this was hardly the time to place his political enmities before the peasants' Christian fervor.†
Chpt 6

"They change the ballots," said Blanca, who was at the meeting, sitting on the ground among the peasants.†
Chpt 6

But the peasants did not trust him.†
Chpt 6

First he would do his exercises and run around the house, oblivious to the taunts of the hardy peasants looking on.†
Chpt 6

They've accused me of murdering some peasants.†
Chpt 6

He knew that the scandal would be the same whether she gave birth to a bastard child or married the son of a peasant: society would condemn her in either case.†
Chpt 7

Everywhere were the bulbs, lamps, and screens she had first seen Jean use at old Pedro Garcia's funeral, when he had been so enamored of photographing the living and the dead that he made everyone uneasy and the peasants ended up kicking his photographic plates to the ground.†
Chpt 8

But in fact she had very little contact with the peasants and was far from knowing each of them by name.†
Chpt 9

But none of this was known to the peasant standing on the carpet, unsure of where to put his hands and perspiring heavily.†
Chpt 9

A while ago they published a manifesto calling on the peasants, sailors, and Indians to unite in the first national soviet, which from any point of view is a joke.†
Chpt 10

How are the peasants supposed to know what a soviet is?†
Chpt 10

The peasants are up in arms.†
Chpt 10

In his mid-thirties, he still looked like a coarse peasant, although it had become more a matter of style since success and his knowledge of the world had softened his roughness and refined his ideas.†
Chpt 10

For a second I toyed with the fantasy that Transito was the woman I had always needed and that with her by my side I could return to the days when I was able to lift a sturdy peasant woman in the air, pull her up onto my horse's haunches, and carry her off into the bushes against her will.†
Chpt 10

In those days, the Candidate was a robust young man with the angular face of a hunting dog, who shouted impassioned speeches over the hissing and heckling of the landowners, and the silent fury of the peasants.†
Chpt 11

But I'm just a peasant.†
Chpt 12

The same peasants who had been born there and had farmed the land for generations formed a cooperative and took title to the property, because it had been three years and five months since they had last seen their patron and they had long since forgotten his hurricane-like temper.†
Chpt 12

There was no one to give orders and no one to obey them; the peasants, for the first time in their lives, were savoring the taste of freedom and the experience of being their own patron.†
Chpt 12

But the peasants paid him little attention, since he seemed like a city slicker and it was easy to see that he had never had a plow in his hand; still, they celebrated his arrival by opening the sacred wine cellar of their former patron, sacking his aged wines, and slaughtering his breeding bulls in order to eat their testicles with onion and basil.†
Chpt 12

No one's taking our hostage companero anywhere," one of the peasants said, and in order to emphasize the words they sent the would-be rescuers packing with a short volley fired into the air.†
Chpt 12

When they reached the ranch, the peasants, emboldened by the support they had received from the press, refused to let them in, demanding a court order.†
Chpt 12

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Definition:

(peasant)
used historically or possibly in relation to a very poor country: a person of low income, education, and social standing -- especially one who raises crops or livestock