Whatever the painter meant, whatever the historical connection of Don Miguel with the legended Don Juan, here at least is his true interpretation. Don Juan is the most conspicuous symbol of Seville. Since Tirso de Molina in the seventeenth century made a play from the old ballad and folklore sources of Don Juan, poets and playwrights of many lands have retold his story.[8] The modern mood has freshened him again with new psychology into a modish legend. But it is futile to approach Don Juan save through the spirit of his town. The Don Juan of Tirso, the first, remains the greatest. For Tirso placed his hero in the proper setting. Tirso was no analyst, but he was a poet ... a great dramatic poet. And his plastic presentation needs no analysis to reach the truth.
Seville—auto-erotic, self-rapt goddess—has a god. Her streets, her churches, her festivals bring you her lord. Don Juan is not the full-grown lover. The true lover dwells within the spirit and body of his woman as within a world holding heaven but earth too and hell: and he enfeoffed to them all for that they all are the true world which he loves. The true lover is constant; he has seen his woman so deep that he has found infinitude within her; and how could he desire to transcend it? What holds him to her is not pleasure: pleasure is but a moment in this eternity of love. Anguish, anger, the black shades of disappointment are also in his woman and he accepts them also. The true lover is rare, rarer than genius. But Don Juan is one who loves in woman his own senses, his own victory, and seeking ever these fleet constants of himself moves ever on from breast to breast. The true lover is rare because the full-grown man is rare. Don Juan is common because infancy is common: the state of seeking only oneself, of taking life as a flowered highway along which appetite and ease run gayly in pursuit of their own image.
Like his mother Seville, Don Juan is restlessly pagan, hunting in countless dramatic scenes a tribute to self-adoration. Each woman is a mirror to himself; love of each woman is a pageant in which he enacts his triumph. When the glance has been enjoyed, what is the mirror for? When the pageant is past, what are its faded garlands? The real is Don Juan! That he may be forever fresh, that his triumph may be forever clear, undulled by custom, there must be new mirrors, new pageants—new women.
Under Don Juan’s lyric words, there is coldness; under his exploits, there is abstraction. His passion is but the spark, ere it has kindled life and made life passion. And his deeds are fantasies, for only he is real and the women whom he meets he never knows, knowing only his desire. Therefore, his deeds like the landscape in the portrait of Mañara are abstract.
All the elements of Don Juan are in Seville. But Seville is greater than her son. His worship of himself in the white bodies of women is true Seville. The constant shift of his deeds, like facets in the crystal of desire, is true Seville. His orgiastic use of blood, of mysticisms, his encounters with statues, necrophiles and ghosts—are Seville of the Semana Santa. His ultimate sinking into the peace of self-absorption is Seville. But the town is ampler, deeper. Don Juan conquers only women. Seville conquers Spain.
This is her ultimate secret. She too—like Córdoba, Toledo, Greco, Cervantes—is a living whole fused from the hostile elements of Spain. But the peculiar chemic proportion of Seville makes all these worlds and wealths the single gesture and the rite of her self-adoration.
She is the pagan goddess, ample limbed, with hair in which brood darkness and the laugh of the sun. She leans over her Giralda. She stirs her head and her arms in a half somnolent, half ecstasied dance, seeking her own image in the water....
e. The Gypsies Dance
Below Al-Baicín the bodiless soul and Al-Hambra the soulless body, there is a gypsy town. The sparse waters of the Darro run at the level of the road. And on its other side the land mounts like a wall. Here, under the hill are caves, the dwellings of gitanos.
Heavy women, their bare arms clinking with metal and stone ornaments, their breasts slung in crass colors, call out for gain. The eyes are shallow and sly; the mouth that smiles is like the straining of an unsmiling substance; the oily hair throws off the glance of the sun. Men are rigid and yet slender; they lack the easy harshness of the women. Their bodies have melancholy and fatigue; as if an endless joust of appetite and song had worn them.