386
PARTISAN REVIEW
All this is part of our purely Arab inheritance. Yet to confuse
the sensual and peaceful Arab converts of Andalusia and the Latin
world, with the mercurial and rebellious Don Juan, is also an in–
excusable frivolity.
There is another, and more picturesque sexual pattern in Anda–
lusia: the kind of love typical of the gypsies. Don Miguel de Una–
muno used to say that the gypsy influence on our national character
is stronger than the moorish influence. It would be hard to measure
it exactly. But unquestionably the gypsy influence is very strong.
It
has given birth to a whole literature, and to a vast amount of ro–
mantic folk-lore, both of which have helped to spread and exaggerate
that influence. And in the matter of love, this influence is quite ap–
parent. The love life of the gypsies is obviously of Oriental origin.
And because of its fiery passions, its constant intermixture of re–
ligious matters, its tendency to resolve itself by means of violence
and blood, it too has been confused with Don Juan's type of love.
Yet gypsy love, burning, unending, forever dreaming of death,
comparing the beloved to the Holy Virgin, fusing them both in the
same passion, finding its truest expression
in
the wonderful verses
of the
cante jondo,
has nothing in common with Don Juan's cynical
and irreligious libertinism. Gypsy love is deep, enduring, ardently
monogamous, almost mystical, incapable of deserting the beloved. In
short, it is the opposite in every way, of the inferior, indefinite, fickle
sexuality of "El Burlador."
When a true Don Juan emerges in Andalusia, he is always either
a foreigner or an uprooted Andalusian. This was the case with Tirso
de Molina's Don Juan, who had learned his technique of loveless
seduction while at the cosmopolitan Court in Madrid, or while
wandering through the towns of Italy. In Andalusia, where they are
great ones for gestures, one may run across a young man with the
petulant air which recalls the true Don Juan. But despite his cocky
ways the young gentleman will almost certainly end up committed
to one of the two anti-donjuanesque forms of love, either shamefaced
polygamy, the occidental version of the harem, or else a deep, stead–
fast, lifelong passion, of which the life of Don Miguel de Mafiara
.affords us a magnificent example. This great
sevillano
(who, inci–
dentally, was of Corsican ancestry- that is to say, he had Italian
blood as well) has been compared, stupidly, with Don Juan. Actually
