The Spanish Temper

by V. S. Pritchett

  Out of their context such satanic lines have an absurd ring, for we can only imagine an unreal, melodramatic figure speaking them. But, clearly, Don Juan is not a person, and in their context such lines are arresting. They are spoken not by a human being but by a demon, and those hours of darkness are, indeed, the kingdom of the carnal spirit.

  In Tirso de Molina’s play Don Juan does not love any woman. He merely possesses women. He is a ravisher—though by deceit, not by violence. His victims are left in tears and grief, for his promises are broken. We can indulge in speculations about the secret pleasure these women have in the irresistible, grief-dealing lover, but nothing in the play justifies us, and indeed Tirso accepts the common experience that the demands of the male ego are different from those of the female. In his long essay Ramiro de Maeztu makes the good point that there are two Don Juans: the Don Juan who appears north of the Pyrenees, who is the romantic rebel, the endless seeker of an ideal love, discarding because he has not found it; and the Don Juan of the south, who is not a lover, but an animal energy or will to power. The absence of northern idealism in love, according to this writer and, indeed, to many other Spanish commentators, is very Spanish; in place of idealism there is obsession, fantasy, passion, the desire to go to the limit. Even in the love of the divine Spouse, described by Spanish mystics (and this is the only Spanish literature which can be said to be exclusively concerned with the psychology of love), the ecstasy of ultimate union is reached by the established processes of our sensibility, and not by a sudden leap from the material to the spiritual world. If a spiritual world is imagined, it is not formless, bodiless, and metaphysical, but is conceived of in corporeal terms. Impossible for these realists to consider a union of souls which is not, but some magic of transubstantiation, a union of bodies. In the north, Don Juan is saved by the discovery of ideal love; in the south—he goes to hell in Tirso de Molina, and in Zorrilla’s play he is saved by the chaste intercession of Doña Inés, which is a bow to northern romantic sentiment. Doña Inés does succeed in awakening love in Don Juan, and in doing so turns him into a recognizable human being. The result is that he diminishes at once. But she has been able to do this because she is hardly more than a child, and may be considered as emotionally immature or unborn, as Don Juan is. She is, emotionally speaking, his similar and match. But in fact de Maeztu’s generalizations about the northern and the southern Don Juan are not quite exact: Lovelace in Richardson’s Clarissa, and Valmont in the Liaisons dangereuses, are two hard militant Don Juans who seek no ideal woman. Their aim, like that of the Spanish Don Juan, is the destruction of the being they are seducing, and themselves are eventually destroyed in the personal hells they have been unconsciously preparing.

  Don Juan is Spanish to the extent that he violently celebrates the implacable and unmovable “yo” or “I” of Spanish individualism. Ganivet, who made an inquiry into the causes of Spanish decadence after the loss of Cuba in 1898, said the Spaniard was a man who carried on his passport the imaginary words “This Spaniard is authorized to do whatever he wants.” Pride, courage, extremism, energy, anarchism are the Spanish substitutes for that idealism which is given to the Don Juan of the north. In Zorrilla’s play, God agrees to make room for Don Juan, who, though supposedly repentant, is still shouting about his honour and is obviously going to be very troublesome in heaven.

  Yet if Tirso’s Don Juan had been simply a play about a man who runs after women, we can doubt if it would have had the myth-creating quality. The Burlador is really two plays in one: the story of Don Juan, the destroyer of women, is married to the old folk legend of the dead man invited to the feast. In some parts of Spain right up to the eighteenth century the peasants used to go to the churches on All Souls’ Night to make prayers and offerings for the dead. As it was a feast day, they would often take their glasses of wine there and very soon were raising their glasses to the departed and inviting them mockingly to eat or drink. As in modern Mexico, the dead spirits were placated and kept off by comedy and mockery. Dr Marañón, who has written with scepticism about Don Juan, says that the religious and funereal elements in the play are the only truly Spanish things in it; the rest, he says, is simply an Italian Renaissance figure, a Borgia, or simply the gangster or condottiere. This argument is a counterattack upon those who have seen Don Juan as an example of the spirit of the Spanish conquistador. Certainly the conquistadors were governed by a great idea and represent Spanish character at its most splendid; they were not intriguers and tricksters without religion. But by the early seventeenth century the figure of the conquistador was in decline, and Don Juan could be seen as a frustrated and decadent example of the type—an example, so familiar in Spain, of the man capable of great efforts of will, who recoils cynically upon himself. Another view is that Don Juan is the lawless man and rebel who rises to the top in periods to anarchy, corruption, and irreligion. He indeed first appeared in the reign of Velásquez’s Philip IV, in that brilliant and licentious court, when the huge assertion of Spanish faith in the Counter-Reformation and the conquest of America was broken. Others see in him a sceptical attack on the accepted foundations of Spanish life; the powerful institution of the family, which breaks all lovers and which keeps the women shut away from the world; and an attack also on the cult of honour. In Tirso’s time the cult of honour had reached a high point of intricacy and delicacy, and when Don Juan is shown tricking his friends, this has been regarded as a satire on men who professed honour like a religion and flagrantly ignored it in practice—a satire, in short, on the morals of “young bloods.”

  In recent years Don Juan has met his worst enemy—the psychologists. They find him to be not the mature and energetic man, but the infantile male, possibly homosexual, possibly almost impotent or with a neurotic fear of incapacity. He is fixed in the undifferentiated sexuality of adolescence. He is a myth created for those thousands of penniless lonely Spanish males who walk up and down the streets all night, who never see a woman outside their own homes, who are dominated by the all-powerful figure of the Spanish mother. Hundreds of these unstrenuous dreamers of love are supposed, in Madrid, to get their mild satisfactions from being crushed against the girls in the trams at the rush hour. The tramway lovers they are called: the Spanish tongue is ruthlessly satirical.

  And who was Don Juan? Did he exist in real life? No one has ever found a model, but for a long time the figure of a celebrated Sevillano, Don Miguel de Mañara, was thought to be the original. His tomb lies in the Hospice for the Poor which he founded in Seville and bears the famous inscription: “Here lie the ashes of the worst man the world has ever known.” Mañara’s family had Corsican blood. He cannot be the original of Don Juan, for he was not born when the play was written; he is, however, an authentic Sevillian copyist of Don Juan. For the legend is that he saw the play and went home saying: “Henceforth I shall be Don Juan.” He started on a career of quarrelling and murder in the street—Don Juan, of course, is a murderer more than a lover—and of seduction. After a terrible career he married, and the sudden death of his young wife turned him to religion. His remorse led the aristocrat to put himself at the service of the poor. In rags himself, he collected the vagabonds and starving from the street and took them to the Hospice that he had founded. He was also obsessed by the idea of death, for he collected the dead from the gallows and the streets, carrying the bodies himself and giving them Christian burial. It was a branch of that fierce, fanatical, and compulsive spirit of proselytism which had driven Spaniards to convert the Moorish remnant after the reconquest, and to save even their dead from the perils of hell. Mañara, like Don Juan, became the protagonist in a large number of gruesome death legends. He pursues a beautiful woman, through street after street in Seville at night, and not until she gets to her door does she allow him to overtake her; then she turns and lifts aside her veil and he sees not a face but a grinning skull. Or again a woman beckons to him from a balcony and when he mounts to her room, she has vanished; the room contains a body lying in i
ts grave-clothes between candles. Or, walking the streets again, he meets men carrying a bier and asks them: “Whose is that body? Who has died?” They answer: “It is Don Miguel de Mañara.” The corpse is himself.

  The Hospice in Seville contains two pictures by Valdés Leal which Mañara commissioned. One is a picture of richly dressed skeletons. A hand dangles a balance, and in one pan jewels are heaped and in the other, bones. On the velvet cloth cockroaches are crawling. The preoccupation with skeletons, skulls, and the dead in Spain recalls the similar preoccupation among the Mexican Indians. Spanish and Mexican Indian ferocity, cruelty, and regard for death were oddly matched in the conquest.

  In his book on Don Juan, Dr Marañón has a far more plausible suggestion to offer those who search for an original figure in real life. His candidate is the Duke of Villamediana. He was a magnificent of Philip IV’s court, a man of gorgeous apparel such as Velásquez painted, and supposed (until contemporary historical researches have proved it otherwise) to have been the lover of the Queen. He was a famous pursuer of women, immensely rich, a great gambler, an elegant poet, and a bullfighter, for bullfighting was originally an aristocratic sport—a knightly tourney between beautifully mounted riders and the bull. The court of Philip IV lived in a condition of scandal, and all Spain knew of Villamediana’s career as an uncontrollable Renaissance figure. He was eventually assassinated, and it was generally thought by the King’s order; but a curious fact has come out which has gone a certain way towards confirming the suspicions of the psychiatrists. Villamediana was not assassinated by the King’s orders: he was not the lover of the Queen; he was killed by unknown men after he was found to be implicated in a homosexual scandal which touched a large portion of the court. Homosexuality exists in Spain but is much concealed; it is not as apparent as it is in Italy, England, Germany, or America.

  The last Spanish play on Don Juan was written a year or two ago by Jacinto Benavente. Benavente is the last of a group of Spanish dramatists—Martinez Sierra and the Quintero brothers were the others—and he is now a very old man. His play was light and amusing and it suggested, as I said before, that the truth about Don Juan is that the women can never get near him, though they are longing to do so, because he is always surrounded by men who are fascinated by his stories and hope to learn a trick or two from an expert. A shrewd piece of observation—Spanish males will listen all night to the fantastic boasts and amusing inventions of a good talker who is telling of his own or someone else’s adventures in love. Although he is represented as an energy in Tirso de Molina and Zorrilla, Don Juan is also unmistakably a traveller, a talker and storyteller. The boasting match in Zorrilla’s play is characteristic and important. We have to agree in the end that Don Juan is not a character but a wish.

  It is tempting at this point to digress in a general way into the subject of the roles of the sexes in Spanish life and into the characteristics of Spanish love. To the northerner, Spain appears to be a male-dominated society in which the women have few rights or liberties and live in a state of complete subjection. He has only to meet a few educated women among either the intellectual classes or the Europeanized aristocracy to find that many of these women hold the same view. Married women live at certain legal disadvantages in relation to their husbands: the divorce laws which had a brief reign during the Republic from 1931 until 1936 have been repealed at the instance of the Church under General Franco; birth control is forbidden—though not unknown—young women go out very little alone and are certainly not allowed the liberty which girls have in the rest of western Europe or America. Twenty-five years ago no nice young woman went to the cinema with a young man unless a duenna or another girl went too. This has changed, but the duenna still survives in disembodied form. The key to the Spanish love affair is the scene enacted every Sunday afternoon in the less frequented alleys of the parks in the big cities, and can be said to have its counterpart in the life of all classes. Seated on a chair with its back to a thick hedge is a young woman. Exactly in front of her sits the young man, his knees a respectful number of inches from hers. Occasionally his hand ventures towards her hands, there may be a fluttering touch of the tips of the fingers for a moment, but hers are expertly withdrawn; rarely is a hand held, almost never is an arm put round a waist or a kiss exchanged. If there is a kiss it will be upon the cheek, not the mouth—this is true, of course in all Latin countries, where to kiss on the mouth publicly is considered an obscene act. It causes catcalls in the cinema. And then one observes that the lovers have brought with them a third chair. Nothing is on it, no one sits there. The chair is a piece of conventional stage furniture; it is meant to represent the imaginary duenna. To an extremely critical neighbour it can indicate that a chaperon had been there a minute ago or is in fact expected. The Spanish love affair requires this fiction.

  Spain is the country of long engagements that go on for years. This is the custom and it arises chiefly because of economic difficulties. In order that its interest shall not be exhausted, the engagement is kept lively on the girl’s part by all the devices of reproach, hurt feelings, feigned jealousy, coldness, coquetry, and reprobation, which are overcome by infinite small attentions, presents, punctiliousness—the whole armoury of the Victorian love affair. From the man the woman demands not passion but marriage; in the woman the man sees the future mother, the image of the mother who has dominated his life so far and who, until the end of her days, will be the ruling figure of his life. His future wife knows this and is not discountenanced. She will have the same role when her large family is born. Both parties will hope to have a very large family. Monogamy is the fixed principle, and although many Spanish men like, in the interest of amour-propre to pretend otherwise, their attitude to sex is puritan and strict. They are deeply shocked by the enticements and behaviour of foreign women. It is a puritanism which is made emotional by the sense of honour and by continuous jealousy. These are a variable quantity from period to period in Spanish life, but in some degree they are always there.

  Some Spanish writers have thought that the austerity or conventionality in Spanish love, its privacy too, contain a certain element of brutality or crudity. In times of notorious licence there is certainly something crude about the scandals of the convent, and the popular imagination runs easily to the thought of orgy. In any case, the classic Spanish attitude to love is maintained only by the preservation of the brothel and a very large population of prostitutes.

  “And now,” says the complacent young lady at the window to her lover as he goes off, “I suppose you are going off with one of the naughty women.” To preserve the conventional façade and the bourgeois Catholic morality, one has to have the imitation domestic world of the brothel. The great poverty of the masses in Spain has enormously increased prostitution, but Spaniards are not indignant about that. Passive, fatalistic, they accept the brothel and the prostitute as an ineluctable part of life, accept them with charity, pleasure, and indulgence.

  The unabashed candour of the Spaniards, men and women, in their conversations about sexual love and the bodily passions is neither sensual nor obsessive. They talk without timidity or reserve. The common oaths or exclamations heard in any café or at any street corner are sexual. Everywhere, people swearing by their private parts with a Rabelaisian freedom and laughter. In their speech nothing is hidden. And under the puritanism of behaviour is something primitive and animal. It does not occur to them to conceal their admiration or their desire as they turn in the street to gaze at the woman who catches their eye; and the women, who make absolutely no response, nevertheless are very gratified by this admiration. They pity those women of other countries where public admiration is restrained; they condemn the women of those countries where such an admiration has an open response. Formal, formal! How often, how many scores of times during the day, does one hear that almost military virtue in behaviour exalted! Preserve the formal, and after that—the whole mystery of private life, which no one can generalize about.

  Chapter VII<
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  When I went to Seville this year in the autumn, I went by train. They turned us all out at Córdoba and packed us into a couple of crowded coaches, and then we clattered along through the milky Andalusian evening. Everyone was entertained by a sparkling, dapper little man of about forty who was travelling with his wife, two nurses, and ten children. The wife, who was pregnant, of course, had a seat, and father hopped about outside, rounding up his chicks every now and then. He was a proud little bantam cock and must have been a man of some means to have such a large family, well fed, well dressed—and alive. In a poor family so many would not have survived. He was very much admired in the train because that is the sort of family the Spaniards love to see. A shout of delighted laughter went up from many passengers when we got to Seville, for he was met by more women and more children, standing in their midst like a wicked little Abraham, and such a kissing and clucking went on in the swarm that it choked that part of the station. I saw him next day marching a selection of his children round the Cathedral, walking very fast, pointing out works of art, uttering dates and names, in a brisk cultural tour. Then out into the orange courtyard he went and marched them up the ramp of the Giralda for a view of a city—the witty little paternal butterfly.

  One comes out into the soft dust of the warm night where the palms droop, into an idle air that smells like no other in Spain. Cool long draughts of aniseed are drawn into the nostrils, the fumes of frying doughnuts. There is no blaze of lights, but the naked electric-light bulbs put their hard, separate tents of light under the palms. Seville is a city of shadows which tunnel under a dense foliage that is dead still, and pleasure seems to walk with one like a person, when one is alone. There is never too much light. In the centre of the small city each street is like a cool narrow channel down which the scents of the jasmine and camellia, of the rose and the orange blossom flow. Once every few years a little snow falls in the winter and excites with wonder the poetic Andalusian, and in the rainy season, before the sun clamps down on the city before Easter, the city can be cold, and few Spanish houses have fireplaces. Even in the coldest cities like Madrid, a room facing south is considered to be heated, and for the rest, there is the brasero, with its smouldering charcoal or ground olive stones, which is carried from room to room. But Seville is a town of great heat that stuns the walker, makes him seek the strip of shadow at the side of the wall, or the shade of the courtyard of the orange trees in the Moorish remnant of the Cathedral, or the grottoes and colonnades of the gardens of the Alcázar, where the fountains are sighing and the goldfish rise in hundreds in the jade water of their cisterns. It is a town of pleasure to the eye, where simply to sit or lie down is the deepest of human pleasures, to sit down with nothing in one’s head. The spacious Cathedral is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world; it is smaller only than the mosque of Córdoba and St Peter’s in Rome. At every turn one sees the strange, even grotesque mingling of Moorish and Christian art—the tower of the Giralda, visible from so far across the plain, with its severe Moorish mass capped by the florid belfry of the Renaissance; the Alcázar, half Renaissance, half Moorish and even pseudo-Moorish. These mixtures are bizarre and not always pleasing; one tires of the arabesques, the honeycomb ceilings, the tiled walls and horseshoe arches, especially when they are garish modern imitations, and the Moorish plays the part in Seville (and Granada) of the crudest commercial Gothic in English Victorian architecture. But the great Arab gateways, the heavy, reddened walls, and the tender colours of the true Moorish tiles always please with their gravity and lyricism. The Moors bring a solacing and private pleasure into Spanish pomp and glory.