(Don Giovanni and Doña Ana, from here)
‘Don Saturno. Prepare yourself for solemn and terrible news. Your son, Don Juan, is no longer on earth.’
‘You will forgive me,’ he said, ‘if I sit down?’
Leaning back in his chair by the writing-table, Don Saturno signalled to Ana to go on.
[Ana] went on. [...] Don Saturno listened with attention. It shocked Ottavio to see how sympathetically, how naturally, as it were, he followed the course of Ana’s narrative, fine shades of surprise, critical interest, disapproval or compassion flickering over his countenance. Hearing of Don Juan’s taunting visit to the cemetery he shook his head, but he might, so Ottavio thought, have been shaking it over a false note in a sonata.
‘The evening came. Supper was prepared, supper for two. At the appointed hour a heavy knocking was heard. Your son, reckless with wine, lost in some dreadful transport of impiety ordered his valet to open the door. More terrified of the dead than of the living, the man refused. The door opened, my father, in his living likeness but white as alabaster, appeared. He rebuked your son. He bade him take this last chance of heaven’s mercy. He spoke in vain. Pointing downwards with a marble finger he consigned Don Juan to perdition. And the jaws of hell opened. With shrieks, with lamentations, with vain appeals, Don Juan struggled in the clutch of demons. The lightning quivered around them, the sentence of heaven spoke in a peal of thunder. And they bore him down to hell.’
Pale as death, with the stately exhaustion of the martyr, she sank into a chair.
[...] ‘And there was no trace of my son’s body?’
‘How could there be?’ enquired Don Isidro reasonably. ‘Your son was taken to hell.’
‘Frankly,’ said Don Saturno, ‘I find this story very difficult to make head or tail of.’
After the Death of Don Juan begins shortly after the end of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Don Juan had tried to assault the virtuous young lady Doña Ana, but had been interrupted by the arrival of Doña Ana’s father, whom Don Juan then murdered. Subsequently, Don Juan visited the cemetery to invite the father’s ghost to dinner. This occasion did not end happily for him, according to his servant Leporello, who maintains that Don Juan was dragged down to hell by demons. Doña Ana is moved to travel to Tenorio Viejo to inform Don Juan’s father, Don Saturno, of his son’s demise, accompanied by her new husband Don Ottavio, her duenna and her priest, Don Isidro (how I love that ‘reasonably’ in the quotation above).
(Design for the cemetery scene in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, French, nineteenth century; British Museum)
The journey lasts a relentless seven days and Tenorio Viejo is far from the earthly paradise Leporello, now in Doña Ana’s employ, had led the party to believe. Clinging to the dusty mountainside, the village is no more than a few dozen hovels surrounded by olive groves that, lacking water, wither in the heat. The villagers are aware that Don Saturno’s meagre interest in their livelihoods has been diverted for years by the need to pay for Don Juan’s lavish lifestyle. But now that the heir is dead, surely Don Saturno could be persuaded of the benefits to everyone of funding an irrigation system for the village fields?
While Doña Ana embarks on a vigil of prayer ostensibly for her father’s soul, her husband frets about ghosts shrieking at him while he sleeps and Doña Pilar, the duenna, embroiders grey pansies on a petticoat with sour little stabs of her needle, Don Saturno wrestles with the improbable story of his son’s death and the peasants dare to hope for a better future.
I first read this novel about twenty years ago and although I vaguely remembered most of what happened I had forgotten how extraordinarily good it is. It is a novel about rural Spanish society (which makes it sound boring – it is not boring) and so, rather than tracing the story of any particular character, it is told from multiple perspectives, the points of view of many characters from all social strata. While the focus begins with Doña Ana and her party, once they arrive at the village it expands to encompass Don Saturno and many of the peasants – the creepy sacristan and his housekeeper, the miller and his daughter, the schoolmaster and the thoughtful Ramez. Everyone is brought vividly to life. We are privy to Don Ottavio’s musings on his astonishing attractiveness as well as Celestina’s desire to flee the mill and join a convent. Just as Jacob’s Room built up a portrait of Jacob by presenting the memories and consciousnesses of a group of people who knew him, so After the Death of Don Juan reveals an entire society through the individuals that comprise it.
After the Death of Don Juan was published in 1938 and although it is ostensibly a historical novel, set in the 1760s, it was STW’s response to the Spanish Civil War – which, as an ambulance driver, she witnessed first-hand. The novel exposes the tensions within Spanish society – the desperately poor peasants, the aristocratic landlords who fail to invest in their tenants for one reason or another, the controlling hand of the Church – and the story it tells, ending in a violent clash, foreshadows the conflict of the 1930s. Ultimately, it is the values of Don Juan, the cynical, cruel and dishonest parasite, which will prevail in the village. (In the Virago edition there is a really brilliant foreword by Wendy Mulford which explores all of this, though if you don’t like spoilers, wait to read it until after you’ve finished the novel.)
If there are tensions between peasant and aristocrat, however, there are other tensions in the novel too: between town and country, between some of the villagers (the miller and the sacristan are particularly unpopular). The book maintains an exquisite balance between the demands of a parable (of the Civil War) and fiction (which requires that Tenorio Viejo feel like a ‘real’ place, its inhabitants like ‘real’ people), between realism (the daily tasks of peasant life) and fantasy (Don Juan’s terrifying death), between comedy and tragedy. There is a whiff of artifice about some of the scenes, either their setting or in the reliance of dialogue, which reminds us of the story’s roots in opera. It’s a very funny novel, alert to absurdity and delusion, until it becomes a tragic novel. It has a Comynsish feeling for the grotesque. It is now my new favourite STW novel – until the next one, perhaps...
(An English Delegate [Sylvia Townsend Warner] (The International Congress of Writers, Valencia 1937), by Gerda Taro, who was also a fascinating figure, 1937; International Center for Photography, The Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive, Gift of Cornell and Edith Capa, 2002; from here)