Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

Chapter 30. ACT 1: Her Women

LA MADRE, on her deathbed, watched over by:

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ and TERESITA, La Madre’s niece, Lorenzo’s daughter, TERESA DE JESÚS in religion; with them are

CATALINA DE LA CONCEPCIÓN

CATARINA BAUTISTA

Followed by entrance of:

BEATRIZ DÁVILA Y AHUMADA, Teresa of Avila’s mother

CATALINA DEL PESO Y HENAO, the first wife of Teresa of Avila’s father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda

Characters passing through, in alphabetical order:

ANA DE LA CERDA DE MENDOZA, Princess of Eboli

ANA DE LOBRERA, ANA DE JESÚS in religion

ANA GUTIÉRREZ

ANA DE LA FUERTÍSIMA TRINIDAD

PADRE ANTONIO DE JESÚS

The image of the Virgin that Teresa always kept with her. Private collection.

BEATRIZ DE JESÚS, a niece of La Madre

BEATRIZ CHÁVEZ, BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS in religion

BEATRIZ DE OÑEZ, BEATRIZ DE LA ENCARNACIÓN in religion

CASILDA DE PADILLA, CASILDA DE LA CONCEPCIÓN in religion

CATALINA DE CARDONA

ISABEL DE JESÚS

PRINCESS JUANA, sister of Philip II

JUANA DEL ESPÍRITU SANTO, prioress at Alba de Tormes

JERÓNIMA GUIOMAR DE ULLOA

LUISA DE LA CERDA

MARÍA DE OCAMPO, MARÍA BAUTISTA in religion

MARÍA DE JESÚS

MARÍA ENRÍQUEZ DE TOLEDO, Duchess of Alba

MARÍA SALAZAR DE SAN JOSÉ, prioress at Seville

EMPRESS MARIA THERESA of Austria

TERESA DE LAYZ

AN ANONYMOUS NUN

With the portrait of the Virgin Mary bequeathed to Teresa by her mother, whose blue veil casts its iridescence over the deathbed scene.

ACT 1, SCENE 1

LA MADRE

TERESITA

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ

JERÓNIMA GUIOMAR DE ULLOA

LUISA DE LA CERDA

ANA DE JESÚS

and CATALINA DE LA CONCEPCIÓN, CATARINA BAUTISTA

Although La Madre had wished to go up to Heaven in a flash, her niece Teresita will testify that her death was neither easy nor quick. And yet Teresa is not distressed at entering into her final agony. The twilight of her awareness fills her with blue-tinted voluptuousness, blue as the wintry dawn over Avila, blue as the Virgin’s cloak in the picture her mother bequeathed to her before she died.

She knows she’s not alone. Ana de San Bartolomé, the young conversa nun who is nursing her, and Teresita — now in the bloom of her sixteen years — keep watch with tender solicitude by her bedside, accompanied by Catalina de la Concepción and Catarina Bautista. Sounds of padding footsteps, rustling habits, murmuring voices; scents of skin, clean towels, cool or warm water. The dying woman cannot see the faithful companions by her side, but they inhabit her visions.

Is it possible to die, when she is already dead to the world so as to live more completely in God? Teresa thinks death is delightful, an “uprooting of the soul from all the operations it can have while being in the body”; because the soul was already, while the body lived, “separated from the body” in order to “dwell more perfectly in God.” Often, as during those terrible epileptic comas, the separation of body and soul was such that she didn’t “even know if [the body] had life enough to breathe.” Soon, now, it will not. The rest is unknown, something even more fearsome and delightful, since she loves. “If it does love, it doesn’t understand how or what it is it loves or what it would want.”¹ The unknown is love. Teresa never stopped wondering about love, and writing about it. There’s no reason to stop now.

The blue Virgin has her hands crossed over her breast, and the face of Beatriz Dávila y Ahumada. With the folds of her azure robe she protects the fortress of Avila, but the Mother of God does not say a word to the dying woman. How long ago did this “mother without flaw” abandon her daughter? Some fifty years?

Teresa sees one of her own texts materialize on the pale silk. To write about the inner life means spewing out “many superfluous and even foolish things in order to say something that’s right.” It required a lot of patience for her to write about what she didn’t know. Yes, sometimes she’d pick up her pen like a simpleton who couldn’t think of what to say or where to start.² It required patience to get people to read her, and then to reread herself. Torrents of engraved words, funerary columns, whole pages stamped into the translucent walls of the interior castle, which Teresa can retrieve with no help from the “faculties”—whether understanding, memory, or will — it’s just there, just like that. “Hacer esta ficción para darlo a entender”:³ literally, to “make this fiction to get my point across.” “Hagamos cuenta, para entenderlo mejor, que vemos dos fuentes”:⁴ “Let’s consider, for a better understanding, that we see two founts.” Let’s pretend, pretend to see. Let’s tell stories. Let’s write them down.

TERESA. Converse with God. What else could I do, being a woman and a conversa? (Lengthy pause.) My Lord and Spouse! The longed-for hour has come! It is high time we saw each other, my Beloved, my Lord! (Listening.) Conversar con Dios. Such things can’t be explained except by using comparisons. To grasp them, one must have experienced them.⁵ (In a rush.) A conversa who wants the world to be saved…with my daughters…After the return of Fr. Alonso de Maldonado from the Indies…Who’d have thought it?…I have been out of my mind…I’m still delirious…the Lord says that I must look after what is His, and not worry about anything that can happen…⁶ (Quick smile.) The long-awaited time has come!

(Long pause.)

A new page imprints itself upon the Virgin’s blue cloak outstretched over the ramparts of Avila, a page La Madre wrote regarding another Beatriz, a relative of Casilda de Padilla. She’d never met Beatriz de Óñez, or Beatriz de la Encarnación, but had heard much about her God-given virtues from the awed sisters at Valladolid. This was one daughter that Teresa was going to take with her when she flew away from the Seventh Dwelling Places toward the Lord.

TERESA, in a tone of fervid reminiscence. Beatriz, daughter, woman without flaw…Mother…pray God to send me many trials, with this I’ll be content…

As she mutters to herself in this vein, pious Ana de San Bartolomé recognizes the words La Madre had written in a section of the Foundations, glorifying the nun whose “life was one of high perfection, and her death was of a kind that makes it fitting for us to remember her.”⁷

TERESA, feverishly. Have you asked the monastery nuns? Did they ever see anything but evidence of the highest perfection? High perfection is an interior space free of all created things, a disencumbered emptiness, a purified soul and God divested of all character, dispossessed of Himself, turned in on Himself.

TERESITA, in tears. She’s dreaming…as if reciting something…

TERESA. “She was next afflicted with an intestinal abscess causing the severest suffering. The patience the Lord had placed in her soul was indeed necessary in order for her to endure it.” Just like my mother. It was wonderful to behold the perfect order that prevailed internally and externally, in every way…

But wasn’t her muddled mind confusing Beatriz de Óñez with the nun who had cancer, the one she had cared for when a novice at the Incarnation? Or perhaps with Beatriz Dávila, the mother Teresa pitied as well as honored, but assuredly praised to the skies? She wanted to follow in her footsteps to the Beyond, but by choosing another way of perfection: the monastic way.

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ, to TERESITA, interrupting her prayers for a moment. She’s calling on her mother for help before going to join the Lord.

TERESITA. Do you think so? I think she’s seeing her mother in the Lord. She wants to find peace in her lap, to know herself to be perfect, in her and like her.

Teresita surrenders to emotion: for the foundress, her little Teresica, as she called her, was always the impish nine-year-old she welcomed into the Discalced Carmel at Valladolid. Even so, the little one is often more insightful than other sisters about the extremes of mind and body, as she has just demonstrated.

La Madre can barely hear them. Immersed in visions, she continues to murmur the text unfurling across the blue robes of the Virgin above the walls of Avila. Nothing but her text, chiseled into what is left of her body and soul, the second nature etched into her by writing. It takes up all the space of her dwelling places, the whole castle.

LA MADRE, reading. “In matters concerning mortification she was persistent. She avoided what afforded her recreation, but unless one were watching closely, this would not be known. It didn’t seem she lived or conversed with creatures, so little did she care about anything. She was always composed, so much so that once a Sister said to her that she seemed like one of those persons of nobility so proud that they would rather die from hunger than let anyone outside know about it.”⁸ (Pause.)

Who is speaking? Who speaks through my lips? I know you’re near, daughters, even if I can’t see you with my bodily eyes. I am not yet dead, so there’s no need to weep or to rejoice, it comes to the same thing. I’m thinking, that’s all, dying people do that, didn’t you know? (Pause.) In fact, the approach of death is the best time for the strange activity of thinking by writing. I think, therefore I am mortal; I question myself, I wonder what right I have to see the Beloved face to face. (With fervent reminiscence.) That sister who was talking through my lips, who is she? Or was it me thinking aloud, a witness to my mother’s distress? Me, wrapped in the suffering of Beatriz de la Encarnación?

Although Teresa’s brain is growing feebler, she keeps qualifying everything she says, as she always used to. The coming end merely adds leisure to her lucidity. One can’t approach God with trepidation, one can’t serve Him in despondence.

LA MADRE, reading. “The highest perfection obviously does not consist in interior delights or in great raptures or in visions or in the spirit of prophecy, but in having our will so matched with God’s that there is nothing we know He wills that we don’t want with all our desire; and in accepting the bitter as happily as the sweet, when we know that His Majesty desires it.”⁹

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ, repeating in simplified form the lessons Teresa has imparted, as she follows the murmuring voice. Now she’s talking about honor, she’s against it, she can’t bear all those people scrambling after it.

TERESITA. At home, she used to accuse my father Lorenzo of doing that. But the honor of Grandma Beatriz, I mean, her flawlessness…I’m confused…

Teresita isn’t sure whether she is supposed to revere the perfection of her grandmother or seek other, happier models. But still, Beatriz Dávila couldn’t have been all gloom, however miserable her life, since La Madre’s mother used to read novels of chivalry, apparently. Fancy that! I’ve also heard that when she was young, Auntie Teresa would get the giggles playing chess!

The dying woman has turned the page. For fifty-five years now, the magic of Beatriz Dávila y Ahumada has been diffracted into a long procession of women who are now filing past one by one, under the closed eyelids of the traveler on her last journey toward the Spouse. They move through Avila’s narrow streets, climb the towers, pop in and out through the gates. The philosopher Dominique de Courcelles, who was no more present than I was at the final days of the future saint, has had the same insight as myself, Sylvia Leclercq, regarding the lifelong hold of the maternal magnet upon Teresa and the powerful way it was projected on her daughters. When La Madre was busy with her foundations she was also exploring the secrets of this relationship, repeatedly testing the proximity she cultivated to her progenitor, as well as the distance she kept from her.

Her “sisters” and “daughters” were not all natives of Avila, except perhaps for María Briceño, teacher of the young lay students at Our Lady of Grace, and Juana Suárez, the dear childhood friend who led the way to the Carmelites; but the nearness of death makes her gather them all together, loved or hated, all of them without exception, in Avila. Time regained unfolds in maternal space.

Doña Jerónima Guiomar de Ulloa opens the procession, dressed alternately in a gold-spun gown and in rags, the way she was on the day she took the veil.

TERESA. Was I mistaken to write that women are more gifted than men at taking the path of perfection?¹⁰ On the whole they are…with some exceptions. I like exceptions. Doña Jerónima, you turned your palace into a convent, and you were the first to donate your fortune to sustain the Work. I can never thank you enough, O Lord God, for allowing me to meet this highborn widow, wedded to prayer, who was closely in touch with so many Jesuit fathers…(Gazes at her for a while. Pause.)

We really became good friends when you directed me to your confessor, Fr. Prádanos.¹¹ (Doña Jerónima blushes at the memory.)

(Teresa’s lips, mumbling inaudibly.)

You knew my needs, you witnessed my sorrows, and comforted me. Blessed with a strong faith, you couldn’t help recognizing the doings of God where most people only saw the devil. (Moving lips.)

DOÑA JERÓNIMA, as a loyal disciple. And where even men of learning were baffled, let me remind you.

TERESA. At your home, and in the churches you know, I had the chance to converse with Pedro de Alcántara…(Lips.)

(Smiling.) I must confess, I had something to do with the favors the Lord was pleased to grant you. And I received by that means some counsel of great profit for my soul.¹²

Doña Jerónima Guiomar de Ulloa goes on her way, all absorbed in her own soul.

Doña Luisa de la Cerda is next in line. Long ago she lavished on Teresa her endearing madness and her jewels; she shared, after all, some of La Madre’s passions and frailties. She too was on excellent terms with some influential prelates, such as Alonso Velázquez who was instrumental for the foundation of the Carmel at Soria. The dying nun is content to smile at this ghost. Her strongest linked memory is the sense of triumph that buoyed the granddaughter of the converso Juan Sánchez in the great city of Toledo: while she was staying, that time, in the opulent palace of Luisa de la Cerda, a violent transport lifted Teresa toward the dove flying over her head. It was quite different from earthly birds — the dove of the Holy Spirit, soaring aloft for the space of an Ave Maria. That jouissance was followed by a deep sense of rest, like the grace accorded to Saint Joseph of Avila himself in the hermitage at Nazareth.

DOÑA LUISA, anxious, dreamy. Will I ever see it again?

TERESA. As I saw it in the city of my ancestors?

Yes, there is the dove again, flying away after Luisa de la Cerda.

Ana de San Bartolomé can only make out murmurs, stray words here and there, she can only follow in prayer: so she invents La Madre’s reverie.¹³ She imagines it, just like I, Sylvia Leclercq, am doing.

TERESA. And you, dearest Ana, my faithful little conversa…my sweet and unassuming secretary, companion, nurse…You were illiterate when you arrived, and you learned to read and write by copying my hand. Oh yes, I know how strong you are: didn’t you fend off your first suitor by covering your head with a dishcloth? (Leaning back.) I can see it from here, you will be sent to found the Carmel at Pontoise in France, where you will be prioress, yes, absolutely, I can see it all, no use shaking your head. Go and rest awhile, go on, Teresita can look after me very well. You can see that I’m better, God doesn’t want me yet…Run along! Who’s this I see coming now?

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ, hopelessly shy, walks on tiptoes, talks in a whisper. It looks like one of your nieces, Madre…

TERESA. Come forward, then, niece — no, not you, Teresita. It’s Beatriz de Jesús, visiting just in time…You will be appointed under-prioress at Salamanca, my dear. Don’t goggle your eyes at me, I know it, that’s all…You have a lot of nerve, and more importantly the pluck to retort to the pamphlet that Quevedo will circulate against me…My being canonized by Gregory XV, he’ll not begrudge me that, but to be anointed “patroness of all the kingdoms of Spain,” that’s going too far! The great satirical poet prefers the Moor-Slayer…of course, a warrior saint like the apostle James, our Santiago Matamoros, whose help was so invaluable during the Reconquista, cuts a finer swagger than a mousy nun who wasn’t even a letrada! As for the Marranos…no, let’s drop it. Well then, you, Beatriz, will stand up for me, yes you will…Though we saints obviously don’t need that kind of accolade. His Majesty is enough for us, as I have often said…it’s a futile quarrel…You won’t call it a stupid one, but that’s what you’ll be thinking. What a lamentable affair. In the end, Quevedo or no Quevedo, the pope approves the court’s decision…the all-powerful minister, Olivares, was rather fond of me…So were you, dear child…Be like strong men, my daughters! (Smiles.) You understand me.

The silence is suddenly torn by the sound of a woman singing and clapping her hands, Andalusia-style.

TERESA. What a surprise! Who can this be, singing and dancing like myself in younger days?

The voice approaches, to reveal the face of Ana de Jesús.

TERESA. So it’s Ana de Lobera! (Falling into excited reminiscence.) Of course! Come closer, my child! You’ve always been different, Ana de Jesús. A queen among women, go on, don’t look so innocent, you knew you were, in spite of your genuine and heartfelt humility, which I don’t deny! You were the most attractive of all. Yes, plenty of people thought so — my little Seneca, for instance, not to use his real name. (In a jaunty tone.) There are great beauties among the nuns, you know. I have my own views on this. I’ve urged you often enough: be of good cheer, sisters!¹⁴ You will all be beautiful and queenly, worthy of the Lord, or almost…For you have to learn how to be cheerful while coming to me “to die for Christ, not to live comfortably for Christ.”¹⁵

So it is you, Ana de Jesús! Come nearer, come on, I can see you with the eyes of my dear Seneca! (Lips.) The best of prioresses, who directs Beas like a seraphim — it was John of the Cross who said that. Approach, child. After I am dead, you will gather all the manuscripts left by the Holy Mother you’ll remember me as, and hand them to fray Luis de León for publication. It’s not that I’m particularly concerned with my writings, as you know I hardly ever reread my work. But The Way of Perfection must, please, remain in the form that I have given it. The rest I leave up to you, do the best you can…You and Fr. Gratian will take care of printing the Foundations that our Lord commanded me to set down in writing…in Malagón, but when was it, exactly? The command Fr. Ripaldo finally asked me to carry out, much later, in…I’m not sure…Salamanca…(Staring fixedly at Ana.)

ANA DE JESÚS. I’ll be reproached for supporting Fr. Gratian, Mother. It’s already earned me the hostility of Nicolo Doria.

TERESA. His fury, to be accurate. You’ll get three years’ reclusion, that’s all, a trifle for an inspirational muse like you. And eternity into the bargain! Not just in the heart of John of the Cross! And fray Luis de León will compose his Exposition of the Book of Job especially for you.

ANA DE JESÚS. You flatter me, Holy Mother.

TERESA. Not a bit of it. And since you find me so holy, hear this prediction: You will introduce the Discalced Carmelite order into France, with the help of little Ana de San Bartolomé who’s kneeling right there. She will be of great service. But we’ll leave that to Madame Acarie, at Bérulle…And you’ll go to Paris, and to Dijon, and maybe even to Brussels and the Netherlands…(Pause.)

TERESITA, bending low over the pallid face. What was that you said about John of the Cross, Mother?

Ana de Jésus. Sixteenth century. Carmel of Seville. Private collection.

Teresita and Ana de San Bartolomé are avidly drinking in the murmured words; the old lady’s life-breath seems in no hurry to desert her. She smiles at her visions, tongue in a knot and throat coughing up blood, making it hard to articulate. Her words must be guessed at, they guess, they love her. She turns toward the two nuns.

TERESA. John met her in 1570, you see, when she was just a novice. When he came out of the dungeons in Toledo in 1578 he dedicated his Spiritual Canticle to her, the poem she’d asked him to write as well as the commentary on it. I haven’t been able to read it, unlike the other texts.…I tell you again, Ana de Jesús has the works, I only have the noise…(Pause.)

La Madre’s lapidary way with words stays with her to the end, whether for laughter or tears. The two nurses stroke her forehead and wipe her lips with a cold cloth. They are not sure what would be most restful for Teresa of Jesus; should they talk or keep quiet? She was never like other people. Why would she conform now?

As she prepares to depart, she finds it sweet to remember the kind, the gentle, the maternal ones. There was Ana Gutiérrez, remember, who cut her hair one day when Teresa became overheated in an ecstasy. The girl thought the hair wonderfully soft and honey-scented.

LA MADRE, curtly. Stop that at once! Throw the hair on the nettle patch!

Exeunt the sainted strands, Teresa remembers it well. Alas, it was just the beginning.

TERESA. To think they’re going to chop me into relics, dear Ana, and you’ll all stand back and let them! I suppose it could be a fashion, one of those inevitable human foibles…No, if the Lord tolerates these macabre orgies, even among my friends, it can only be because I’ve sinned.

She shakes with laughter on her narrow cot. The sisters glance sidelong at each other: Is she losing her mind? “No, never, not a saint like Teresa of Jesus!”

TERESA. María de Jesús Yepes, she was something else, awfully manly! (Wrinkling nose.) The pope said that about her. Not quite my type, that lady, but don’t forget she helped me draft the Constitutions.

(She lifts her head, tired eyes sparkling with mischief.)

Do you know what would give me pleasure, girls? (Speaking fast.) Bring me Isabel de Jesús, she could sing me a villancico in her crystalline voice. Or better not, leave it, it’s too late at night — not even Princess Juana, the king’s sister, could get her to come around at this time. Why did Her Royal Highness come to mind just now? She wanted to imitate me, that’s right, I seemed awfully simple for a saint! It was too great an honor for me. And not simple enough for her, as it turned out. One must turn things inside out in order to grasp what’s really going on in someone’s head, especially a woman’s…She was a great help, the lovely Isabel, I mean. So was Princess Juana.

Teresa straightens up suddenly. Those two girls mustn’t think the foundress is in any hurry to meet her Spouse! And the faithful pair rejoices at the improvement.

TERESITA. A sip of water, Mother?

TERESA. Why not? God keep you, darlings. I’m not thinking of water just now. I’ve drunk too much, said too much…“Just being a woman is enough to have my wings fall off — how much more being both a woman and wretched as well”!¹⁶ No matter, a person’s soul, male or female, is nothing but an abject pile of dung, and only the Divine Gardener can change it into a fragrant bank of flowers. And even then He needs a great deal of help! You look frightened, you two. What are you afraid of? That I might die? Or of what I say? (Knowing smile.)

TERESITA and ANA lower their eyes and kiss her hands.

TERESA. “We women are not so easy to get to know!” Women themselves lack the self-knowledge to express their faults clearly. “And the confessors judge by what they are told,” by what we tell them!¹⁷ (Broad grin.)

Racked once more by a dry cough, Teresa can’t laugh, the spasms block her throat. Another sip? No. She thinks some confessors incline to frivolity, and in such cases it’s advisable to “be suspicious,” “make your confession briefly and bring it to a conclusion.”¹⁸ Then she falls back onto her pillows and closes her eyes again. (Pause.)

TERESA. Not too much affection, if you please, and refrain from too much feminine intimacy. Beware, it smells a bit too much of women around here, don’t you think? (Wrinkles nose.) How often have I told you, daughters, not to be womanish in anything, but like strong men? And if you do what is in you to do, the Lord will make you so strong that you will amaze men themselves.…He can do this, having made us from nothing.¹⁹ Do you understand, Ana, Teresita? Do you, Catalina de la Concepción, Catarina Bautista? Be like strong men!

(Her lips sticky with dried blood can barely part to let the hoarse voice out. La Madre is almost shouting, to the alarm of the nurses she has so sternly told to change sex.)

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ. This is most unwise, Madre! Calm down. A nineteenth-century writer called Joris-Karl Huysmans will credit you with the virile soul of a monk.

TERESA. I thank him! But he clearly doesn’t know me very well. (Reading.) Ah, daughters, I have seen more deeply into women’s souls than any future pathologist! No, I am not referring to my admirer and enemy, the one-eyed Ana de la Cerda de Mendoza, princess of Eboli, in religion Ana de la Madre de Dios; after all, she and her estimable husband Prince Ruy Gómez provided for the foundation of two discalced monasteries.²⁰ You’ll remember nonetheless that as soon as her husband died, the lady ditched her six children and became a Carmelite, to be more like me, and then caused me no end of trouble with the padres of the Inquisition! God have mercy on her soul! A formidable battle-ax, that Eboli. Good King Philip was right to summon her back to her maternal duties…(Pause.) Is that true, or am I dreaming, in revenge? Calling herself Anne of the Mother of God, as if she were Mary’s child, that was bad enough. Girl child or boy child, who’s to say? (Wrinkling nose.) Did I tell you how she arrived at the convent? In a hermetically sealed cart, again to be like me, but with a full team of maidservants and luxury furniture for her cell.…You see the kind of person she was? I could weep!²¹

(La Madre starts choking again, and Teresita hastens to fetch a jug of cold water.)

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ, fussing is her way of showing love. Are you sure she wouldn’t prefer it hot?

TERESA, revived by anger. Finally earthly justice dealt with that pretentious woman as she deserved. Did you know, girls, that Eboli was convicted of plotting with the secretary of our dear King Philip to assassinate Escobedo, the secretary of don John of Austria? She was locked up in the Pinto tower. I can see it now, she will die in prison at Pastrana, and then it’ll be up to the court of the Last Judgment. In all humility, grave sinner though I am, I am glad not to be in her shoes.…(Falls backward.)

ACT 1, SCENE 2

LA MADRE, with her carers

ANA DE LA FUERTÍSIMA TRINIDAD

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS

CASILDA DE PADILLA, CASILDA DE LA CONCEPCIÓN in religion

CATALINA DE CARDONA

AN ANONYMOUS NUN

MARÍA DE OCAMPO, MARIA BAUTISTA in religion

MARÍA DE SAN JOSÉ

EMPRESS MARIA THERESA of Austria

TERESA DE LAYZ

With, passing through:

ISABEL DE SANTO DOMINGO

ISABEL DE SAN PABLO

ISABEL DE LOS ÁNGELES

ANA DE LOS ÁNGELES

After swallowing some water from the glass proffered by Ana de San Bartolomé, Teresa sinks back onto the white sheets. There will be no rest. The specter of the princess of Eboli hovering around the bed charges her with fresh energy. The dying woman finds great entertainment in the parade of complicated female souls.

But she lacks the strength to name her thoughts; they are only visions floating before her open eyes, blurred by tears, a down of memories; hazy shadows, opalescent or brightly hued, filling the frigid cell, flowing out of Alba de Tormes and rising heavenward with Teresa.

Here is María de San José, the prioress at Seville, the cleverest and craftiest, the one to watch. She is wearing a fox pelt over her habit.

LA MADRE. I noticed you at the palace of Luisa de la Cerda, do you remember, daughter? (Stares at her for a long time.) Trained by the greatest lady in Spain, you were a scholar, a rare jewel, speaking and reading Latin, an enchantress in prose and verse and all the rest.

(Teresa is thinking these memories, but not formulating them in words.)

MARÍA DE SAN JOSÉ. Your sanctity entranced my soul at once. “She would have moved a stone to tears,” I kept saying to anyone who’d listen. (Remembering, silent.)

LA MADRE. How many letters did I write you after by the grace of Jesus you became prioress at Saint Joseph’s in Seville? Dozens? And I’m sure you knew why at the time. (Pause.) Out of respect for your wisdom, undoubtedly. But also, or more so, because our mutually cherished Fr. Gratian wouldn’t budge from Seville. (Falls back. Palpitations.) You knew, didn’t you? What I mean is, he wouldn’t budge from your side. (Her throat tightens further, no air gets through.)

María de San José has not forgotten the tensions, the recriminations, the quarrels. A blend of affection and jealousy linked and opposed her to La Madre. Today she lowers her eyes, she won’t say a word. Teresa for her part is mentally rerunning the many equivocal pleas she addressed to the prioress.

TERESA, reading, vehemently. “Give us even more news about our padre if he has arrived. I am writing him with much insistence that he not allow anyone to eat in the monastery parlor…except for himself since he is in such need, and if this can be done without it becoming known. And even if it becomes known, there is a difference between a superior and a subject, and his health is so important to us that whatever we can do amounts to little.”²² Serve him some fish roe, an olla podrida if you can, and why not some salpicón.…(Smothered laugh.)

MARÍA DE SAN JOSÉ, unable to resist self-justification. You’re saying, Mother, that we should make an exception for him?

LA MADRE. If only you love me as much as I love you, I forgive you for the past and the future. (Teresa is not listening. While she lived, didn’t she do everything in her power to look into the soul of this fascinating woman? Tonight, let the visitor listen to her.) “My only complaint now is about how little you wanted to be with me.”²³ (She looks steadily at her. Over and above their mutual fondness, the pivot between them was Gratian. Who could fail to realize it? Not they, at any rate.)

TERESA, thoughtfully. “For goodness’ sake, take care to send me news of our padre.”²⁴ (Pause.) “Oh, how I envy your hearing those sermons of Father Gratian.”²⁵ “I am worried about those monasteries our padre has charge of. I am now offering him the help of the discalced nuns and would willingly offer myself. I tell him that the whole thing is a great pity; and he immediately tells me how you are pampering him.”²⁶ (Wrinkles nose.)

“Please ask our Father Gratian not to address his letters to me, but let you address them and mark them with the same three crosses. Doing this will conceal them better.”²⁷ (Lips moving.)

“Never fail to tell me something just because you think his paternity is telling me about it, for in fact he doesn’t.”²⁸ All this commotion about Fr. Garciálvarez, the meddling of Pedro Fernández and Nicolo Doria.…Write to me without delay, for charity’s sake, and tell me in detail what is going on. (Smile fades.)

The sentences roll through her mind. In 1576 she was obsessed with Fr. Gratian, while he was loath to leave Seville — he obviously preferred the sparkling company of María de San José. Or did he?

LA MADRE, an incisive dialogue breaking into her dreamy monologue. Do you remember when the superiors of the order wanted to send me to the Indies to separate me from you? That is, to separate us, me and Fr. Gratian.²⁹ (Teresa sinks back feebly. María looks unruffled: she knows all about this kind of female play-acting.) Was Gratian so naive? He timed his moves too cleverly between the two of us for that.…Yes, he was a chess player too, not as good as me perhaps, but not bad.…(Pause. Long silence from both Mothers.) “Our padre sent me your letter written to him on the 10th.”³⁰ Above all, and this is an order, “do not oppose or regret Father Prior’s leaving.” Don’t be like me. “It is not right for us to be looking out for our own benefit.”³¹ (Pause.)

“You must have enjoyed a happy Christmas since you have mi padre there, for I would too, and happy New Year.”³²…(Another choking fit, her lungs are full. That confounded prioress from Seville!) I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you that I saw more clearly into Gratian than you thought. “I was most displeased that our padre refuted the things said against us, especially the very indecent things, for they are foolish. The best thing to do is to laugh at them, and let the matter pass. As for me, in a certain way, these things please me.”³³ (Leaning back again.) But let’s get back to you, if we may. “I would consider it a very fortunate thing if I could go by way of Seville so as to see you and satisfy my desire to argue with you.”³⁴ Now we are in 1580 and I am very old, aren’t I? Tell me how you feel, and how happy you must be to have our padre Gratian nearby. “For my part, I am happy at the thought of the relief for you on every level to have him in Seville.” (Lips. Wrinkled nose. Retching.)

Have they made up, these true-false friends, now that the end is near? That would have been too easy. A gob of blood. The dying woman gasps for air. And spits out the anger pent-up in her old body, anger that had filtered through her pen at times but will now burst unrestrainedly from the compression of her thoughts: judgment before forgiveness.

LA MADRE, beginning quietly. What can I say, you are a great prioress, by all accounts. And a famously learned woman, a letrada, no one else comes up to your ankle, let alone me, my lovely, you’re a letrada all over.…(She gets the giggles, chokes, marks time.) But take it from me: I was upset by your foolishness, and you lost much credit in my eyes. (Stares at her for a long time.) You are a vixen, and I don’t use words lightly. If death is an almighty carnival, and hardly an amusing one, our masks still get truer as we pass over toward the truth that only exists in the Beyond, and I know you follow me on that point at least.…Where was I?…No surprise to see you wearing the skin of that crafty beast I compared you to, over your habit! Because you introduced, into our saintly community in Seville, a greed I could not bear. (Flared nostrils.) You’re certainly shrewd, beyond what your position required. Very Andalusian, really. You were never openly on my side. I can tell you, I suffered a lot on your account. Whatever possessed you to put it into the poor nuns’ heads that the house was unhealthy? It was enough to make them fall ill. When you couldn’t sort out the interest payments on the convent, you had to infect them with this strange extra fear. (Bends head, reading.) Do you suppose such matters are part of the prioress’s vocation? Well, I finally complained to Fr. Gratian about you, absolutely, I got it all off my chest. And why shouldn’t I?³⁵

(María de San José remains silent, looking down.)

LA MADRE. Stop avoiding my eyes, it’s over, I’m done here on earth.…It’s no use, she doesn’t dare look at me. (Shakes head from side to side.) You are tough and pigheaded, my dear, you resist me like you did when I wrote you those furious letters. It was like trying to make a dent in iron. Get away with you, then, adieu! What’s keeping you? Of course I forgive you, away, be off!³⁶ (Waves hand, turning face to the wall.)

La Madre has hardly regained her breath when another of those complicated females appears before her tired but vigilant gaze: María de Ocampo, the cousin whose idea it was to revive the Discalced Carmel, and who would be prioress at Valladolid. Another snooty soul, and sly-faced with it — passing judgment on all and sundry from her lofty perch. She rushes, cooing, to embrace the patient. La Madre withdraws to her innermost refuge, closes her eyes, holds her breath, plays dead. Her thoughts are more eloquent.

TERESA, reading, in an angry voice. “I don’t know how from such a spirit you draw out so much vanity.”³⁷ No, I won’t let her brag of having seen me on my deathbed. Let her reread my letters. I told her and wrote her a thousand times: it is selfish of you to care only about your own house! I dislike the way you think there’s no one capable of seeing things as you do. You think you know everything, yet you say you are humble. How dare you presume to reprimand Fr. Gratian! (Wrinkled nose, nausea.)

(The defendant remains silent.)

TERESA, staring intently at María de Ocampo. Yes indeed, this woman, my own relative, who I myself propelled into the coveted post of prioress, had the impertinence to meddle in what was none of her business! How could she have the slightest idea of what it means to talk to Gratian? Speaking with him is like speaking with…an angel, which he is and always has been. My friendship with this father troubled her soul, did it? Well, I did what I could, and I’m not sorry. (Straightens up in bed, lodges a pillow at her back, harangues the insolent phantom with closed eyes and disdainfully moving lips.) I call it a friendship, if you want to know. Friendship sets one free. It’s completely different from submission, and that’s what you never understood, my poor child. To think you wanted to “save” me from Gratian! (Forcefully.) Save me and send me back to Fr. Bánez, whom I was neglecting, in your opinion! So off you went almost every day with your nasty gossip to the illustrious Dominican, trying to turn him against me and Gratian! You proved inflexible, a stance no one has ever taken with me. Yes, inflexible, to put it mildly.³⁸ (Pause.) No, I won’t open my eyes, you will have to leave unseen. You will be pardoned without the light of a look, without brightness. That’s all. It’s too much already. But forgiveness is my religion, as it is yours, in principle. “A wise man does not bar the room of pardon, for pardon is fair victory in war.”³⁹ Who wrote that? (Teasing smile.) A “wise man,” perhaps, does not. Much harder for a woman. So what am I? Nothing. Go away now, you have my forgiveness, of course. But for pity’s sake spare me your presence.…Farewell, daughter!

Teresa represses a desire to vomit. She mustn’t, it only suits young bodies, young women; the dying must make do with the rising gorge of revulsion. She clings to her friendship with Gratian, just to show María Bautista what it is to be a woman: a woman of God, obviously, both here and in the afterlife. But a woman nevertheless, always in want of something or other — in want of love, what else.

TERESA. That prioress of Valladolid was smarter than me, perhaps. For one, she never wrote Gratian until he’d replied to her previous…at least, that’s what she said.⁴⁰ It’s different with me, I’ve always been the servant of our padre, his true daughter, and it’s no concern of María Bautista’s what went on between him and me, Him and me.…Who is He? May our Lord be with us.…My head is so tired.…(Voice cracks.)

Muffled footsteps, rustling habits, wet towels, cold water. Catalina de la Concepción and Catarina Bautista have come to take over from Ana and Teresita. La Madre meets their tender, vacuous gazes, her eyes try to smile, her lips quiver almost imperceptibly.

TERESA. We are not lovely to look at when we die, but some of us are luminous. I don’t mean that a confession trickles at last from our naughty-baby mouths — for babies is what we become at the end — but…(pause). What comes out are ranting commonplaces, ready to be staged years hence by a certain Beckett. Rarely something original or striking. But one doesn’t fear Nothingness, and when not cursing this vile world while waiting for Godot, one may find one’s tortured, waxen countenance becoming lit by a futile glow.⁴¹ (Fast.) All things are nothing, and that’s fine. (To the two carers.) Don’t you worry, my dears. There is a great difference in the ways one may be.…

Having tasted of spiritual wedding in life, Teresa now expects nothing from her Spouse but total dispossession. She will be emptied of Gratian, also. The ultimate mystery: Could Nothingness actually be Being? “Mas habéis de entender que va mucho de estar a estar.”⁴² The two nurses are bewildered: Is La Madre delirious, or is she seeing the Spouse? Already? Probably the latter, since she’s smiling.…A hideous smile all the same, stretching the lips that babble sounds in which the carers can only make out two, wearisome, obsessive words: all and nothing, nothing and all…todo and nada.…Silence.

In a flash, look, a few vice-ridden little hussies skipping past. One is the anonymous novice, who will remain anonymous: it was she who spread the rumor about discalced nuns scourging each other while suspended from the ceiling.

And this better-looking one, Ana de la Fuertísima Trinidad, a nosey parker who was always ferreting through my business, as if she wanted to impose an illegitimate proximity on me, or maybe she was a spy, but whose? The princess of Eboli? Officials of the Inquisition?

As vices go, I prefer ambition and scope, thinks Teresa. In the style of Catalina de Cardona, say. Here she is: I project the black shadow of this melancholic soul over the Alcázar gate that pierces Avila’s girdle of walls.

TERESA, calm and composed. You exerted quite a pull on me, as the daughter of the duke of Cardona, I can tell you that now, in the endgame of the end. (Pause. Cheeks reddening, elbows sunk into the mattress, makes huge effort to straighten up, fails, tries again.) You were governess to the ill-fated prince don Carlos, son of Philip II, weren’t you? And also to don John of Austria, the illegitimate child of Charles V? (Wrinkles nose.) Because I’m always attracted by rank and honor, nobody escapes the family sin, I know it. Your noble self, as a doña, had considerable appeal for me, I must admit. (Hands fingering veil, adjusting it on head.) Then, suddenly, aged forty, you marched into the desert of La Roda, laden with penitentiary chains and blood-soaked hair shirts, in the sole company of your demons — gray serpents and fierce mountain cats. Not to mention fasting, dear me, every day but Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday! (Gabbling, out of breath.) You chose to wear a monk’s cowl, and I’ll be frank, to me you’re just a kind of transvestite. At the Escorial palace, did Princess Juana and King Philip invite you in that guise? I had to put up with you; my penances were small fry, compared to yours. I wanted to equal you, which was confusing. That’s it, I was overcome with confusion when I thought about you — especially when the Toledo community, a convent you once briefly visited, described being enchanted by the odor of sanctity emanating from your clothes, although it strikes me that your grimy habit could not but stink to high heaven. I can’t help it, you see, I hate bad smells, I dread them, I run from them, there we are. (Getting redder and more voluble.) I trust my corpse will not be smelly, I’m sure it won’t be. Here, have a vision, I’ll share it for free: long after my death some good sisters will discover my fragrant body — so unlike yours, do you get me? — under a heap of limestone rocks (of course), and the news will astound the world. Jealous?

(Catalina de Cardona’s shadow remains mute. No sign, no sound, petrified in its transvestite pose.)

TERESA, in a hammy, pseudo-humble voice. I felt all mixed up before you, oh yes I did, and I confess it. His Majesty understood, and reassured me: “I value your obedience more,” His voice told me; you can imagine my relief. I didn’t ever get to be as mortified as you, or as dirty, and certainly not a man, needless to say — ha ha ha! (Open-mouthed, is she expiring, gagging, or laughing?) I know all about obedience. Most of the time I obeyed as sincerely as I could. Quite often I did so playfully, I can say that now. The Lord knew it, for nothing eludes His infinite wisdom, and He let me, because if I was pretending it was only to please Him. (Pause.) I know how to obey, then. Despite the hardness of my heart, which is certainly male. Harshness, too, I cultivated just to please my Spouse! But not in your way, oh no! A female I was and a female I find myself to be, for the purposes of suffering, of course. And for those of enjoyment, obviously! Especially! Not like you, no. But sure of His love, in sovereignty, like Him, whatever else might happen. With or without Gratian. With everything and with nothing.…You’d never understand. You see, we belong to two different species. There is a great difference in the ways one may be…(Smiling.) To bud forth, to be drenched in water like a garden, streaming with joy, to say yes to everything, to nothing.…(Smiling again.) What else is there to do? To write, to make foundations, to hurry, because time is getting short, to lie…Truly I say this unto you.…(Lips.)

At these words the black shade of Catalina de Cardona disappears from the place where Teresa was amused to see it — the Alcázar gate in the ramparts of Avila — and takes refuge, offended, in Carmelite memory.

ACT 1, SCENE 3

LA MADRE, with

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ and TERESITA

CASILDA DE PADILLA

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS

TERESA DE LAYZ

MARÍA ENRÍQUEZ DE TOLEDO, Duchess of Alba

The voice and ghost of the EMPRESS MARIA THERESA

The opalescent light of the death scene grows paler as the hours tick by. Even though La Madre knows her Spouse is waiting, her old, shrunken body cries out for motherly caresses. Does she really exist, this “mother without flaw”? Teresa no longer utters a word. Only her mind, the thoughts that leave her behind as they flee toward the Lord, clothe the visions — those wings, those ships — carrying her to Him.

That young noblewoman advancing toward her bed, isn’t that Casilda de Padilla, the daughter of the Castilian adelantado, Juan de Padilla Manrique? Her father died when she was very young, leaving her to be raised by her mother, María de Acuña Manrique, and guided by her confessor Fr. Ripalda — the inspired Jesuit priest who ordered the writing of the Foundations.

TERESA. I miss you, daughter. (Now her words run through the dying woman’s mind, through neurons that obstruct or let them pass, but no word is uttered.) Why did you leave me? Barely a year ago, it was. For the Franciscans of Santa Gadea, near Burgos, I seem to recall. (Long stare.) I recognized myself in you, or rather not — you ranked so far above me. And again, I hated that stubborn taste of mine for the finer things that drew me to you, that ambushed me in my unwitting state as a semi-Marrana determined not to know, that made me laugh at myself when I caught myself being so frivolous! First, from tender youth, like me you despised the world. (Fast.) They found a way to betroth you to a brother of your father’s, so as to keep the fortune and the family name; your brother and one sister had already taken vows, that was enough, they thought. Your parents obtained a papal dispensation to license the match with your uncle. You were only twelve at the time. You fled to a convent, they dragged you out, you went back, your uncle-husband got you out, you fled again, but this time you came to me, to the house at Valladolid.

(The film rewinds inside her head, the brain sees, speaks without uttering, scrambles, speeds up, bumps into itself.)

Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we. Your story reminds me of my own paternal uncle, the pious, unforgettable Pedro Sánchez. (Jumpy encephalogram.) No connection? You’re right, there isn’t. Except, and this is the point, that Uncle Pedro was the one who made me decide to take the veil. I can admit it now. Nobody knows, only you. Do you see? My story was the exact opposite of yours: I didn’t marry my uncle, he made me marry Jesus. Strange, isn’t it? By the grace of God, I escaped sooner than you did from the fate reserved for women, mothers, families. You took your time. You tried to do it through me. At last you obtained what I offered, didn’t you? (Pause.) In matters of love only the Other’s love endures, don’t you agree? The rest, including the attractions we feel as women, or especially those, is insoluble: the shadow of the mother gets in the way, do you follow me?

Teresa contemplates her reflection in Casilda de Padilla’s specter, plunges into the other’s life before retreating, lucidly; doubles briefly back onto the self to loop the loops of the writing and the girls’ portraits sketched out in the Foundations. That’s not me, is it? It’s not me so who is it, who is she, what is a Me? Exile or castle? Dwelling places, maybe, but no me, there is no Me…unnameable Me that tells lies, basely splashing in the unnameable fount divine, of the Word rejuvenated.…

TERESA, like an excited little girl. Is that still you, Casilda, or have I got you mixed up? Do you know you’re dressed like doña Catalina, my father’s first wife? In the clothes that were packed away in wardrobes and precious chests. How can that be.…

CASILDA. You dressed me yourself, Mother, just now, with your own hands. (She’s trying to explain that it’s all happening in the older woman’s foggy mind. Or is it La Madre speaking, taking Casilda’s role? She stares at the visitor for a long time. Superimposed images, chromatic deluge.) You picked out this shantung skirt, made from the watered silk of old China, with a bias binding in slashed yellow taffeta and a red lining. And this violet damask bodice, ribbed with black velvet. You used to say your mother Beatriz used to put them on when she wasn’t feeling sad, until, near the end of her life, she wore nothing but black…

TERESA. That’s right, I did, I remember now! (Carried away by reminiscence.) And you used to speak so sweetly about your own mother, and the joy and fun she gave you every day, that I felt quite at home. And yet that same wonderful mother provoked violent inner struggles in you, with her sainted praying. (Raising hands and holding them up, open, before eyes.) To be faithful to such a perfect mother, as I tried to be to mine, you couldn’t do better than leave the world that had caused her such grief, reject your marriage, and keep all your love for the holiness she herself aspired to, though she lacked the courage to pursue it wholeheartedly. Are you with me?

CASILDA. I thought I cared for my betrothed, Madre, much more than his age might warrant. Rather as you loved your Uncle Pedro, if I understand correctly…(Reading from the Foundations.)⁴³ “At the close of a day I had spent most happily with my fiancé…I became extremely sad at seeing how the day came to an end and that likewise all days would come to an end.”

TERESA. All is nothing, I realized that at the same age you did. Or earlier. (Pause.)

CASILDA. I began to hate the world in the midst of its pleasures. (Pause.)

TERESA. We are much alike, daughter, and I love you because you persevered. Your mother couldn’t bear to lose you to a nunnery. God bless mothers who pray on the one hand, and cherish worldly vanities on the other; such mothers sow war in the souls and bodies of their daughters. And war is the only thing worth living, my daughter; I mean it. Peace? (Pause.) Ah, peace! You too, you mouth it like everyone else, “Peace! Peace!” You, of all people! Peace doesn’t exist, my heart. There is no peace, remember Jeremiah! (Voice cracks.)

Casilda de Padilla will never know the thoughts of a mind now beyond the power of speech. She is full of her own story, as we all are.

CASILDA. Father Báñez believed in the sincerity of my vocation. Twice I entered the convent at Valladolid, and twice I was expelled, even though I’d already put on the habit. I got no support from my mother; did she think I was being childish, or that I was possessed? (Pause.)

TERESA. Maybe she wanted to test you? That’s what she told me, and your mother was a holy woman, my girl, believe you me. (Momentary smile.) So you worked out a compromise between you as follows. You signed away all your goods and assets, dear Casilda; that’s what it comes down to, choosing the religious life. Which is to say, choosing me — clear as day. Then your mother arranged with Rome to whisk you away from my lowly Carmelite house to become abbess at Santa Gadea, a convent founded by your own parents. Thus the family honor remained safe; but as for ours.…Let’s drop the subject, shall we? (Breathes out.)

(Teresa is smiling, yet there’s no detectable expression on her placid face. Ana de San Bartolomé thinks she must be with her Creator. But she’s not there yet. Her mind wanders back to her part in Casilda’s story, for this was one of her favorite daughters.)

TERESA. I can still see the way you lost your pursuers! (This movie doesn’t bother her, on the contrary, it’s entertaining.) Once you got safely into our house, your habit went straight back on. It suited you, it still does, I must say. But I hope you don’t mind if I like you better this way I dressed you just now? In that festooned skirt and purple bodice, Sister, you bring my mother’s youth back to me! Between ourselves, our rough habits never make us forget that we’re women. (Pause.) There’s always something underneath.…Do you find that funny? (Pause.) And those unspoken wars the mothers waged, they passed them down to us, via invisible and downright twisted paths. But I can’t stop thinking that those paths, those secret conduits, are precisely what make us so quick to turn toward the Lord, and so amenable to that divine Spouse. (Forcefully.) Come now, don’t look so embarrassed! Keep them, keep the skirt I put on you and the top as well, I’d have given you all of Catalina’s clothes if I could. I like you. You please me because you please the Lord, it’s that simple, there’s no sin in it. It’s a game, let’s be merry, daughter, it’s only a game.…And playing is not forbidden, take it from me. Only today, for instance.…(Pause. Asleep. Dreaming.)

(The mind journeys, but the stiffened body does not move. Has she become paralyzed?)

Ana, Teresita, I don’t sense you anymore, are you there? (Wakes up, full face.) I know you can’t hear me, my voice won’t come out. I’m cold. This blue air chills me to the bone, I wish there were some warm arms around my neck. I long for nurturing breasts, soft lap. Hot water, the four waters of the divine garden. Can’t you see that I’m a newborn babe? Bathe me, fill my mouth with warm milk! (Convulsions. Thin trickle of blood from corner of mouth.)

I’m shivering, but only because I’m too lightly dressed. This fresh breeze, so airy and sharp-edged, tells me I’m in Avila, is that right? (Fervid reminiscence. The serial goes into historical-epic mode.) Father let me wear the white silk gown with pearl trimmings and lilac-pink stitching over muslin sleeves, the one Mother wore when Charles V came to town. And those leather ankle-boots I loved to see on her. Today’s a holiday, I’m sixteen, and the Empress Isabella is coming with little Prince Philip, who is only four and who will become His Catholic Majesty King Philip II. (Fast.) To swap one’s infant garb for a sovereign’s finery, what a tiresome ceremony: flamboyant celebrations, head-spinning fuss. Then that feeling of emptiness and discomfort, me trembling and shivering like I am now, look, in this lovely dress of white and old-rose silk you’ve decked me out in, I know you meant well, but it’s the middle of winter, be sensible, children.

(No answer. La Madre can no longer hear the nurses whispering, her mind spins upon itself inside the crystal castle of her soul. No, it’s a castle of snow and ice that’s either melting or hardening, it depends. A delicate confusion merges dwelling places, years, silks, contours, beings.)

Is it me arrayed in queenly splendor, or is it you, my daughter? Father Gratian’s favorite, little Beatriz Chávez? (Stares at her for a long time.) Another one with my mother’s name; the Beatrices are definitely keeping me company on this last voyage. And you even took the religious name of Beatriz of the Mother of God! Like our dear padre, that noble squire of the Virgin, who chose the same name to become Jerónimo Gracián de la Madre de Dios. I presume you noticed the coincidence? (Pause.)

Ah, that Mother of God, how desperately we reach for her when our own fails us! It would be an understatement to say you lacked a mother, Beatriz dear. (Attempts sweeping movement with arm. Falls back.) She was unkind and a bully, quite unlike other mothers that have been coming to my mind ever since I’ve lain dying in this freezing cold, for how many days now?…Anyhow, not really a mother at all, not like mine, nor like the way I attempted to be a mother myself, although, God forgive me.…(Pause.) He knows how flawed I am. (Pause.)

(Beatriz de la Madre de Dios makes the most of this sentimental moment by acting the little girl, and a pretentious one at that: she’ll never change.)

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS. In centuries to come, people will say that I was an abused child, won’t they, Madre? You went into detail about my ill-treatment in the Foundations, in the chapter about the painful process of foundation in Seville.

TERESA. Appalling, to leave a seven-year-old mite with her aunt! They may have been rustic mountain folk, but your parents were Christians, like everyone else! (Falls back.)

(Beatriz doesn’t reply at once, intent on her own history as though drunk on bitterness.)

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS. And then those three servants, who were after my aunt’s inheritance, accused me of trying to poison her with arsenic!

TERESA. To be honest the idea doesn’t seem to me so far-fetched (full face again), in an abandoned child who would do anything to get home to her mother. We can admit these sorts of things now, can’t we? This Hell on earth is well behind us, I mean behind me, and the cold air is already carrying my body, if not yet my soul, up to Heaven.

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS. You are more au fait with all that than I, Mother. How can I remember what happened when I was so little? I do know that when Mother got me back, she gave me a scolding and a whipping and made me sleep on the floor every night for more than a year.

TERESA. And yet your mother was virtuous and devoutly Christian, like mine! (Long pause. A joyful expression gradually forms.) Aren’t human beings strange! You’d think the Creator had not made us all of a piece, but out of mismatched scraps. As a result we all have several faces. You in particular, my child, it’s a veritable curse.…Unless it’s a stroke of luck, a kind of grace or freedom, do you follow? One of the most enviable of God’s gifts, the ability to travel through our innermost spaces in a kind of pilgrimage.…

(Beatriz goes back to poring over the twisted threads of her misfortune, not listening to La Madre. Teresa, carried away by storytelling, is not listening either. She has already written this drama, she contents herself with gleaning a word here and an image there. Hopeless, toxic female contiguity.…)

TERESA. Ah, so your father passed away? (The movie allows itself some melancholic frames.) You never told me about that…and your brothers died as well? The Holy Virgin had to take you under her wing to ensure that when you were around twelve, you stumbled on a book about Saint Anne and developed a great devotion to the saintly hermits of Mount Carmel. (Joyful expression returns, more intensely.) Like me, you chose virginity. Clearly the best choice of a bad bunch. Fatherless and miserable, harried by your poor mother, who couldn’t help taking it out on you, you barricaded yourself behind your hymen. (Thin smile, fading.)

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS. I wanted to die a martyr, like Saint Agnes. Father and Mother beat me almost to death, then they tried to choke me.…I was confined to bed for three months, unable to move.…I wanted desperately to lose myself.

TERESA. Lose yourself, child? (Leans back to inspect her.) Thanks to the love of Christ, you were saved! To suffer like Him is pure glory. Once you felt affinity with the martyrs and the Passion, your family’s harassment was transmuted into a token of love, wasn’t it? (Long pause.)

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS. There was only one way out for me: to become a nun.

(Teresa seems to be suffocating again, she gasps for air to the alarm of Teresita and Ana. She thinks of the other Beatriz: Beatriz de Óñez.)

TERESA. Beaten children, abandoned children, it’s all the same: that’s what you are, my darlings. (The sequence of images is overtaken by darkness.) Primed to take shelter in the bosom of the tortured Father whom I call our Lord. (Turns to face us.) My sisters, you are, and I along with you, we are the paler twins of the Lord on Calvary. The Lord who allowed Himself to be tortured, abused to death if you like, in order that we might merge with Him, fuse our flesh with His, and thus and only thus be saved along with Him. (Sudden vehemence.) You see, little one, you can escape from a degraded or violent mother, flee a falsely respectable and profoundly distressed family, but you can never, ever, get away from Him. We poor mistreated creatures — and what creature is not? — could only be saved by a Father as cruelly flogged as we were, who loves us and saves Himself, and thereby saves us too. (Voice cracks.)

(The Chávez girl will never hear the catechism lesson La Madre recites to herself in order to make sense of her life and death. Beatriz is still hung up on her own adolescent yearnings.)

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS, in a perverse whine. I couldn’t find a good father confessor anywhere, Mother.

TERESA. That’s the way it goes, perfectly natural, my child. (Smiles.) But you are a shocking little flirt, let me tell you plainly.…As plainly as I allow that your mother was a wicked bully, in her way. (Knowing smile.) No need to blush! I can tell your cheeks are on fire, even with my eyes closed. (Turns her back, settles on side with face to wall.) I’ve known you long enough.…(Breathes out.)

I know you like the back of my hand, in fact, and you hardly need me to tell you why: because of Gratian. Yes, him again. (Pause.) Not knowing how to become a nun, you became depressed, and started haunting churches, looking haggard. An old white-bearded Carmelite did his best to convince you that God had already made you strong, since you’d survived your decomposing family, but that wasn’t enough, you were on the lookout for something else. What could it be? (Smile fades. Lips.) The arrival of young Fr. Gratian on the scene lifted you to seventh heaven. You went to him for confession at least twelve times — oh, I know every detail! — you stalked and harassed him, in fact. (Vehemently.) He was wary of pretty airheads like you, I made sure of that, I wrote to him endlessly on that topic, as on many others.…Finally a lady interceded for you, and the painful richness of your soul was comforted: you clung to him like a limpet, determined not to let go!

(It would take a lot more to dislodge that little pest of a Beatriz.)

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS. It was the feast day of the Holy Trinity, 1575, when you came to Seville, Madre, that I ran away from my parents’ house to take refuge in the convent. I was your first novice, remember? You made me eat properly, I put on weight, I made peace with my mother. A few days after my profession of faith, my father resigned himself to die, and Mother came to join me at the convent.

TERESA. Nothing ever made me so happy as to see mother and daughter devoted to the service (effortfully turning over, stares at her for a long time)…the service of One who proved so generous toward them.

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS. Mother and I? Or do you mean you and I, Madre?

TERESA. Mothers and daughters, you know, can never be reunited in this world. (Rubs finger over lips.) So much passion, so much rivalry, with love thrown in; and love is at its murkiest between a mother and a daughter. But there is a way to solder them, the only way! Remember what I am about to tell you, hic et nunc. Were female cohabitation possible at all, it is only possible in the name of His Majesty, a Third Person: that’s what the true, Catholic, Roman, and Apostolic religion teaches. Will you remember that? I hope so, for your sake! As for the rest, between ourselves.…(Nose, lips.) Some of the father confessors God sends us are deplorably frivolous, in my experience. (Reading from Way.) “If this confessor wants to allow room for vanity, because he himself is vain, he makes little of it even in others.”⁴⁴ Be forewarned! (Pause.) You aren’t obliged to agree with me. In reality, Sister, you are quite incapable of having any opinion on this subject. Besides, these gentlemen are inclined to render us mistrustful of one another, it’s well known.…(Gravely.) Why do you suppose I wrote a whole chapter about you, the twenty-sixth of my Foundations? It was because I knew the story would gratify him, who adored you. Of course I mean Fr. Gratian, who else? A foundation, you see, rests upon a host of stories like that, what did you think? (Tries mechanically to adjust veil, forgetting that she is bare-headed.) And it has a great deal to do with raptures, something else I daresay you know nothing about. Ah, they are impossible to resist, and cannot be disguised. On those days I am like a drunken man, I entreat God not to let it come over me in public! As for the lascivious feelings that come afterward, and that other people have mentioned to me, I pay no attention to them and I advise you to do the same. (Knowing smile.) Actually, I have never experienced this.⁴⁵ The truth is that I am so cheerful at departing at last toward His Majesty that I can confess all these trivialities to you, trivial creature that you are. But how I always distrusted you! (Rueful smile, followed by nausea.)

(Three knocks at the door. Who is it? Who wakes La Madre from her coma?)

TERESA. Let me go in peace! Dear God, You will not despise a repentant heart? (Lifts beseeching eyes heavenward.)

Father Antonio de Jesús, the old companion of John of the Cross, now a vicar-provincial, has come to witness the agony of the foundress. With him is the new prioress at Alba de Tormes, Juana del Espíritu Santo, a sweet and gentle girl but excessively fond of fasting, in Teresa’s opinion. On grounds that Teresa was junior to the prioress, Juana offered her white linen bedclothes in place of the usual straw mattress, but then left her alone…so as not to be importunate! Father Antonio seemed not to notice this underhand score-settling between women. And now, at the end of the end, sensing the approach of the final hour, the two of them decide to show up — the Carmelite may well become a saint, you never know! But Teresa can’t be relied on to collaborate. She is already floating on another level, waiting to be seized by the “royal eagle of God’s majesty,” “esta águila caudalosa de la majestad de Dios.”⁴⁶

TERESA. Ah, you must be here to talk business. (Condescends to open eyes a crack.) The battle for the Salamanca Carmel will be my last, and I have some concerns about this latest institution, having formally prohibited that the house be bought. But the prioress Ana de la Encarnación had set her heart on it. (Turns page.) So, it’s you, Teresa, my daughter, Teresa de Layz, I regret that we must meet in these circumstances, but never mind, since it’s God’s will. Come closer, don’t hang back. (A new lease on life, briefly: foundational affairs stimulate her to the last.) I took you, too, for another myself. It was you who founded this discalced convent at Alba de Tormes where I now lie, by God’s grace, on this final leg of my journey. (Reads.) I devoted a nice little “short story” to you, as it will be called, in my Foundations. Don’t thank me, thank the Lord for making you as you are. You had everything to be the beloved daughter: a well-heeled family, noble, pure-blooded parents so as not to feel “sold into a foreign land”⁴⁷ the way I sometimes did…I won’t dwell on it, but I’m telling you, know it and don’t forget. But no, that’s wrong, it wasn’t like that at all.…(Rubs her eyes, nose, lips.) God wished you to be abandoned also; soon after you were born, your parents left you unattended for a whole day from morning to night, as though your life mattered little to them. So many abandoned girls it pleased God for me to gather up — a sign from Providence, was it not? Providence, no doubt about it, decreed our paths should cross.…What was I saying.…(Hacking cough.) You were their fifth daughter, and people have no use for girls in this ignorant world.⁴⁸ Now listen, and retain what I say to you: “How many fathers and mothers will be seen going to hell because they had sons and also how many will be seen in heaven because they had daughters!”⁴⁹ (Stares at her for a long time, then bows head to read from the pages that continue to unfold on the blue cloak of the Virgin, caressing the body on the brink of death.) The times will have to change, that’s all, and I have a premonition that it will be soon…

TERESA DE LAYZ, in a faint voice. The village woman who found me thought I was dead, apparently she said to me: “How is it, child, are you not a Christian?” And I piped up, “Yes, I am,” despite being only three days old, because I knew I’d been baptized; and said no more until I reached the age when all children start to talk.

TERESA. That’s quite a story, my dear; these women tell so many of them! Be that as it may, tell yourself that God willed it so, and don’t attempt to fathom the mystery, we all of us bear its stamp (Stares at her again, with incredulity.) Forgotten by both parents, you knew you were a Christian. An excellent Christian! I myself recognized this about you, or else I should never have let myself be awoken by your visit at this stage. When your parents heard what their baby had said, they were amazed. They would have been amazed by far less. (Coughs again, clears throat.) Full of remorse, they began to lavish love and care upon you.…They were also troubled by your subsequent lack of speech that went on for a long time, I believe! (Widens eyes. Pause.)

TERESA DE LAYZ, reciting her homily. I didn’t want to get married. But then, on hearing the name of a man who turned out to be both virtuous and rich, Francisco Velázquez, I consented at once. He loved me and did everything to make me happy, while on my side, God had equipped me with all the qualities he could wish for in a wife.

No, women never stop telling stories.…And this is another, stranded on its sandbank, jumbling times and places, high on love, children, and disappointment. Teresa isn’t listening, she knows it all in advance, always did. What she had to do was swim on by, let the rest sink, wash herself down, escape.

TERESA. A happy marriage, then. Like my marriage to my Spouse? (Broad grin.)

TERESA DE LAYZ. Not all that happy, Madre, in that it was barren.

(At these words the foundress falls back into her blue chill of agony. The visitor continues prattling about the desire for children, hijos, posterity, generación, and the many devotions and prayers she offered up, all in vain. Teresa thinks nothing. Nothing but the cold that sends icy fingers through the entrails that once were enflamed by the spear of transfixion.)

TERESA DE LAYZ. “Do not desire children, for you will be condemned,” I was told by Saint Andrew, a powerful patron of these causes. And then I seemed to see a patio, Mother, and beyond it green meadows as far as the horizon, dotted with white flowers. Like your gardens, Mother, irrigated by the four waters, fragrant and in bloom. Saint Andrew appeared to me again, saying: “These are children other than those you desire.” At that I understood that our Lord willed me to found a monastery. (In a metallic, conquering voice.) I no longer wanted to have children.

(Teresa remains silent for a long time. Why must this other Teresa rekindle such hoary griefs, incommunicable, forgotten, overcome and buried long ago?)

TERESA. I never wrote about what is now burning the tip of my tongue, and will remain as pure, unformulated thought.…(Fervid reminiscence.) Your story finds an echo in me. Two Teresas, de Cepeda and de Layz, two barren wives who begat religious houses instead of offspring.…(Pause.) You and your faithful husband eventually created Our Lady of the Annunciation at Alba de Tormes, a fine convent, and I’m proud of it. (Pause.) Sincerely proud. (Weeps. Another long, heavy silence.) And now, they tell me that the good donor that you were torments those great souls? (With sudden violence.) “I fear an unsatisfied nun more than many devils!” There!

Teresa de Layz feels the fear of sterility come over her again. If a mother upbraids her daughter, if she deserts her, is it not because the mother is herself unhappy, numbly inadequate, afflicted by some inexpiable infirmity? A dried-up fig, in short.

(The dying woman pushes herself up on her elbows in the white bed with its freshly changed sheets.)

TERESA. Ah, dear lady, one cannot serve God in disquiet. All this is infantile, mere attachment to self. How different it is wherever the Spirit truly reigns! (Turns the page.)

Teresa of Avila can be cruel, all right — just enough to restore order. Up to her last breath, and, if God wills it, piercing her foremost alter egos to the quick.

Father Antonio de Jesús shows Teresa de Layz the door.

TERESA, to Ana de San Bartolomé. Tell me, child, are we still in Alba de Tormes, on the duchess of Alba’s estates? (In a childish tone of regressive nostalgia.) Ah, the duchess! She delivered me for a time, like the exit from Egypt, she nurtured me.…It was her, doña María Enríquez de Toledo, wasn’t it? Or am I out of my mind? I see her now.…(Tries to rise onto elbows, falls back.)

(Doña María Enríquez de Toledo, the duchess of Alba, walks past holding a trout.)

TERESA, in a changed, respectful, courtier’s voice. The grace of the Holy Spirit be always with Your Excellency. Have you received my letter imploring your kindness regarding the house founded in Pamplona by the Society of Jesus? I know, the duke your husband is leading an army into Portugal, and the constable is your brother-in-law the viceroy.…(Whispered aside to Ana de San Bartolomé.) We must absolutely protect the Society as it protects us, don’t forget that, my child…a testament, if you will.…(Respectful voice.) I am very sick, You Excellency, I am bleeding, I am on my way…it is important to me that the favor you show me in everything be known.⁵⁰ (Quick sigh, soft voice for herself.) The duchess is definitely worth keeping on side. After all, it was she who helped to have my little nephew Gonzalo exempted from serving in the duke’s Italian campaign, dear Gonzalo, who caused me so many headaches after that.…Oh well, I did my best and so did she, and at least he didn’t get killed.⁵¹ (Pause, broad smile.) I’ll always remember the nice fat trout you sent me, Excellency, when I was here in Alba, a good ten years ago it must be; a gift from God.…(Tired voice, sigh. Suddenly sits up, reads in emotive voice.) “If you favor us in this regard it would be like liberating us from the captivity of Egypt.”⁵² (Silence.)

(Broad smile, repeating.) Like liberating us from the captivity of Egypt…liberating us from the captivity of Egypt…from the captivity of Egypt…the captivity of Egypt.…“Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.…And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob…I am the Lord.”⁵³ Let my people go…my people…from the bondage of Egypt…deliver me…deliver.…(Coughing fit, long silence. Rest.)

(Teresa wastes not a second of this respite, the clarity that precedes death. She addresses Ana de San Bartolomé.)

My dear child, as soon as you see that I am a little better, please order a cart.…(Barely audible.) Settle me in it as best you can and we will go, you, me, and Teresita, home to Avila (voice breaking).…Do you promise?

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ. Planning to travel, even with her last breath!

TERESITA, plaintively, in tears. She wants to be close to her parents.…

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ. I don’t think so. She wants to leave Egypt.

TERESITA. But that’s been done, way back in the Bible!

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ. Not like that. I think she’s still caught in her own personal Egypt.…

Suddenly, after a few slow bars of introduction, a slender, diffident but cultivated soprano voice is heard. Delicately it sings an unaccustomed Kyrie for a funeral service — from the Missa Sanctae Theresiae, the Mass for Saint Teresa by Michael Haydn. The work was commissioned by the Empress Maria Theresa, and the voice we hear is hers.⁵⁴

TERESA, surprised, intrigued, attentive. Don’t be afraid, my daughter, nervousness inhibits the voice…as well you know, since at home in Austria you regularly sing the soprano solos of sacred music compositions. (Motherly smile, timidity.) Relax, let yourself go…you are after all the wife of Emperor Francis I of Austria! Come closer, let me hear your tuneful little voice.…Everybody will agree one day that Your Majesty’s musical sensibility was the finest of all the Habsburg line.…You can believe me, it’s your own patron saint telling you.…(Vertigo, slackening, peace invades the spasm-shaken body.)

EMPRESS MARIA THERESA, singing the first movement of the Mass composed for her by Michael Haydn. The choir remains in the background throughout. “Kyrie eleison.…”

LA MADRE. “Bravo!” “Superb!” “Majestic Haydn!” Are those your words or mine? I am not very musical, Majesty, as is well known, and you honor me by associating me to that sort of faith which music is…being the most spiritual…or rather the most physical…that is, both at the same time…or not? (Dreamy voice.) Majestic, yes, that’s what you called the little brother of the greater Haydn, for you could see he wasn’t so little…a Kapellmeister of Salzburg Cathedral, no less.…The young Mozart will learn a lot about sacred music from Michael, no secret there.…He mentions him in letters to his father Leopold.…They will remain friends, even after Wolfgang’s turbulent break with Prince-Archbishop Colloredo.…Music specialists will have a great deal to say about him, as time goes by…yes, I assure you.…Some will point out that Mozart’s celebrated Requiem has much in common with the Requiem composed by Michael on the death of Prince-Archbishop Sigismund von Scrattenbach, another friend of Amadeus. But we’re not at the requiem stage yet, are we, Majesty?…In my case, at least.…Sing on, my daughter, and may God bless your lovely voice.…(Peaceful smile, falls asleep.)

EMPRESS MARIA THERESA, solo voice for the Benedictus, once again an unusual choice for Haydn in his homage to the empress and the saint. “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.…”

TERESITA, crouching at the foot of the bed. It seems the empress is giving her voice to La Madre.…What am I saying, La Madre gave her voice to her.…

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ. Is this really a Mass? It sounds more like a prayer, the sound of peace.…

(Empress Maria Theresa is oblivious. She exits, carried on the Benedictus by Michael Haydn.)

La Madre’s spirit floats over the eighty-eight towers of fortified Avila, protected under the hem of the Virgin’s blue cloak. At the same time she addresses the cortege of dark female silhouettes filing past her bed:

TERESA, in a chanting voice. Farewell, ladies, I am on my way to different skies. (Pause.) With no regrets. That is, I don’t think so. (Subtle smile.) You did a good job of filling my life, as I filled yours. Enough is enough.…

The procession of nuns and prioresses includes Isabel de Santo Domingo, Isabel de San Pablo, Isabel de los Ángeles, Ana de los Ángeles.…

TERESA. If the soul is a woman, she grieves to see that her nature, or rather her sex, hinders and ties her down. (Reading.) “Si es mujer, se aflige del atamiento que le hace su natural.…(Short silence, then rapidly.) She can’t enter into the midst of the world to praise God.…And she envies those who have the freedom to cry out and spread the news about this great God of hosts.…(Short silence.) Those who are free to proclaim to all the world the greatness of the God of cavalries.”⁵⁵ (Turned toward them, gazes after the procession of women leaving the scene.)

(La Madre’s head rolls back onto the fluorescent white pillow, an exceptional concession to the dying in this Spartan place.)

(Long silence. A voice is heard in the distance.)

When the breeze blew from the turret

Parting his hair,

He wounded my neck

With his gentle hand,

Suspending all my senses.”⁵⁶

TERESA. What song is that? I never wrote that.…(Voice breaking.) Could it be dear John of the Cross speaking through my lips? Is that you, Father, by my side?

(The voice stills. The eighty-eight towers, a glimmering girdle of Avila blue, encircle the dying body of La Madre.)

Chapter 31. ACT 2: Her Eliseus

ANGELA, a code name for Teresa in correspondence with Jerome Gratian

LAURENCIA, ditto

LA MADRE, out of breath

ISABEL DE SANTO DOMINGO, prioress at Segovia, passing through

FATHER JEROME GRATIAN OF THE MOTHER OF GOD, permanent presence Aliases:

ELISEUS, PAUL, JOANES

TERESITA and ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ, at prayer

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, psychologist

VOICE OF HIS MAJESTY THE LORD

VOICE OF A FUTURE EDITOR OF TERESA’S WORKS

ACT 2, SCENE 1

Cast as above, minus the VOICE OF HIS MAJESTY THE LORD

The soul in agony here enters a terrain that rather resembles that of my MPH, were it not for the way the Holy Mother’s faith has changed it into a well-watered, flower-filled garden. Here, at the extreme of being, extreme beings trail their sufferings and raptures, their obsessions and exaltations, deliriums and OCDs, hysterical passions, manic self-punishments, dull melancholies, and searing moments of lucidity. Filtered through the body and the word, these states at the limit — hers, theirs — appear as alluring as passion, as beautiful as Paradise, as necessary as ideals.

La Madre has rallied a little: it’s the upturn before the end. She can speak again, although with difficulty. The words that garland her memories and premonitions elude her throat and mouth. Almost silent, voluble inside, she relies upon the body more than ever, and marks the passage of time in beats of sound, touch, taste, smell. The failing Madre’s flesh is no more than a love letter by now, a letter endlessly edited, corrected, and rewritten.

The skin thirsts for cooling waterfalls. The tongue cries out for pungent tastes. The shattered bones dream of strolling among fragrant lilies. When loneliness is so immense, to whom can these entreaties be addressed? Absence makes one mad. So does the longing for presence.

ANGELA, in a normal voice. One day in 1575…was it in February or May? At the Convent of Beas…the Lord told me that He could grant my wishes. (Pause.) And as a token of that promise He put a handsome ring onto my finger, an amethyst. What divine bounty toward my sorry life, worthy of the fires of Hell! I know it was delirious nonsense to have felt this wedding to be real, in broad daylight. Christ as a marriage broker, un casamentero, that’s insane! Foolishness…I can laugh at it now.

VOICE OF A FUTURE EDITOR OF TERESA’S WORKS, attempting to moderate the harshness of a judgment that shows her, even on the brink of death, being as tough on herself as ever. Madre, you noted in that context “I am writing this foolishness,”¹ but the fragment is apocryphal, of dubious authenticity, and the Church does not recognize it.

TERESA: You, too, love me too well, Father. (Looks at him for a long time.) Let me confide what comes to my mind about all this now. Was it not foolishness on my part to have seen — around the time I received the amethyst ring — the Lord join my right hand to Fr. Gratian’s? And to have heard Him say that I should take that master as His representative, all the days of my life? (Raises chin, looks straight ahead.) Now, then, Father, don’t back down, I pray you. I take it upon myself to admit that I committed that desatino and many more, fair enough. Neither right nor wrong, but inevitable. Logical. Well, yes, I’m a logical woman! If you think about it, all that kind of thing derives straight from the sacred humanity of Christ. And there aren’t many of us prepared to take on the full implications of Cristo como hombre. (Knowing smile.) Please don’t make that face, Father, I know the repugnance I inspire in you. I have felt my abjection and soiling intimately, I assure you. (Stops smiling.) But after so much pain and contrition, the disgust turned even so to pleasure, to desire, and — but I’m not telling you anything you don’t know — into a clandestine relationship with my Eliseus, my Paul, my Joanes. He needed me. He needed that secret friend, code-name Laurencia, or sometimes Angela.…That’s what I called myself in letters to him that he most certainly has kept, you’ll see. (Hand stroking the veil she imagines is still covering her disheveled head: incorrigible coquetry.) His letters, no, I haven’t kept them. He didn’t write often, anyway, we’ll never know what he really thought, or how different it was to what I suggested he think.…(Tender voice.) I elevated dear Gratian to the place of God, outwardly and inwardly, I confess it. I needed those antojos, cravings, whims, and on reflection, they weren’t incompatible with the Incarnation. (Pause.) That’s all. Mad! (Broad smile.)

The enigmatic grin brightens La Madre’s face for so long that her two nurses suppose she must be getting an early glimpse of her Spouse.

She is not contemplating Gratian as he looked the day of their first meeting, but as he is in the seventeenth-century portrait of him that hangs in the Carmel at Seville. Because Sylvia Leclercq has no other way of picturing him.

LAURENCIA. You’re a charmer, Padre. Had I had no other reasons for serving God, your angelic grace would have sufficed to convince me. And “in a certain manner it is a delight for me when you tell me about your trials.”² I can think of someone — me — who will know how to defend “her son Eliseus better than anyone else in the world.”³ (Reading.) “I was pleased that Paul wrote me as ‘your dear son.’”⁴ “Oh Jesus, what a wonderful thing it is for two souls to understand each other, for they neither lack something to say, nor grow tired.”⁵ “Mi padre—and my superior, as you say, which delighted me and gave me a good laugh.…(Chuckles.) What little need there was for you to swear — neither as a saint nor much less as a teamster — for I am fully persuaded.…I only want to remind you that you gave me permission to judge you and think whatever I want about you.”⁶ (Still reading.) Oh, my soul grows lonelier every day, so far from you.…(Normal voice.) I feel as though I’m “always near Padre José,”* [*A code name for Christ. — Trans.] but who is he? Jesus Christ or you? “In this way one passes through life well, without earthly consolations, yet continually consoled. It seems you are no longer of this earth, since the Lord has withdrawn the occasions of becoming attached to it and filled your hands with what keeps you in heaven.”⁷ (Big smile.)

Fr. Jerome Gratian of the Mother of God. Sixteenth century. Carmel of Seville. Private collection.

Here, Sylvia Leclercq grows irritated. Despite her years of graphomania, our poor Madre remains a slave to her passions! (The therapist will not speak of her irritation, but allows herself a moment’s intrusion into the deathbed scene of this most unusual patient.)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ. After so many years of, um…(hesitates, clears throat)…of flattering, supporting, and shielding your precious genius of an Eliseus, mightn’t it be a good idea to give it a rest? And for you to find rest in the peace of the Lord Himself, rather than in some stand-in or other?

Teresa is not best pleased by this interpellation. Under the guise of protectiveness, could the stranger be seeking to discredit her?

LA MADRE, trying to get a clear view. How very sensible of you, my dear! Kindly refrain from treating me as an invalid who has lost her marbles. (Tries to point a finger at the intruder, hand falls back onto sheet.) Think what you like, but pray keep this in mind: “The important thing is not to think much but to love much.”⁸ Consider if you will, clever lady, that by 1575 I had already started seven convents and was having some trouble with the friars of my Order. There weren’t many discalced men in those days, and not one, frankly, who could hold a candle to Fr. Gratian. (In a wheedling voice.) And so, you understand, a fellow like that who as a young man in Madrid used to beseech an image of our Lady, whom he called his “Beloved”—all right, it’s a bit pretentious, but with such disarming humility! He fell in love with our order in Pastrana, where he charmed the socks off the prioress, Isabel de Santo Domingo.…(Snort.) Who succumbed like all the others, male or female, to the magic of his conversation.…Finally he decided to take his vows with us, after trying out the Jesuits.…(Widens eyes.) An hombre with that kind of mettle is something to treasure, don’t you think? (Knowing smile.)

Defeated by the evidence, Sylvia Leclercq keeps quiet.

ANGELA. When he came to see me at Beas, a few years later, in that unforgettable year 1575, he was already widely esteemed as a discalced white friar. Considering that, three months before his profession of faith, he had had to vanquish some very powerful temptations; he told me a little about it.…(Absorbed in Gratian’s travails, the voice grows dreamy, quivers, melts. Is Teresa taking the path of ecstasy already?) Anyhow, he had been called upon to be a captain of the Virgin’s sons, and he was fighting with great valiance.

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, trying to get through to her via realism. So you needed him, just as he needed you? Gratian would be the organizer you had been hunting for in vain, the man to coordinate the renovation of the Primitive Rule. And yet he didn’t include your name in the Alcalá Constitutions published in 1581; there’s no mention of you at all!

LAURENCIA. That was our agreed strategy. You are being petty. (Normal voice.) True, Fr. Gratian drafted the Constitutions for the discalced friars.⁹ (Silly voice.) He was plainly helped by our Divine Majesty, and our Lady had clearly chosen him for the task of restoring Her Order. Of course, wretched sinner that I am, I strove to hide my imperfections from my daughters — although my flaws are so many that they must have noticed some. For instance, my affection for Paul, not the same today as it was, perhaps, but it persists.…(Tragic voice, reading.) And the concern I have for him. “I often point out to them how necessary he is for the order and that I am under an obligation — as if I could act otherwise if I didn’t have this reason.”¹⁰

SYLVIA LECLERCQ. I see. Not only was he useful to you, you loved him. (She advances a simplistic, coarse interpretation, as one does with smart-ass patients who try to hide their cards. Take it from me, such patients are conscious of all sorts of things that are assumed to be unconscious!)

Teresa has stopped listening, doesn’t reply, plays dead. The psychologist, somewhat embarrassed, circles the bed. Not a flicker. Sylvia withdraws, resigned. La Madre remains with her Pablo-Paul-Joanes-Eliseus.

Isabel de Santo Domingo walks across the stage.

LA MADRE. You’ve come to say goodbye, dear child, God be blessed, I was expecting you. You met Fr. Gratian when he was a student, and I know it was you who steered him toward the Carmelites. In short, I met him thanks to God…and to you! (Quick smile.) “I had never seen perfection combined with so much gentleness.”¹¹ You feel the same way, I know. (Lingering smile. Lips.) Go in peace!

(She turns to the wall. Not dreaming, but rereading her life.)

ANGELA, reading, with a little smile. “I am now very old and tired, but not in my desires.”¹²

LAURENCIA. For pity’s sake, write to me! She has a point, that psychologist: why don’t you write? (Tragic voice.) I stand up to the censors, I do battle with Nuncio Sega here and with Nicolo Doria there, all for the sake of our joint work, and also to please you, but you leave me to pine.…If at least you’d give up the fight, and give me up, cleanly. But instead you maneuver, you’re equivocal; another sign of your genius, no doubt. I beg of you, write me, Padre, instructing plainly what I must and must not do. (Imploringly.) It’s not fair of you to touch on these matters so confusedly. And also you must pray for me, a lot.…I am surprised you don’t tire of me; I suppose God permits it so that I can bear a life in which I enjoy so little health or satisfaction, apart from what pertains to you. (Pause.) Lord, I well remember having written that to my Eliseus. And this: if, by wounding me, they wound my Paul no matter how slightly, I cannot bear it. I was not upset in anything that concerned me.…There, that’s how I lived my life. (Raises hands and holds them before eyes.) Love will never be a sickness.…I hope that little psychologist who was trying to guilt-trip me has left. It’s obvious the silly woman has never read the First Epistle of John (3:14): “He that loveth not his brother abideth in death.” I’ve read it. Pablo and I, we knew that.…For charity, write to me, mi padre! (Broad smile.)

(Silence from Jerome Gratian. He will not respond to the woman on the brink of death.)

LAURENCIA. Is he still in Seville? Traveling through Andalusia? (Silly voice.) With María de San José? Or Beatriz de la Madre de Dios? What do women want, cloistered or not? A father to reign over, of course. But a man? Jesus, in his sacred humanity? What does a man want? To be loved by women, so as to escape from his brothers and be elected by the father? My mind is wandering.…The Dominican Juan de la Cueva, an eminently sensible man, observed that Gratian had a tendency to act alone, without consulting others. (Suddenly vehement.) Did my Paul think he was some kind of spoiled Infant King? He didn’t even come back for the solemn vows of Lorenzo’s daughter at Avila, although I begged him to, and poor little Teresita was so looking forward to it. Where are you, Eliseus dear? (Silence from Paul.)

ANGELA. I’m talking to you, pleading with you. Laurencia does not often enjoy her confessor, Paul, whom the Lord gave to her, because in the midst of so many troubles he is always far away.…

(Silence from Paul.)

ANGELA, reading. “But what learning and eloquence Paul has!”¹³ And he has an honorable and agreeable family for whom I came to care, especially his mother, doña Juana Dantesco.…I hope that beastly psychologist isn’t listening, God knows what she’d make of that! (Pause.) Ah, my darling Paul, I did all I could to protect you from Methuselah, our pet name for the nuncio Ormaneto, do you remember? (Normal voice.) Now that it’s behind us, I’m wondering whether the most egregious aspect of the affair might not be my passion for your mother, doña Juana. (Long silence, smile; collapses heavily back onto mattress, fondly shaking head from side to side.) I was as crazy about her as I was about you. (Warm smile.) Who wouldn’t be? Because I’ve seldom, or probably never, met her equal for talent and character. (Reads.) “She has a simplicity and openness that put me in seventh heaven,” I can’t repeat it too often; and “in these she greatly surpasses her son.”¹⁴ That was naughty! You’ll forgive me, Father, won’t you?

At this point Sylvia Leclercq feels compelled to tiptoe once more into the scene: Will Teresa’s free-associating cast any light on the (pretty indiscreet) pathology of that godly woman?

ANGELA, silly voice. It was very amusing, Eliseus my sweetheart, when you told me to open the grille and lift my veil for your mother; to show her my face, basically. Good grief, it seems you don’t know me! I would have opened my belly for her! For her first of all, her above all, who bore you in her womb! (Pause.) For her, sure, sooner than for the great Bernini who will make my marble entrails thrill to the cherub’s lance. (Smile.) The sculptor never suspected that the little angel was you…my baby, my lance, my javelin, stabbing me in the heart and beyond…deeper, lower, in the castle’s remotest chamber.…(Blissful smile.)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ. Poor thing, what a passion! Shoving the Word in up to her.…(For reasons of technique, the therapist is given to using crude language with certain patients. Today she holds back, flashing a half-mocking, half-complicit grin at La Madre, who doesn’t notice, immersed in her sensations.)

ANGELA. I was thinking, Joanes darling, I’d willingly give the habit to your sister doña Juana, who stayed here with your mother until the last day. And also to that little angel her sister Isabel, “who is as pretty and plump as can be.” Doña Juana very much resembles you.…(Pause.) I’d love to have her with me. By the way, which of us two loves you more, do you think? “Doña Juana has a husband and other children to love, and poor Laurencia has nothing else on earth but this padre.…”¹⁵ (Laughs out loud. Pause.) So, since I couldn’t give birth to you, or suckle you, all my care went into feeding you. Remember, Eliseus my soul, how often I nagged you to eat properly…(silly voice) to put some weight on, to make sure María de San José plied you with tasty dishes? Even if they were cooked by her, who I didn’t much like. I took huge pleasure in feeding your mother, as well as your angel of a little sister, Isabel, who is with us at present. “How plump she’s getting, and charming”;¹⁶ I love her almost as much as I love your mother, since I can’t love you more than I do already. (Knowing smile.) I give her ripe melon to eat, it’s the best I can do, since breastfeeding is not given to all — but shush, that psychoanalyst is still eavesdropping. (Smile fades.) My temperament is strange: the less notice you take of what I think, the freer I feel about expressing my desires and opinions. God bless you.…(Long silence, cheeks reddening.) Ah, it breaks my heart to hear that you are unwell, my father, my son.…A rash, it seems, doubtless due to the heat. That reminds me (tragic voice)…I must tell you about a temptation I had, which persists, concerning you. And I wonder whether you yourself do not neglect the whole truth at times. (Touching voice.) Do you think I’m jealous? Well, what if I am?

Perhaps La Madre is a normal woman after all. Though Sylvia Leclercq already thinks so, she’s somewhat taken aback by such goings-on beneath the rough woolen habit. Two hundred years before Diderot’s The Nun, a scandal in its day. But on closer inspection, is Teresa indulging in a carnal freedom forbidden by her religion, or is she, on the contrary, activating the interior (as La Madre would say) message of that religion? It’s an unconscious message as far as Sylvia is concerned, which acquits desire of guilt, provided the desire is for the father. Well then, let it be proclaimed, let it happen in words rather than deeds! And if matters should get so muddled that sin does ensue, the weight can still be lifted through the senses and in words, over and over again. Isn’t it more enjoyable that way? The jouissance of everything and nothing, from words to flesh and back again. Physical frustration heightens the power of fantasies, while fantasies sharpen sensation to the max. There’s no possession as satisfying as abstention. This could be the delights of masochism, or alternatively an inversion of sadism into an objectless exhilaration, in the omnipotence of narcissism; Sylvia Leclercq is not sure what to think anymore. She is disposed — almost — to admire, while concealing her Voltairean smile.

LAURENCIA. May God pardon the “butterflies.”…(Pause.) I am talking about our Carmelites in Seville, lucky enough to enjoy my Eliseus. It’s a great hardship for me. (Reads.) “I can’t help envying them, but it is a great joy for me that they are so diligently seeking to provide some relief for Paul, and so inconspicuously.”¹⁷ I like women, too, I won’t deny it. Oh, I understand, Eliseus my son, I even approve. Up to a point. God alone knows which point…

Sylvia is practically rubbing her hands. What a windfall! This deathbed is a positive psychotherapist’s couch.

ANGELA. Are you taking revenge on me, adored Pablo? (Sighs, reads.) The time left to you after my death — a long time, never fear—“will bring you to lose a little of your simplicity, which I certainly understand to be that of a saint.”¹⁸ (Humbly.) But be on your guard! The sisters are young, and the thought of you spending the summer in Seville is alarming. (Touching voice.) Needless to say you’ll be working against our enemies, like those Jesuits who are giving us a hard time. I used to call them “ravens,” to amuse you; and what about the “cats” and the “wolves”—the more malicious of our discalced brothers, hard to believe, but they exist, and they were after you; not to mention the “night owls,” those dismal calced nuns who can’t stop conspiring…and of course Methuselah, the apostolic nuncio…always the same ones…among so many others determined to scupper us! (Irritated chuckle.) I wrote to you extensively at the time on these urgent topics, in order to guide you, of course. And now, at the end of my allotted span, I only have two counsels for you. (Reads.) Primo, “One gains a great deal from being attached to the Society of Jesus”: a rule not to be forgotten. Secundo, “Believe that I understand woman’s nature better than you.” That’s a fact. The devil likes nothing better than to make a woman’s least whims appear attainable.¹⁹

(Silence from Father Gratian.)

LA MADRE. Why won’t you speak to me? (Pleading voice.) Say something? It pains me to remind you of the rumors that hurt me so greatly…and against which I defended you with all my might. It’s only natural, being your daughter and your mother at once.…No need to thank me…not that you are thanking me, for that matter. Anyhow, I washed the opprobrium off you with all the friendly solicitude of the wretched sinner I am.…(Pause.) At least I hope so, it’s not definite, the future is highly uncertain, and needless to say I’m more afraid for yours than for mine. (Threatening voice.) You engaged in carnal relations with the nuns…you spent the night in such-and-such a convent, you were spotted naked in another…oh, I know.…(Tragic voice.) Our enemies make the most of imagination, just to cause us harm.…Just to prevent my reforms.…(Hopeless voice, cough, nausea.) But please be careful all the same.

La Madre’s blood pressure shoots up, irrigates her brain. A final apoplexy? Teresita and Ana de San Bartolomé jump nervously to their feet. But the old lady has not done with score-settling on earth.

LA MADRE, in a menacing voice. How am I supposed to forget, here on my deathbed, how in…November 1576…I warned you against a strange woman who wanted you to visit her at home, with the excuse of a nervous illness.…(Pause.) I’m still convinced it wasn’t so much a case of melancholy as of meddling by the devil, because she was obviously possessed. He wanted to see if he could fool you in some way, now that he’d fooled her. (Normal voice.) So by no means go to her house! Remember what happened to Santa Marina, who lived disguised as a monk, and was accused of fathering a child! That would be the final straw.²⁰ (Arms crossed on chest, strangled voice.) It’s no time for you to be undergoing such an ordeal. In my humble opinion, dear father, dear Eliseus…if my words are not enough to push you back onto the right path, think of the papal nuncio, Felipe Sega, the bishop of Piacenza.…(Voice cracks.) The most inveterate adversary of our reform, who does not bear you in his heart and would pounce on any scandal as grist for his mill, you know it.…(Long sigh.)

(Pure tears trickle from the dying woman’s closed eyes. There’s no spasm of weeping, her eyes are simply melting, exhausted by visualizing so many scenes of love and turning themselves away from such profanity.)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, entering for the last time, she crosses the stage unseen by Teresita and Ana, praying on their knees beside the bed. La Madre is watering her garden. Maybe she’s the voluptuous type without realizing it, wrapped in that innocence tailor-made for transgression, sure to be forgiven by the Holy, Roman, and Apostolic Church. She takes her pleasures gently, I see, and gives herself down to the last drop, with just enough guilt to spark desire again and again, interminably.

LA MADRE. Lord, I cannot hope for better days than those I spent with my Paul. But for charity, mi padre, do not read out my letters in public.…(With distress.) Don’t you understand anything? I never wanted anyone to hear me when I spoke with God, I wanted to be with Him in solitude. Well, it’s the same thing with you, my dear Paul.

(Silence, prolonged silence from her Eliseus.)

LA MADRE. You’re in hiding, you don’t dare face the nuncio I advised you so strongly to visit.…(Suddenly anxious.) “My Paul is very foolish to have so many scruples,”²¹ if your reverence will permit me not to mince words for once. (Silly voice.) For the devil never sleeps, my baby! You, with all your ducking and weaving, your indecision about whether to attend Mass — your obsessional moods, as the Leclercq woman would say — have you, or have you not, been excommunicated by Sega? Oh, stop it! I’m fed up with hearing how depressed you are. (With sudden violence.) What would you have said if you’d had to live like Fr. John of the Cross? You are impassioned, agreed, but you could do with more tactfulness and insight. Although you rarely preach, according to you, watch what you say all the same. (Silly voice.) My son, my baby.…“He looks healthy and well fed.” ²² “Even a few hours without knowing about you seem to be a very long time.”²³

(Still no sign from Gratian.)

LA MADRE. Right, you let me down when I need you most, and I pardon you for it, because we can only follow the path of perfection in hardship. (Another coughing fit.) Allow me, dear friend, to tell you one last time that I am sorry for your “mental fatigue.” As I once wrote you: “Learn to be your own master, avoid extremes, and profit from the experience of others [Sepa ser señor de sí para irse a la mano y escarmentar en cabeza ajena]. This is how you serve God, and try to see the need we all have for you to be in good health.”²⁴ (Long sigh. Pause.) No, I haven’t forgotten what I owe you: you convinced me of Christ’s humanity, of which I was not exactly ignorant, but you enabled me to imitate Mary Magdalene for real. (Coughing, choking.) Women have a special capacity to love an eternal Spouse, a king-man, a man.…Not to die of love, but to suffer from it so as to do things better. I wrote in the account of my Life that nothing meant more to me than to attract souls to a higher blessing.²⁵ That was too general, too abstract, I was being defensive, as the Leclercq woman would rightly say; I think I am about to embrace her logic. And so what? You turned me into a Mary Magdalene, Eliseus, and I found the power to attract, with you and beyond you, in order to serve that higher blessing.…(Dry eyes, long silence.)

(No sign from Gratian.)

LA MADRE. I know you’ll remain attached to the memory of me, that’s something, my Paul. I mean to say, Glory to God! (Reading, in sensitive, almost emotive tones.) “She told me all about her life, her mind, and her plans,” that’s what you’ll write about me, isn’t it? It was the first day we spent together, apart from Mass and mealtimes, of course; the first time we talked about ourselves. “I so submitted to her”—now, that’s laying it on a bit thick, Pablo my sweet—“that from then on I never undertook anything important without benefit of her counsel.” That’s true enough. (Smothered laugh, voice suddenly dreamy.) You are destined to write a great deal, in the future, and you will always pray for three hours a day, because you are a saintly man, in a way.…(Pause.) The Flaming Lamp, am I right? There’s a title little Seneca would have loved. It’s perhaps the book of yours that cleaves most closely to our doctrine.…That’s right, I said “our.” All of your writings evoke your own life, that’s only to be expected. Researchers will detect a faint trace of me in your mystical theology, your way of perfection…it’s not hard to find.…After all, you were dead set on getting me canonized. Apparently that’s a sign of fidelity. (Broad smile.) I want to believe it, and so I will.…(Shaken by simultaneous coughing and laughing fits. Uncontrollable laughter. Tears. Long silence.)

(She is very cold, shivering in every fiber of her being.)

Take my hand, Father.…Just for a moment.…For friendship’s sake, I’m on my way to the Spouse, I’m in transit.…Hold my hand, in the name of Christ’s sacred humanity.…(Flat voice, almost cold.) No, what are you doing, I didn’t ask you to cut it off, just to hold it.…You make me laugh…no, of course I don’t feel any pain, not by this stage. You amuse me, you often did.…(Quick sigh.) You’re still chopping me up…you’re not listening…did you ever listen to me…who listens to anyone.…There’s another fine myth, this business of listening. One hears voices, sure enough, but from there to listening.…(Serious voice.) Stop it, really, you’re hurting me now, for the love of God…I suppose you want some relics out of me, what utter nonsense.…(Drawn-out groan, then talks at speed.) You found my body whole and uncorrupted…well, obviously, under that heap of limestone.…You conveyed it stealthily to Saint Joseph’s at Avila, you set it up as an object of devotion.…A great comfort to the dear little nuns.…My sisters placed the coffin in the chapter house, on a stretcher, with curtains that could be pulled aside for visitors to gawp, and afterward closed again.…Ah, that casket, lined in violet taffeta with silk and silver braids, the outside covered in black velvet with ornaments of gold and silk, gilded nails, locks, rings, and handles, and two escutcheons of gold and silver, bearing the symbol of the order and the name of Jesus, and on an embroidered cloth the words Mother Teresa of Jesus.…(Knowing smile.) I gave off a lovely fragrance…I should hope so, what with my four waters every day, and the flesh that becomes Word, or the other way around, goes without saying.…(Reading.) “The clothing smelled bad once removed from the body, and I had it burned. While it was on the body, it smelled sweet.” (Lips. Pause.)

(No sign from Gratian.)

TERESA, in a faint voice. That’s what you wrote…and the Jesuit priest Ribera would quote your words in the first biography he wrote of me, by the grace of God.…(Reading, fast.) You also mentioned your surprise at the firmness of my breasts…is that so? And then you cut off my left hand, as a gift for the Carmelites of Lisbon, and added in the margin of your memoir: “When I cut off her hand, I also cut off a little finger and kept it with me and from that day to this, glory be to God, I have not suffered any illness, and when I was taken captive by the Turks they took it from me and I bought it back for ten reals and some gold rings I ordered to be made using some small rubies that were on the finger.”²⁶ My baby, you’ll always be a baby, Eliseus…but you still don’t miss a trick, do you? A relic can also be a splendid bargaining chip. (Sigh, broad smile.) And that wasn’t the end of it, you were so proud to have got me home to Avila in the dead of night, firmly sewn into a canvas bag that you flung over the back of a mule. It was a kidnapping, another journey.…(Smile.) You wanted to be buried next to me. The dukes of Alba objected that I belonged to them, which was only to be expected: Hernando de Toledo, the duke’s nephew, thought the world of me. So he went to the Holy See about it and Pope Sixtus V ruled that I be taken back to Alba…that was in August 1586. (Grave voice.) What a crowd was there…an admiring crowd, of course, which would have torn me to bits, so I was kept behind the grille as a precaution. My detached left arm was brown and creased as a date, thin and slightly hairy; after they changed the cloths that wrapped it, the old cloths were touted as relics, too.…Ribera was right to predict that I would be chopped up further, into a thousand pieces.…What a racket! The new prioress of Alba de Tormes, Catalina de San Angel, demands my heart, to keep in her cell.…Saint Joseph’s gets a clavicle and a ring finger…My right foot and a bit of my upper jaw end up in Rome.…(Faint voice.) How profitable I am, from the Beyond!..Who’d have thought it? (Long silence.) Hold my hand, Father…it’s all nonsense.…After all, the sacred wedding takes place in the soul, doesn’t it? That’s what all the learned fathers worth their salt used to tell me.…

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, who can’t resist popping up again. What a fetishist, really! Father Gratian collecting the organs of the phallic mother! A gore movie, I do declare. The little finger, the hand, the arm — left or right?…Who cares, a writer’s arm, that’s good enough for anyone. (Exit. The audience boos the intruder who can’t stop bothering a dying woman. La Madre pays no attention, absorbed in her Eliseus. But she’s reached the end of her tether.)

LA MADRE, losing her temper. Enough, for pity’s sake! Eliseus, kindly put a stop to this cult of the corpse, this carnage.…(Pursing mouth and wrinkling nose with vehement revulsion.) At last! Oh.…You no longer dare do it yourself, so you ask Fr. Nazianze to chop off my left arm for the chapter house in Pastrana — I don’t believe it! What’s stopping you all of a sudden? Are you feeling the pangs of remorse, Father? Is your love growing humanistic? Oh no, not you! An arm is a lot more unwieldy than a finger or a hand, I do sympathize.…Ribera, with dark irony or sincere outrage, marvels at how “easily, with no more effort than it takes to slice a melon or some fresh cheese, Nazianze cut off the arm at the shoulder.” Oh dear, how tedious men are.…I’m tired…forgive me, dear Eliseus.…(Weary, fed up. Brief silence. Then speaking fast.) Poor Fr. Nazianze, he confessed that this act had been the greatest sacrifice he had ever made for our Lord as a token of obedience.…What a notion! “Sacrifice,” indeed — sacrificing me into the bargain! Now for the best part, which is that my hand will wind up in the possession of General Franco…taking pride of place on his bedside table, and all through his long agony! He’s anointed me a “saint of the race.” What I’ve had to put with from men. Poor things…I’m so tired, so tired, my Pablo…my father…tired of you, too…of everything…of nothing…my poor sweet.…Whatever is the point of that hideous butchery? It’s not even mystically correct! Yes, make a note of that expression if you please: mystically incorrect, that’s it.…I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. What’s your position on this, Lord? (Tears flow from wide-open eyes, she is hardly breathing.)

(Still no response from Gratian. Nothing from the Voice, either. A long silence falls.)

LA MADRE, reading. Speaking of Eliseus…it’s a strange thing that the affection I have for him causes me no embarrassment, as though he were not a person.²⁷

(Laurencia falls asleep.)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ. That’s saying something! If he’s not a person, Gratian is something more than God’s servant; is he God Himself? A splinter of the divine? She loves Gratian in the way she believes the Church wants her to love Jesus — her beaten Father, her manly double, her Lord. “Not a person.” And also a twin, perhaps; her male clone, her creature, her work? (Such is the psychologist’s opinion, as she leans against the wall in a corner of the stage, watching the saint doze off. She doesn’t say it aloud.)

ACT 2, SCENE 2

LA MADRE

HIS VOICE

TERESITA

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ

HIS VOICE. “Eat, daughter, and bear up as best you can. What you suffer grieves me, but it suits you now.”²⁸

LA MADRE. Who goes there? Eliseus?

HIS VOICE. Father Gratian is far away as you know, and you won’t see him for a while. He has gone to cross swords with Nicolo Doria.

LA MADRE. In Hell?

HIS VOICE. No. Your Eliseus is not the holiest of men, which won’t be news to you, whatever you may have said or written.…But he redeemed himself, and he did a lot, on balance, for the creation of your order. Peace be with his soul!

LA MADRE. In Purgatory, then?

HIS VOICE. Steady on! You’re far too hasty and intemperate, I am always having to tell you. In his own way, and it’s an honorable way, he will remain true to you. Consider: he goes to Rome to plead the cause of your reforms. Embarking for Naples, he falls into the hands of the Turks. Crosses are tattooed on the soles of his feet while he is the pasha’s captive. An exceptional destiny, so no need for regrets. Finally he is ransomed by Clement VIII, enters the Carmel, and holds your relics close for the rest of his life.

LA MADRE. Wretched am I, a wretched sinner! (Normal voice.) I thought I was Laurencia, or Angela, or goodness knows who. I thought I was married to my Paul as I was married to the Lord. Did I ignore His Majesty’s voice? Did I forget to be that other person I became for You and with You.…(Still normal voice.) The Teresa of Jesus who is in love with the one and only Third Person, His Majesty?

HIS VOICE. My Will is that the great favors come through the hands of the sacred humanity. As I have told you numberless times, that is the gate you must enter through.²⁹

LA MADRE. And that’s how I understood You, Lord. Your Majesty never said that there is a great difference in the ways one may be…a master; (reading, still in a normal voice) or that the master “is never so far from his pupil that he has to shout.”³⁰ (Pause.) I feared confessors who feared the devil more than I feared the devil. (Calmly.) It was Master Gratian who immersed me in Your humanity.

HIS VOICE. Daughter, it is written in Exodus that the people saw the signs, rather than merely hearkening to the “words which the Lord had spoken”;³¹ but you have done more. You don’t merely see My Voice, you feel it in your whole body. More than a visible or audible presence, I am a sensory presence for you.

LA MADRE. “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”³² Ego phonè, ego vox.…Now I’m talking like a scholar, like John the Baptist. Too proud, again? (Normal voice.) And I am the wilderness, and I am the voice that gropes in darkness…I don’t understand why this is, but that I don’t understand gives me great delight.³³

HIS VOICE. Listen, daughter, there is something demonic about a voice that rises within. A Greek philosopher said so before me and without me, and he was right. Because the voice that calls you out of yourself usually deflects you from what you are doing; it never urges you to act.

LA MADRE, ardently, My Lord, Voice of His Majesty, You never turned me away from action.

HIS VOICE. That is what I like about you, daughter. In you, the voices don’t die away as the Word grows, they only fan out through all the senses, as Jesus’s Voice did in John. But who understood this? It took sixteen centuries for you to come along and persuade the Church that this metamorphosis is always, still, possible. You and Ignatius Loyola, don’t forget!

LA MADRE, greedily. Nobody receives the Voice of His Majesty…without knowing true pleasures and refreshments, gustos, from God.

HIS VOICE. What do you mean?

LA MADRE, in a meditative, quiet voice. The Lord gives me to understand. El Señor me da a entender. The Lord gives us freedom. Licencia nos da el Señor. As he gives us, when we think of the Passion, greater anguish and torments than the evangelists record.³⁴ When I speak of refreshment, I am speaking of “a gentle refreshment — strong, deeply impressed, delightful, and quiet.”³⁵

HIS VOICE. Show some humility, daughter. You are not the first to embark on this path. “The senses rebound in thought,” wrote Meister Eckhart; he and his disciples were familiar with “the essential foundation”³⁶ and “learned ignorance” that were nonetheless open to be “touched” and “tasting of eternity itself.”

LA MADRE. I didn’t know, my Spouse. I am determined to be different from all those bookish, saintly men. For Your call does not keep me in “indefiniteness,” as the honorable doctors past and future like to say.³⁷ You authorized me not to turn absolutely away from all that is familiar. (Pause. Eyes, squarely in shot.) And there’s nothing indeterminate about this familiarity, to my mind. It is delectable through and through.…(Smile that fades at once.)

(The Voice does not reply.)

LA MADRE, in a conversational tone. That being the case, Your word and Your call are not for me reduced to a “vocal utterance.”³⁸ I appreciate them, I seek them out. You know it. But more importantly I register them as a brazier burning inside my body. Because I don’t neglect other sensations, on the contrary I savor them, Lord.…Where your humble servant is concerned, I must say that sensations often take the upper hand, I mean the lower, well, in short, they take over! (Red cheeks despite the livid features; then meditative voice, closed eyes, peacefulness.) For aren’t all sensations destined to be reabsorbed into the movement of imaginative thought that is distinct from intellectual understanding?

HIS VOICE. The flesh is feminine, my beloved child, Christ himself was aware of it. To the best of my knowledge, in his case the Father’s Voice was not merely a “giving-to-understand,” and was indisputably a “giving-to-feel,” as it is for you, my daughter.

LA MADRE. I am born all over again when you call, my Spouse, and my rebirth is not just vocal, not a brute cry, let alone an understanding. I am reborn in You through all my intermingled senses joined into one, mouth, skin, nostrils, eardrums, eyes, the whole garden awash with Your waters. (Reading, serene voice.) Didn’t you say to me that “turning away from corporeal things must be good, certainly, since such spiritual persons advise it.…[But] the most sacred humanity of Christ must not be counted in a balance with other corporeal things”?³⁹

(The Voice does not respond.)

LA MADRE. You are silent. Is Your Majesty’s Voice deserting me because It considers any corporeal thing likely to hinder contemplation of It? (Anxious voice.) But to withdraw completely from the body of Christ, or to count His divine Body among what causes us nothing but misery, no, I can’t accept it.⁴⁰ (Reading.) We can compare His Voice to “a food that many persons eat.”⁴¹ The epileptic, anorexic novice I once was, plagued by such nervous anxiety that everything frightened her, gradually relaxed and grew stronger, according to the academics García-Albea and Vercelletto, as well as that nice psychologist Leclercq. She acquired her manly courage by receiving from His Majesty the kiss a Bride demands. How good it tasted, Lord! (Replete, satisfied voice.) One sees how beneficial it is, and one’s taste has so adapted to this sweetness that one would rather die than to taste any other food.…(Pause.) Because anything else would only take away the delicious taste Your food left behind. (Exhalation.) Here an abundance of water was given to this unloved woman who was wounded…⁴² and thus I can live in Your world, separate from the world. Because I clearly heard You say: “You will grow very foolish, daughter, if you look at the world’s laws.”⁴³ (Nostalgic voice.) That was You, wasn’t it, Majesty? Where are You? You won’t talk to me anymore. Say, Lord, where has Your admirable, friendly company gone to…?

(The Voice remains silent.)

LA MADRE. “Dilatasti cor meum,”⁴⁴ so sang the Psalmist, but it’s not my heart, it’s another, still more interior part that dilates and expands in me.…(Pause.) It must be the center of the soul.…(Long pause.) Or the center of the body? (Shrewd smile.) Or maybe both?⁴⁵ I hope it’s not an illusion crafted by the devil, to feel that Your Voice impresses itself by dilating through me.…When Your Majesty inhabits me like that, everyone complains of what a ignoramus I am. All but the disciples of John of Avila, and the Jesuits.…(Pause.) Mind you, on reflection, it was the disciples of Loyola who got me to meditate on the sacred humanity of Jesus — at the time when I’m afraid I was adrift in some fairly hazy orisons, Osuna-style. (Knowing smile. Pause.) Answer me, Majesty, don’t desert me!

(Silence.)

LA MADRE. My nuptials with dear Eliseus, my father turned son…my fetus…my achievement…could well have been the devil’s work, if I hadn’t known that the fire came not from me but from You, Lord. (Tragic voice.) Not one word?…Perhaps Your silence, Majesty, suggests that Laurencia or Angela once shut herself all alone in a room with Eliseus? That she didn’t realize that the light which married them came from His Voice? (Pause.) Are you suggesting I’ve forgotten that the carnal furnace itself, the furnace of desire, is consubstantial with His Voice?…(Tragic but feeble voice.) That it doesn’t come from me or from you, Eliseus, but it does make us other, both of us, because it comes from the Other.…Perhaps I was foolish to the point of imagining.…Oh, it’s nothing but gossip…my Gratian decked out in garlands and crowns like a heavenly King.…I did, “I saw my Eliseus there, certainly not in any way black, but with a strange beauty. On his head was what resembled a garland of precious stones, and many maidens went before him with branches in their hands singing songs of praise to God. I didn’t do anything but open my eyes so as to distract myself, and this wasn’t enough to take away my attention. It seemed to me there was music from small birds and angels in which the soul rejoiced; although I didn’t hear it, but the soul was experiencing that delight.”⁴⁶ (Pause.) A Christ.…(Pause.) A sovereign.…(Pause.)

HIS VOICE, at last! You took a risk, the pair of you, unhappy sinners. But you managed to thwart the consequences, in the end. I choose to consider that you thwarted them, and would inevitably have done so sooner or later, because it was My Will that you should.…So there you are. It’s over now, go in peace, both of you.

La Madre lies motionless for a long while. Exhausted by her efforts, glad to have been accompanied by His Voice one last time, is she still thinking, feeling, or living at all? There’s no way of telling, because Teresa has completely merged with her interior castle. There she holds open the doors of possible and impossible dwelling places.

She wants to let go into meaningless words, to speak in tongues…Delirium is her Pentecost, and she pulls herself together.…This transit toward His Majesty is going to be interminable.

LA MADRE, regaining her breath and her senses. They say the “babbling talk” of lovers does not say anything about the events of the world. (Knowing smile.) I expect they’re right, because they are philosophers, whereas I am just a woman, and a wretched one at that. Certainly, lovers’ babble has nothing to tell, not about worldly events.⁴⁷ (Another shrewd smile.) But my own babblings, inflamed to the point of madness by the fire that carried me to Pablo, made me tell everything I knew about…about what? (Stops smiling.) About my wanting to do what is in me…me, outside myself…outside the world within the world.…(Opens eyes, seeking to rest them upon an absent interlocutor. Sylvia Leclercq hides, unseen, behind a column.)

HIS VOICE. What are you talking about now, you stubborn creature?

LA MADRE, reading. “Oh, Lord, how we Christians fail to know you!”⁴⁸ To do what is in me, “do what lies within your power,”⁴⁹ that’s what living is. (Pleading voice.) That is the reconciliation of Martha with Mary Magdalene. Does it surprise you that a contemplative like me should identify with Martha? (Pause.) Because Martha is not a contemplative in the way of the Magdalene, that’s official. You know better than I do, Majesty, that contemplative women are not immune to the call of the flesh. (Pause. Reading.) If Martha had been like them, who would have prepared food for His Majesty? Who would have served Him? Who would have eaten at table with Him? Contemplation makes one forgetful of self and of all things, and progress is fast.⁵⁰ Others such as Martha, however, are led by God into the active life. (Still reading, gravely.) The Lord, fostering them little by little, gives them determination and strength.…⁵¹

TERESA, palms joined in prayer. By straying with my Eliseus, while also listening to the Voice of the Lord — Oh God, would that I heard it more often! — I was attempting to reunite Mary Magdalene and Martha. (Pause.) It seemed to me that, since the Lord is corporeal and likewise His Voice, the Creator was surely to be sought in His creature.…⁵²(Quavering voice.) To be precise, I knew this to be true, but thanks to my folly with Eliseus I experienced it body and soul, in this world, by trying to accomplish the work of a Martha reconciled with Mary. (Lifts hands and holds them open before face.) A contemplative soul is left floating in the air, as they say; it seems it has no support no matter how much it may think it is full of God. (Normal voice.) Well then, the humanity of Christ’s body provides that support.…Ah, but that humanity attracts the desires, in other words the fires of the Spirit, which weaker souls are daunted by.…(Pause.) And such souls are quick to conceive fears…flee from the pleasures…and reject that extreme sweetness…which I so often could not tear myself away from, no more than could Saint Francis, Saint Bernard, or Saint Catherine of Siena.⁵³ (Expression of happiness.) Most of the others prefer to ascend or be elevated, and that is doubtless excellent for the souls most advanced in spirituality, but it is not continual. (Happy expression fades.) Pardon me these comparisons, Majesty, I often have trouble being humble, in spite of my best efforts. And yet I fear that others are far more deficient in humility than I am, if they’re not content with so fine an object as the humanity of Christ. And, of course, “a woman in this state of prayer is distressed by the natural hindrance there is to her entering the world.”⁵⁴…She is distressed, I am distressed, do You hear?…

(His Voice remains silent. Here Teresa believes she can hear it smiling at her.)

LA MADRE, surer than ever of His Voice. Jesus was not an angel…(shrewd smile)…so far as I know! (Reading.) We are not angels either, we have a body.⁵⁵ I always go back to that.…Is that called an obsession, you psychologist over there? Laurencia and Angela under the habit of Teresa of Avila, Pablo beneath the appearance of Fr. Gratian.…(In a frankly serene voice, still reading.) Being human, it is very beneficial for us to consider God in human form, suffering because desiring, for as long as we are in this life.…(Voice breaks, blood trickles from right corner of mouth.) To desire to be angels while we are on earth — and as much on earth as I was — is foolishness. (Pause.) Ordinarily, thought needs to have some support.…(Pause.) Jesus Christ is an excellent friend, in His sacred humanity.⁵⁶ (Broad smile.)

(La Madre has finished her plea.)

TERESITA. She’s going to sleep.

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ. She has seen the Lord.

(Teresa’s visage radiates complete peace. Is there nothing left to wait for?)

LA MADRE. What’s that I hear? His Voice again? No, it’s not the same carnal timbre, the voice that guides me tentatively, caressingly, upliftingly.…(Pause.) So it’s not the Lord, not yet. Who, then? Could it be you, my little Seneca? I miss you so much! Even though we don’t agree on everything, you and I. What did you say? That you personally don’t need support? You push on to the end of the night? (In a greedy voice.) Me too, I try in my own way, in my own night…No, don’t take that for an exaggeration, Father, I pray you, in reality my words fall short because the experience is unexplainable.⁵⁷ You know that better than anyone.…It seems to be like gibberish, algarabía.⁵⁸…A taste in the mouth…I know, we never finished discussing it; we were both of us rather against it, though, weren’t we, my big Seneca? (Imploringly.) And what if that were Paradise? An adjustment of just souls? We never stopped trying to be just, did we? You less than me, perhaps, or vice versa.…(Reading.) For “the soul of a just person is nothing else but a paradise where the Lord says He finds His delight.”⁵⁹ So what happens when in addition to this, two souls strive to offer delights to the Lord.…What do you think? Speak up, won’t you, John dear? Come on, force that thin adolescent voice of yours.…(Pause.) I daresay you’ve scorched your vocal cords as well, then, today.…(Short laugh.) All I can hear is an ashen sound, I’m dying, you know. (Cheerful laugh.)

~ ~ ~

Saint John of the Cross. Spanish school, seventeenth century. Toledo, Museo de Santa Cruz. © Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.

Chapter 32. ACT 3: Her “Little Seneca”

TERESA OF AVILA, with her carers

JOHN OF THE CROSS

MOTHER MARIE

BLANCHE DE LA FORCE

THE CARMELITES OF COMPIÈGNE

BOSSUET, writer, prelate, bishop of Meaux

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, psychologist

VOICE OF LEIBNIZ

VOICE OF SPINOZA

ACT 3, SCENE 1

JOHN OF THE CROSS

TERESA OF AVILA

MOTHER MARIE

BLANCHE DE LA FORCE

THE CARMELITES OF COMPIÈGNE

The scene takes place in the ground-floor parlor of the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila. This is where, according to legend, the levitation of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross occurred. The two future saints are seated in the very chairs concerned (today on display to the public). Instead of the bluish light of preceding scenes, a fiery glow bathes the room.

JOHN OF THE CROSS. Without support and with support,

Living without light, in darkness,

I am wholly being consumed.¹

TERESA OF AVILA, after a pause. “We belong to the party of the Crucified One.” Somos de la banda del Crucificado.² Your paternity employs the same language as I, but not with the same meaning. To you, everything is wound and oblivion; to me, everything is union and delight. Is that too perfunctory, or exaggerated?

JOHN OF THE CROSS. Surely our first care is to devote ourselves to the dark night of the senses. To detach the exterior senses and pare the natural exuberance of the appetites.³

TERESA. Since our first meeting in Medina in 1567—when you, Father, were still a young student in Salamanca — I recognized in you the spiritual authority we needed, by God’s grace. (Shifting her chair away from his.) I also realized straight away that your paternity would not be easy to deal with. You wanted to become a Carthusian, but I quickly made you see that you could be one, to perfection, with me. Do you remember what you replied? “I give you my word, on condition I don’t have to wait too long.”

JOHN OF THE CROSS, after a silence. “For, the farther the soul progresses in spirituality, the more it ceases from the operation of the faculties in particular acts, since it becomes more and more occupied in one act that is general and pure.”⁴ “The soul no longer enjoys that food of sense, as we have said; it needs not this but another food, which is more delicate, more interior, and partaking less of the nature of sense,”⁵ full of “peace and rest of interior quiet.” (He is motionless, eyes fixed not on her but on the glowing red space.)

TERESA. I expounded on these delicate matters long before you did, my little Seneca. Recall that by 1567 I had already written the book of my Life and The Way of Perfection. (No longer at death’s door, voice calm and authoritative.) It’s true that God accorded me the spiritual marriage in November 1572, and your arrival six months earlier did have something to do with it; still, I was already prepared, I had been ready ever since my re-conversion. I know you don’t dispute it, but I’d rather set the record straight once more before I die, seeing how absorbed you are by that flame…(Gazing at the brazier herself.) You didn’t write anything before my Interior Castle, and that’s a fact. (Shifting her chair back nearer to his.) The life of the spirit — which I taught you — arises from the most intimate part of the soul. It burns, and how! I am a connoisseur of fire, contrary to what you might expect from the voluble female you suspect me to be. Water is my element, I can’t help that, but it doesn’t prevent me from acceding to the soaring of the flame. You have often witnessed it yourself. For the spark that suddenly begins to blaze and shoots up like something extremely delicate to the higher plane that pleases the Lord is of the same nature as the fire that remains beneath. “It seems to be a flight, for I don’t know what else to compare it to.”⁶

JOHN OF THE CROSS. “Withdrawn from pleasure and contentment.”⁷ (Pause.) Nothing! Nothing! I would give up all I am for the sake of Christ! “Love is begotten in a heart that has no love.”⁸

O living flame of love

That tenderly wounds my soul

In its deepest center! Since

Now You are not oppressive,

Now Consummate! If it be Your will:

Tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!

O sweet cautery,

O delightful wound!⁹

(Silence.)

TERESA, in a soft voice, eyes turned inward. Expiation, are you summoning me to expiation? I know…I’ve tried everything…it’ll never be enough.…But I insist on it right up to the final pages of the Castle: “What I conclude with, Sisters, is that we shouldn’t build castles in the air,” or towers without a foundation; and remember that there is no foundation during this short life other than to “offer the Lord interiorly and exteriorly the sacrifice we can.”¹⁰ What generations to come will retain of our experience as Carmelites is the acerbic taste of a noble atonement, isn’t that right, Father? Are you thinking, like me, of the Carmelites of Compiègne, in the Dialogues screenplay by Bernanos?

(John remains silent. La Madre glimpses the shadow of Mother Marie sweeping over the walls of Avila.)

MOTHER MARIE. There is no horror but in crime, and in the sacrifice of innocent lives the horror is expunged, and the crime itself restored to the order of divine charity.…¹¹

JOHN OF THE CROSS. O sweet cautery!

The two friends hear the court pronounce the death sentence on sixteen Carmelites for holding counterrevolutionary meetings. Then they watch the nuns climb down from the tumbril at the foot of the guillotine in the place de la Révolution. Young Blanche de la Force advances calmly, her face shows no fear. Suddenly she breaks into song: “Deo Patri sit Gloria, et Filio, qui a mortuis surrexit, ac Paraclito, in saeculorum saecula.” Blanche becomes lost among the crowd, along with the rest of the sisters.

JOHN OF THE CROSS. Solus soli.

TERESA, after a silence. The feminist philosopher Edith Stein, who became Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, remembered them too, inevitably, as she offered herself up for God. “Come, we go for our people,” she told her sister Rosa, on August 2, 1942, as the Gestapo hustled them out of the Carmel of Echt, in Holland, where they had taken refuge.¹² She refused all privileges, unwilling to be an exception to her people’s fate or take advantage of having been baptized.…Like the Carmelites of Compiègne, she was thinking of you, Father, when she chose this self-sacrifice.…I’m sure of it…more of you than of me, anyway. There will be periods like that, in the history of men and women, when chastisement will be salutary. “With his stripes we are healed,” the prophet Isaiah said.¹³ The concentration of evil will be such that martyrs will be needed to testify that the relationship between Heaven and earth has broken down.…Had I lived then, and had they sewn a yellow star onto my sleeve, I would have behaved exactly like Sister Teresa Benedicta, don’t you think?…I hope I would have taken that decision, or done something similar like joining the Resistance or the maquis.…Not really the Carmelite style, I grant. But who knows? I’m asking you, as an expert in martyrdoms.…

(A large photograph of Edith Stein floats above the walls of Avila.)

TERESA, voice breaks, then steadies. Look at that smile.…The strength, the steadfastness that supported her along the road to Auschwitz.…She must have known she’d enlisted in the struggle between Christ and Antichrist. Why, on Palm Sunday 1939, she gave her prioress a note requesting to be given up as an offering. (Reads.) “Dear Mother, permit me to offer myself up to the sacred heart of Jesus as the expiatory victim for true peace, so that the reign of the Antichrist might collapse if possible without another world war, and a new order may be established. I would like to do it today, for we are at the eleventh hour. I know I am nothing, but Jesus wishes it, and He will surely call many others in these days.”¹⁴ All for the love of God, indeed…“the love that gives itself unstintingly,” as she wrote in a little biography of me, Love for Love’s Sake, while she was still only a postulant at the Carmel of Cologne, so you see…I could have written those words, couldn’t I?…I feel fulfilled, dear John, I can say this to you, at having been the inspiration for such a soul, who harbors divine grace within her so absolutely.…Do you think I’m committing the sin of pride, out of stupid vanity — that this is too much honra for the wretched creature that I am? (Sidelong glance at the photograph of Edith Stein as a young philosophy student, passing swiftly over the Avilan fortress.)

(Silence from John.)

TERESA, in a melancholic and then assured voice. I think so too, you know I do, my sweet Seneca, I have often atoned, for far more than you can imagine, although it doesn’t stop me sensing the Guest inside of me, that’s just how it is.…Must one offer oneself up as a holocaust to appease the wrath of God, as Bernanos has the Carmelite prioress decide, during the Terror of 1794? Did the Lamb of God want Sister Teresa Benedicta to become another mystic Lamb, to be immolated by the Nazis, so that the profound joy and inner gaiety with which she submitted to His will at the blackest moment of that black night could burst back over the world to save even the most hardened sinner, and perhaps redeem the criminal himself? Do you know? She will write that “the mania for suffering caused by a perverse lust for pain differs completely from the desire to suffer in expiation,”¹⁵ and I believe her, of course. Although my path was a different one, and different also to yours, dear friend, for all your clear complicities. Sacrifice, suffering, obedience, and profound humility, of course…the fact of sin demands them.…But martyrdom?…Hombre como Cristo? What do you say? God loved me as something other than a Lamb, He loved me as a Bride and was content to demand works, works, and more works from me.…He bathed me and inflamed me and I wanted to enkindle you all with celestial fire…I wanted to become a perpetual spur to virtue…I mean, to love.…¹⁶ You can be Stein’s Science of the Cross, and I, the Hidden Spring.…¹⁷ Don’t pull that face.…All right, it’s not so simple! We are converging, though. Saint Teresa Benedicta will experience our reunion in herself.…We’ll come together in her, do you see? It diverts me to argue with you today, my good friend, just for the pleasure of getting closer to you, I know you understand.…In a nutshell, you’ll be most read in times of war, and I in times of peace…if such a thing exists.…(Moves her chair nearer, he doesn’t budge, doesn’t look at her.) In the Love of the Other, it does. (Tranquil face, pensive smile.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS, immobile in his love and as if absent, surrendered to his dark night. O delightful wound!

(Silence.)

TERESA, shrinks back, straightens up and presses her head against the back of her chair. Here it comes again, that feeling I always had in your company, Father: dare I tell you aloud, by now? I am frightened by the spell you cast. How grateful I was to your paternity for founding the first discalced male monastery in Valladolid in 1568! But I know you felt snubbed when I wrote more about Prior Antonio de Jesús than about you, in relation to the foundation at Medina del Campo, and didn’t even mention you in connection with Granada. And yet you are everywhere in my pages: that wounded deer, for instance, slaking her thirst in the living waters;¹⁸ or that poor little butterfly so full of apprehension that everything alarms it and makes it take flight before the Lord has a chance to fortify it, enlarge it, and render it capable.¹⁹ It’s partly me, but very much you: you’ll be recognized in those figures one day. Excuse me for prophesying, I do it sometimes, I’m sorry, it’s embarrassing, you know how your Madre is.…But how can I refer to you but through secret analogies, when the sweet perfection of your suffering body often impressed upon my soul your own lovely pains and froze me with fright: you can understand my trepidation, can’t you, dear John? Oh, and those death’s-heads, those skulls in Pastrana! When all’s said and done it’s the Trinity that separates us, Father. I don’t feel it in quite the way you do, and your paternity doesn’t die of it the way I do.

JOHN OF THE CROSS. “I know that the stream proceeding from these two

Is preceded by neither of them

Although it is night.”²⁰

(Pause.)

“A lone young shepherd lived in pain²¹

Withdrawn from pleasure and contentment.”

(Pause.)

Even in darkest night.

(Silence.)

TERESA. Look here, my brother! Although I am a woman and haven’t studied Latin, I try to comprehend the Mystery you describe so well. (Reads.) “I was reflecting today upon how, since they were so united, the Son alone could have taken human flesh…these are grandeurs which make the soul again desire to be free from this body that hinders their enjoyment.”²² That’s what you’re saying, too, yes or no?

JOHN OF THE CROSS. “In the beginning the Word

Was; He lived in God…

The Word is called Son;

He was born of the Beginning…

As the lover in the beloved

Each lived in the other…

And the Love that unites them

Is one with them,

Their equal, excellent as

The One and the Other:

Three Persons, and one Beloved

Among all three.

One love in them all

Makes them one Lover…

Thus it is a boundless

Love that unites them…

And the more love is one

The more it is love.”²³

TERESA, fast. Father and Son, united in equality and excellence: I see that. The more love is one, the more infinite it is; I’m with you there, too. But what equality, what excellence? And how does this infinity become concretely plural among the Three Persons, and then in our souls? (Pause.) Oh, Father, please don’t scold me for splitting hairs; unworthy woman I am, and fleshly with it, I don’t want to make a mistake. As you know, I would go “to the ends of the earth as long as it were out of obedience.”²⁴

JOHN OF THE CROSS. “They were meant for the Son

And He alone rejoiced in them.…

My Son, only your

Company contents Me.”²⁵

TERESA, settling back into her chair, which will not levitate. Well said! Gospel truth! And yet it would seem that I took the opposite path to yours. One day, “I was given understanding of how the Father receives within our soul the most holy Body of Christ.”²⁶ Have you tried it, my great Seneca? (Thoughtfully.) Your vision is pure and intellectual, I know, you refrain from detailing ecstasies and raptures, you prefer only to explain the words, or rather your own stanzas, as befits a learned man. (Knowing smile.) You have no time for physical apprehensions and manifestations. (Pause.) Whereas me, I am a scruffy sparrow rather than a golden eagle.…I try to be inseparable from Jesus’s humanity, inside my flesh and its retinue of visions, revelations, words.…Your unsullied way is one of darkness, death, and desolation. A wholesale negation that peters out exhausted in a purified tranquility, a terrible, pitch-black peace. Like you I started off with pain, loss and separation. (Pause.) In my banishment as I moved toward the Spouse, ecstasy emptied me of myself. (Long pause.)

(Silence from John. Wary tenderness.)

TERESA, in an anxious voice. Do you think, Father, that I allot too little space for the Holy Spirit? That I only mention it when a great scholar like yourself steers me back onto the straight and narrow? (Pause, short laugh.) Oh, but I said that in the Life…that’s the meaning of the dove…of course!²⁷

(Silence from John.)

TERESA, fast. I can see you coming, with your pure-man’s objections to the base woman I am! That Christocentric Teresa, not theocentric enough — that’s what people will say, and I expect them to. Still, I often wrote and here repeat that when the Persons of the Trinity “take human flesh” in my soul, I felt a kind of obstacle to seeing three of them (parece me hacía algún impedimento ver tres Personas):²⁸ Not easy, for I am a creature, and a sinner.

(Silence from John.)

TERESA. Quite quickly, however, the Lord filled me with His presence. “In emptying my soul of all that is creature and detaching myself for the love of God, the same Lord will fill it with Himself.”²⁹ (In a greedy voice.) That’s right, the Lord, Cristo como hombre, man and God, Son and Father, both inseparable and all of them deep inside me. But you’re the opposite, you only countenance the carnal figures of God — kisses, splendors, or what have you — to beseech them, to moan and groan over them, and then run away. Whereas I have our Guest dentro de mí. (Normal voice.) That’s the difference between us, my ideal father. For you, it gets cleansed in the fires of agreeable tortures, is that right? That’s what you feel?

(Heavy silence from John.)

(Teresa stares at him for a while. Concerned tenderness. Silence.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS. “Where have You hidden,

Beloved, and left me moaning?

You fled like the stag

And after wounding me;

I went out calling You, and You were gone.”³⁰

TERESA, pulling back again, not looking at John anymore. Hands crossed over her breast, like the blue-cloaked Virgin image bequeathed by her mother, La Madre looks inside herself. I’m not saying it’s not like that, but here again the Trinity is at stake, and my Trinity is as bodily, delectable and obliging as the Spouse when He does me the favor of lodging within.…If I tell you that Christ is inside of me, it goes without saying that only divinity penetrates there, but naturally, if I may put it that way.…The humanity alone of the Son could never enter into our souls, many learned fathers have told me so, and I agree. And yet since the Three Persons are united and inside us, I understand — and this is where our experiences differ, Father, with all due respect — I understand how this offering from the Son, the only Person to have become incarnate, is pleasing.³¹…Yes, pleasing to the Father who receives it. (Pause.) But inside my soul…deep inside my soul.…(Reading with her soul the text from the Testimonies as it scrolls past on the Virgin’s blue veil.)…Pleasing deep inside my soul.…Do you understand? This offering enables the Father Himself to enjoy, down here on earth, the pleasure of His Son. Both together. Deep inside me. The Father rejoices in His Son within my soul. I mean that the delights of the filial sacrifice are permitted to the Father and to the Son and to the Spirit, and that these three divine Persons are inside us.…(Pause.)

(John keeps his eyes fastened on the flame.)

TERESA, exhaling deeply. Ah, dear Seneca, I’m sorry to repeat myself so often, but within us such great mysteries lie! At the moment of Communion, our interior is more than bodily when pleasure involves both body and soul. Does that make it any less spiritual? (Pause.) For me, the two go together. (Long silence, then slight smile.) No matter if the officiating priest is in sin: the reception of the jouissance of the Three Persons inside depends rather on the soul receiving the sacrament. If the sun doesn’t shine on a piece of pitch as it does on glass, the fault is not with the sun but with the pitch.³² (Imploring tone.) I myself have no hopes of conquering Heaven or avoiding Hell, I want to live here and now, lowly smear of pitch that I am, like a pane of glass penetrated by Christ made man, inseparable from the Holy Trinity. By my love, in the delightful friendship of His sacred humanity, spirit and body together, I try to achieve what you seek in your hopeless pursuit: “And He was gone.” It’s the living God, dwelling in my soul, who grants me the favor of such a powerful energy. “Esto no es como otras visiones, porque lleve fuerza con la fe.”³³

(Silence.)

“Look, look, she’s going up again, she’s off the ground, she’s flying!” Ana de San Bartolomé and Teresita scramble for a better look from the parlor door.

“And Father John of the Cross, too!” Catalina de la Concepción and María Bautista have joined them.

(Silence.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS. I take what you are saying, Madre, but not completely. What you do in your relish is to gobble down sacred history until your mouth bleeds with it: look at the state you’re in! You’re dying, I realize that — but throughout your life this kind of symptom, or worse, has always waylaid you. I am well informed of it, and was even a witness on some occasions. (Pause.) Once you nearly choked on the Lord’s blood…or was the blood yours? (In a cold, level voice.) You seem blind to the difference, when it comes to union with Him as you engage in it. Is that what you’ve been trying to tell me, yet again? (John of the Cross lands his chair on the ground in front of Teresa, the better to fulfill his confessor’s vocation.)

(Long silence from Teresa.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS. To make myself clear, tell me, are you capable of distinguishing between sensuality on the one hand and the taint of the sensual on the other? I’m asking you, Mother, and I’m not asking lightly. We both agree that nature takes pleasure in spiritual things. “Since both the spiritual and the sensory part of the soul receive gratification from that refreshment, each part experiences delight according to its own nature and properties. The spirit, the superior part of the soul, experiences renewal and satisfaction in God; and the sense, the lower part, feels sensory gratification and delight because it is ignorant of how to get anything else, and hence takes whatever is nearest, which is the impure sensory satisfaction. It may happen that while a soul is with God in deep spiritual prayer, it will conversely passively experience sensual rebellions, movements, and acts in the senses, not without its own great displeasure. This frequently happens at the time of Communion. Since the soul receives joy and gladness in this act of love — for the Lord grants the grace and gives himself for this reason — the sensory part also takes its share, as we said, according to its mode. Since, after all, these two parts form one suppositum, each one usually shares according to its mode in what the other receives. As the philosopher says: ‘Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.’³⁴ Because in the initial stages of the spiritual life, and even more advanced ones, the sensory part of the soul is imperfect, God’s spirit is frequently received in this sensory part with this same imperfection. Once the sensory part is reformed through the purgation of the dark night, it no longer has these infirmities. Then the spiritual part of the soul, rather than the sensory part, receives God’s spirit, and the soul thus receives everything according to the mode of the spirit.”³⁵

TERESA, eyes lowered, she continues to gaze inside her soul. The sensual also takes delight in spiritual things, Father, and I do not find that spirit and sense are so divorced from one another. Nor does merit consist only of gratification, it also means action, suffering, and love, all at once and together. “Look at my life: you will find no joy there other than that of Mount Thabor.” Of the Transfiguration. For incontinence of love is not dirty, Father; it is an excess that leads us down the true path, the path of suffering: I can’t forget that.³⁶ And I understood that you intended to reel me back toward your reason, your purity, when you offered me just half a wafer at Communion; you must remember that occasion, one which religious commentators will pick over avidly for ever and ever, amen.…(Short laugh.) You were already playing the psychoanalyst, my dear Seneca, trying to cure passion by means of frustration, weren’t you, go on! (Jovial laugh.) But surely the Discalced Rule I restored aims at the same result? I discovered it long before I met you, after all. (Vehemently.) And yet deep down in my soul I never thought it necessary to lay on the penance with a trowel, as your men do in Pastrana, and you too, in your own burning way.…The Rule, no more and no less: that seems enough to me. “The rule that heals all,” as a woman will write four centuries hence, without the least inkling of my existence.…³⁷

JOHN OF THE CROSS. I am a denying spirit, whereas you say yes to everything.

(Silence.)

TERESA. To everything, but also to nothing, Father. (Eyes, head-on.) On that day I mentioned, even if you’d given me nothing but a crumb of Host, or none at all, I to whom the Lord had already given so much would have felt just as replenished by the mere fact of knowing He exists. (Eyes, looking upward.) Therefore the presence of His Majesty — even in a tiny speck of matter on my tongue — is more than sufficient to unite me to the Beloved, in a way you cannot imagine, Father, with all due respect. (Lips.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS. O guiding night! O night more lovely than the dawn! O night that has united the Lover with his beloved, transforming the beloved in her Lover.³⁸

TERESA, losing her temper. So tell me, Father. When you say: “transforming the beloved in her Lover,” you’re talking about your soul, of course, but don’t you also mean yourself, Brother John, here before me in flesh and blood? Yourself in the feminine? Or am I mistaken, being so lowly.…Yo que soy ruin.³⁹ (Lips.)

(Silence from John.)

TERESA, eyes head-on. Shall I have the impertinence to repeat, Father, that your mournful felicity frightens me? (Reading.) Of course, like Christ…you are suspended in the void…your heart racked by love and forever unsatisfied. How far I am, I the sinner, from that heart burning to obtain something or other…but loathing any food he sees!⁴⁰ I am the unworthy servant of your Lord, chosen by His Majesty to be filled with the divine essence.…

JOHN OF THE CROSS, edging his chair back a little, pinched face, then expressionless. “Not that which is most delectable, but that which is most unpleasing; not that which gives most pleasure, but rather that which gives least.”⁴¹ (John of the Cross begins to take flight, trying to escape La Madre’s appetites.)

TERESA. Your naked faith, my son, your desnuda fe is unsparing toward naked flesh.⁴² (Pause.) Here, I’ll offer you this insight, Father, the modest opinion of a woman. (Eyes upward, then down.) The only naked faith is that which transits through naked flesh, that’s what I’ve realized.…Only transits, mind you…Can you understand that, my little Seneca? (Broken voice.)…But what an incandescent transport in that baring of the flesh! (Flies off in her turn.)

(Silence from John.)

TERESA, vehemently. Yes, my soul’s union with the Three Persons is a matrimonial one, dear Father — that is the divine mystery. Edith Stein says about human marriage in her Science of the Cross, listen: “Its actual reality has its highest reason for existence in that it can give expression to a divine mystery”—or perhaps it’s the other way around?⁴³ (Long silence.) For my part, I can’t see how that can be possible unless the soul is wedded to the sacred humanity of the Son of God. The Lord necessarily wants to make His presence felt: “Quiere dar a sentir esta presencia…para conocer que allí está Dios.”⁴⁴ And God the Father, along with the Holy Ghost, are necessarily present at the nuptials.…That is their place, and this union gives it to them, gives rise to them.…

(Silence from John.)

TERESA. Won’t you answer, my little Seneca? Say, do you really hold the people of Israel to be the Bride? In the Song of Songs, of course. But the Bride of the Trinitary God? Of the Holy Spirit, I mean, as well as of the Father and the Son; of the Three Persons in their distinctness and yet substantial oneness? I can’t affirm this incontrovertibly when I listen to you…and yet it’s of the essence, for me. It’s a question of bodies, do you understand? Of course you do, forgive my choice of words, dear John.…In the long run people will realize, I know they will, that our religion — Christianity, of course, what else — that Christianity was founded on the loss of a body. Michel de Certeau will spell it out; he’ll be very fond of us both, believe it or not. The loss of Christ’s body, of course, but duplicated — are you listening — by the loss of the body of Israel.…It’s obvious, surely.…Well, the disappearance of both kinds of body, the Christic and the Jewish, was perhaps necessary: logically there had to be a detachment from both “nation” and “genealogy,” as they will be called, if the religion was to become universal and spiritual. In the Jewish tradition, you know, living bodies are always shifting and moving around.…Among us, the party of the Crucified One, it’s different, as I hardly need tell you: we start off depriving ourselves of the body and then, based on that absence, we keep trying to “form a body,” to incorporate ourselves. Don’t you think? You and me too, we make ourselves a body out of words, not in the same way as each other, but still. Add in the ecclesiastical body, the doctrinal corpus, all of that…delightful experiences, I grant you.…The Word becomes flesh and back again, a risky operation for the likes of us, and not given to all: you tend to overlook the flesh, and I the word.…Where was I? Oh yes, the Trinity. Well, there it is, the Bride can’t help but wed all three of them! And like the Sulamitess finds her Solomon, I find Him in the actual reality of marriage. “Draw me, we will run after thee.” That’s your sentiment too, Father. So let’s continue. Read with me what follows: “The king hath brought me into his chambers; we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine.”⁴⁵

(Long silence.)

TERESA, heavy sigh, before resuming, convinced and convincing. Heaven opens its gates to us in this life, that’s what I’m trying to say. Your business, the trato as you call it, is an affair of faith, that is, of knowledge. But it’s not because the contemplation I dwell in is an affair of the heart that the soul does not unite fully with God. (Short silence. Normal voice.) Then, in the surrender to God’s will, “the soul wants neither death nor life”: “Tiene tanta fuerza este rendimiento a ella, que la muerte ni la vida se quiere, si no es por poco tiempo cuando desea ver a Dios.”⁴⁶ (Beaming smile.) We concur on this point, my son, don’t we?

JOHN OF THE CROSS, clearing his throat, hesitating a moment, then speaking fast. There’s no longer any need to question God as in the olden days, under the Ancient Law. (Without looking at her, his eyes seem to be listening.) Listen to Christ: God has no more to reveal. The Word no longer speaks, and instead the Spirit of Truth makes itself understood. (Closes eyes.) Understanding…understanding…understanding.…(Gazing in rapture at the ceiling, with ramrod body.)

TERESA. In my own way I, too, manage to attain a measure of understanding…reaching the Spirit of truth itself…fire and splendor.…“Neither death nor life are objects of desire anymore,” do you hear me? And if my intercession could lead a single soul to love Him more, it would matter more to me than being in glory. “Y si pudiese ser parte que siquiera un alma le amase más y alabase por mi intercesión, que aunque fuese por poco tiempo, me parece importa más que estar en la gloria.”⁴⁷

Therefore do the virgins love thee…

The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth…⁴⁸

You’ll say, my great friend, that I lack “understanding of the vernacular meaning of the Latin,” and you have a point. But I feel great joy every time I read the Song of Songs, a great spiritual consolation, for “my soul is stirred and recollected more than by devotional books written in the language I understand.”⁴⁹

A deafening noise interrupts the holy dialogue. The monastery door is being battered by fists, sticks, and musket butts; will it hold firm?

The stage goes dark for the duration of the protracted assault.

When the lights come up again, but only dimly, the moribund woman is back in bed.

TERESA, agitated. Owls, Carmelites of the observation, cats, wolves, discalced monks.…I mean, mitigated ones.…All of them, anyway, they’re coming, they’re after Brother John! Help, Sisters, help! (La Madre rears up in bed, fearfully. She fears the martyrdom planned by the enemies of her discalced reforms for this peerlessly chaste and pure priest. Or does she really fear John’s judgment of her?)

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ, never having had much notion of time, now confuses one major crisis with another. After all, there have been so many. No, Mother, it’s the alguaciles trying to break down the door. But don’t worry, the sisters are reinforcing it with heavy joists. We’ll look after you!

ACT 3, SCENE 2

TERESA OF AVILA

TERESITA

JOHN OF THE CROSS

HIS COMPANION

BOSSUET, bishop, writer, the “Eagle of Meaux”

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, psychologist

The stage goes momentarily dark. Teresa is still in conversation with John, now present only in the forms of his voice and his portrait, an anonymous work of the Spanish school.

JOHN OF THE CROSS, voice receding, reciting his works. “The interior bodily sense — namely, the imagination and the fancy; this we must likewise void of all the imaginary apprehensions and forms that may belong to it by nature.…”⁵⁰

Now the flame returns, henceforth to remain on stage. Teresa is back at the Incarnation, alone, this time in her prioress’s chair. She converses with John’s spirit; there is no longer any bodily evidence of him.

TERESA, in an anxious voice. They’ll reproach me, I’m sure, for not mentioning him enough in my writings. His body was not at all attractive. Unlike his eyes. And his mind. It’s true Fr. Antonio de Jesús takes up more space in my Foundations, and God knows he was no genius, nor an hombre in the strong sense, well, I know my meaning. Brother John practically forced us to overlook him, such was his urge to self-annihilation.…(Pause.) He nearly caught us out that way.…I wouldn’t let him…I went all the way to our good Philip II, to rescue him from the mitigated lot…and succeeded, thanks be to God. (Pause.) There’s nobody like him for making me feel obscurely unworthy and infinitely guilty.…(Pathetic voice.) Under the steady gaze of his burning eyes, I stop being a crystal, I become once more that black pitch I’ve never ceased to be, as I know better than anyone, with or without the Lord’s voice, between ourselves. (The dying woman, appeased, has recovered the critical lucidity that is the hallmark of her writings. Casts circular glances around her.)

TERESITA, mothering her beloved aunt. Don’t beat yourself up so on your deathbed, Auntie: after all, the asceticism of John of the Cross was hardly yours, while you lived.…

TERESA, exhaling. Never fear, darling, I can look after myself, and even John got the sharp end of my tongue when he deserved it. I must say…(coughing) over and above the obliviousness to his person that he more or less deliberately instilled in us…(eyes looking right, pause) the great purifier aroused in me a dash of, what’s the word, impatience. (Eyes looking left, pause. She is no longer uttering a word, but knows her little niece can read her thoughts and only wishes to do her some good.) Oh, it was just a game between us, he wasn’t fooled…a piece of mock cruelty, don’t get me wrong.…(Circular glances, sighs.) Just for a laugh at his expense, and at mine too, of course. I’d found the sweet key to revenge, you see! (Looks at her fixedly for a while.) When in distress…and to shake up any who wallow in it just to show off…there’s nothing more effective than to be happy. (Pause.) And to laugh. Do you think that’s easy? (Pause.) But not everyone has the knack.…Try it and see. It’s enough to disarm the Inquisition itself. Even the “chief angel,” as I used to call him in my letters to Gratian, you know, the grand inquisitor…that’s right, Gaspar de Quiroga, bishop of Cuenca, archbishop of Toledo, well, even he came around to my reforms. As I was saying.…One of his nieces became a Carmelite.…But to bend such a model of perfection as dear Seneca, that’s a whole other matter.…It can be done.…Well, we’d better wait and see (Wry smile.). Death himself may get nothing for his pains, I’ll let you know from the Beyond once I have passed over.…(Stops smiling.). Does it seem to be taking a long time, little one? I think so too. How am I supposed to be afraid of the Reaper, as the wicked call him, when he is what I desire? One stage in my long desire for the Other…hardly anything…I’m nearly there.…(Deep sigh.)

The din made by the alguaciles can still be heard.

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ, upset at her inability to make La Madre’s last moments quiet and peaceful. What a hellish racket!

TERESA, gaily. Wrong, my girl, it’s not the alguaciles but the commotion stirred up by the Vejamen, that some will call my Satirical Critique! (Smiling.) You know, that mock-colloquium, remember? That parody of a homage rendered to me by Julián de Ávila, Francisco de Salcedo, my brother Lorenzo, and John of the Cross himself, in the parlor at Saint Joseph’s, before a rapt audience of sisters.…(Broadening grin.) We’re going to have more fun before I take my final leave, come along, cheer up.…(Mock-serious expression.) Bishop Álvaro de Mendoza had requested them to send me their thoughts upon that edifying instruction I received from the Lord one day of grace in prayer: “Seek yourself in Me.” (Stops smiling.) The gentlemen’s muddled remarks were positively comic: it still tickles me to think of their precious colloquium and my own barbs in response! (Smiling again; the faithful nurses can’t hear the words, and can only imagine what’s passing through her mind.) Good Lord, I had no idea at the time — five years ago, it must be — that one’s dying agonies could also be a sort of satirical critique. Yes, indeed, a teasing yet gracious exchange with others very similar to my progress toward God, as you’d confirm, my daughters, would you not?…I’m much obliged. (Normal voice, fast.) Who mentioned Hell? Not I. Nor Heaven, of course, not even Purgatory, it’s nothing but a vejamen, believe me. (Coughing, tears.) Because I don’t know who I am, but I know that in seeking myself in the Other within me, I am a double self. I should add that those are Montaigne’s terms, the expression of a writer who is younger than me and not precisely on my side, as will soon be a matter of public record. “And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.”⁵¹ Yet that man is not so far from me, I assure you.…Will anyone have the insight to notice?…Too bad…I am double, I say, and uncertain, endlessly seeking myself; but not shy or distraught, and with good reason! Because the Me in which the Lord invites me to seek myself (“Seek yourself in Me”), the Lord’s Me, the Other Me, is nothing less than recollected deep inside of me, for God’s sake!

Teresa is wearing her teasing smile again. Her attendants read it as ecstasy, as though La Madre were practically knocking on Heaven’s door.

TERESA, waving her arms. So I loosed a volley of grapeshot in the direction of those fine, chin-stroking gentlemen, though leavened needless to say by my customary pinch of amused affection. (Wrinkled nose.) It was aimed at John of the Cross first and foremost, since the dear friar had contributed the longest commentary of all, as befits a highbrow scholar from Salamanca. (Lips.) What’s more he was addressing me, a poor unlettered woman, the way the Jesuits always do, with such haughty condescension…such.…Oh, you know. (Lips again.) Between strict paternalists and patronizing persecutors, no contest! I’ve never hesitated for a moment, do you hear me, girls? (Wavering voice.) A tenderly strict paternalist is indispensable, and will be needed for a long time to come, mark my words. (Does this please or frighten her? Looks up and straight ahead.)

The dying nun continues to argue in her head with John. He is the only one at her side during these final instants before the Other.

TERESA, reading, fast. Why seek God as if we were dead, or when we are dead, my little Seneca? And why do you do no more than seek, unremittingly, wearing yourself out with it? While always claiming that there’s nothing more to question? Why, let’s rejoice, now that the Word has been revealed! The Sulamitess was good at bliss, even though she was always chasing after her elusive Spouse.…In the union I obtained by means of prayer, God’s grace bestowed on the soul means that the soul has found Him, once and for all. (Deep breath. Open palms stretched upward.) His actual presence actually inhabits me inside…since how long ago? As long as I’m alive I seek, but I seek inside me, because I’ve already found Him. I’ve said yes to the Other in me, and His Voice knows it. He is in me, I am Him, I am she who says yes. A woman called Molly Bloom will do likewise, more drolly. Did Joyce, a Catholic Irishman, think of me when he set that scene in the Spanish landscape of Gibraltar? (Pause. Stares at the flame. Closes eyes. Brief rest.)

TERESA, with a beaming smile, reading. “Yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”⁵² (Smiling more brightly still.) No, that’s not me, Father, it’s all right, just a vision that resembles me. I can see the future now…having got this far, why not.…Do you consider me excessively carnal? Others have done. A bishop even wrote to me about it, but which one? I haven’t a clue, I get them mixed up, all those dour, po-faced prelates. (Pause.) “God deliver me from people so spiritual that they want to turn everything into perfect contemplation, no matter what.”⁵³ I have always felt the greatest envy of you, I’ve told you so: le tengo una envidia grandísima.⁵⁴ Good father, good brother John, you should expect irreverence from me.…(Wrinkled nose.)…for I already spoke of you in my Dwelling Places.

(No sign from John. La Madre’s gaze alone outlines and enlarges her friend’s portrait.)

TERESA. Yes, it’s not just deer and butterflies, you are present too.…(Reading.) That man I was speaking of, who was “so desirous of serving His Majesty at his own cost, without these great delights, and so anxious to suffer that he complained to our Lord because He bestowed the favours on him.” And had it lain in his power, that is, in your power, my little Seneca, had you been graced with the enjoyment of His favours, you would have declined them!⁵⁵ (Lips.) Goodness me! I wouldn’t! I am talking about the delights God gives us to taste in contemplation, not about the visions themselves — you’re entitled to despise those, and I myself am doubtful about them. But the contemplation that emerges out of suffering to overwhelm us with graces! Why deny ourselves the sweet fruits of spiritual marriage? I know, you’ve told me often enough, that the dark night for you is “deprivation of the soul’s taste or appetite for things”; “llamamos aquí noche a la privación del gusto en el apetito de todas las cosas.”⁵⁶ Nevertheless, dear John, to not expand is to shrink. And where love is true, it “cannot possibly be content with remaining always the same.”⁵⁷ (Pause.)

TERESA, startled and fearful. Shall I tell you? It was manifested to me, with “a knowledge admirable and clear” how the sacred Humanity of Christ “was taken into the bosom of the Father.”⁵⁸ Divinity…extraordinary glory.…(Trembling voice. Lips.)…And that’s not all. Since we are concerned with the Holy Trinity, do you think I’ve forgotten the Blessed Virgin, in other words, the woman I am? Not at all. Listen: “The Lord placed Himself in my arms as in the painting of the fifth agony.”⁵⁹ You see? And stop looking at me with those vacant eyes. Christ is held in the Father’s bosom, the Virgin’s arms, and mine.…Same thing.…Don’t worry, these are merely intellectual visions, the only sort you allow. But they’re so vivid that they resemble imaginative ones.…(Pause.)…I’m going too far, aren’t I? I’m being too greedy again? (Throws herself backward as if to picture John more clearly.)

When the body speaks, seeing images is unavoidable, dear John, but I do not really perceive them with the eyes of the body, in fact they are no more than intellectual visions.…In a way, yes, there’s such a thing as “sensation freed from the trammel of the senses.”⁶⁰ Those aren’t my words, they belong to Marcel Proust, do you know that writer? An expert in accursed races, men, women, and in-betweens, in hawthorn and rose windows and felt time.…Of course I can tell from here, I’m a visionary, don’t look at me like that, my great Seneca…you understand perfectly well.…“My imagination, which was my only means of enjoying beauty.”⁶¹…Those words could have been written by me, too bad, Marcel will do it for me. Better than anyone. And that’s why the imagination is “the organ that serves the eternal,” do you follow us, the two of us, that eternal young man and myself?…Deep down you agree with us, Father, but you concur in your own erudite, demanding way.…(Normal voice.) Does that make you feel better?…It’s true, I am very spiritual also. (Pause. Hint of a smile.)

(Close-up on John’s portrait.)

TERESA. I’d have had to master mathematics in order to please you, and yet, I can’t help it, poor little me pleased His Majesty himself from time to time. I’m a pretentious woman and I repent of it. Not your style, I know. (Closes eyes and reopens them.) You see, Father, I don’t let go of you all the same, I love you more than you think, for look, even on my deathbed I am prolonging our so-called colloquium, the vejamen—remember? (Normal voice.) I cannot do otherwise, having this radiant Other at the core of me while you are constantly scurrying after it, poor little wounded deer, unhappy, racked priest whom I love with all my heart. (Long silence.) I understand, mind you: you’re nothing but a wretched man, which when all is said and done is even more frustrating than being a wretched woman. The truth is you’ll never be the Other’s Bride, whereas I am confident that I am. That’s how it is, get used to it. (Lips.) I enjoyed having that place, acquired since my prayer over the Song of Songs, and I’m not budging from it, hardened sinner that I am. But thank you kindly for having so clearly explained to me, in the course of your fraternal contribution to the vejamen, matters I hadn’t asked you about! (Teasing voice.) You disparage the understanding, and yet you wouldn’t stop commenting every sentence, interminably, where I, lowly creature, did nothing but feel.…Forgive me, Father, I don’t need convincing, as you know, that you alone are perfection. Me, I’m nothing but a trifler, I own. The Lord will judge; I’m on my way there now. (Listening expression.)

(Long silence.)

TERESA. You say that David assures us…of what? That the death of the just man is precious in God’s eyes.…Speak about yourself, Seneca my dear, I’m a mere woman, and a hard-hearted one at that.…Is it really in my power to tear the fabric of mortal life, as you put it so well? Perhaps.…But only in the Seventh Dwelling Places.…Run away, you say? No, I feel that I’m closing in on the jewel, la joya, within.

JOHN OF THE CROSS’S VOICE, with the face of an El Greco Christ. Solus soli.

TERESA, vehemently again. Quite so, I was about to say. “For it is not knowing much, but realizing and relishing things interiorly, that contents and satisfies the soul.”⁶² It may be that I am closer to these words of Loyola’s than you are, my friend. Ignatius does not refer to prayer, as we know, even if his spiritual graces are not so very different from your “substantial words of the soul,” are they?⁶³ And he is warier of the devil than I am, I agree. But.…(Broken voice, silence.) but when he has a vision of the Blessed Trinity “in the form of a lyre or harp,” amid uncontainable tears and sighs, and when.…⁶⁴ (Pause.) When Jesus appears to him in “white,” in His humanity as I see it, and again when He dazzles him like a sun…and leaves him nothing but the relish for the interior loquela, the uninterrupted voice.…(Her breathing and pulse accelerate.)…Well, I feel for it, it moves my soul, wounded with love, that seeks solitude with the help of the Holy Spirit.…⁶⁵

JOHN OF THE CROSS’S VOICE, still with his El Greco face. Solus soli. There is nothing nuptial in Ignatius Loyola!

TERESA, with a broad grin. Fortunately not! Man or woman, alone with the One and Only…what else do you think marriage is, my great Seneca!

(The flame turns bright red as La Madre’s innocent laugh rings out.)

TERESA, suddenly anxious. I smell burning, daughters, can you smell it? Is it me that’s on fire? That wouldn’t be surprising since His Majesty threatened me with Hell once before, but it was a stinking tube, a space without space where to be was impossible. A place that John of the Cross alone — who else — managed to survive and escape from. He must be a saint, that Seneca, as the hole where the mitigated friars locked him up was so infernal that it was a miracle he got out alive. A miracle, I tell you! (Still excitable.) Oh no, it’s not me that’s on fire! I do not consume myself, I can’t compete with John on that score, God bless him. It smells of charred paper; are they maybe burning my letters to the papal nuncio, the dreaded Nicolás Ormaneto? Or those I wrote to Pius V? To the Carmelite principal, Ángel de Salazar? To the nuns at the Convent of the Incarnation? How many thousands of letters and notes have I written…a collection not everyone regards as a treasure trove, naturally, plenty of people would sooner destroy it. How well I remember.…(Pause. Wide smile.) I who have a short memory.…(Smile wider still, with an edge of sarcasm.) It was the Dominican priest Diego de Yanguas, a reader of superior capacities, who when he heard that I had written down my meditations upon the Song of Songs commanded me to torch them on the spot, and of course I hastened to obey. (Pause. Hides face behind crossed hands.) What a silly I was…never suspecting what fearful dangers lurk inside that book for a woman.…(Uncovers face. Sighs, smiles.) But what’s this I see? (Worldly.) No, not you, my dear John! (Long pause. Stops smiling.)…So you’re playing the wafer trick on me again? Terminally, this time? I didn’t expect that, hats off, I’m impressed! I should have known it was too much to ask; you couldn’t fail to burn them. All my letters, up in smoke? Incredible. So driven to abolish yourself that you divest yourself of everything, even of me, especially of me.…We are so like and so unlike, aren’t we; day and night. Day is afraid of night. Night is indifferent to day.…And yet they are indissociable, one cannot be without the other.…

(The flame licks into the cell, two shadows move over the white wall: Brother John and a companion, who is holding a small bag.)

COMPANION. Look, Brother John, I have just found this taleguilla whose contents might interest you.

JOHN OF THE CROSS, absorbed in being perfect. Interest me?

COMPANION. I said “might.” This bag contains the letters of the late Mother Teresa of Avila, may she rest in peace.

JOHN OF THE CROSS, turning slowly but decisively to toss the bag into the fire. Burn them!

(After uttering the above words in dispassionate tones, “Little Seneca” glides serenely into the furnace invading the cell. From there we hear JOHN OF THE CROSS’S VOICE reciting.)

“Without a place and with a place

to rest — living darkly with no ray

of light — I burn my self away.”⁶⁶

(John’s companion murmurs the words after him and follows his master into the furnace. The recitation can still be heard.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS’S VOICE. “In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,

Desire to have pleasure in nothing.”⁶⁷

(Pause.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS’S VOICE. “O living flame of love.”

(We hear Teresa laughing.)

Sylvia Leclercq sees the shadow of Bossuet approach against the quivering, dark red firelight.⁶⁸ The silhouette of the bishop of Meaux advances, carrying the Funeral Orations in one hand and the Instructions upon States of Prayer in the other.

BOSSUET. “It is an odd weakness of mankind, that while death surrounds us in its myriad forms, it is never present to our minds.” But since “we must only be lofty where St. Teresa is concerned,” bear in mind that Heaven above “has a plan to repair the house he has given us. When he destroys it and casts it down in order to make it anew, we must move out. Yet he himself offers us his palace, and within it, gives us rooms.” “And yet it was never so for this creature, Teresa, who dwelt on earth as though she were already in Heaven.”⁶⁹

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, occupying La Madre’s shadowy place stage right, speaking in a drained voice. Here’s a surprise Fénelon will appreciate, not to mention Madame de Guyon.…⁷⁰ I might have known the Eagle of Meaux would be here; he was never very keen on intimate, Quietist, or amalgamated-type scenes, but he made an exception for Teresa. Sylvia Leclercq “in the footsteps of Bossuet,” who’d have thought it? Ah, he’s no longer the bos suetus aratro, the “ox accustomed to the plough” of the Jesuit school.…The old theologian has aged as well, he’s got excema and gallstones and who knows what else.…But he will still go down fighting, weapons in hand, Saint-Simon tells us, and might have added: “like Teresa.”

BOSSUET, in a metallic, slightly breathless voice. “Our society is in heaven above,” nostra autem conversatio in coelis est.…And the hope of which the world speaks is but an agreeable illusion, somnium vigilantium.…If I don’t dare to affirm it, who will? I am a Cartesian, but not to the last ditch. Primo: Hope equals the “sleep of vigilance,” of course, except.…Except when hope comes from the Lord. In that circumstance its words are assured, and consequently the hope in Him is likewise assured, ergo it is certain.…Secondo: Contra spem in spem.…This is the anchor of our souls, something the true Christian does not possess, but is looking for. (Puts down the two tomes he was carrying and takes the Panegyrics proffered by Leclercq, riffles through while holding forth in a firm, steady voice.) And this “infinite munificence” was lavished on Teresa in life, while she yet inhabited her mortal coil.…Tertio: Such is indeed the grand spectacle to which the Church invites us.…

SYLVIA LECLERCQ. Nicely put, “munificence” and “grand spectacle” are appropriate. (Hand over mouth, she has finally been awed by the infallible rhetorician).

BOSSUET. “St. Teresa lives among angels, convinced that she is with her Spouse,” and thus fulfillment succeeds to yearning.…“A divine sickness,” undoubtedly, one whose power increases day by day? But there remains the “link, gentlemen, which is charity.…It elevates Teresa above the throng.…She speeds toward it, driven by ardent, impetuous desires…which prove unequal to severing the bonds of mortal flesh, against which she now declares a holy war.…For all true Christians should feel like travelers on a journey.” They must feel, yes, feel.…

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, hand over mouth again, disconcerted by her sudden admiration for the bishop. That’s right, go on.…

BOSSUET, imperturbably. Qui non gemit peregrinus, non gaudebit civis.…Saint Augustine had some splendid turns of phrase, madam. “He who does not lament the journey will not rejoice on reaching the city.” And Saint Teresa becomes “ever freer, more disengaged from perpetual agitation.” “The harder she finds it to cast off her body, the more detached from that body she becomes.”

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, admiringly. Is that in relation to John of the Cross? How unexpected, from you! Might you be an unjustly neglected author?

BOSSUET, ignoring the compliment, enthused by his panegyric. One can scarcely credit the way she built her monasteries, that girl.…

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, thoughtfully, almost inaudibly, hugging the Orations and the Instructions. Bossuet the Academician turns out to be a pragmatist with his own brand of mysticism, quite unlike his image. But he couldn’t have been any less, if he was to prevent a schism with Rome. Courted by the dauphin, the king, society ladies like Maintenon, Montespan, Sévigné; patron of men like La Bruyère, associating with the likes of Pascal, Molière, La Rochefoucauld, Leibniz.…Yet he still remembers his conversation with our Teresa. “That girl,” he calls her. Their conversation is in Heaven above, apparently, albeit that Heaven exists down here on earth, according to La Madre? Intermittently, but still. A weird space it is, Monseigneur. Go take a look.…(She tries to detain the Eagle of Meaux but he returns the Panegyrics to her and vanishes, holding a Cross, into the darkness stealing across the stage.)

ACT 3, SCENE 3

The voices of TERESA and SYLVIA and the virtual characters of LEIBNIZ⁷¹ and SPINOZA.⁷²

The stage is empty. A huge diamond stands in place of La Madre’s body, shot through with rays of light and cascading waters that bathe the facets of cut stone and also circulate inside it. The fire that consumed Teresa’s letters to John of the Cross has left its red-gold color in the air. From time to time three shadows move through the permeable walls of the liquid jewel; one resembles the Teresa of the portrait attributed to Velázquez, another is Leibniz, and the third, Spinoza. There is also a mathematical formula, to wit:

We hear a high-pitched choir of Carmelites singing the Veni Creator, as well as the voice of Sylvia Leclercq and La Madre’s mature tones; her body has been removed. This castle without walls stands in for it. The portrait of Teresa the writer is animated, miming the stage directions and accompanying the saint’s voice.

TERESA’S VOICE. “A great gush of water could not reach us if it didn’t have a source somewhere; it is understood clearly that there is Someone in the interior depths who shoots these arrows and gives life to this life, and that there is a Sun in the interior of the soul from which a brilliant light proceeds and is sent to the faculties. The soul…does not move from that center nor is its peace lost.”⁷³ It’s true, the center exists and is at peace, and that’s why I can be so fluid…and vagabond, if I wish it.…(Subtle smile.) Who am I? “You who seeks yourself in Me,” or “Me who seeks myself in You?” Who speaks? Is Teresa I, You, or She? “We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment.”⁷⁴ (Eyes glance right, left, close.) “These interior matters are so obscure for our minds.…Whoever reads this must have patience, for I have to have it in order to write about what I don’t know. Indeed, sometimes I take up the paper like a simpleton, for I don’t know what to say.”⁷⁵ (Wrinkles nose.)

TERESA’S VOICE, coming from the immense diamond revolving on the stage. My castle is not an accumulation of images, it’s an imaginary discourse: ask Michel de Certeau if you don’t believe me! I am indeterminate, fluid, permeable, radiating light from my center: ask Mercedes Allendesalazar.…“I want to make one or more comparisons for you.”⁷⁶ “Turn your eyes toward the center, which is the room or royal chamber where the King stays, and think of how a palmetto has many leaves surrounding and covering the tasty part that can be eaten.…The sun that is in this royal chamber shines in all parts. It is very important for any soul that practices prayer, whether little or much, not to hold itself back and stay in one corner. Let it walk through these dwelling places which are up above, down below, and to the sides, since God has given it such great dignity. Don’t force it to stay a long time in one room alone. Oh, but if it is in the room of self-knowledge!⁷⁷ (Momentarily short of breath, coughing.) “God help me with what I have undertaken!..Let’s consider…two founts with two water troughs.…I am so fond of this element.…With one the water comes from far away through many aqueducts…with the other the source of the water is right there.…The water coming from the aqueducts is comparable, in my opinion, to the consolations drawn from meditation…thoughts…tiring the intellect.…With this other fount, the water comes from its own source which is God…with the greatest peace and quiet and sweetness in the very interior part of ourselves.…This water overflows through all the dwelling places and faculties until reaching the body. That is why I said that it begins in God and ends in ourselves.…The whole exterior man enjoys this spiritual delight and sweetness.”⁷⁸

(After trying in vain to help her drink, Teresita refreshes Teresa’s face with a moist cloth.)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “Transumanar,” why, she talks like Dante:

“To represent transhumanise in words

Impossible were; the example, then, suffice

Him for whom Grace the experience reserves.”⁷⁹

TERESA’S VOICE. “The King is in His palace,” just as the soul is. The King, the soul, it-you-I? It’s all the same. Interchangeable, permutable, reversible. “In those other dwelling places there is much tumult and there are many poisonous creatures and the noise is heard”—all this being the drives, as Dr. Freud will tell us. And yet “no one enters that center dwelling place and makes the soul leave.…The passions are now conquered.” This is sublimation. “Our entire body may ache; but if the head is sound, the head will not ache just because the body aches.”⁸⁰ The mind and the word “must have amounted to much more than is apparent from [their] sound.”⁸¹ (Turns head leftward, with calm face.) It is not an imaginative vision, even if the soul, unable to express it in words, perceives it here by means of sight. And yet the sight is neither with the eyes of the body nor with those of the soul.…The three Persons of the Trinity are perceived in an intellectual, yes, intellectual vision, like a certainty of truth in the midst of fiery brightness, like a magnificent splendor coming straight to the mind.⁸² I am a point inhabited by infinity, the infinite contracted into a dot, a dot dilated to infinity. Infinitesimal Teresa: a curious phenomenon, don’t you think? (She opens her eyes again, unseeing eyes, as when she bent them on the portrait of Velázquez. La Madre is listening to herself.)

(Silence.)

LEIBNIZ, in the voice of an anonymous man. “To me, infinities are not totalities and infinitely small values are not magnitudes. My metaphysics banishes them. I regard infinitesimal quantities as useful unities.” “My fundamental meditations turn on two things, namely, on unity and on infinity.” “Each monad is a living mirror, or a mirror endowed with an internal action, and that it represents the universe according to its point of view and is regulated as completely as is the universe itself.” “Everything is taken account of, even idle words…the just will be like suns…neither our senses nor our mind has ever tasted anything approaching the happiness that God prepares for those who love him.” “Imaginary numbers have the following admirable property, that in calculus they enclose nothing absurd or contradictory and yet by the nature of things they cannot be represented seu in concretis.”⁸³ The same goes for the infinitesimal: it is a fiction, and not a true difference. God is “the realm of possible realities.”

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “The infinity-point obeys the laws of transition and continuity: nothing is equivalent to anything else, and apparent coincidences really conceal an infinitely small distance. Thus the infinity-point does not form a structure but instead posits functions and relationships that proceed by approximation. A difference, never to be made good, persists between the number marked π and the set of terms able to express it:

The unit has been dislocated. The sign-number, a unifying mirror, shatters, and notation resumes beyond its scope. The resulting differential, equivalent to the sixteenth-century nominalists’ syncategorical (in fieri) infinite smallness, is not a unity that can be added to other unities to form a whole, but rather the slippage of infinity itself within the closed enunciation.”⁸⁴

LEIBNIZ, in the voice of an anonymous man. “Teresa of Avila had this fine thought, that the soul ought to conceive things as if there were only God and itself in the world.” How this limpid, fecund insight gives us to understand immortality! “This thought gives rise to an idea which is significant even in philosophy, and I have made good use of it in one of my hypotheses.”⁸⁵

TERESA’S VOICE. Might I be a soul, then, a woman co-present ad infinitum? Might I be an ancestor of infinitesimal calculus?⁸⁶ Little me?

SPINOZA, in the voice of the anonymous man. “God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love.”⁸⁷

TERESA’S VOICE. God loves Himself? Himself, myself, yourself? I are the Trinity. I was writing the sensual mathematics of sacred humanity!

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “Paradise and its plenitude of grace, the Trinity in person, are unveiled in the Intellection of love. The more I love, the more I understand. The more I understand, the more pleasure I feel, and the more I love.” Not my words, but those of Philippe Sollers in his introduction to Dante’s Paradiso.⁸⁸

TERESA’S VOICE. “The image may be very helpful — to you especially — for since we women have no learning, all of this imagining is necessary that we may understand that within us lies something incomparably more precious than what we see outside ourselves.” (Coughs, trickle of blood.) You say women are hollow inside? You have no inkling of what a Guest we harbor!⁸⁹ You smile, I see: so who might this Guest be? The Father? The phallus? Animal lust? Hysterical excitability? All of the above, and of necessity sublime? Call it what you please, call it desire for the Other if you want to. Personally I’ll stick with Guest, for the moment.…“Nor is that happiness and delight experienced, as are earthly consolations, in the heart. I mean there is no similarity at the beginning, for afterward the delight fills everything; this water overflows through all the dwelling places and faculties until reaching the body. That is why I said it begins in God and ends in ourselves.”⁹⁰ Clear as day, is it not? Are you with me, my Seneca? (No reply.)

TERESA’S VOICE, meditatively. Some minds are orderly, and some are “so scattered they are like wild horses no one can stop.” I’m thinking of myself, of course…you guessed it.…Always restless and on the go…“and perhaps they were no more than two steps from the fount of living water, of which the Savior said to the Samaritan woman, ‘whoever drinks of it will never thirst.’ How right and true!”⁹¹ (Voice weakening, trembling of the arms, legs, head.) Between ourselves, I prefer Saint Augustine above other spiritual masters because he was once a sinner,⁹² a runaway horse. O rushing storm, euphoric tempest that “comes from regions other than those of which [the devil] can be lord”!⁹³ And how can we be sure? Why, because the soul derives benefits from it, by confronting the ringing Voice of His Majesty, or the superego if you prefer, the ideal Father who imparts the Law — that of both Testaments at once, needless to say. Poor butterfly-soul, “that went about so apprehensive that everything frightened it and made it fly.…The Lord has now fortified, enlarged, and made the soul capable.”⁹⁴ (Long silence. The crimson light turns violet.) The soul does not leave the wondrous company of His Majesty and never ventures out of its interior mansion, as a consequence of which it is somehow divided, like Martha and Mary Magdalene: perpetual calm and repose on the one hand, problems and worries on the other. (Exhales.) Although the degree of clarity is not the same, because the vision of the Divine Presence is rarely as vivid as it is on the occasion of its first manifestation, when God elects to grant His gift, “quiere Dios hacerle este regalo.”⁹⁵ (Breathing faster.) The light has changed color, it will accompany me to the very end of this final road. Its variations still illuminate, even today, the anguish I felt when I discovered that the movement of thought, or more precisely the imagination, was not the same thing as understanding.

(Pause. Bright lights diffracting the sparkle of the diamond.)

TERESA’S VOICE, doubtful, quizzical. The understanding is one of the soul’s faculties, and is apt to be flighty. Flighty, yes, that’s the word, like a tortolito.…The understanding is like an inexperienced novice, or a smitten turtledove; it takes flight in so abstract a fashion that nothing embodies it. The imagination, for its part, cannot be confused with it, but takes from it the cue to soar up; since God alone can hold it fast, one is misled into thinking it detached from the body. “I have seen…that the faculties of my soul were occupied and recollected in God while my mind on the other hand was distracted. This distraction puzzled me.…The pain is felt when suspension does not accompany the prayer.…But it would be very bad if I were to abandon everything on account of this obstacle. And so it isn’t good for us to be disturbed by our thoughts, nor should we be concerned.…Let us be patient and endure them for the love of God since we are likewise subject to eating and sleeping without being able to avoid it, which is quite a trial.”⁹⁶ (Touches her arms, breast, stomach, then relaxes, exhausted.) Attached or detached? To the flesh or to the Lord? To each of them alternately and together? I love the imagination when it takes flight from the body, with the body, when it dives deep into our entrails and carries them away with it. I can feel it splitting from the senses, becoming purified in the Lord. And I prefer it to that other flighty thought, unsupported and disembodied — abstract thought. “Porque, como el entendimiento es una de las potencias del alma, hacíaseme recia cosa estar tan tortolito a veces, y lo ordinario vuela el pensamiento de presto, que sólo Dios puede atarle, cuando nos ata a Sí de manera que parece estamos en alguna manera desatados de este cuerpo. Yo veía, a mi parecer, las potencias del alma empleadas en Dios y estar recogidas con Él, y por otra parte el pensamiento alborotado: traíame tonta.”⁹⁷

(Exhalation, accelerated heartbeat, repose.)

TERESA’S VOICE, getting feebler, but firm, without trembling. Gratian maintains it’s a typical female fallacy to confuse imagination with the movement of thought. Ribera, by contrast, lets me develop my intuition about the existence of an imagination in which thought is fulfilled ad infinitum. One day Sylvia Leclercq will write that I am at the heart of the mystery of a sublimation that “journeys itself” between the instincts and the senses. But I say: a castle compartmented by transparent membranes, translucent walls, between the teeming of poisonous vermin below and the flashing of the central jewel. Between what seems to be me, and the God inside me. (Unseeing eyes, as in the Velázquez.) Ah, Sisters, only imagination can bring us close to that desire for the Other within, while at the same time releasing us from that hot brazier. I am leaving you now, so you’ll just have to read me. One final word before I depart. You mustn’t be afraid to play, to play with that thought in motion. Our worries and our fears don’t come from movement, but from a want of light. Inside us a whole world exists, and just as it’s not in our power to halt the movements of the heavens, swirling at prodigious speeds, neither can we stop our racing minds.⁹⁸

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, 1, verses seven to nine: “Because in drawing near to its desire / Our intellect ingulphs itself so far, / That after it the memory cannot go.”⁹⁹ Is Teresa the Spanish Dante, as Meister Eckhart was the German Dante?

TERESA’S VOICE, her face in the painting eclipses the polyhedron. Let’s play, Sisters! Play, my girls! To deliver yourselves unto the King and be delivered from Him, endlessly, for there is no stopping this game, this vejamen, these death throes.…Am I lucid? Let me elucidate. “My soul is completely taken up in its quiet, love, desires, and clear knowledge”;¹⁰⁰ “y claro conocimiento,” oh, yes. Listen: someone who doesn’t know how to set up the chessboard will be a bad player, and if he doesn’t know to check the opponent’s king, how will he ever checkmate it? You will frown to hear me talk of games again, because no games are allowed in this monastery. Look what kind of a Mother God gave you, skilled at such a vain pursuit!..But this game is allowed sometimes. And very soon it will be allowed more often, if we practice enough to checkmate this divine King! After that He’ll never be able to escape, and indeed He won’t want to. (Perceptibly relaxing, cheerful smile.)

TERESA’S VOICE, while Bernini’s Transverberation is refracted by the jewel. In chess, the queen has many advantages over the king, and is supported by all the other pieces. Well, there’s no queen like humility for forcing the divine King to surrender. Humility drew Him from heaven into the Virgin’s womb; and with it, by one hair, we will draw Him to our souls. (Beaming smile.) People say, “Here is a very contemplative soul,” and immediately expect him to possess all the virtues of a soul elevated to great contemplation. The person concerned aspires to this and more. But he is misguided from the outset, because he didn’t know how to set up the game. “He thought it was enough to know the pieces in order to checkmate the King. But that was impossible, for this King doesn’t give Himself but to those who give themselves entirely to Him.”¹⁰¹

(In a serene voice.) “La dama es la que más guerra le puede hacer en este juego, y todas las otras piezas ayudan. No hay dama que así le haga rendir como la humildad. Esta le trajo del cielo en las entrañas de la Virgen, y con ella le traeremos nosotras de un cabello a nuestras almas. Y creed que quien más tuviere, más le tendrá, y quien menos, menos. Porque no puedo yo entender cómo haya ni pueda haber humildad sin amor, ni amor sin humildad, ni es posible estar estas dos virtudes sin gran desasimiento de todo lo criado.”

As Teresa’s voice inundates the stage, we watch the slow rotation of the watery gemstone of her dwelling places.

Chapter 33. ACT 4: The Analyst’s Farewell

SYLVIA LECLERCQ

The diamond of the previous act retreats into the background, where it refracts the anonymous portrait of Teresa of Avila commonly attributed to Velázquez. The left side of the stage represents Sylvia Leclercq’s office. There are a couch, an armchair, and a desk. The analyst is writing. Her voice follows the rhythms of her thoughts, and sometimes the movements of her hand. She is bidding La Madre farewell, from the first to the third person.

SYLVIA LECLERCQ. It’s infectious, this journeying to the far depths of private dwelling places, like a sort of self-analysis.…(Mocking smile.) I’ll never see the end of it.…Just when I thought I’d done with all that…I managed to send Marianne off to Cuenca and to reconcile her with her father.…The way of perfection is full of surprises, once you set off on it. I might have guessed, in light of the trajectory from beloved fatherhood to loving fatherhood.…(Hands on temples, affectionate, moved expression. Neutral voice.).

I never dreamed of my father again, after that teenage nightmare in which I had him run over by a train, inverted Oedipus oblige, it’s all in the pink pages of the Larousse of psychoanalysis.…One kills one’s Laius as best one can these days, preferably by night and at high velocity. Corny as anything. Modern daughters won’t be pushed around, and the fathers, or some of them, play along.…(Silence. Hands folded over the white pages. Adopts dreamy voice.) But for the last week…Holy Week, in fact…some coincidence…Dr. Thomas Leclercq has visited me in dreams, no face, just a presence, and his voice. Singing. All those years of analysis, all those years of clinical practice, and I never gave a thought to Dad’s singing.…With his decent tenor voice and knowledge of opera and musical culture in general, my doctor of a dad was great company. He really livened up our family meals — though not to the point of leaving his daughter with any recollection of his favorite tunes. (Still speaking in a dreamy voice, opens a notebook, gropes for a pen.) For me, his charming amateurism was secondary; his scholarly erudition when in serious “doctor” mode obliterated his fondness for singing in my mind…though I do remember how it provoked Mom’s pitying condescension, of course. She was a sensible woman, Mme Blandine Leclercq, doctor’s wife, schoolteacher, almost a proto-feminist in her way.…(Hesitant voice, screwed-up eyes.) In my defense, I should say that Dad stopped singing early on, at least I think he did…when I graduated from kindergarten, pretty early in my life, anyway. Yes, it was around then.…If I remember right.…

There was trouble at the hospital, conflicts with some big cheese, possibly a marital crisis into the bargain; I didn’t want to know, I cleared off in a hurry, like the self-reliant adolescent I wanted to be.…Yes, there must have been some kind of a crisis, because that’s when Blandine began hanging out at literary soirees, whatever was hip, launch parties at trendy bookstores for celebrated authors who’d sign your copy. I recall a rapid-fire succession of au pairs who cooked supper for me, because Dad was overwhelmed with work. Doctors are on call day and night, you see, yes, I did see.…So, no more singing in the shower.…(Childish smile.)

That’s it: he used to sing in the shower! (Delighted silence, big smile, hardly awkward at all.) That’s it, that’s the tune that has been filling my head at night, all week long.…(Writes.)…so bright and bracing…I knew it by heart.…I still do, I know the words, I’m asleep, I’m dreaming, I mouth them along with Dad, an unknown joy comes over me, it doesn’t wake me up though, it awakens me, I’m dreaming awake, I’m singing with him, a cherub’s youthful voice, it’s mine it’s his.…(Long silence.)

And then in the morning it’s gone, so frustrating, I hardly attend to my patients, I even forget to think about my saint, I rummage through the dream, it gets more and more infuriating, I’m fed up, I turn my memory upside-down: nothing, not a quaver. And it’s the same the next night.…So I decide to get up in the middle of the vocal dream, I’ll write it down while it’s still there in my throat, my lungs, my mouth, my memory, my smile.…But I can’t, the dream squeezes me in its arms, I am held, held prisoner, all I can do is sing along with Dad, glued to my pillow, unable to raise my head.…No worries, this time I’m sure I’ve got it, the confounded tune he used to warble under the shower while I drank my cocoa and left for school, with a peck for Blandine and a “See you tonight, Dad! Maybe? Okay, ’bye, then.…” But when I wake up, nothing. The bird has flown again. A phantom bird, no doubt: Did that song even exist? It’s a dream of course, my long cohabitation with Teresa can lead to anything, an unnameable hallucination, there you go, call yourself an analyst but that hoodlum Oedipus can sure play tricks on you. (Pause. Raises eyes to ceiling, cocks head, listens intently. Picks up pen once more.)

It must have been in Latin, couldn’t have been anything else, since Thomas was brought up in a religious boarding school, after his mother died giving birth to him.…I’ve spent hours of analysis on that little point, at least. My grandfather couldn’t think of anything better than to entrust him to the Jesuits. And they eventually expelled him for reading smutty books, as well as revolutionary ones, it was the period of colonial wars.…Well, Dad always put on the same complacent smirk when rehashing these daring exploits to Mom and me, over and over again, for the nth time, the only feats to his name.…I haven’t forgotten that, either. But the singing?…Definitely in Latin. Yes. (Radiant face, writing faster.)

I’ve got it. Thanks to that patient this morning, in Holy Week mode, going on about the father and the son in this litany that compulsively linked “father and son” as if we were in church, I thought at one point, it’s coming back to me, that’s it…Gloria.…No, it wasn’t a Gloria. I’m burning, it’s on the tip of my tongue.…I only did two years of Latin, and Dad never bothered passing on much of his Jesuit humanities (“Outdated claptrap, all of it. What’s left is an oath for doctors with or without borders, which is: love your neighbor and minister to ailing humanity. There you have it, the one and only universal principle that makes sense. As for the decor, well, that’s what museums are for, aren’t they?”) All the same I knew it wasn’t a Gloria, no, no, it was…Bach’s Magnificat! BWV 243 in D Major! Of course! I can’t get over it! Everybody knows the tune and the lyrics these days, thanks to CDs, MP3, and the rest. Part of the “immaterial human heritage.” (Scratches head. Glance of complicity at Teresa’s diffracted portrait.) How much did I love him, my Dad, to have forgotten those incendiary words, those vibrations that shook his whole being at the beginning of every day, that primed him to set off gaily to work, while Mom seethed: “Listen to that, it’s his ‘Marseillaise’ he’s belting out, his ‘Internationale,’ his ‘Hymn to Joy’…hopeless! Your father will never change his spots, whatever he says.” Depooo — suit, depoooo — suit poteee — ntes de seeee — de et exaltaaaaaa — aaaa — aaaa — vit huumiiles.…

F^# F^#.………………ED C^#BAG^# AF^# B^#

De — po.……………………su — it

C^# C^#.………………BA G^#F^#E^#D^# E^#G^#B D

De — po.…………………………su — it

C^# A^#C^#A G^#C^#G^# F^#DF^# E^#C^#

po — ten.…………………tes

C^# C^#BAC^# BAG^#B AG^#F^#A G^#F^#E^#D^# C^#

de se.…………………………de

G^# A F^# D^# C^#BA BAG^#B E DC^#B

Et ex — al-ta.…………………

C^#BAC^# F^# EDC^# DC^#BC^# DC^#DE

…………………………

F^#EF^#G^# A E D C^# B A A.…

…….…. vit hu — mi — les

The stately notes would spiral through the early-morning air, carrying me with them as they rose toward unimaginable expanses that I could barely discern at that age, but I could tell how they uplifted my father until I felt exultant too, sounds pulsing through my lungs, my blood, like a happy cascade of laughter…(Lays down the pen, closes the book, leans chin on clasped hands. Silence. Then, in neutral voice.) Have I come to the end, at long last, of my analysis of fatherhood, my Oedipus complex to be exact…as demanded by the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris…by rescuing my father from oblivion and making my peace with his voice, over and above his function, his function as a medic of course, as well as the inevitable paternal function…all this thanks to my roommate? (Forced smile.) Well, it’ll do for now, and for a long time to come, I hope. I can say goodbye to Teresa now, withdrawing into my father’s youthful voice.…Of course I don’t intend to say a word to Jérôme Tristan, who’s bound to retort to the effect that I’m not well, or positively in regression. Nor to Bruno, he’d only try to convert me to Buddhism. Nor to Andrew, who would make the most of this opportunity to tease the “poor thing” I become when he wants to impose himself, however sweetly. Maybe I’ll teach Paul the “Deposuit”: his singing is as pitch-perfect as his emotions. Just him. There’s no one as sensitive as Paul to what these kinds of melody, words, voices, are all about…the way they don’t say what they’re saying.…Sounds that must have lulled me constantly, from birth to when I was about six years old. “Depoooo…suit, depoooo…suit poteeee…ntes de seeee…de…et exaltaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaa…vit huuumiiiles.…”

F^# F^#……………….…ED C^#BAG^# AF^# B^#

De — po………………….…su — it

C^# C^#……………BA G^#F^#E^#D^# E^#G^#B D

De — po…………………………su — it

C^# A^#C^#A G^#C^#G^# F^#DF^# E^#C^#

po — ten………………tes

C^# C^#BAC^# BAG^#B AG^#F^#A G^#F^#E^#D^# C^#

de se………………………………de

G^# A F^# D^# C^#BA BAG^#B E DC^#B

Et ex — al- ta………………

C^#BAC^# F^# EDC^# DC^#BC^# DC^#DE

……………………….….

F^#EF^#G^# A E D C^# B A A.…

…….…vit hu — mi — les

(Pause.)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, against a faintly heard fragment of Bach’s “Magnificat,” performed by a clear tenor voice. “He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.…” To think how often I must have heard it since, that soaring “Deposuit,” looping through clouds and lights! That “heritage hit,” as my mother used to call it, among what is called “our sort”.…(Sigh.) But it’s never given me the thrill I got from agnostic Thomas when he sang it a cappella. The thrill that led me all unsuspecting to Teresa, who led me back to him. With this dream, the circle is closed. Well then: farewell!

She does not put down the pen, or close the notebook: her hand falls still over the lines.

“Depoooo…suit, depoooo…suit poteeee…ntes de seeee…de…et exaltaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaa…vit huumiiiles.…”

Here the front of the stage grows dark, so that we can barely make out the form of Sylvia Leclercq, once more writing at her desk. Spotlights pick out the portrait of Teresa in her diamond. Slides are projected over it from time to time, showing rapid glimpses of Luis de Morales’s Virgin and Child; Bernini’s Transfixion; Zurbarán’s Saint Francis, housed in Lyon; El Greco’s Christ in the Garden of Olives, in Lille; the royal monastery San Lorenzo del Escorial, by the architects Juan Batista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera; Rubens’ Rape of the Daughters of Leucippe, in Munich; and the vault of the Church of Saint Ignatius in Rome, painted by Andrea Pozzo. Over these images, only Sylvia’s monologue is heard.

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, in a clear voice. Is Teresa more analytical than Freud, or differently than Freud? Hope nobody’s listening, just kidding, shhh! Enough dreaming, it’s time to draw up the balance, since I was with her during her last hours. (Long silence. Glances at Teresa’s portrait.) She constructed her dialogues from beyond the grave as she built her interior castle: temptations and struggles, associates who were sometimes helpful, sometimes loved, too, and the busy affairs of the world in parallel to the deepening of the intimate sphere, diaphanous, shifting, sensitive, and lucid…and this intimacy reveals itself only through metaphors and little stories. (Reads.)

Teresa moved in spaces that were undistinguishably interior and exterior; they were manifest in a profusion of expressions that resorted to arresting figurations, appealed to meaning, and imposed rules. The “region of the dissimilar,” the abode of sin, the deformity of dissemblance, entailed a genuine loss of being for the creatures God made in His own image; this is because the creatures concerned, failing to comprehend the honor, let themselves sink from resemblance into dissemblance. This is where my Carmelite’s pen comes along to transform the regio dissimilitudinis into a polymorphous world, a shifting, soothing polytopy.

(Fast.) It starts with the discovery that body and soul suffer if — and only if — they do not want to know that they are in love with a good, in other words loving, Being. So much for the Christic background: clear, but inadequate. From that point on what’s required is to amplify the scenario of the Song of Songs. To generate an infinite number of dwelling places that are not recondite crannies, but multiple crossing points in continual expansion: a blooming of words, representations, and sensations. This could have been represented by a flower, yet like her rocky land of Castile, the more-than-feminine Madre is aquatic and mineral, she must necessarily have architecture. (Subtle smile.)

The subject in love and her loving Beloved spread through it, phase by phase, so that the access to the love union (itself not in doubt) is built station by infinitesimal station, the portals to intrapsychic and interactive serenity. The most harrowing ordeals become experiences to be savored, as the lover increasingly appropriates them by the grace of a simultaneously imagistic and controlled verbal representation. And the time wasted in erotic and infantile trauma becomes reversed into infinitely malleable psychic spaces, because they enclose the infinity of love given and received. The interior castle is the product of all this. However, La Madre doesn’t shut herself inside; she opens it to the world, because this castle is none other than the volume of her personal experience certified to be shareable — with her sisters, with you and me, in another infinite multiplication. (Quick glance at Teresa’s diamond.) Could this spatial burgeoning of dwelling places also be a challenge to Hell, the placeless place that terrified her so? The final liquidation of the unbreathable, unrepresentable trauma in which desires and defenses, thoughts, images, and sensations are annulled, leaving only comatose victims, sickening bestiality, cadaverous misery? (Exhales.) Her writing is a potion of youth, too, chasing aggressive anxieties away. No more depressions or somatic illnesses; adieu sadomasochistic hatefatuations! (With a mischievous smile, hands mime the clearing of the air.)

Teresa is not after a fortified, defensive retreat but a narcissistic, ideal, sublime place of reassurance where you are invited to dissolve into perfume, to intoxicate yourself, but gently and in peace. That’s right, perfume, a solid distilled, a sublimation, in other words: she says so explicitly, or almost, I’m coming to that.

(Talking fast.) The alchemy she develops in her inimitable style begins with the urge to tell. Nothing new in that, Confession relies on the same thing, as do plenty of spiritual exercises; the young Thomas Aquinas hazarded the notion that theology per se was basically a narrativus signorum, a narrating of signs.¹ But Teresa does more than follow their lead: she comes up with fresh words to unfold the temporal phases of her amorous adventure with the Other into space, across spaces. Her baroque spirit whispered to her that only the “image,” itself generated by talking and “communication” between lovers, can provoke a “narrative.”

Listen. (Normal voice, underlining the emphases.)

“What you can do as a help in this matter is try to carry about an image or painting of this Lord that is to your liking, not so as to carry it about on your heart and never look at it but so as to speak often with Him; for He will inspire you with what to say. Since you speak with other persons, why must words fail you when you speak with God? Don’t believe they will; at least I will not believe they will if you acquire the habit. Otherwise, the failure to communicate with a person causes both estrangement [porque si no, el no tratar con una persona cause extrañeza] and a failure to know how to speak with him. For it seems then that we do not know him, even if he may be a relative; family ties and friendship are lost through a lack of communication.”²

SYLVIA LECLERCQ. Begin, then, by imagining the image of the person you love, and that will encourage you to speak with them, and thence to communicate with the good Being and ultimately partake of Him, logically and inevitably.

The images involved are first of all representations, fantasies that are not always present to the eye, but given to thought, which is visual, and to all the senses. From this derives an apology of mental imagery, with its power to contain the lover’s need to be loved and acknowledged as lovable. Here is the cornerstone of belief. We are like blind people in the presence of an interlocutor: “They understand and believe this, but they do not see the other [entiende y cree que está allí, mas no la ve].”³ They sense the presence: I sense, therefore I am. Rather than debating with the Lutherans, what Teresa is doing is rehabilitating a therapy of the imagination, calling it to the rescue of blind reassurance. For she knows from experience that the imaginary is vital to the survival of a subject who only exists insofar as she or he is in love. I am capable of imagining the amorous bond, of communicating with it and about it; I can create/recreate it by my powers of representation; by constantly expressing it in signs, or signifying it, I come to possess it; and therefore I believe in it — more and more. (Glances at the possible Velázquez portrait.) Can I say that I am? There are many ways one may be. My being has been indefinitely transferred into the Other.

Listen again. (Normal voice, underlining the emphases.)

“I could only think about Jesus Christ as He was as man, but never in such a way that I could picture Him within myself no matter how much I read about His beauty or how many images I saw of Him.…I was like those who are blind or in darkness…they know with certainty that the other is there (I mean that they understand and believe this, but they do not see the other); such was the case with me when I thought of our Lord. This was the reason I liked images so much. Unfortunate are those who through their own fault lose this great good. It indeed appears they do not love the Lord, for if they loved Him they would rejoice greatly to see a portrait of Him, just as here on earth it really gives joy to see the one whom you deeply love.”⁴

Finally the image becomes interiorized, as wordless, nonvisual sensations. Neither “belief” nor “reasoning,” this new way of “understanding” is frightening, because it imposes the lover’s companionship very very deep inside (en lo muy muy interior), in the manner of an inevitable, indelible truth.⁵

At this stage of the spatialization of subjective time, according to Teresa, the “knowledge” identical to “belief” is experienced as a “favor.” However, in a crowning twist of genius, the nun grasped that these states of reassurance by osmosis with the Ideal are imaginary “locutions” (hablas), and therefore “illusions” (antojos).⁶ The explorer nevertheless recommends us to entertain these fantastic exchanges in order to combat the devil, who is not, for Teresa, an absolute evil so much as resistance itself, opposed to imaginative experience. The tournament the writer has described creates the amorous union at the same time as it creates the interior space — the space that will be crossed repeatedly, without end.

The great enemy, then (smile of complicity) is nothing other than the deficiency of imagination and desire: the lack of figurable representations that makes us settle for harmful, unhealthy drives. Here is a devil whose power Teresa knows too well—son semblable, son frère, perhaps.* [*A reference to the famous address to the reader in Les Feurs du Mal: “Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!”—Trans.] It tips one into comitial excitability, undermining the containing capacity of thoughts and images. It is futile to resist these imaginary fissures, these feeble, fearful, terrifying fantasies. My message is that it is possible to transform them: plunge yourself into the abundant figurations of my lovers’ spaces, read how by amassing them I come into possession of the Other in me, how I change and grow. For is it not foolishness (desatino) to believe we could ever enter Heaven without entering into ourselves first?⁷

(Pause.)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, puffs, and resumes at speed. And though the building thus erected constitutes a shelter, it is steeped in the inconstancy of the baroque: its safety is but a fleeting spark, “centella de seguridad.”⁸ A bolt of lightning, a whirlwind, interior rapids: Teresa’s writing, reflective and caressing, surges along nonetheless with the speed of Love in Angelus Silesius: “Love is the quickest thing and of itself can fly / To topmost Heaven in but the twinkling of an eye.”⁹

Saint Teresa of Avila in Glory. Tapestry woven by the first Carmelites in Avignon (twelfth century). © Fine Arts Museum, Budapest.

And just as opposites coexist, when they are not actually interchangeable, in the works of Rubens, Guarino Guarini, Andrea Pozzo, or Tiepolo, so God and the Devil rub shoulders in the tornado traced by La Madre’s pen: why do we cry “‘The devil! The devil!’ when we can say ‘God! God!’and make the devil tremble,” she writes defiantly, and earlier, “His Majesty favor me so that I may understand,…and a fig for all the devils [una higa para todos los demonios].”¹⁰ Teresa has no compunction about firing obscene insults at the paternal superego of her more disapproving confessors! Against them, her love upholds her legitimate right, as the Lord’s Bride, identified with His Royal Majesty, not to fear anything or anyone: “I fear those who have such great fear of the devil more than I fear the devil himself, for he can’t do anything to me. Whereas these others, especially if they are confessors, cause severe disturbance: I have undergone some years of such great trial that I am amazed now at how I was able to suffer it. Blessed be the Lord who has so truly helped me!”¹¹ (Breathes out. Stares at the diamond.)

The Apotheosis of Saint Teresa (1722). Fresco by Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770).

Church of the Scalzi, Venice, Italy/De Agostini Picture Library/F. Ferruzzi/ Bridgeman Art Library.

Step by step the imagery of resistance to the erotic brazier gives way before the profusion of another imagery, orchestrating its success. The amorous subject triumphs over the soul unable to represent to itself the trials joining the lover to her Beloved; the castle-building narrative excludes from its halls disgraced souls who stray from the enchanted imaginary, like the prodigal son who once thought he could leave his father’s house and live off the husks of swine. A soul in love and proud of it, Teresa stakes out a double space (anxious voice): “outside this castle,” an alien exteriority inhabited by the kind of person who eats pig-swill, is contrasted with one’s “own house,” which has everything a person could need, and “especially, has a guest who will make him lord over all goods.”¹²

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Giuseppe Bazzani, oil on canvas (1745–1750). © Fine Arts Museum, Budapest.

Could the imprecision of the phrase manjar de puercos (pig feed) suggest that people who are incapable of inhabiting themselves and fully enjoying the riches of the imagination are eaters of pork? A diet that offends Jews and Marranos, not to say…the hidden interiority of my Teresa, always in search of some secret faith, some protected clandestinity. Like the faith of her ancestors, perhaps? Of course the prodigal son was uncritically welcomed back by his adoring father, and Teresa herself addressed her experience en lo muy muy interior to everyone, for universal dissemination.

(Silence. In the background we hear the voice of Dr. Thomas Leclercq, softly humming the “Deposuit.”)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, fast, reading and underlining. Clearly, this publicity for an amorous imagination that converts suffering into a gemstone and crystallizes masochism into self-overcoming, without letting itself be affected by the exaltation it rests upon, has nothing in common with the Freudian scalpel. Because the interpretation of transference/countertransference proceeds by means of subtraction, whereas Teresa amplifies in order to magnify; only thus can she render secure the inner being of the loved lover. Freud operates per via di levare, he writes, like a sculptor using the chisel of free association to chip away the patient’s defenses and uncover the infantile impasses of the capacity for loving and thinking. In aid of this dismantling he is armed with the discovery of the unconscious, based on the Oedipus: killing of the Father and identification with his ideality and power, incestuous desire for the Mother, the accidents of which exhort from our psychic bisexuality the emergence of speaking-thinking-loving beings.

Teresa, for her part, proceeds like the painter of a baroque cupola: applying layer upon layer, per via di porre, adding twist upon high-wire twist to her tale — inviting her sisters and readers to dreams and hallucinations of amorous success, a success warranted by the grace of the Trinity and the indisputable devotion of Mary and Joseph, the parental couple.¹³ Pointing out all the while what a fiction it was, a necessary game of infinite communication; but since the experience creates a saving neo-reality, it is the Truth. What’s more, this amorous intoxication does not display as a liberty taken with the transcendence underwritten by the paternal function and mellowed by the Marian cult, not at all! It merely, if I can put it that way, advances, with extravagant ease, through the fundaments of Christian ethics.

(Silence. Head in hands.)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, enunciating slowly, underlining. To sum up, if Teresa’s lucidity unwraps the stages and components of amorous passion…she does not aim to be delivered from it, as promised by the adventure of analysis; on the contrary, she wants to enjoy it the more, and so demonstrate the ineluctable logic of the biblical and evangelical premise. While Freud questions and dismantles the patient’s defenses in order to leave the subject free to reconstruct his amorous and rational bonds, Teresa, on the contrary — in her infinite traversal of the Oedipus complex — never suspects that God is a question. For the Beloved is a strange Archimedes’ lever that sends one precisely inside oneself, where the Other dwells. It enables one to let go of the bristling array of defenses and fears, and thus to discover, along with the enigmas of love, well-being itself, the good and supreme Being. She would agree with Leibniz that “since we are beings, being is innate in us”;¹⁴ she went on to prove it by erecting the inner dwelling places of a being that only is if he or she is in love. While beating the Lord at chess, it doesn’t occur to Teresa for one second that the game could be possible without His august and loving Fatherhood; after all, the player’s desire reaches its acme in the avowal that she longs to have a child from Him, to become the Mother of God, Sovereign in her own right. Divine. (Long silence.) Reading her, listening to her, it seems the Other in me is not infernal, like the unconscious. It is forcibly uncertain, or prey to the devil. But it is definitively lovable if I can find it in me to listen to it, articulate it, and write it, as a lover/loved.

And yet, after this long trek in Teresa’s company, I maintain (measured, poised, confident voice, occasionally emphatic) that Freud, while embarking on a completely different course, could not be ignorant of the advantages of the interior dwelling places discovered by La Madre. What “substance” was the dauntless Viennese sculptor chiseling into, if not that enigmatic transference/countertransference that he never really theorized, leaving that task to the female psychoanalysts who were the first disciples of Melanie Klein? Alert to the double Judeo-Christian alliance concealed at the heart of the Spanish sixteenth century,¹⁵ Teresa amplified in her own way the diabolical resistances we each oppose to the flourishing of our amorous representations, themselves founded on a no less amplified need to believe, which succeeds to the oceanic dependence on the maternal container and the primal identification with the Father of personal prehistory.¹⁶

As a writer she shines a light on these fundamental logics, while not averse to pinpointing the abuse or distortion of them by those polar opposites to the Lord (to the ideal of the Self) constituted by the twin tyrants of the sex drive and the moralizing superego. But the holy woman would never question the Other’s love and her love for the Other: how could she conceive of a viable way of being if not in love with the ideal Father?

(Sylvia falls silent. We hear Dr. Leclercq’s muffled voice tackling the complex notation of “Exaltavit humiles.”)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ. In my view — but keep this to yourself (here her voice becomes intimate, hushed, singular) — our dear, great Sigmund was not far from thinking, though he stopped short of formulating it, the same as what Teresa celebrated in all her writings. What did he lay onto the couch, if it wasn’t love? Love, again, is what’s transferred in the attention we pay to our patients’ words, drives, and affects. Freud’s philosophy was explicitly based on the Enlightenment, his interpretative method was without doubt Kabbalistically and Talmudically Jewish, but his unconscious was baroque. (Sidelong glance at the diamond.) Baroque — as in inconstant, mobile, playful, reinvented on the go — is the word for the amorous principle upon which he founded psychoanalysis, and over which he lingered in his scrutiny of the history of myths, religions, arts and letters; the principle Teresa crosses back and forth, with cheerful faith, never underestimating the demons of excitation unto death. Teresa reigns as the high priestess of the continent of idealization that inaugurates the transference that precedes the cure, into which the psychoanalyst will hack with the blows of his chisel, ice ax, hammer, or pen.…

(She closes her notebook, rises from the chair, walks toward the door — then turns back and sits down again, picking up the pen in a mood of contented, tranquil solitude.)

Can I convince you that by remitting the truth of the amorous bond, and by extension of the transferential bond, to an unconscious that is equally in love and yet infantile, no analytical interpretation can expel this “delusion” of love from the field of that (interminable) analysis? Not only does the constant of the loving bond persist under the guise of some “future of delusion,” notably religious delusion, which Freud regards as regrettable yet insurmountable; the permanence of the Teresian problematic of love manifests itself even at the termination of the cure, which, for all its dissipation of illusions, merely leads to the creation of…new and no less amorous bonds. These new transferences, better apprised of the impasses of the subject’s former traumas and hatefatuations, embark all over again — at best more soberly, but never desisting — upon the quest for jouissance in the intimacy, forever to be reconquered, of an interior castle forever to be rebuilt, by the latest self with its latest set of narratives.

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, in a calm voice, eyes drawn to the divan. In order to remain psychically alive, or alive tout court, I can’t do other than try to re-inhabit my inner dwelling places — with someone new this time — while realizing, courtesy of my analysis, that it will once more be in vain, or almost. But as the baroque poet said, “Everything is mutable in this world. We must snatch love as we can.”¹⁷ (Broad smile.)

Teresa, already a potential saint when on her deathbed, has not quite reached this point. Her brand of baroque differs from that of artists who solemnly assert, in the face of the One, the power of a nonessential, theatrical, “performing” humanity. The baroque illusion — triumph of the as-if, celebration of the inconstancy of objective reality (the very stage sets are to be cast into the flames, like Don Juan) — assumes an extravagant superiority nonetheless, negating every value and form of otherness. The baroque artist lays no claim to inner authenticity; he is praised for shape-shifting alone, for his dexterity with whirling masquerades and the opulent play of simulacra. (Amused glance at the divan.)

None of this with Teresa; La Madre was never content to approach delusion as an illusion. Being a mystic, she was afraid the crumbling of fantasy would reduce her to the condition of a worm in the nonspace of Hell; so she distilled the imaginary into the joy of love and a life founded on love, like an alembic distills spirits. (Exhales, looks at Teresa’s diamond.)

Like me, and after much weeping, La Madre no longer weeps as the end draws near. Now her tears pour forth of themselves, with abandon, with the certainty of happiness. The fruits of a once terrified imagination (before it tamed the plenitude of love), tears remain, to her valedictory eyes, illusions, deceits, engaños. They are the devil’s work. And if God Himself sometimes has a hand in them, for our gratification, we shouldn’t indulge all the same.

Hear what she says (in a normal voice, underlining): “I mark danger everywhere and in something as good as tears I think there can be deception; you are wondering if I may be the one who is deceived. And it could be that I am. But believe me, I do not speak without having seen that these false tears can be experienced by some persons; although not by me, for I am not at all tender. Rather, I have a heart so hard that sometimes I am distressed; although when the inner fire is intense the heart, however hard, distills like an alembic.…Let the tears come when God sends them and without any effort on our part to induce them. These tears from God will irrigate this dry earth, and they are a great help in producing fruit. The less attention we pay to them, the more there are.…”¹⁸

(Meditative silence.)

“And suddenly it seemed that day to day was added, as if He who has the power had with another sun the heaven adorned.” (Sylvia recites the unknown lines that have swum into her mind. It’s not Hell any more, nor is it Purgatory, so could this be Paradise? If Teresa hasn’t earned a place in Heaven, who has?) “Transumanar.…To represent transhumanize in words impossible were.” Teresa, transhuman? No, not that chess-playing woman. Transfinite, rather…an infinitesimal human.…“She, who saw me as I saw myself.…Here do the higher creatures see the footprints of the Eternal Power.…Here vigor failed the lofty fantasy: but now was turning my desire and will, even as a wheel that equally is moved, the love which moves the sun and the other stars.”¹⁹ (Rubs her eyes, comes back to her roommate.)

The loving heart, Teresa fashion, is hard as diamonds, meaning it cannot be liquefied anymore: it endures the toughest test, it is rock solid. (In a voice of farewell.) But it is no less subtle for that. It distills into scents, penetrates castle walls, traverses the spaces and elements it imbues. And then it takes wing, spinning and fluttering with the Other’s voice, that necessarily loving voice. Pulverizing the rectilinear power of the Lord Himself into cloudy cascades of justice implored, of sublimated desires. (With a final glance at Teresa’s portrait.) A vibrating voice, arpeggios and triplets, mounting and descending, a-flutter, à la volette [Repeated phrase in eponymous traditional French children’s song. — Trans.], again and again, exultant:

F^# F^#…………….…. ED C^#BAG^# AF^# B^#

De — po……………….…. su — it

C^# C^#…………….…. BA G^#F^#E^#D^# E^#G^#B D

De — po………………….…. su — it

C^# A^#C^#A G^#C^#G^# F^#DF^# E^#C^#

po — ten…………….…. tes

C^# C^#BAC^# BAG^#B AG^#F^#A G^#F^#E^#D^# C^#

de se……………………….…de

G^# A F^# D^# C^#BA BAG^#B E DC^#B

Et ex — al-ta…………….….

C^#BAC^# F^# EDC^# DC^#BC^# DC^#DE

……………………….…

F^#EF^#G^# A E D C^# B A A.…

…….…vit hu — mi — les

Just like my father’s voice. (In the background, a snatch of Bach’s “Magnificat.”)