TIM. God help me, with your glorious triumph! Jump into the street, and you won’t see a neighbour who is not the son of somebody. Each individual has a father.
JUAN. Yes, but I was the libertine; I was the man that drained the cup of pleasure and the cask from the wine-cellar: the invalid of the orgie. “That fellow is consumptive,” they used to say. “That fellow will die some morning,” you thought. And suddenly I became restored to life in Lazarus. Lazarus is my resurrection. And how robust and strong he is. And what talent he has! A prodigy--a Byron, an Espronceda, an Edgar Poe--a genius. That’s not what I alone say: you have it written in all the journals of Madrid.
JUAN. Well, now, frankly--he who has led the life that I have led--he who while saying: “I must rest for a time,” has a son like Lazarus: that man--is he not a man, indeed?
TIM. Fine subject of rejoicing for a Tenorio.
TIM. This of yours. Does it not come to this that you are the father of a genius?
JUAN. And what then, dotards? Strength is strength, and becomes transformed: you don’t understand this. I make no doubt that I had all the genius of Lazarus concealed in some corner of my brain; but as I gave it neither time nor opportunity it could not exhibit itself. At last it grew tired of waiting, and it said: “Eh! I am going with the son, because with the father I can make no headway.” (_Laughing._)
TIM. Don’t delude yourself, Juanito. The talent of Lazarus, for indeed he seems to have great talent, is not inherited from you: he must have derived it from his mother. The paternal heritage will have been some rheumatism, some affection of the nerves.
NEM. The sediments of pleasure and the dregs of alcohol. (_Drinks._)
JUAN. Blockheads! I went through my school-days badly, and I lived worse; but there was something in me.
TIM. Quite a genius frittered away on a lost soul.
NEM. And by what did you recognise this something?
JUAN. It was on awaking from a drunken bout.
TIM. Now that you are going to ascend to the sublime don’t say a drunken bout.
JUAN. Well then, on arising from an orgie.
NEM. That’s well. “To Jarifa in an Orgie,” Espronceda. (_Drinks._)
JUAN. Yes, señor, the very thing. I once felt that which neither of you ever experienced.