My argument about the play of desire in these novelas is twofold: I shall consider, first, how desire plays, how it plays out in a narrative; how the plot plays with desire, and the role of desire in driving the actions of characters. Second, I hope to show how we readers, in our negotiation with the text, are enticed to endure the vicissitudes of the characters and to pursue our own quest for the satisfying ending. There is, however, another sense for the ‘play of desire’, and that is the playfulness of the author in the representation of the desires of the characters in, for example, the characters’ misconstruals of their own desire and of the desire of others. There is, in addition, the ‘readerly’ desire formed in us by our previous readings, and by our being members of a reading community. To quote Peter Brooks, ‘the tale as read is inhabited by the reader's desire and […] further analysis should be directed to that desire, not his individual desire and its origins in his own personality, but his transindividual and intertextually determined desire as a reader including his expectations for, and of, narrative meanings’.

El celoso extremeño (The Jealous Old Man from Extremadura) would be an obvious choice for this approach, but I have chosen not to use it because of its very obviousness. In that story, Carrizales's obsessive desire to possess, to enclose, and, Pygmalion-like, to shape his human material, arouses counter-desires. These are the givens of the plot; they stand out in plain view and they forewarn us of the inevitability of a destructive ending. The subtleties and the political implications of the story lie elsewhere.