DON JUAN IN SEVILLA

Every woman alive has suffered the attentions of some guy who imagined himself as Don Juan, and I suspect every man alive has at least once fantasized about being the irresistible womanizer. No doubt the type would have existed anyway, but it was Madrid’s playwright monk Tirso de Molina who gave him a name. Placing him within a minor noble family from Sevilla, he made Don Juan Tenorio his central villain in the 1630 play El Burlador de Sevilla, or The Trickster of Seville. He has proved an enduring character who represents the darkest side of Spanish machismo. Seeing Don Juan in his natural element of Sevilla is a way, I like to think, or getting to know one’s enemy.

The monk’s Don Juan was a seducer, murderer, and more than once he is identified as the incarnation of Satan. In the end, he unsuccessfully repents his errant life and is condemned to burn in hell for all eternity. That de Molina placed his wicked character in Sevilla was no accident, and authors who appropriated Don Juan over the years saw no need to change his zipcode. In the imagination of other Europeans (including Mozart’s librettist for Don Giovanni, Lorenzo de Ponte), Sevilla was an exotic and mysterious city where passions ran high and moral aberrations were no doubt rampant.

The Mozart opera is possibly the most famous version of the story in the rest of the world, but Spaniards—especially Sevillanos—are more partial to the version written in 1844 by José Zorrilla (1817-1893), in which Don Juan’s immortal soul is redeemed by the love of a good woman. Zorrilla at least had the decency to write his play in Sevilla, providing it with a genuine sense of place. He stayed at the Hostería del Laurel, an ancient inn located in the Barrio Santa Cruz near the Cathedral and the Alcázar. Ask a local, and chances are that she knows the opening lines by heart: “¿La hosteria del Laurel? / En ella estáis, caballero.” In the play, Don Juan and his friend, Don Luis, meet at the inn to see which of them has won the bet made a year before that he could seduce more women and kill more men than the other.

www.visitasevilla.es/en/Seville-city-of-opera

More than one hundred and seventy years later, La Hostería del Laurel is still there. It’s a modest little hotel with twenty-one simple rooms, and the bar is a fine place to have a drink and admire the carved wooden panels with scenes of the Don Juan tale. It’s just a couple of blocks from Plaza de los Refinadores, where a statue of Don Juan stands, and a block in the other direction from the house of Don Luis’s fiancée, Doña Ana Patoja, whom Don Juan woos and seduces in Zorrilla’s version of the story. (The “City of Opera” walking tour map of the city pinpoints all the relevant spots.)

Leading men from John Barrymore to Johnny Depp have portrayed Don Juan in film, and many men no doubt imagine themselves as the hand-kissing womanizer. But one Sevillano, Don Miguel de Mañara (1627-1679), apparently took the fiction to heart. When he was just thirteen he saw a production of Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador and announced his intention to grow up to be Don Juan. Whether he ever really lived up to the character is hotly disputed. His deathbed confession certainly makes it sound that way. He calls himself the most evil man who ever lived and confesses that he “served the devil, the prince of darkness, with a thousand abominations, pride, adultery, oaths, scandals and thefts.” He asks to be buried where everyone will step on his grave. It was such juicy copy that at least two other operas were written about “Don Juan de Mañara.”

Toward the end of his life, the real-life Mañara tried to atone for his sins, real or imagined, by building Sevilla’s Hospital de Caridad, or Charity Hospital, that still stands right behind the stunning new opera house, the Teatro de La Maestranza. If you visit the hospital’s church of San Jorge with its stunning Baroque altar, you can also see the tomb of Mañara. The Catholic Church has begun his slow rehabilitation. In 1680, the archbishop submitted his candidacy for sainthood, and 305 years later, Mañara was declared “Venerated,” the first step to becoming Saint Don Juan.

In Zorrilla’s version, the woman Don Juan has most wronged takes matters into her own hands. She makes a bargain with God in the afterlife to have her soul and Don Juan’s bound together for all eternity. As Don Juan dies in the final graveyard scene, he chooses to be with the saintly Doña Ines in heaven rather than plunge them both into hell. Every Sevillano knows the story, as it is performed every year on All Saints Day. As one Sevillana once told me, “We don’t have Halloween, but we do have Don Juan.”