Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Excellent as the Tirso original was, so far as Spain was concerned it remained merely one more good play among the hundreds produced in this period and it appeared in the theater no more often than any of the minor works of Lope de Vega, who died just about the time when Tirso’s play was published. But in 1844 something happened, of itself of no significance but of great accidental importance. A romantic playwright named José Zorrilla y Moral (1817–1893), the darling of the theater at that time, produced Don Juan Tenorio, a metrical version in full-blown romantic style. It was a sloppy play filled with so many improbabilities that any critic could tear it apart, as many did. The author himself termed it ‘the greatest nonsense ever written’ and listed the dozen or so points at which it violated dramatic canons and psychological reason. And yet it was touched with flashes of true poetry that tugged at the sentiments; it was flamboyantly staged and excited the imagination, and in some curious way that has never been explained, it evoked a sense of Spain, and in its bombast people of all degrees could see themselves. It leaped into prominence and has ever since retained a hold on the Spanish imagination, both in Spain and in the New World.

  Zorrilla’s Don Juan is an astonishing man to have become the hero of a nation. Before attempting to guess why this has happened let me assert briefly that it has; intellectuals today in Spain will try to pooh-pooh the idea and say, ‘Don Juan Tenorio? No one takes him seriously any more,’ but I have talked with too many Spaniards to accept that easy dismissal. Toward the end of October, for reasons which I will describe later, newspapers across Spain carry full-page analyses of Don Juan and find a surprising number of public figures to admit that he is their hero. ‘Tenorio lives the way a hero should, not giving a damn for anyone, and when it comes time to die he dies like a man.’ ‘Tenorio is Spain. I feel very much like Tenorio. I hope I can stand up to adversity the way he did.’ ‘Estupendo! I vote for Don Juan.’ ‘What I like about Tenorio is the way he was willing to fight anybody for any reason. The bit about the girls? Well, a man couldn’t get away with that today. At least not so much, but men are fundamentally like that. He’s my hero.’ The statements go on and on. I have more than fifty before me as I write, and some are much more revealing than the commonly heard ones which I have quoted. Today Zorrilla’s Don Juan has practically the same power over the imagination of the Spanish male, at least certain males, that he did when he first appeared in 1844.

  Actor as Don Juan Tenorio.

  What changes did Zorrilla introduce to account for the popularity of his hero? Well, the setting remains much the same but the time has been advanced from the indiscriminate fourteenth century to the heroic 1550s, when Carlos V was king and Spain was on the move. In the play there is a sense of Spain’s new greatness and some of this rubs off on Don Juan. This time the curtain rises on an inn in Sevilla, where Don Juan sits writing a letter to his intended bride, Doña Inés, on whom he has not set eyes, since according to custom she has been hidden away as a novice in a convent. He is masked, for it is carnival, and is awaiting the arrival of his friend Don Luis Mejía, with whom he made a wager a year ago ‘as to which could commit in a year more evil.’ This is the night for casting up accounts. Unexpectedly Don Juan’s father and the Comendador de Calatrava, father of Doña Inés arrive separately, also masked, and take chairs in a side room so as to overhear what this disreputable young man is up to. Don Luis appears; the bettors unmask; and they proceed to report on their behavior. Don Juan says that he chose Italy as his theater of operations and in Rome fixed the following notice to his door:

  Here is Don Juan Tenorio,

  For anyone who seeks anything of him.

  When forced to flee from Rome because of his evil reputation, he repaired to Naples, where he posted another sign:

  Here is Don Juan Tenorio

  And there is no man his equal.

  From the haughty princess

  to the lowly fisherwoman

  all women are fair prey;

  and he will undertake anything

  if it involves gold or valor.

  Let troublemakers seek him out;

  let gamblers crowd around him;

  let anyone who dares come forth

  to see if anyone can best him

  in gaming, dueling or making love.

  When his extended list of accomplishments is compared with that of Don Luis, it is seen that Don Juan has won, with thirty-two men murdered in duels and seventy-two women seduced. Don Luis admits himself the loser but points out that Don Juan’s list lacks one type of seduction to make it strictly first-class, that of a novice about to take vows as a nun. Don Juan leaps at the challenge and says that for good measure he’ll add an additional category, the intended bride of some good friend. Don Luis proposes a time limit of twenty days, but Don Juan says that six will be sufficient, because he does not require much time per woman:

  One to make love to them,

  another to enjoy them,

  another to get rid of them,

  two to replace them,

  and an hour to forget them.

  With supreme arrogance he climaxes his boast with the announcement that the bride whom he will ravish shall be none other than Doña Ana, Don Luis’ betrothed. At this dreadful statement the two men in the side room have heard enough. The comendador, convinced that his intended son-in-law is a monster, announces that Don Juan’s engagement to Doña Inés is ended, whereupon Don Juan says that the novice he must seduce shall be Doña Inés. At this blasphemy his father disowns him with the words, ‘You were never my son.’

  Don Juan succeeds both in seducing the novice, Doña Inés, and the bride, Doña Ana, but at his country house, to which he has taken the former, he discovers that she is madly in love with him, in spite of his treatment of her; overcome by her pure innocence, he awakens to the fact that he loves her. His change of heart comes to nothing because at this moment the comendador and Don Luis Mejía break in, seeking satisfaction for their injured honor. Don Juan kneels before the comendador, begs his forgiveness, and tries to convince him that he is a new man, but to no avail. When the comendador seeks to engage Don Juan in an honorable duel, the latter whips out a pistol unexpectedly and shoots the old man dead. He then kills Don Luis, too, and escapes to continue his rampage of destruction. He has proved false to his love, whom he has seduced and abandoned, to his father, whom he ridicules, to his religion, which he has debased, and to every generous impulse save bravery alone.

  What can a foreigner make of a nation which elects such a man its national hero? Before trying to explain we must look at the surprising conclusion of Zorrilla’s play. Years later Don Juan returns to Sevilla to visit his family home but finds it converted into a cemetery, one corner of which is a mausoleum in which a sculptor is at work putting finishing touches to a group of life-sized statues representing the victims of Don Juan. To the latter’s surprise, he notices among the dead a beautiful standing statue of Doña Inés and he learns that she died of a broken heart. When the sculptor has left, the don addresses the effigy of his lost love and confesses that he did truly love her. Overcome with grief, he leans weeping upon her tomb, and when he opens his eyes he finds that her statue has disappeared from its pedestal. In a dream sequence the ghost of Doña Inés appears and tells him that since she has chosen to remain faithful to her satanic lover, God has condemned her to the purgatory of her tomb to await the return of Don Juan, both of them to be saved or lost together. Don Juan dismisses her appearance as an illusion and his old bravado reasserts itself. As in the Tirso play, he invites the statue of the comendador to dine with him; subsequently he dines with the statue in the cemetery. Again the statue offers its hand, and Don Juan feels himself pulled down toward hell. ‘Lord, have mercy on me,’ he cries, but the statue replies stonily, ‘It is too late.’ But now Doña Inés takes a hand in the proceedings, and the stage directions for the final scenes explain better than the dialogue what is happening:

  Don Juan falls on his knees, stretching toward he
aven the hand that the statue leaves free. Shades and skeletons are about to throw themselves upon him, but at this moment the tomb of Doña Inés opens and she appears, taking the hand which the don stretches upward.

  Flowers open and little angels issue forth, surrounding Doña Inés and Don Juan, scattering over them petals and perfume, and to the sound of a sweet and distant music the scene is diffused with the light of dawn. Doña Inés falls on a bed of flowers instead of in her tomb, which disappears.

  Don Juan falls at the feet of Doña Inés and both die, but from their mouths issue their souls, in the form of two bright flames, which disappear in space as music plays and the curtain falls.

  This Mercy of God and the Apotheosis of Love as the last act is subtitled, can be quite moving if well staged and if no one laughs; it has made the play acceptable to believing churchgoers in spite of Don Juan’s execrable list of crimes in the first two-thirds of the play. Tenorio thus becomes a sardonic morality play, demonstrating the doctrine that even the most flagrant advocate of Viva yo can attain salvation. In fact, God seems to approve of Don Juan and, through him, of Spain as well. Also, the engaging figure of Doña Inés—and she can be one of the most appealing heroines in drama—as she saves the rakehell through the purity of her love, is attractive to women. I have seen the play four times in Spain, twice in Mexico and twice on television, and each time as it ended the women around me were crying. A friend once explained, ‘Every Spanish woman sees herself in Doña Inés. By her love alone is her husband saved.’

  One of the reasons why Don Juan Tenorio is so popular is accidental and relates to cemeteries. Because Zorrilla introduced in his concluding scenes a mausoleum containing marble statues of the don’s victims, a tradition was established for Spanish cities to offer Don Juan Tenorio in the week of November 1, the eve of All Souls’ Day, which is the Spanish Memorial Day, when families traditionally visit cemeteries. This aspect of the play’s acceptance is of course irrelevant and childish.

  During feria the young women of Sevilla appear at their most seductive. And always in the background, iron bars of tradition.

  But Zorrilla’s Don Juan is much more than an accidental cemetery prank. To understand the strange grip it has on the Spanish audience one must remember what was happening in Spain when it appeared. It was 1844, a time of chaos, when knowing men already suspected that Spain was in permanent eclipse. The empire was falling apart; the internal government was inept; the economy had failed; the storms of liberalism and conservatism were beginning to rip the country; and here came a figure who recalled the days of glory when Spain ruled Europe. (Remember that numerically most of Don Juan’s adventures took place in Italy, not Spain, and those of Don Luis in Flanders, along with Germany and France.) He was a kind of challenge to the rest of the world, the brave, arrogant man who would surrender to no adversary. He was Spain entrapped; he was Spain fighting against great odds; and in the end he was saved, partly because of his tremendous intransigence.

  Don Juan is also the exemplification of male values in Spanish life. From what I have said of his career one might suspect that Spanish women would hold him in contempt, but that is far from the case. He is their hero as much as he is the hero of their husbands and sons. His love scenes are never gross; he woos with tremendous passion and with a poetry that explodes in symbols and verbal fancies; he is no cruel Bluebeard but a devoted lover; that is, during those two days that he can allot a woman. He is also manly in a general sense, quick with the sword, swift to resent insult and brave beyond challenge. On stage he is enormously attractive; Enrique Guítart, one of the actors who specialize in portraying him, wears a large variety of brocaded capes, which he has learned to flourish in beautiful sculptured circles much as a matador does when fighting a bull, although better because the stage capes are bigger and their flourishes more unexpected, cutting wide swaths of astonishment.

  Finally, say the critics, Don Juan is more than a man, more than a hero. He is all humanity, and like humanity he seeks ideal solutions. He is not chasing women; he is seeking the perfect woman. He is not a cowardly murderer; he is mankind faced with the inescapable responsibility to kill in warfare. And in the culminating scenes of apotheosis he becomes all guilty men throwing themselves on the benevolence of God and finding themselves saved because of their submission to the female principle of love. All these things Spain believes of herself; redemption is possible. I spoke a few paragraphs ago of how I have seen women weep during the scene in which Doña Inés rescues Don Juan; I have seen just as many men weep in an earlier scene in which Tenorio, learning for the first time that Doña Inés died after he stole her from the convent and abandoned her, utters a heartbreaking sob and acknowledges that he did truly love this girl. ‘At this moment,’ a friend explained, ‘each man in the audience remembers all the pretty girls he kissed years ago and didn’t marry, and the passage of time and the closeness of death become very real.’ My friend had tears in his eyes as he spoke. Without question, this strange and poorly written play evokes in the Spaniard a memory of Spain and of lost opportunities.

  My own interpretation of Zorrilla’s play is that it epitomizes the union of pundonor and Viva yo. At a dozen places Don Juan affirms the principle of pundonor. In defense of his peculiar definition of honor he would die, kill his best friend, duel his closest associates, challenge the marble statue or oppose God. He is almost a burlesque of pundonor, but not quite, because both he and the audience take his challenges seriously. At the same time he is the epitome of Viva yo. No other national hero is so self-centered as Tenorio. Faust is concerned about human values and is hesitant about ignoring the rights of others until Mephistopheles goads him to do so. Hamlet constantly weighs the good and evil which his actions might impose on others: the king praying, the queen’s right to remarry, Ophelia’s future. Don Juan Tenorio indulges in no such soul-searching, not even when it is forced upon him by his father, whom he spurns abusively. And this makes him attractive to the Spaniard, who feels the same way about his country. The visitor to Spain is often shocked by the fact that what he holds to be a cause for condemnation is judged by the Spaniard to be a cause for congratulation. Later when I speak of Queen Isabel the Catholic, I shall make it clear that I find her one of the notable women rulers of all time, probably greater even than Elizabeth of England, but I have always regretted two acts which tarnish her reputation: her sponsorship of the Spanish Inquisition and her expulsion of the Jews. I was surprised to find that Spaniards are apt to love her because of those reasons: ‘She showed the rest of the world that she was boss and that Spain was Spain.’

  Before ending this adventure in romanticism run wild I must point out that among young Spaniards the cult of Don Juan is being subjected to analysis and sometimes to ridicule. One newspaper in 1966 asked its readers whether Don Juan still existed in Spain: ‘Yes, and in today’s world he’s contemptible.’ ‘Sure, in the cinemas. He’s masquerading as James Bond.’ ‘Of course, in the Spanish gallants who swarm the beach at Torremolinos, trying to seduce Swedish girls.’ ‘Yes, the gamberros [hoodlums] and the ye-ye crowd [rock-and-rollers].’ It was generally agreed that Don Juan was hanging on, especially in small towns, where men took seriously their obligation to be lady killers. ‘He exists in every real Spanish man. We all dream we are brave, honorable and death to ladies.’ But one young woman warned, ‘I’ve got news for Don Juan. He may exist but girls like Doña Inés are no more. I don’t know any girl who’s going to swoon because some man looks at her.’ Another girl said, ‘Doña Inés is still around but today she’s comical.’

  If one were preparing for a visit to Spain it would be profitable to learn the language; it would be more so to see a performance of Don Juan Tenorio, for with mere words one can go only so far, but with the vocabulary of this play one can speak of central matters. To prowl the streets of Sevilla with Don Juan in cloak and poignard is to explore permanent Spain.

  Even if Sevilla had no Don Juan and no feria, it would still throw down
a unique challenge. Outwardly it strikes the visitor as a congenial place, but inwardly it permits no stranger to penetrate its secrets. It is not a city of contrasts; it is a city of contradictions, enticing but withdrawn, alluring but arrogant, modern in appearance but eighteenth century in attitude. In Madrid or Barcelona the stranger has some hope of forming friendships which will uncover something of the workings of Spanish life, but in Sevilla this happens so infrequently as to constitute a miracle when it does. The symbol of Sevilla is the caseta, brightly illuminated and with its front wall removed so that the passer-by can observe the festivity of a closely knit family group. If he is lucky enough to own a horse, he can even rely on a traditional sherry if he stops outside. But to enter the caseta and to participate in the mystery that surrounds the family of southern Spain seems almost impossible.

  Time and tradition pass very slowly. It is the people who age rapidly.

  Sevilla is a feminine city, as compared to masculine Madrid and Barcelona, but if one finds here the ingratiating femininity of grillwork on balconies and grace in small public squares, one finds also the forbidding femininity of a testy old dowager set in her preferences and self-satisfied in her behavior. It is not by accident that Sevilla has always been most loyal to movements that in the rest of Spain are in decline.

  For example, at repeated points in history Sevilla has been faithful to the crown when other cities have not; the symbol of Sevilla is the rubric NO-8-DO, in which what looks to be an 8 is really a skein (madeja), so that the whole reads: ‘No madejado’ (She has not abandoned me), referring to a time when a king in trouble appealed to Sevilla for help. The city also adheres to an older interpretation of religion and to feudalism. As we have seen, in the countryside surrounding Sevilla the relation of noble to peasant is much the same as it was in England in 1400. Laws of course proclaim otherwise, but custom prevails.