THE COUNT OF VILLAMEDIANA
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generally resemble each other. What it amounts to is a limited num–
ber of variations on the same theme. Don Juan, on the contrary,
is incapable of loving any fixed type of woman, even temporarily.
What he is looking for is simply Woman: the opposite sex. Women,
for him, are nothing more than the means of sexual satisfaction. His
attitude, therefore, is the unselective one of the adolescent; it is also
the attitude of the male of most species of animals. The researches
of natur.alists have recently provided some interesting illustrations of
this, which I can only allude to here.
At the very outset of his literary legend, in the first scene of
Tirso de Molina's play, Don Juan has entered the Duchess Isabela's
bedroom in the dark, pretending to be her betrothed, and has rifled
her chastity. This is Don Juan: the pure essence of donjuanism. A
truly selective man, on the other hand, a genuine male, wants to
see his beloved, and wants her to see him, for the awareness of each
other's personalities is an indispensable condition of a great love.
When the King, hearing the cries of the betrayed Duchess, enters and
asks, "What is it?", Don Juan, with biological exactness, answers
"Who could it be? A man and a woman." That is to say, not two
individuals, Don Juan and Isabela, but two sexes face to face. And
when Isabela, hearing Don Juan approaching her in the dark, asks
him who he is, he answers, "Who am
I?
A man without a name."
And there, definitively expressed in its first literary form, is the
definition of Don Juan. He is a man without a name; a sex, not an
individual.
The physique of the genuine Don Juan bears out this theory
of his uncertain virility. Don Miguel de Maiiara, who is supposed
to be one of the models of
"EI
Burlador," looks, in Murillo's por–
trait of him, like a beautiful
girl.
According to the only known au–
thentic portrait of him, Casanova, a famous Don Juan, had the
perfect and delicate features of a woman. Nearly all the Don Juans
we know of were very different from the energetic and hirsute norm
of the masculine prototype.
The physical appearance of men endowed with an unusual sex–
ual capacity is, as a rule, somewhat anti-aesthetic. They tend to be
rather short in stature, short-legged, with rough, sharply defined
features, and thick skin closely covered with beard and hair. In
fact not at all like the refined, elegant, smooth-complexioned Don
