The Legend of Don Juan

In Spain, a land of ardent religiosity, at Christmas, when such ardor burns brightest, a certain play is performed in theatres throughout the nation. To be present in the audience at these times is an unforgettable experience. A ripple of restlessness runs through the spectators every time the main character steps on stage. There is scattered applause, excited murmuring; and then a wave of voices rises to snatch the familiar lines from the actor's mouth. The actor smiles and bows, pleased at having evoked such response, and he speaks unheard as the many voices of his audience intone the verses for him in a swaying, swelling litany.

The character who has so stirred these people, and whose drama is re-enacted every year at the highest Christian festival, is not the Nazarene, nor any saint, nor even a mighty warrior of Spain nor a beloved patriot or savant. His name is Don Juan.

Man and myth, noun proper and noun improper, he is the subject of not only this 19th Century Spanish play (Don Juan Tenorio, by Jose1 Zorrilla) but also of other plays and other stories, songs, poems, operas and films in many languages. In recent times, he has been the subject of psychological autopsies, too. Don Juan is said to have wooed and won exactly 1003 women in Spain alone; therefore, the analysts would have us believe he was no better than any other obsessive sexualist. He was a fixated infant, he was a latent sadist, he hated his father, he hated his mother; naturally, he was a homosexual. Perhaps the notion that a man makes love to many women because he happens to like women is too simple for our times. We have to search for other, darker reasons. But that "we" does not include the Spanish, for whom Don Juan is no tormented pervert and no inconsequential skirt-chaser. He is what all men would like to be if they had the fibre and the fire. He is Virility incarnate. And he is a Spaniard. It is important to remember this, for to understand Don Juan one must understand the Spanish soul, of which opulent texture Juan is an inextricable brocade.

Youth, love, passion, courage, strength: these are the elements Spain sees in Don Juan, her wayward son, her incorrigible boy, afire with the fierce Latin potency they understand and for which they have a word: donjuanismo. Spanish mothers may shake their heads ruefully, but with a brand of Spanish pride, at some Juan of theirs who pursues the senoritas. "Cosas de amor," they say, "cosas de Don Juan." Which is the Hispanic equivalent of "Boys will be boys."

There is something primitive and patriarchal, something oriental and almost Biblical about the man's position in Spanish society. Northern peoples can hardly understand it. The world was made for man, say the Spanish, and woman is no more than a part of that world, a complement to his being. The women have believed this, they have gloried in it, they have accepted with relish this philosophy down through the stormy years of Spanish history. Fertile ground, this, in which to grow a Don Juan. But the fertile ground of a patriarchal society required other ingredients to create such a unique personality. It required the right time in history, the right place on the map, and the imagination of an artist. The artist was a 17th Century Mercenarian friar named Gabriel Tellez.

Tellez gained immortality under the nom de plume Tirso de Molina, as the author of a play, El Burlador de Sevilla (The Deceiver of Seville). In this play, Don Juan — who was later to be treated by Byron, Moliere, Goldoni, Pushkin, Mozart, Rostand, Dumas, Shaw, Richard Strauss and others — made his first appearance in world literature. Don Giovanni enthusiasts will find the Tirso plot somewhat similar to the Mozart opera:

Juan has just made love to an Italian noblewoman in her bedroom. She had given herself to him thinking he was her intended, Duke Octavio. Juan makes his escape under dramatic circumstances, and after many priapic encounters with fishergirls, peasantgirls, harlots and others, he disguises himself as the affianced of another lady called Dona Ana. The girl's father, Don Gonzalo, catches him and Juan has to kill the old gentleman in order to escape. Later, in a cemetery, Juan sees the statue of Don Gonzalo on a grave. He insults it. The statue comes alive and Juan invites it to dinner. The statue accepts, and the play ends with Juan being dragged down to Hell by the stony avenger.

Such was the flamboyant plot of Tirso's El Burlador. Did the good friar base his fictional rogue upon a living model? Well, in Seville they will show you a rose arbor planted by a certain Miguel de Manara centuries ago, and he was a Don Juan in real life, according to sevillano legends; in Tirso's own time there lived a certain Cristobal Tenorio, who seduced and raped and left a trail of broken hearts behind him; there was Lope de Vega, known as the monster of nature, who wrote 1800 plays and excelled in activities amatory as well as literary; but perhaps the most likely candidate of all was a nobleman named Juan de Tassis, Duke of Villamediana, who awed even his ribald era with new heights of deadly charm and ruthless immorality. He was quietly disposed of after an amour with the king's favorite mistress.

Any or all of these might have served Tirso as a model, but no one has succeeded in proving that any of them did. All such a listing can prove is this: that Renaissance Spain, like Renaissance Italy, France and England, produced a breed of men who believed that one way to demonstrate their manhood was through abundant exhibitions of sexual dominion over women. It was a spirit in the air, and Tirso, a priest who heard thousands of confessions and who traveled widely, could hardly escape being steeped in it. Such was the artist who gave birth to Don Juan out of reality, legend and his own creative genius.

What of the time and place of this birth? The two are so intertwined that it would be difficult to talk about one without the other. Spain was, in Tirso's day, still a great power in the world. Europe aped Spanish manners, dress and literature. But the Renaissance came late to Spain and it came diluted. Spain's Renaissance was a rebirth hedged in and curbed by forces weak in Italy and France, but strong in the Iberian Peninsula. Spain was not touched by a reformation, and of course never had the agony of a counter-reformation. Its church was strong, its people were orthodox, strait-laced, strict, especially in regard to respectable women.

And here is the essence of Don Juan's greatest attraction for Spanish manhood. Don Juan dared to fly in the face of all this at a time when the Spanish Inquisition was still alive and active. People still went to the stake for heresy, and Juan was a near heretic. He was an iconoclast and a rebel. It took courage — more courage than any other man had ever demonstrated — to do what Don Juan did. He trampled social customs, openly committed adultery, violated convents and dragged out novices — in short, broke all traditions religious and secular. G. B. Shaw said, in the preface to his own Don Juan play, Alan and Superman, "What attracts and impresses us in El Burlador de Sevilla is ... the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God.... such enemies have always been popular." Furthermore, Juan dared to defy an institution so Spanish as to defeat comparison. This was pundonor.

Pundonor, point of honor, was the terrible code of Spanish noblemen. It gave pause to many a would-be Don Juan. The particular point of honor it concerned itself with was that of the women of the family. Transgression against a woman called for swift and final vengeance by her brothers, her father, or her husband. If we can draw anything from studying the literature of Tirso's time, as well as the court records, pundonor was a way of life. According to its strictest rules the woman had to die, as well as the man, even if she had been raped. The stain was on her, guilty or innocent, and her family through her was in disgrace. Only by blood could that stain be removed. So Spanish was pundonor that one authority avers no real Spaniard would have violated it so often, and therefore Don Juan must have been an Italian. But defiance of pundonor gave Tirso one of his strongest elements of shock. By having Don Juan smash even this icon he imparted to him a bravery that fascinated and amazed Spanish audiences. Nothing could have awed a Spaniard more than this.

And now the place of Juan's origin: Tirso called him The Deceiver of Seville, and it is true that Seville is proud to claim him. To appreciate the importance of this birthplace and how it contributed to the renegade character of Seville's favorite son, we must know something of that southern region of which Seville is a principal city: Andalusia, which at one point is less than eight miles from Africa.

For something like 800 years, Andalusians lived like a Moslem people, cut off from European culture and Christian custom. Men from Morocco, Arabia and Syria invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711 a.d. Their influence was felt longer and more strongly in Andalusia. Voltaire said, "Africa begins with the Pyrenees." Even today, anyone who travels south from the French border will sense a gradual difference, the farther south he goes. By the time he arrives in Andalusia, the African impact is vivid. Where else in the Western world can you find women wearing veils over the lower parts of their faces? Where else in the Western world do palm trees and oranges and rice and sugarcane grow so profusely?

In eight centuries, habits and customs send down deep roots. The Moors practiced polygamy, like most Mohammedans. Spaniards lived side by side with them, and some, the Mozdrabes ("men who try to live like Arabs"), wore Eastern garments, learned Arabic, sent their children to Moslem schools and ate Moslem foods. Many Mozdrabes even took Arabic names. They had harems and concubines. In Andalusia, polygamy was a legal institution for the better part of a thousand years. "Custom is stronger than morals," said Havelock Ellis. This Andalusia of the Moors, luxury-laden and fabulous, a part of the East transplanted to Europe and protected from the North by its stark mountains, inspired Tirso who had visited it. The Moors were gone, but their blood and their customs had not passed away.

Tirso's El Burlador, though it introduced Don Juan to the world, has never been as popular with Spaniards as Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio, the play they enjoy during the seemingly inappropriate Christmas celebration. There is a very good reason.

The Juan of Tirso dies unabsolved. His last words, spoken to the statue of Don Gonzalo who is dragging him down to Hell, are searing to the Spanish soul: "Let me call someone to hear my confession!" The statue is relentless: "There is no time. Your repentance comes too late." Both sink into infernal fire, "to the sound of great noise." It is a grim play and a didactic one, for Tirso — ever the priest — wanted to show that no one could put off repentance to the last second and then hope to escape God's punishment.

Zorrilla's play is another matter. Here, too, Juan is the great iconoclast. He is still the great love-rogue, the rebel against established order. He is every bit as wicked and arrogant. There is still something grand, Mephistophelian, divinely infernal about him. But Zorrilla knew his Spaniards and he knew theatre audiences.

In his last scene, he puts Don Juan in the cemetery with the statue of Don Gonzalo. Juan is on his knees. "Let me go," he pleads, "for even now there is a single last grain of sand in the hourglass of my life, and if it is true that one jot of contrition gives salvation to a soul for all eternity, then, Holy God, I believe in Thee; if my wickedness is unheard of, Thy mercy is infinite. God have mercy upon mel"

Don Gonzalo says, "No. It is too late."

On this cue, a tomb opens and one Doña Inez steps forth. She is the one woman Juan truly loved in his life, and she is pure Zorrilla. "No!" she cries to the statue. "I am here, Don Juan. My hand protects that hand of yours that you have held out to the Most High in true repentance; and God pardons Don Juan at the very edge of the grave."

The play ends spectacularly. To quote the stage directions: "Flowers open and give passage to various tiny angels, which surround Doña Inez and Don Juan, shedding upon them blossoms and perfume, and to the sound of sweet and distant music the theatre is illuminated as by the light of dawn.. Doña Inez falls upon a bed of flowers which appear to view in the place of the sepulchre, which vanishes. Curtain."

For Spaniards — perhaps for all men — shrewd showman Zorrilla provided a loophole, a ray of hope that, legitimate or spurious, has an undeniable appeal. It is as if Don Juan were saying to us: Live! Taste of life's joys, even of those joys that are called forbidden. If at the final hour there is real masculine forth-rightness, an honest man-to-God talk, then things may not go badly for you. Look at me, the man who lived only for the moment, the greatest lover of them all, the rebel who enjoyed life to the last sharp thrill; and remember — I got off.

Odd and even sacrilegious as this may seem to some, there is an irresistible message here that goes a long way toward explaining why the legend of Don Juan may not be such strange fare for the Christmas festival, after all. Considered in its intricate and fascinating context, it is almost a way of saying, in Spanish, God rest ye merry, gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay.

Friar-playwright Gabriel Teilez, above, was the fountainhead of the entire Don Juan mythos. He wrote under the name Tirso de Molina.

Below: on Broadway, Charles Boyer played G. B. Shaw's intellectual Juan to the Devil of Charles Laughton.

Juan had gentle moments, as this idyllic illustration from Byron's poem testifies.

Gaiety reigns in a scene from Don Giovanni, above.

Below: an old engraving depicts the statue's revenge.

Monks of Seville condemn Juan to death in one version of the legend.

Popular basso Ezio Pinza epitomized the Mozartean Juan of Don Giovanni.

Film Juans have been athletic (Errol Flynn, 1949), abductive (Doug Fairbanks, 1934), satanio (John Barrymore, 1926).

Film Juans have been athletic (Errol Flynn, 1949), abductive (Doug Fairbanks, 1934), satanio (John Barrymore, 1926).

Film Juans have been athletic (Errol Flynn, 1949), abductive (Doug Fairbanks, 1934), satanio (John Barrymore, 1926).

Ramberg's engraving shows Juan carried off by demons.

Below: Louis Jouvet as Juan in Moliere's tragedy, Le iestin de pierre.

Juan's valet reads the list of 1003 amours to a dejected lady.