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

Chapter 5. PRAYER, WRITING, POLITICS

Whatever the wellspring of her writing, internal urgency or external urging, Teresa clearly knows that she writes in order to be: to encounter herself, to encounter and understand others, to “serve” as a conduit for “words” so as to “seek herself” and hopefully “find herself.” She writes “almost stealing time, and regretfully because it prevents me from spinning”;¹ “[Saint Martin] had works and I have only words, because I’m not good for anything else!”² And again, “I don’t understand myself…So that when I find my misery awake, my God, and my reason blind, I might see whether this reason can be found in what I write” (pueda ver si la hallo aquí en esto escrito de mi mano).³ None of this diffidence prevents her from holding her imagery, or fiction, in high esteem — not least when noting the appreciation of the Inquisition.

Thus she tells Fr. Gaspar de Salazar that The Book of Her Life, then under examination by the Grand Inquisitor Gaspar de Quiroga, bishop of Toledo, is a “jewel” in the latter’s hands. He “praises it highly. So until he tires of it he will not give it over. He said that he wants to examine it carefully.” Teresa champions her fiction with mixed anxiety and irony. She affects a swagger when announcing that “another” gem awaits her detractors, with “many advantages over the previous one. It deals with nothing else but who [Christ] is; and it does so with more exquisite enameling and decoration. The jeweler did not know as much at that time, and the gold is of a finer quality, although the precious stones do not stand out as they did in the previous piece.”⁴

Indeed, while not as straightforwardly autobiographical as the Life, The Interior Castle chisels in its Dwelling Places a faceted itinerary of the mystical journey, revealing Teresa as the master craftsperson of a rarefied genre: theological psychology. The poems of John of the Cross, such as the Dark Night of the Soul, the Living Flame of Love, or the Spiritual Canticle, are accompanied by explanatory “spiritual treatises” both short and long. More intersubjective and physical than the prose of the man she called her “little Seneca,” less elliptical than his verse, might Teresa’s fiction constitute that gemstone, that crystal, condensing theopathic states and expounding them so thoroughly as to rule out any future hermeneutics or philosophy of stature in the Castilian tongue?⁵ Contrast with the Rhenish case, whose densely intellectual mysticism, of an Albertino-Thomist cast, cried out to be conceptualized — as it would be by German philosophy. In reality the two Avilan mystics, John and Teresa, invented bridging genres that passed between theopathy and theology on the one hand and the psychology of extreme creative states on the other. The writing produced by these “ungenred” genres appears to us, at this distance, as the crucible of the continent in gestation that was European literature; its fiery quality remains unequaled, with rare exceptions.

Teresa suspects that she thinks like a novelist, and comes close to saying so, with a proud twinkle. And sure enough I see a novel of introspection, appropriating Chrétien de Troye’s Grail, to be decoded in the “precious gems” of her greatest texts, just as there is a picaresque novel lurking in her letters.⁶

In all these forms, however, and given that it traces the begetting of the self, writing seems to be an essential stage, foundational but not final, of the experience of the “love of God” according to Teresa. Is this “mystical theology, which I believe it is called”?⁷ But “I am speaking about what has happened to me, as I have been ordered to do [yo digo lo que ha pasado por mí como me lo mandan].”⁸ Precaution, irony, disclaimers: Teresa frames her fiction from the outset by defining it as the “account” of a complex “sensorial experience” whose initial station was prayer. The act of re-founding the Carmelites, which would mark the history of the Catholic Church in general and Spanish society in particular, would be its political counterpart.

Regardless of her epileptic seizures, in these writing states, on their twin pillars of prayer and foundation, the Carmelite nun exhibits a remarkable capacity for observation, bolstered by an unprecedented rhetorical elaboration of what it is to lose and to reconstitute oneself through amorous transference onto the other. These writings cannot be reduced to the discharge of a duty; they refashion in depth the complexity of a whole person, along with her relationships. First in the verbalization of Confession, then in the still more intimate act of writing, the ground covered mentally and physically, emotionally and culturally, biographically and historically takes over the subjective state of distress, be it neuronal or existential, and moves aside from it — when not independent of it — to transform it at last into a being-in-the-world that re-founds both self and others. From that point on, prayer-writing-politics are lived and restored as the three indissociable panels of a single process of ceaseless re-foundation of the self, of the subject, continually open to its own otherness, thanks to the call of the Being-Other (“Seek yourself in Me”). They trigger the spiraling re-creation of the woman who prays, and writes, and is metamorphosed: “When the soul [in the form of a silkworm] is, in this prayer, truly dead to the world, a little white butterfly comes forth.”⁹

Teresa begins her “search” with a “suspension of the faculties”—in scholastic terms, the intellect, the will, and the imagination — in order to regress to that state in which the thinking individual loses the contours of his or her identity and, beneath the threshold of consciousness and indeed of the unconscious, becomes what Winnicott calls a “psyche-soma.”¹⁰ In that state, which for psychoanalysis is a reversion to the archaic osmosis between mother and infant (or fetus), the tenuous link to the self and the other is maintained solely by that infralinguistic sensibility whose acuteness is the greater in proportion to the relinquishment of the faculty for abstract judgment. A different thought results, an a-thought, a dive into the deeps that terms like sensorial representation or psyche-soma convey better than any notion of mind. It is as if the reasoning mind had passed the baton of being-in-the-world to a fantastic fabrication domiciled in the entire body, touching-feeling outside and inside, its own physiological processes and the external world, without the protection of intellectual work or the help of a judging consciousness. Winnicott wondered why we locate the mind in the brain, when the regressive states entered by some of his patients testified, he thought, to how all the senses and organs play a part in self-perception and perception of the outside world: his observation suggested that the psyche is the body, or soma, and the body is the psyche.

UNIVERSAL SEPARATION

After the work of repentance, quiet, and union, Teresa describes the fourth degree of prayer, which is rapture: this shows how the destitution of the self in the psyche-soma begins with the sense of “being distant from all things.”¹¹ In an acute state of melancholic loneliness, the soul desires “only to die,” feeling bereft of consolation and not finding “a creature on earth that might accompany it.” And yet this low mood does not lead it to complain:

Now, I understand clearly that all this help [from others] is like little sticks of dry rosemary and that in being attached to it there is no security; for when some weight of contradiction or criticism comes along, these little sticks break. So I have experience that the true remedy against a fall is to be attached to the cross and trust in Him who placed Himself upon it.¹²

For there is not a “creature on earth” who is consistent, lovable or kind; people invariably let one down; and this primary frustration has me cloistered in a convent as if to embody, confirm and perpetuate my isolation. My longing for love is not however quelled by this universal separation, this “distance from all things”: in a last-ditch erotic impulse, I invest it in an imaginary Object who is the absolute Subject, the God-man who bestowed divinity upon human suffering (and vice versa) to the point of fusion with it, a merging of the two. Is Christ the last of the gods? Did He betray divinity? Or perhaps, by revolutionizing the one God of the Bible, He incarnates an ultimate anthropological truth: it is imperative to divinize the universal separation and turn it into a Great Other, this being the only way to mend the distance and mend ourselves in the union with Him, our fellow, the Crucified One who rose again. If you wish to be “saved” from universal separation, if you believe in the possibility of rapture, go in for regressions as delightful as they are excruciating, because the price of salvation is to cross that distance (a process later known as masochism — albeit the friars of Duruelo, supporters of Teresa’s reforms, could have shown a thing or two to that scandalous Sacher-Masoch).

Teresa’s trajectory is a descent into the doloristic depths of the religion of salvation to uncover its intrapsychical operations. But she also transcends these, as no one had done before, by opening body and soul to the joys of the love of the Other and reasserting His presence on earth with the creation of an innovative religious institution: “I have become so adept at bargaining and managing business affairs.”¹³ Is she adumbrating an exit from voluntary servitude? Or locking it into a new and exalted impasse?

For the early Christians, as for Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada in the sixteenth century, Jesus and His powers were in no sense the “fantasy” the coming humanism would label them as (shortly echoed by psychoanalysts, including myself). Christ was convincing. He imposed himself as an absolute truth because He managed to project everybody’s pain into His own “masochism,” to inscribe our grief into His Passion, if only we believe that this loving sacrifice on the Cross will also open the Heaven of resurrection to us. Thus Jesus Christ became a subtle antidepressant for abandoned, unhappy humanity.

The black sun of melancholia that weighs on “separated” humanity then split into its parts. On one side, the sun: the God-man, the Light, the Word, Who loves and saves us; the exultant denial of separation, sorrow, violence, death. On the other, the black shadow that overhangs believers in the grip of solitude: the body of the tortured Christ, in which men and women can immerse their own. Either side, heads or tails, when through prayer the osmosis with the crucified-resurrected Christ is realized, it can only be paroxystic — annihilation and rebirth — and, on that condition, gratifying. The consolation that results does not suspend sorrow, let alone get through it. It is content to maintain or stoke it up, the better to reward it.

Is this a reparation, or a stimulation of the “pleasure unto death” diagnosed by Nietzsche well before the Freudians got hold of it?¹⁴ Teresa is sharply aware of the issue, enticingly so for future analysts. In this properly vicious circle, the melancholic pain of separation from one’s loved ones becomes vastly more poignant when the Beloved is God Himself, as she points out:

It seems to me that God is then exceedingly far away.…This communication is given not to console but to show the reason the soul has for becoming weary in the absence of a blessing that in itself contains all blessings.

With this communication the desire increases and also the extreme sense of solitude in which, even though the soul is in that desert, it sees with a pain so delicate and penetrating that it can, I think, literally say: Vigilavi, et factus sum sicut passer solitarius in tecto [I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop. Ps. 102:7].¹⁵

By identifying with the wounds of Christ, who is God, desolation compressed becomes a glorious pain, absolute doloristic bliss in lieu of the absolute Body: unhappiness cries out, but in flight, over the housetop and far away.

“I LIVE WITHOUT LIVING IN MYSELF”

Before long, the descent into the underworld is qualified by the inordinate gratification of being Him: inhabiting a man’s body, of course, which is far preferable to a woman’s, let alone that of a pretty, cloistered girl without a dowry! In addition the man on the Cross is a God-man, the Son of God, and a potential lover of the praying woman, as the Song of Songs joyfully proclaims. The Bride undertakes penances, but her desire for the imaginary Object — absolute Subject is so overwhelming that the pain—“little felt” as such, however intensely mentalized and interiorized — is on the contrary a “special favor,” because it is mingled with His pain, shared with Him.

Exhibiting a rare gift for psychological self-observation, introspection, and retrospection, Teresa depicts the initial stages of prayer in terms of anorexia: her worship of the ideal Man obliterates elementary desires, beginning with the appetite for food. She wants to annihilate herself the better to deserve Him, in the suspension of every sensation. She will let the tears flow, she’s good at that, but almost without noticing; above all she will not complain, for that is a female trait. The praying woman, unable to eat, feverishly cleaving to her ideal Object, is lifted up by fasting and hovers beside Him, beyond the scope of sexual difference:

The impulses to do penance that come upon me sometimes, and have come upon me, are great. And if I do penance, I feel it so little on account of that strong desire that sometimes it seems to me — or almost always — that penance is a very special favor.…

It is the greatest pain for me sometimes, and now more extreme, to have to go to eat, especially when I’m in prayer. This pain must be great because it makes me weep a good deal and utter words of distress, almost without being aware of it, which I usually do not do. However great the trials I have experienced in this life, I don’t recall having said these words. I am not at all like a woman in such matters, for I have a robust spirit.¹⁶

Here Teresa’s account adopts, as it often does, the precision of a clinical description. She reconstitutes in writing the body paralyzed by cold acceptance of her separation from the One who, nevertheless, remains present in mind by the strength of the union she has thought and felt. This rigid body will be succeeded by a body blown on the air, carried away in a whirlwind of energetic release. The radiant phase climaxes in a feeling of hollowing out, weightlessness, elevation, levitation — so many states of grace that are recaptured by the racing pen and brim over in abundance of writing. And then, a final reversal: the nocturnal phase returns. She plummets into revulsion and refusal: refusal to eat, denial of pain, intense pleasure of self-dominion that harshly abrogates the gendered experience: “I am not at all like a woman in such matters, for I have a robust spirit.” The merciless precision of this clinical semiology cannot, beneath its ironic scalpel, conceal the writer’s pride at escaping the feminine condition.

The catatonia that accompanies manic-depressive psychosis or states of comatose epilepsy, as diagnosed by modern neurology, assuredly overtakes this soul as it strains for fusion with the imaginary Object with all the verve of its psyche-soma, aspiring only to “rise” toward the All-Other, the “exterior agent” of her “interior castle,” the missing second person, the thou of love. And the abolishment of the self in the suffering-delighting body remains the goal, if one is to attain the grace of dissolution into the fervors of medieval faith that transcend the life of all mystical practitioners.

But what distinguishes Teresa from other adepts of prayer is the way she couples this suspension of reason to an astonishing clear-sightedness, which notes, if transiently, its own befuddlement:

Everything is almost fading away through a kind of swoon in which breathing and all the bodily energies gradually fail…one cannot even stir the hands without a lot of effort.…[The persons in this state] see the letter; but since the intellect gives no help, they don’t know how to read it, even though they may desire to do so.…In vain do they try to speak, because they don’t succeed in forming a word, nor if they do succeed is there the strength left to be able to pronounce it.…The exterior delight that is felt is great and very distinct.

It is true that in the beginning this prayer passes so quickly…that neither these exterior signs nor the failure of the senses are very noticeable.…The longest space of time in my opinion in which the soul remains in this suspension of all the faculties [esta suspensión de todas las potencias] is very short; should it remain suspended for a half hour, this would be a very long time.…It is true that since there is no sensory consciousness one finds it hard to know what is happening.…It is the will that holds high the banner [as one side in a joust: mantiene la tela];¹⁷ the other two faculties quickly go back to being a bother.…

But I say this loss of them all and suspension of the imagination…lasts only a short while; yet these faculties don’t return to themselves so completely that they are incapable of remaining for several hours as though bewildered [confused, befuddled: como desatinadas], while God gradually gathers them again to Himself.¹⁸

Sensory regression, exile from self, installation of Him within me in the fourth prayer; the intellect and the ego are abolished for the sake of the contact, shortly to become capture, of the psyche-soma and the Being-Other:

The Lord spoke these words to me: “It detaches itself from everything, daughter, so as to abide more in me. It is no longer the soul that lives but I. Since it cannot comprehend what it understands, there is an understanding by not understanding.…”

If a person is reflecting upon some scriptural event, it becomes as lost to the memory.…If the person reads, there is no remembrance of what was read; nor is there any remembrance if one prays vocally. Thus this bothersome little moth, which is the memory, gets its wings burnt here; it can no longer move. The will is fully occupied in loving, but it doesn’t understand how it loves. The intellect, if it understands, doesn’t understand how it understands; at least it can’t comprehend anything of what it understands. It doesn’t seem to me that it understands, because, as I say, it doesn’t understand — I really can’t understand this!¹⁹

Even more incisively, Teresa describes the paradoxical “joust” of this deconstruction as if it were another life, one consisting of an uninterrupted death of the self exiled beyond the frontiers of identity: “I live without living in myself”; “I already live outside myself” (vivo ya fuera de mí). One must enter a continual state of “dying of love,” in which “sensitive betterment” is felt as infinitely preferable to being locked into conscious, self-protective life. For “dying of love” is an alternative way of living, in opposition to that biological life, which represses the risk of regression and stubbornly wants “not to die.” Only thus, only on condition of dying of love, can Teresa’s soul make “her God her captive.” But in a further paradox of apophatic thought, shutting oneself away with one’s God in the prison of the living body here below might come down to a tedious wait, a postponement of the plenitude of bliss in Him, the Pauline face to face in the Beyond after death. Therefore, it is crucial that, in the meantime, the passion for the “captive God” is soothed in sweet abandon to the Lord:

I live without living in myself,

And in such a way I hope,

I die because I do not die.

Since I die of love,

Living apart from love,

I live now in the Lord

Who has desired me for Himself.

He inscribed on my heart

When I gave it to Him:

I die because I do not die.

Within this divine prison

Of love in which I live,

My God my captive is.

My heart is free

To behold my prisoner-God,

Passion welling in my heart,

I die because I do not die.

Ah, how weary this life!

These exiles so hard!

This jail and these shackles

By which the soul is fettered!

Longing only to go forth

Brings such terrible sorrow,

I die because I do not die.

Ah, how bitter a life

When the Lord is not enjoyed!²⁰

While love is sweet,

Long awaiting is not.

Oh God, take away this burden

Heavier than steel,

I die because I do not die.²¹

This poem, the most successful of Teresa’s verse pieces, sums up the states of rapture described in The Book of Her Life.²² However, it is in her fiction — itself inherently poetic and meditative — that the saint’s writing comes into its own.

Chapter 6. HOW TO WRITE SENSIBLE EXPERIENCE, OR, OF WATER AS THE FICTION OF TOUCH

TACTILE VISIONS

Teresa began writing for the first time between 1560 and 1562. The Relations or Spiritual Testimonies (1–3) date from 1560–1563; the first draft of The Book of Her Life, now lost, is from 1562.¹ By now, aged between thirty-five and thirty-seven, her second “conversion” (1555) was behind her, and the silent and vocal praying that accompanied her early monastic life had become very intense. She meditated on Francisco de Osuna and Juan de Ávila, and in 1562 she met Pedro de Alcántara; her vision of Hell (1560) came to her at much the same time as her decision to found a convent based on the Primitive Rule. As a spiritual, physical, and political activity, writing was a necessity for her. The act of writing was the element that allowed her to keep contact with regression in prayer (itself induced and spurred on by theological and evangelical texts: Teresa was an avid reader), while at the same time elucidating it and making it shareable — by tying it to her own memory, culture, and will, as well as to the judgment of her confessors and, beyond the domain of the Church, to the social and political life of Renaissance Spain.

The writings of La Madre (first published in 1588 thanks to the offices of Luis de León and Ana de Jesús, and completed later) bear witness to her itinerary and to the many strands of her personality. As we have seen, The Book of Her Life (final draft, 1565) braids autobiography into the meticulous description of the constant self-deconstruction inherent in spiritual experience and essential to its clarification. The Way of Perfection, the one text Teresa was minded to publish, stresses the exactions of monastic life with a view to fortifying her fellow nuns and ushering them along the path of prayer.² The Foundations record the foundress’s social experiences, intermixed with her spiritual life.³ Finally, The Interior Castle, also known as the Mansions or Dwelling Places of the Interior Castle (Moradas del castillo interior, 1577), recomposes the plural space that had constituted and sustained the complex movements of Teresa’s love for Jesus, internalizing into a single but shifting emplacement — the “castle” of many abodes — her three aspects: prayer, writing, and foundation.

Across the range of themes and intentions, secret aims, and foundational ambitions, Teresa’s style is stamped with an indelible seal: it works to translate the psyche-soma into imagery, images that in turn are designed to convey visions that are not a function of sight (at least, not of eyesight alone), but indwell the whole body. They make themselves felt first and foremost in terms of touch, taste, or hearing, only afterward involving the gaze. The psychical or physiological descriptions of her states, cumulatively presented, are thus products of a sensorial imaginary rather than of any imagery, imagination, or images in the visual sense. This sensorial, or sensible, imaginary in writing demands to be read by the psyche-soma as much as by the intellect. Are contemporary readers capable of adjusting to this requirement? If so, they may have access to this experience, in which the words on the page render sensual perceptions, the author’s sentience. Again, for La Madre it was not a question of creating an oeuvre but of calling into play (into the jousting lists?) the felt experience of her addressees, from the confessors who requested and approved her texts, the sisters who looked up to her, and the believers who followed her, to the readers of today and tomorrow.

Metaphors, similes, or metamorphoses in words? How did Teresa take possession of the Castilian language to say that the love bond between a secluded nun and the other-being — both the other in oneself, and the Other outside oneself — is a tournament of the senses? How did she express so recognizably the otherness impressed on her in the experience of separation magnetized by rapturous union? A separation, which albeit radical, is bridgeable by words, by a certain utterance; a separation that does not set itself up as an abstract law, or goad itself into a spiritual vocation, or fret over metaphysical conundrums. Instead it finds a balm in the reciprocal, if not symmetrical, calls and responses between two living bodies in desirous contact with each other; two infectious desires gently appeased in the moradas, the mansions of writing.

What guided the flow of Teresa’s silent prayers? Was it her deep intuition, or the resurgence of the evangelical theme of baptism, or again her devotion to Francisco de Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet? Osuna’s text, which proved seminal for her development, abounds with images of water and oil to suggest the state of abandonment (dejamiento) cherished by the Illuminati or alumbrados, and compares this to the infant suckling at its mother’s breast. Likewise Teresa wrote: “This path of self-knowledge must never be abandoned, nor is there on this journey a soul so much a giant that it has no need to return often to the stage of an infant and a suckling [tornar a ser niño y a mamar].”⁴ La Madre was also prone to regressing, more consciously than not, to the state of an embryo touched-bathed-fed by the amniotic fluid. For the hydraulic technique narrated by Teresa is intended to gratify the skin, that first, constant frontier of the self, rather than the eyes. Moreover it “easily and gently” carries away the trusting, abandoned soul, like a “straw” or “little bark” in a “trough of water” fed by springs — before “with a powerful impulse, a huge wave rises up.”⁵

And yet the bather, for all her blissful abandon, is well acquainted with the “dryness” that necessitates the “tedious work” of the gardeners. These “need to get accustomed to caring nothing at all about seeing or hearing,” and “to solitude and withdrawal”; sometimes they will feel “very little desire to come and draw water,” frequently “they will be unable even to lift their arms for this work.” A case of boredom or distaste? Open your eyes, water is everywhere. “Here by ‘water’ I am referring to tears and when there are no tears to interior tenderness and feelings of devotion.”⁶ It’s enough to lighten the yoke of God himself (“For my yoke is easy” [Matt. 11:30]; “suave es su yugo”),⁷ amid surprise at “obtaining this liberty.”⁸

The comparison with water practically forces itself on Teresa, not without arousing her misgivings:

I shall have to make use of some comparison, although I should like to excuse myself from this since I am a woman and write simply what they ordered me to write. But these spiritual matters for anyone who like myself has not gone through studies are so difficult to explain. I shall have to find some mode of explaining myself, and it may be less often that I hit upon a good comparison.…

Beginners must realize that in order to give delight to the Lord they are starting to cultivate a garden on very barren soil, full of abominable weeds. His Majesty pulls up the weeds and plants good seed. Now let us keep in mind that all of this is already done by the time a soul is determined to practice prayer and has begun to make use of it. And with the help of God we must strive like good gardeners to get these plants to grow and take pains to water them so that they don’t wither but come to bud and flower and give forth a most pleasant fragrance to provide refreshment for this Lord of ours. Then He will often come to take delight [deleitar] in this garden and find His joy [holgarse] among these virtues.⁹

Is she embarrassed by the sensuality of this watering, which might seem to overstep a strictly spiritual contact? She disowns the image: “It seems now to me that I read or heard of this comparison—though since I have a bad memory, I don’t know where or for what reason it was used.” She goes on to distinguish the four degrees of prayer by comparing them to the “four waters” that may irrigate a garden:

It seems to me the garden can be watered in four ways. You may draw water from a well (which is for us a lot of work). Or you may get it by means of a water wheel and aqueducts in such a way that it is obtained by turning the crank of the water wheel. (I have drawn it this way sometimes — the method involves less work than the other, and you get more water.) Or it may flow from a river or stream. (The garden is watered much better by this means because the ground is more fully soaked, and there is no need to water so frequently — and much less work for the gardener.) Or the water may be provided by a great deal of rain. For the Lord waters the garden without any work on our part — and this way is incomparably better than all the others mentioned.¹⁰

RHETORICAL FIGURES OR WORD-THINGS?

Always ready to laugh at herself, Teresa pretended not to know the first thing about rhetoric, when in fact she was highly proficient in this art. As Dominique de Courcelles has shown, she is highly likely to have read Miguel de Salinas’s Retórica en lengua castellana (1541), as well as the Libro de la abundancia de las palabras.¹¹

Sixteenth-century Europe was richly endowed with courtly literature. Beatriz de Ahumada, Teresa’s mother — like Ignatius Loyola — was a great fan of Amadis of Gaul and its sequel Esplandian. She passed down this taste to her daughter, despite the reservations of her husband Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, who, as befits a second-generation converted Jew, made it a badge of honor to prefer Seneca, Boetius, and spiritually edifying “good books” such as hagiographies. Meanwhile the popular surge of vernacular literature was spawning, even then, a science devoted to studying its allure: the various “discourses” came under intense scrutiny in the light of the rediscovery of Greco-Roman grammar and rhetoric, which scholars rapidly adapted to the new profane registers. Sifting the novels everyone was talking about through the screen of his erudition, Salinas stressed the importance of comparison for their narrative structure. “The third manner of amplifying a story is comparison: whether by similarity or inversion, it permits all circumstances to be taken into account.” Inventio, the author insists, is built of images; and “do not the Latins use imago to denote both comparison and parable without distinction?”

There is every reason to suppose, then, that Teresa was familiar with Salinas’s works. So what prevented her from citing her source? Was it, as she claimed, her “bad memory”? Or is the water she evoked not really a rhetorical figure like comparison or metaphor? In that case, what is it?

Let us go back to the account of the water that comes between the lover and the Beloved.

Water is, for the writer, the soul’s link to the divine: the amorous link that puts them into contact. Springing from outside or inside, active and passive at once, or neither, and not to be confused with the gardener’s labor, water transcends the earth whence it emanates and on which it falls. I, earth, says Teresa (tierra: terrestrial, Teresa), can only become a garden by the grace of contact with the life-giving medium of water, which bubbles from my entrails up to the surface, and/or showers down and soaks into me from on high. Water I am not, for I am earth; nor is God water, since He is the Creator. Water is the fiction of our encounter, that is, the sensible narrative representation of it. This representation figures the space and time of an interaction that can only be expressed in narrative, resorting to comparisons and metaphors that narrative converts into metamorphoses. At the moment when fiction utters the interaction between I and He, it also accomplishes it: an erotic cleaving body to body, a co-presence and co-penetration that convince me I exist, I’m alive.

This written water is a crucial moment in the event we refer to as “Teresa of Avila”; I would even say it constitutes Teresa’s own brand of ecstasy. The fact is that before being whispered abroad by sisters who had witnessed her raptures, before being put into words in the aquatic fictions of the protagonist, this ecstasy was basically an epileptic fit, as modern physicians like Esteban García-Albea and Pierre Vercelletto have diagnosed.¹² Only fiction, first speechless, then spoken, and finally written, and above all the fiction of water, could transform what had been undergone, but was unnameable, into an experience. For the water fiction maintains the tension between God and myself; it fills me with the divine but does not subordinate it; it saves me from the madness of confusing myself with Him, while allowing me to claim an association. Water is my living protection, therefore my vital element. As a figure of the mutual contact between God and his creature, water preserves agency, the Other’s action, but it also demotes God from his suprasensible status and brings Him down, if not exactly to the role of a gardener (though didn’t Mary Magdalene take the resurrected Jesus for a gardener at the Holy Sepulcher?), then at least to that of a cosmic element I can taste and which feeds me, that touches me and which I can touch.

Husserl wrote that “the element which makes up the life of phenomenology as of all eidetical science is ‘fiction.’”¹³ In other words, fiction “fructifies” abstractions by resorting to rich, precise sensory data, transposed into clear images. Never has this value of fiction as the “vital element” for the knowledge of “eternal truths” been more justified, perhaps, than it is in Teresa’s water fiction, used to describe her states of prayer and to figure the meeting between the earthling and her Heaven, her Beyond.

The fable of the four waters severs Teresa from the faculties (intellect, will, imagination) to plunge her below the barrier of word-signs, into the psyche-soma. So what remains of “words” in the economy of this kind of writing as fiction? Assuredly not signs (signifier — signified) independent of external reality (referents, things), as is habitual in everyday language and understanding. Prayer, which amalgamates self and Other, likewise and inescapably amalgamates word and thing. The speaking subject then comes dangerously close, when she does not succumb, to catastrophic speechlessness: the self “is undone,” “liquefies,” becomes “bewildered.” “Exile from self” is a psychosis: I am the other, words are objects. Nevertheless, through the novel of her liquefaction, Teresa balances her experience at a point halfway between these two extremes, on one side the faculties and on the other a delirious befuddlement (between consciousness and psyche-soma), without falling into the vacuum of asymbolia. Here lies her genius, in that ability to go back over the loss and to designate it with the mot juste. In her prayer fictions, what separates the word water from the thing water is not so much a “bar” as a fine and permeable membrane through which they alternately overlap and separate, as the self is lost and recovered, stricken and jubilant, forever between two waters. Annihilation/sublimation: the fluidity of the aquatic touch exactly translates this rapturous to-and-fro. And the penchant for “greatest ease and delight” (grandísima suavidad y deleite) leads Teresa to set water’s thirst-quenching properties above its capacity to drown, its cleansing above its siltiness; she also prefers water’s coolness to fires of pitch — the black desire that even water is apt to be enkindled by, inflaming too the woman at prayer.

Let us consider now that the last water we spoke of is so plentiful that, if it were not for the fact that the earth doesn’t allow it, we could believe that this cloud of His great Majesty is with us here on earth.…

There is a very strong feeling that the natural bodily heat is failing. The body gradually grows cold, although this happens with the greatest ease and delight.…In the union, since we are upon our earth, there is a remedy; though it may take pain and effort one can almost always resist. But in these raptures most often there is no remedy; rather, without any forethought or any help there frequently comes a force so swift and powerful that one sees and feels this cloud or mighty eagle raise one up and carry one aloft on its wings.

I say that one understands and sees oneself carried away and does not know where. Although this experience is delightful, our natural weakness causes fear in the beginning.…Like it or not, one is taken away.…Many times I wanted to resist…especially sometimes when it happened in public.…It carried off my soul and usually, too, my head along with it, without my being able to hold back — and sometimes the whole body until it was raised from the ground.¹⁴

By the end there is no longer violence in the raptus (from Latin rapere, “to seize or abduct”). The abruptness of rapto and vuelo (flight) gives way to euphoric transports (traspasos), subtilized by entrancement or arrobamiento, and Teresa’s rapture dispels into clouds, mists, serried raindrops, billows of vaporized spray. Or into a “mighty eagle” (viene un ímpetu tan acelerado y fuerte, que veis y sentís levantarse esta nube o este águila caudaloso y cogeros con sus alas). Isn’t that so, my apophatic Teresa?

Had these written waters been sensed during the epileptic seizure itself, or were they subsequently reconstituted in the act of writing? We cannot know. But Teresa’s intellectual honesty, the vivid detail of her chills, frights, and swoons, suggest that verbalization was not part of the shock of the experience. It seems likely that the aquatic narrative emerged later in a written reconstitution, with its cortege of physical, psychological, and spiritual comments giving rise (or place, literally) to ecstasy. Therefore I confidently maintain that Teresa’s ecstasy, as it has come down to us, is the doing of her writing. By returning to the “tournament” of the fantasy incarnate that is prayer, writing recreates the theopathic state, and only then does ecstasy exist. In this very real sense, Teresa only found jouissance in writing.

In this fiction of a soul’s romance with its Other, it would be pointless to ask whether Teresa’s water image is a simile (a figure comparing “two homogeneous realities belonging to the same ontological kind”) or rather a metaphor (a figure establishing a resemblance between two heterogeneous realities). Doubtless the infant science of rhetoric as expounded by Salinas was more or less directly of assistance to the writer-nun, who shared that author’s fondness for the vernacular. But, like all the “disciplines” that sprang from the fragmentation of metaphysics, rhetoric, with its elaborate figures, was ultimately irrelevant to the experience Teresa was attempting to translate in terms of water.

In Teresa’s hands, the referent water is not just an object — and one of the four cosmic elements — but the very practice of prayer: the psyche-soma induced by the state of love, that generator of sublimated visions. Language is not a vehicle, for her, but the very terrain of the mystical act. To discourse, the object of study for rhetoric and other recently rediscovered stylistics at the time, Teresa adds the ingredient of a savory, tactile, sensual, overwhelming passion — to the point of annihilating herself in it, the better to dodge both discourse and passion. But it is also a sovereign, imperious passion, as God’s captive captures God to make Him her pleasure-giving prisoner.

Unschooled in Latin, and lamenting this ignorance with a certain coyness, Teresa finds great relish in Castilian. But unlike a linguist concerned with dissecting a language by uncoupling its signs from their objects, the better to analyze them, Teresa plunges into her mother tongue as into a bath consubstantial with the experience of engendering a new Self, coiled in the Other: a Self that loves the Other, whom the Self resorbs and the Other absorbs. Her “water story,”* [histoire d’eau, pun on Histoire d’O, the mystico-erotic novel published in 1954 under the pen name Pauline Réage. — Trans.] if I may call it that, imposes itself as the absolute, inescapable fiction of the loving touch, in which I am touched by the other’s touch who touches me, whom I touch back. Water is the fiction of the decantation between the other-being and what is intimate and unnameable, between the external milieu and the “organ” of an interior empty of organs, between the Heaven of the Word and the greedy void of a woman’s body.

What language could possibly accommodate such porosity? None could satisfy the writing of this woman. She presses on with it, not rereading very much, so that her fiction will always be the outpouring of herself into manifold streams of subjective positions, sites of utterance, moradas. It will be her delirium and her rebirth. Her soul “would want to be all tongues so as to praise the Lord” (toda ella querría que fuesen lenguas para alabar al Señor).¹⁵

BEGUINES

I leaf through the Beguines catalog Bruno gave me. As time goes on I find myself accepting the truth: it wasn’t Bruno I was hugging in the courtyard of the Louvre, it was the life of these women, among other experiences and higher things of the mind that were dancing through my head that Christmas Eve. Or at least the novel I was building around them, the stories I still can’t stop weaving around “all that,” as my publisher calls it.

These paintings, covering a span from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, were part of the everyday life of the lay Beguine communities of the southern Netherlands. They were anonymous commissions, most likely designed by the Beguines rather than painted by them; only the reliquaries and the “installations” they called “secret gardens” seem to have been made by their own hands. Their vows were not for life, and they did not give up their property; they worked to support themselves, and celebrated Saint Begga as their patroness. A world away from Teresa and her Carmelite reforms — except perhaps as regards solitude.

Here, look at this woman with her luminous face, framed by a black wimple and crowned by a circlet of thorns. She loves just one man. He is her God. It is absolutely indispensable for this man to have suffered and died. Jesus’s martyrdom, the Nothingness He walked through, is proof for this woman of what her subconscious experience has already taught her, what the males of this world stubbornly deny: no man is not castrated, no father is not dead. While lavishing this sadistic assurance on her, the depiction of the Passion and the skull in the right-hand corner reconcile the woman to her own melancholic passion — the passion for suffering, for becoming gradually frozen into indifference, for dying. In love, this man, this death’s head, is her. And yet He came back from Nothingness into life. His loving heart delights the earth, fulfills her to overflowing. She will stroke Him with an infinite, maternal, absentminded tenderness. Is it the male sex she is saving from damnation? Or the germ of life, their reciprocal immersion, her own fertilized womb? In another painting, the crucified Christ’s breast is cut open to show a heart in which nestles the embryo of Jesus, as if in a uterus of its own.

A woman is fundamentally alone. By leaving her mother to enter into language and the father(s), she has no other choice: either she attempts to love the man, that stranger, with the aid of a few children and a dash of sublimation (daydreams, embroidery, reading, and faith); or, she returns to the mother via a homosexual affair or a sisterly community of mutually idealized women. The shadow of an incomplete separation always hangs over her. Alternating between frustration and euphoria, female solitude removes us from (provisional) communities and casts us out into the black sun of melancholy; on our good days, it furnishes us with all the masks of irony.

How does this female condition differ from that of all other humans? Men, too, have to give up the mother in order to become speakers, but variants of incest remain open to them; men can regain, in sexual encounters and even in the fleurs du mal, the fragrant Paradise of yore. More radically, women share this common condition, and yet they are (with rare exceptions) debarred from regaining via eroticism the safe haven of primary oneness — even the original relationship is often refused to them, because mothers are liable to reject their daughters for the sake of more dependable values. Female loneliness simply adds pathos to the common condition of both sexes, one that in given historical circumstances has relegated women to silence, isolation, or repression. The nun or Beguine constructs an experience that is at once imaginary (a series of fantasies), symbolic (adherence to sacred law), and real (modulation of her body, her existence, her entire being), allowing her to sidestep this choice, or better said, to reconcile the two options. Thus she loves the absolute Man (Jesus), devotes herself to ordinary men (by treating their symptoms), and appeases her female passions (through solitude and proximity in the fabric of collective work and prayers).

And of what did the secret garden consist? What images, what reveries, what fantasies fed into these women’s forsaking of all things in order to nurture and enhance that vital energy, self-command, and mischievous slyness that come through so clearly in these old portraits? Materialized in the hortus conclusus of the Beguinage, their “apartness” from the world touched off a profusion of naive confections and unselfconscious pieces of exuberance, cruelty, and love crafted by the weavers, spinners, embroiderers, tapestry-makers, gardeners, jewelers, and apprentice sculptors that they were. Voluntary seclusion was reversed into symbolic power. Women whose bodies had never “opened up to any creature” open themselves up here to unsuspected delights of the mind, which in turn will nourish the body. Frontiers are breached: those that surround the Beguinage, those that stand between man and woman, and between the Beguine and her God. It’s heaven to be cloistered in this secret garden amid such excesses.

I admire the Beguines, but I admire Teresa more, because my nocturnal companion cultivates the seclusion of her soul nowhere else but in the folds of language, in the pungent beats of her rocky yet fluid Castilian, dreamy yet incisive. She, too, is into making and crafting, but when she speaks of hacer esta ficción, her materials are words. And suddenly I comprehend, no, I perceive with all the fibers of my body, with all the shades and glimmers of my mind, that it’s the power of language, handled with her own peculiar craft, that permits her to saturate the “cloister of the soul” differently from the Beguines, in order to escape it. Deployed in speech and writing, the same amorous loneliness as that cultivated by the followers of Saint Begga steps back from the signs of the unspeakable to become transformed, across La Madre’s pages, into subjective lucidity: as the captive of the Other, she is sure to capture this Beloved herself, and thus sure of existing. The sensual, manual, cosmic, biblical, and evangelical bricolage displayed by the Beguines’ installations is turned by Teresa’s pen into a new world: the thought of an aloneness (a lone Self) that encompasses the Infinite. The a-thinking of extreme singularity is on the way to being constituted, in and through fiction.

NARRATIVE, OR THE SURPRISES OF WATER

Neither simile nor metaphor, but both at once, playing one against the other as symmetrical opposites, Teresa’s fiction is a paradox: controlled yet wayward, serious and fantastical, imperious and docile. But these ambiguities are not due to mental laxity so much as to the bipolarity of the experience itself, at once impairment and conjunction, inventing an undecidable enunciation in which water will be the fiction par excellence. An enunciation in which water itself is trumped by fire, and vice versa, while the narrative goes on to lose the logical thread of these multiple inversions to create that perceptible ductility of Teresa’s writing, which infects us with its stylistic, psychological, physical, and theological metamorphoses.

I say metamorphosis rather than metaphor, using the word in Baudelaire’s sense, when he refused to be taken for a poet “comparing himself” to a tree, for he was the tree, he took on its reality, rather than picturing himself as like a tree.¹⁶ Water, says Teresa, is not like divine love; water is divine love, which is water. And we form part of it: me, you, and God Himself. The watery image Teresa lights on shifts us from stylistics to the tactile nature of the psyche-soma, which the writer conveys through the sensory, tirelessly elucidated metamorphoses that are the fabric of her texts.

In the eyes of the unbelieving denizens of the third millennium, the mystical experience equates to this recomposition of the speaking being by means of metamorphic writing. Teresa transcribes the dissolution (análusis or diálusis in Greek) of her intellectual-psychical-physical identity in the amorous transference toward the All-Other-Being: God, the father figure of our childhood dreams, the Sulamitess’s unpindownable Spouse. A lethal, blissful metamorphosis, this writing heals the melancholy of separation by appropriating the Other-Being in an infracognitive and psychosomatic yet infinitely nameable encounter.

When regression, edged by masochistic pleasure, succeeds in adjusting to the Word, it is not rhetoric that helps us to read this elevation of the speaking subject, recomposed in the begetting of its speech, but Aristotle. In On the Soul and Metaphysics, he defines touch as the most fundamental property of being and the most universal of all the senses. To tell of touch, to touch by telling: might the inception of the incarnation myth lie here? Does Jesus’s “Noli me tangere” only prohibit the act as an invitation to the word to become touch, tact: delicate presence, subtle reciprocity?

If it’s true that every animate body is by that token a tactile body, the sense of touch possessed by living things is also “that by which I enter into contact with myself,” as Jean-Louis Chrétien reminds us.¹⁷ On a naive level, touch appears as unmediated contact. But there always remains a hiatus between the toucher and the touch: sheath, air, blade; and therefore the impression of direct touch, with no mediating element, implies “a concealment of mediation from sensation itself.” Teresa, by contrast — aware of herself as being touched-bathed by and in the Other — far from concealing the mediation, grants it the status of a third element: the mystic third party of her immersion in the Spouse.

The fiction further outlines a narrative that does not confine itself to naming the mediation as “water,” but refracts the water into a story involving God, the gardener, and the four ways of watering the garden. This ingenious procedure allows for an implicit critique of the immediacy of osmosis with the divine: Teresa distances herself from it and attempts to unfold the autoeroticism, painful and joyful in equal measure, of her nuptials with the Other into a series of physical, psychic, and logical actions, neatly figured by the four registers of water. It is not the water so much as the “narrateme,” the story, the novel of waters, that diffuses the fantasy of an absolute touch via a sequence of ancillary parables (the well, the water wheel, the rain, the gardener, the earth, the nun).

In The Way of Perfection, the writer continues to relate the adventures of these waters, to which she now ascribes three properties: cooling, purifying, and thirst quenching. The soap opera of divine touch is compounded and amplified as Teresa proceeds to couple water with its opposite, fire, making these contrary elements vehicles for the contradictory states of amorous passion. Having distinguished the waters, she evokes the variants of fire, and compares the two elements while also mixing them up, undaunted by the risk of contradicting herself: “Oh, God help me, what marvels there are in this greater enkindling of the fire by water…!” Fire and water: on closer inspection, are they really so opposed? The story eventually reconciles its opposites in the realm of passion, the passion for writing the unnameable. Then it loses interest in images, words, writing; it pulls out of the exchange; it bows out of love itself to contemplate the brilliance of the diamond alone, petrified liquid in the cache of the “Seventh Dwelling Places.” Is water, then, as much the fiction of the sensory impact on Teresa of the divine, as a critique — unconscious, implicit, ironical — of that impact? Touched by the Other, I am diluted into Him, who Himself is diluted and then condensed in me.

Let us follow the metamorphic adventures of water.

The first [property] is that it refreshes; for, no matter how much heat we may experience, as soon as we approach the water the heat goes away. If there is a great fire, it is extinguished by water — unless the fire burns from pitch; then it is enkindled more.…For this water doesn’t impede the fire, though it is fire’s contrary, but rather makes the fire increase!..

Those of you, Sisters, who drink this water and you others, once the Lord brings you to drink, will enjoy it and understand how the true love of God — if it is strong, completely free of earthly things, and if it flies above them — is lord of all the elements and of the world. And since water flows from the earth, don’t fear that it will extinguish this fire of the love of God; such a thing does not lie within its power. Even though the two are contraries, this fire is absolute lord: it isn’t subject to water.…

There are other little fires of love of God, that any event will extinguish. But extinguish this fire?…

Well, if it is water that rains from heaven, so much less will it extinguish this fire: the two are not contraries but from the same land.¹⁸

If water provides a privileged link to the Beloved in the Life, in the Way it sometimes proves helpless in the face of fire, the “absolute lord” that is not “subject to water.” Here Teresa’s experience turns before our eyes into an “ignitiation,” to borrow Philippe Sollers’s coinage regarding Dante. And now a fresh reversal causes water to itself become fire: an antithetical figure, apophatic par excellence. Does this suggest poor reasoning? On the contrary, it betrays an outsized attempt to control everything, negating difference in a bid to obtain, in the process of writing, total dominion over all the things of this world, and find an absolute remedy for separation and loneliness:

Isn’t it wonderful that a poor nun of Saint Joseph’s can attain dominion over all the earth and the elements?…Fire and water obeyed Saint Martin; even the birds and the fish, Saint Francis; and so it was with many other saints. There was clear evidence that they had dominion over all worldly things because they labored to take little account of them and were truly subject with all their strength to the Lord of the world. So, as I say, the water that rises from the earth has no power over the love of God; the flames of this love are very high, and the source of it is not found in anything so lowly.¹⁹

Teresa’s water, cleansing and refreshing, can just as easily cease to be “living water” and turn into a parable of understanding. For when it comes to “reasoning with the intellect” it is “not so pure and clean,” but muddied by “running on the ground” and soiled by our “natural lowliness.” We must wait for the sublimity of the Other to “bring us to the end of the journey”:

Living water is not what I call this prayer in which, as I say, there is reasoning with the intellect.…

Let me explain myself further: suppose that in order to despise the world we are thinking about its nature and how all things come to an end. Almost without our realizing it we find ourselves thinking about the things we like in the world [things we love about the world: cosas que amamos de él]…²⁰

Wondrous Teresa, unearthing in every utterance — like Freud — the countermeaning that is pleasure’s secret lair!

Lastly, water douses the fire of mortal desire, because the pleasure of slaked thirst is a “relief” that deflects the praying woman from the “desire to possess God”—from sexual, and hence lethal, passion: “and so sometimes it kills”—and nudges her toward an “enjoyment” depicted as a slackening of tension. Thus metamorphosed in this last water, love overwhelms the experimenter, leaving her without defenses or initiative, offered up, passive, deprived of her I. Teresa alludes to herself in the third person here, as a she delivered from “desires” and “devils,” whose ravishment has her “almost carried out of herself with raptures.”²¹ But since nothing is simple in this labyrinthine fiction with its multiple detours and switchbacks, her desires continue to pain her — a welcome pain, for it comes from Him, although one can never be quite sure of that: the devil’s stratagems are unpredictable. The very thirst for God, insofar as it is “indiscreet” and violent, is a desire verging on “derangement.” Witness the derangement of the hermit who threw himself into a well in order to see God sooner, not realizing he had been deceived by the devil.²²

As the princeps figure of metamorphosis, according to Teresa, water holds a last surprise for us: it will need the diversion of thought in order to “cut short” desire, if not to take it away altogether, thus helping the lover/beloved, who touches/is touched, to “enjoy God more.”

There is always some fault, since the desire comes from ourselves.…But we are so indiscreet that since the pain is sweet and delightful, we never think we can have enough of this pain. We eat without measure, we foster this desire as much as we can, and so sometimes it kills.…And I believe the devil causes this desire for death, for he understands the harm that can be done by such a person while alive.…Anyone who reaches the experience of this thirst that is so impelling should be very careful.²³

Do you mean yourself, Teresa, my love? You continue, with razor-sharp intelligence:

For I do not say that the desire be taken away, but that it be cut short.…Sometimes the pain [in itself…very delightful] is seen to afflict so much that it almost takes away one’s reason. Not long ago I saw a person of an impetuous nature who…was deranged for a while by the great pain and the effort that was made to conceal this pain.…

I wouldn’t consider it wrong if [a person] were to remove the desire by the thought [que mude el deseo pensando] that if he lives he will serve God more…he will merit the capacity to enjoy God more.²⁴

That’s right, Teresa, the only resort we have left is to transmute desire by thinking (que mude el deseo pensando). You knew it, and you wrote it 440 years ago.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE WORK, THAT GREAT FLOWER

Let’s consider [let’s imagine: hagamos cuenta], for a better understanding…

Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle²⁵

Gardens. The Paradise of dreamers, of Persian astronomers, of lovelorn poets, of seekers of the Grail, of Beatrice, of Molly Bloom, of flowers…and yours, too, Teresa? “And all my spring-time blossoms rent and torn” (Omar Khayyam);²⁶ “O perpetual flowers / Of the eternal joy, that only one / Make me perceive your odors manifold” (Dante);²⁷ “Sweetheart, let’s see if the rose…” (Ronsard);²⁸ “I pray thee, give it me. / I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows” (Shakespeare);²⁹ “I have punished a flower for the insolence of Nature” (Baudelaire);³⁰ “Oh rose, pure puzzlement in your desire to not be anyone’s sleep beneath so many eyelids” (Rilke);³¹ “Though haunted by telephones, newspapers, computers, radios, televisions, I can watch right here, right away, dozens of white butterflies visiting roses against a backdrop of sea. The Work alone triumphs, that great Flower” (Sollers).³²

I return to the garden of the Beguines, which really was a garden: joy, bliss, mystical rose, triumph of ecstasy beyond words. But above all a secret, silent garden — on the other side of human passion, a simple craft of blooms, enamels, cameos, colored yarns tressed into figures. A geometry of the senses, metaphors of the fragmented body seized by a thought preceding thought. Red drops of your blood, my blood, intimate fluttering of my being, beacons of Being. Nature or abstraction, no matter, this ornamentation transcends human quibbles: whether pre- or postanthropomorphic, it exudes the simplicity of its communion with culture and the cosmos at their most rudimentary, most resistant to interpretation. The simplicity of these flowers, pebbles, tapestries is far from mean, but its wealth has an obvious immediacy that preempts comment. It does not argue with happiness or misery, it is content to appear, to exhibit what converts into a string of questions for you, visitors and interpreters: “What does this nosegay mean?” “Where did that stone come from?” “Whose is this coat of arms?” “What is that disembodied shower of blood about?” Here, face to face with the carpet of flowers, something remains undisclosed, not because it seeks to hide, but because the rose, for Angelus Silesius, has no why or wherefore.

Still, as the reliquaries fill up with little flasks and pouches, and the secret garden begins to burst with buds and blossoms, the secret may betray itself: it comes within a hair of acknowledging its sexual underside, the image of a body that parades itself or, on the contrary, punishes itself in order to merit the Garden of Eden at long last.

Judging from the paintings and objects shown in the catalog that will be my sole souvenir of Bruno, the mystical adoration of these far-distant women was prone to paroxysms of passion, unendurable splinterings, intimacies that stayed intact despite being shared. These lay sisters discovered, in mystical love, a continent — a continent-container, external and internal to the lay and religious communities of their time. They stood apart from both, not as a way to escape exclusion, horror, or evil, but the better to confront them, to consume them in self-consummation. Such was their path to happiness.

Teresa’s garden is quite different. It is not exactly poetic, as in the works of the masters of floral eroticism, nor does it contain, as in the enclosures of the Beguines. Flowers are mentioned in passing, they have no fecund names; there are no petals, no feathers, no wings, no pearls, no agricultural or horticultural bric-a-brac, no household accessories. A precociously intellectual outlook? A reflection of Castilian aridity? Maybe, but it is also more. In Teresa’s garden, we read about — she only desires — two things, an abundance of water and a solitary flower, which is her body. Drowned in the electric waves of her epileptic brain or soaked through and through by the mist of the divine Spouse, this woman wrote but a single garden to remember, the garden of sensation elucidated; the garden of her infinite introspection with the Infinite. The flower then becomes a way of perfection forever wending through the dwelling places of the translucid castle, which it also is. Once ensconced — inside the flower, the way, the castle — and quill in hand, Teresa will climb into carriages and carts, take the reins of horses, donkeys, whatever she must. She will set forth to conquer austere Spain and turn it into another garden, physical and political this time, the garden of the reformed Carmelite order.

Chapter 7. THE IMAGINARY OF AN UNFINDABLE SENSE CURLED INTO A GOD FINDABLE IN ME

UNFINDABLE OR OMNIPRESENT: TOUCH

And so I arrived at this conclusion: Teresa’s ecstasy is no more or less than a writerly effect! Spinning-weaving the fiction of these ecstasies to transmute her ill-being into a new being-in-the-world, Teresa seeks to “convey,” to “give to understand” the link with the Other-Being as one between two living entities: a tactile link, about contact and touching, by which the divine gifts itself to the sensitive soul of a woman, rather than to the metaphysical mind of a theologian or philosopher. To sense the sense, to render meaning sensible: in Castilian, Teresa’s writing and her ecstasy overlap.

Perceived by the mouth and the skin, essentially gustative and tactile, water is the fiction par excellence of a body thought-touched by the Other, thinking-touching the Other. It is the privileged element of an unsymmetrical reciprocity that realizes the contact between outer environment and inner depths. Water also reveals that the praying body is an orifice-body, a skin-body, that operates through proximity and is perpetually in vibration with everything that affects it.

Normally, sight and hearing tend not to be invaded by what is seen or heard. In the case of mystics and artists, however, the senses may be so overwhelmed by perceptions that they all work like the sense of touch. With Teresa, this incessant exposure is no bar to lucidity, but rather a royal road, the divine road to a more nuanced apprehension of that Self reborn in the link to the Other.

In Greek (aisthesis) as in German (Gefühl), the same term designates both touch and sensitivity, as though to insist that touch — understood as the generic for all the senses — transcends the senses; it founds them and exceeds them. That is why touch is not confined to any particular organ; it is not exclusive to the skin, or the mouth, or the hand, or the flesh.

Teresa seeks in vain, all through her body, for this enigmatic agent of contact and sensibility. After journeying through the multiple dwelling places piled up in her castle, she finally withdraws to the deepest retreat of inner space, a provisional, elusive place of shifting levels that liquefies at the very instant when the writer — and with her the reader — tries to stabilize it within fixed contours. Is it some cavity (vaginal, gastric, pulmonary)? A ceaselessly pulsating cardiac muscle? Where should the nameless site of self-perception of one’s own insides be located, when a touch from outside filters through into one’s heart of hearts? Teresian theology, echoing the Aristotelian idea that intelligence becomes intelligible “by contact with the intelligible,” “for “thought does think itself,”¹ is a psychosomatic intelligence engaged in a permanent act of deconstruction — reconstruction; it perceives and traverses itself by constantly destabilizing and restabilizing the contact between contingency and the intelligible: to-ing and fro-ing, crossings, ripples.

Hunting for the mots justes, for an exact image of the touching-touched body thrown open to the plenitude of the Other-Being, Teresa adds to the water fiction of the Life and later works the fiction of overlapping dwelling places inside a castle: heaped, penetrable, ostensibly numbering seven but consisting of a host of doorless rooms and cellars, porous spaces separated as if by stretches of translucent film. Is it an allusion to the Sheva Hekhalot, the seven palaces of Jewish mysticism?² Or to the parable of the palace in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed?³ No testimony survives, whether from Teresa, her associates, or her exegetists, to settle the question. At any rate the echoes are striking.

From the very beginning of the Dwelling Places, Teresa admits to her lack of a “basis” for what she is preparing to write. “While beseeching our Lord to speak for me because I wasn’t able to think of anything to say nor did I know how to begin to carry out this obedience,” it occurs to her to ground her account in a vision of frozen water, a diamond: “We consider our soul to be like a castle made entirely out of a diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many dwelling places.” The castle of the soul or the palace of the Lord? Both, of course, for however wide the gap between them, the creature is in the image of the Creator. Here we have it: interpreted in masterly fashion by Saint Augustine,⁴ the image experienced by Teresa, in which she experiences herself, is consubstantial with the Creator, and, again, she will apply herself to conjuring “visions” (representations) in order to cast light on how “the very secret exchanges between God and the soul take place.”⁵

Straightaway the image-visions start proliferating, contaminating one another, changing places, blurring together, always touching-touched: a castle, but made of glass; a stone building, but transparent; an earthly work, and yet celestial; a single castle, but many rooms. The habitat thus designed is not out of bounds, barred and fortified against trespassers; on the contrary, it can be entered at will: “I think it will be a consolation for you to delight in this inner castle, since without permission from the prioress you can enter and take a walk through it at any time.”⁶

It would be no good trying to delineate this topography, although many still attempt to do so, for the chief property of imaginary vision is to baffle our eyesight. We catch barely a glimpse of the jewel’s brilliance, only a rapid “streak of lightning” is left “engraved on the imagination” should we try to open the reliquary, that hiding-place of the Other in the Self. If any sort of image transpires, it’s not so much a painting as a bedazzlement, always sensory and implicitly tactile: like a “sun covered by something transparent,” the Beloved’s body is nothing but a draped form, in a garment like “a fine Dutch linen.”

Bernardino de Laredo, whom Teresa had read, expresses the closeness to God in tactile terms: “Thus was God’s will touched…without the mediation of reason or thought.”⁷ The “application of the senses,” for Luis de la Palma among other Jesuits, was after all a higher method of prayer than verbal orisons.⁸ The beginning of contemplation? The prerogative of perfect men? Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, whose coincidences with Teresa’s practice cannot be overstated, urge the meditator to “realize and relish things interiorly” (el sentir y gustar de las cosas internamente), in imitation of Christ.⁹ The ecclesiastical authorities jumped at that: did he mean imagined or spiritual senses? There loomed the danger of heresy, the specter of an excessive fleshliness: such lack of rigor could open the door to those Illuminati, already in the Church’s sights, or to the misplaced fervor of overemotional women. Aristotelo-Thomism was always on its guard, and rightly so. The Jesuits’ riposte showed them to be more knowledgeable and prudent than Teresa. Are not sense impressions, they argued, always-already molded by the spiritual virtues, at least among the faithful? Theological reason was saved, and Fr. Jerónimo Nadal, who had great insight into the founder of the Society of Jesus, could proclaim, in a sublime prayer: “From the conviction of faith comes hearing, and from its intelligence comes sight. From hope comes the sense of smell. From the bond of charity comes touch; and from the joy of charity comes taste.”¹⁰

The aesthetic profusion of the Counter-Reformation imbues this cenesthesia of virtues and senses governed by…the virtues themselves. It could equally be a synesthesia of Teresa’s glorious body as she wrote her Dwelling Places.

A cascade of sensible and ephemeral images, in fluid movement: the partitions between the dwelling places seem as yielding as hymens, and to pass through them unleashes such an intensity of emotion that these “intellectual visions” obliterate ordinary cares and feelings. Is this to say they petrify the woman as she prays? Make her into a fortress? No, they turn her rather into a crystal hive whose cells enclose the invisible, the searing flash, the imprint…God’s touch is forever diffracted into warmth, flavor, fragrance, and sound, and sometimes it whips up a storm: a babble of parables orchestrates the polyphony of sensations around this unfindable sense, the most human and sublime of all. Not to touch, while yet touching: isn’t that the definition of tact?

What Teresa sets out is a delicately mobile approach to God. First He is “this sun that gives warmth to our works”;¹¹ he is also the “center” toward which all eyes turn, likened to the tender heart of a “palmetto” whose outer bark is “covering the tasty part.”¹² This mystical desert does not prevent the writer from gulping in the divine “touch” with a great longing of the soul to enjoy that “spiritual delight in God [pleasures, in Spanish the same word as tastes: gustos de Dios].”¹³

Taste, that olfactory contact that ensures our survival and inspires the refinements of cooking, seals the Teresian link to the divine in what she calls “the prayer of quiet.” In the Fourth Dwelling Places, “two founts” overflow “through all the dwelling places and faculties until reaching the body,” for “the delight…begins in God and ends in ourselves.”¹⁴ But the union of the Lover to the lover can just as easily smolder away like a “brazier giving off sweet-smelling perfumes,” and this “swells and expands our whole interior being.”¹⁵ Not forgetting the eardrums, tickled by a “whistle so gentle that they themselves [the senses and the faculties] almost fail to hear it.”¹⁶ A flurry of parables relates the lover’s metamorphoses: Teresa calls them comparisons, again, and blushes for them: “I am laughing to myself over these comparisons for they do not satisfy me, but I don’t know any others. You may think what you want; what I have said is true.”¹⁷ What is truth? A cataract of metamorphic fictions telling of the perceptions anchored in the touched and touching body, which thrill the flesh like a “delightful tempest” (tempestad sabrosa).¹⁸

The castle curves in on itself, and its partitions give way when the soul’s love touches the mercy of the King. Just as the hedgehog and the tortoise retract into themselves (according to Francisco de Osuna in the Third Spiritual Alphabet, which Teresa knows by heart), so the soul pulls the Other inside before rising to float above itself.¹⁹ Should its senses and faculties “have gone outside and have walked for days and years with strangers — enemies of the well-being of the castle,” they need only to have “seen their perdition” and, abashed but “not traitors,” “begun to approach the castle,” for the Monarch to call out to them, like the shepherd he is, “with a whistle so gentle that even they themselves almost fail to hear it,” before they “enter the castle” once more.²⁰ They enter it differently, for the ever-malleable doors are absorbed into the state of “suspension” that overtakes the soul: there is no closed door between the Sixth and Seventh Dwelling Places.²¹ Only thus can the ductility of the dwelling places touched by the supreme Good deal with “enemies,” wretchedness, and every “symptom.”

Was Teresa anorexic, bulimic, or both? That cluster of disorders being so fashionable just now, my friend Dr. Baruch and even Bruno has asked me about it, all agog. I dodge the question: “Read her and see!” But I have my suspicions. Teresa, anorexic? Maybe, at times, not always. She was certainly keen on “experiences that are both painful and delightful [delicious: sabrosas]”,²² and strove to defend herself against her own hearty appetite for tasting, feeling, knowing, listening, seeing: against the blooming of all the senses together in aiesthesis-Gefühl. As a novice it disturbed her, and she’d make herself vomit, empty herself out in order to meet the high standards of her heart’s Elect. Later, she learned to convey conaesthesia in words. Desire, experienced as a delectation of all the senses triggered by suffering, would then become equal to its object, and ultimately be assuaged in the “spiritual marriage” of the Seventh Dwelling Places. With the strange, asymmetrical parity that obtains between the Bridegroom and his Bride, this spiritual soaring also finds expression in sensible or sensory terms — metamorphic terms, in Baudelaire’s sense: “When our Lord is pleased to have pity on this soul that He has already taken spiritually as His Spouse because of what it suffers and has suffered through its desires, He brings it, before the spiritual marriage is consummated, into His dwelling place which is this seventh.…Let us call it another heaven.”²³ On reaching this point, the writer ceases to defend herself. For speaking and writing for the Spouse about their mutual truth, touching and touched, is proof in itself for Teresa that the divine, not the devil, has entered into her.²⁴

But can we be so sure? No appeasement of Teresa’s spirit can be read in her account, no matter how serene she tries to sound: the story goes in circles, and the comparison — yes, that again — links Jesus and the one who prays, sets off again, contradicts itself, asserts itself by dint of repetition. Teresa is aware of it, she scolds herself: “Indeed, sometimes I take up the paper like a simpleton [idiota], for I don’t know what to say or how to begin.”²⁵ Or is this perhaps a scrupulous loyalty of the pen to the psyche-soma that will be transmitted — drowning the visible in the sensible — by tracing the very loss of intellectual understanding in ek-stasy, where the conscientious silkworm is annulled and there is only the dancing butterfly of the imaginary incarnate?

“IMAGINARY VISIONS”

Teresa’s visions dictating her experience of the divine have nothing in common with a painting, as I’ve already said. For by sensorializing to extremes her contact with the All-Other via the fiction of water and its multiple conaesthetic transformations, La Madre inscribes it into the cosmos. But in the fiction of the castle, whose walls turn into nets, her experience relates to the constructions of men — oppressive fortresses in contrast to her own crystalline mansions — which can only be justified by being perpetually rewritten. In so doing, Teresa of Avila is not content with humanizing the Creator. Against Lutheranism, she rehabilitates images…and becomes a Counter-Reformation saint.

I read in a book that it was an imperfection to have ornate paintings.…And…I heard the following: that what I wanted to do was not a good mortification (what was better, poverty or charity?); that since love was the better, I shouldn’t renounce anything that awakened my love, not should I take such a thing away from my nuns; that the book was talking about the many carvings and adornments surrounding the picture and not about the picture itself; that what the devil did among the Lutherans was take away all the means for awakening love, and so they went astray. “My Christians, daughter, must now more than ever do the opposite of what they do.”²⁶

Suspected at one time of Illuminism, then anointed a Catholic saint, perhaps Teresa is inviting us to temper our resistance and raise the portcullis of our defenses. Her apologia for an interior body and soul fully exposed to the Other, inhaling the Other, is certainly not given to everyone. But what a demonstration of the therapeutic powers of the imaginary! What openness toward the possible metamorphoses of the divine itself, under the impact of the fiction Teresa managed to found upon…an unfindable sense!

The water parable and the permeable castle lay the groundwork for the recurrent fable of the silkworm that evolves into a butterfly, which to my mind marks the climax of Teresa’s metamorphic fiction.

You must have already heard about His marvels manifested in the way silk originates, for only He could have invented something like that. The silkworms come from seeds about the size of little grains of pepper. (I have never seen this but only heard of it…) When the warm weather comes and the leaves begin to appear on the mulberry tree, the seeds start to live…The worms nourish themselves on mulberry leaves until, having grown to full size, they settle on some twigs. There with their little mouths they…go about spinning the silk [out of their own selves: van de sí mismos hilando la seda] and making some very thick little cocoons in which they enclose themselves. The silkworm, which is fat and ugly, then dies, and a little white butterfly, which is very pretty, comes forth from the cocoon.…The silkworm, then, starts to live when by the heat of the Holy Spirit it begins to benefit through the general help given to us all by God and through the remedies left by Him to His Church…It then begins to live and to sustain itself by these things…

Well, once this silkworm is grown…it begins to spin the silk and build the house wherein it will die.…This house is Christ.…It seems I’m saying that we can build up God and take Him away, since I say that He is the dwelling place and we ourselves can build it so as to place ourselves in it.…Not that we can take God away or build Him up, but we can take away from ourselves and build up, as do these little silkworms.²⁷

Where the hysteric fails — in defying the Master, in seducing Him, in being unable to dispense with Him — the metamorphic soul (seed, silkworm, silk, butterfly, and seed once more, and silkworm…eternal return) succeeds, by merging into oneness with Him. He, the “intellectual vision,” the “flight of the spirit,” the “Giant” with “milky breasts.” A feminine sensibility, with typically extravagant, immoderate drives? Absolutely. Accompanied by a terrific superconsciousness, it sets off an unexpected biblical and Hellenic return to shake up the austere, Albertino-Thomist interpretation of the Areopagite corpus.

Touching and touched, this fiction is still, of course, an act that requires the full vigilance of her own judgment, according to La Madre. Nothing “automatic” about Teresa’s writing: laxness and torrential fancies, keep out! Stiffened by her experience as founder, she was critical of postulants whom she felt did “not have good judgment.” Not only would such girls not be accepted by the Discalced Order, they must be discouraged from writing about prayer: “Even though doing this amounts to nothing but a waste of time, it impedes freedom of soul and allows one to imagine all kinds of things.…and if something could do them harm, it would be for them to give importance to what they see and hear.…I understand the trouble they will run into from thinking about what they should write.”²⁸ For cloistered little Bovarys like these — a breed Teresa disliked — it was quite sufficient to talk to their confessor. In the same dismissive vein she calls one overschooled woman a letrera, rather than letrada, or “lettered”: she is a mere bluestocking, more at home with facts than with experience. And the rapture goes on…in writing.

In the “Sixth Dwelling Places,” “another kind of rapture” appears, which she calls “flight of the spirit.” Here it is no “small disturbance for a person to be very much in his senses and see his soul carried off (and…even the body with the soul).”²⁹ And so on to the Seventh Dwelling Places, where the “spiritual marriage” comes to pass, “not in an imaginative vision but in an intellectual one, although more delicate than those mentioned” before; “I don’t know what to compare it to,” and yet there will be no shortage of metamorphic comparisons.³⁰ The more high-minded are gratified here to see Teresa revert to the “core experience” of the likes of John of the Cross, purged of “imaginative visions.” However, I invite them to read the lines that surround the moment, finally regarded as authentic, of Teresa’s elevation.³¹ In this text the “flight of the spirit” mutates into a “straw” being snatched up by a “great and powerful Giant,” then into a “little bark” being lifted high by a “huge wave” (the waters, again) let loose by “this great God.”³² As for the “spiritual marriage” whose glory is revealed “in a more sublime manner than through any spiritual vision or taste,” is it really quite relieved of imaginative comparisons when God can appear as “divine breasts” from which “flow streams of milk bringing comfort to all the people of the castle”?³³

Consistently and to the end, Teresa stages an intimacy that is secret and yet without secrecy, in a continuous state of budding emergence, alluring and infectious: in a word, baroque. Devoid of sensation, it seems, during the final ecstatic trance, and yet always supraconscious of what makes her swoon with pleasure, the writing of rapture “touches” the theopathic state to the point of “divine touch.” At this point too, dispossession and destitution can only be described in a flow that is more denuded than ever, admittedly, and yet still incandescent with metaphors and metamorphoses.

Was this not a peerless exposition in plastic terms of the very principle of the Incarnation? The Church, and the world, were impressed.

The fiction produced by this paradoxical theologian, at the intersection of flesh and spirit, of subconscious drives and conscious meanings, triggered a theological revolution. Not only did Teresa fully earn her title of “Doctor of the Universal Church,” she also bequeathed us a mission that would otherwise be impossible to fulfill: to solve the enigma of that embodied imaginary — of sublimation, Freud would say — as the prerequisite for going further, or indeed in a different direction.

And here am I, Sylvia Leclercq, knowing nothing about faith but embarking on that very mission! Oh, why did it have to be me — when all I care for is young Paul, that misfit teenager who could be my son, and that frail and crumpled flower-bud called Élise?

I DREAM, THEREFORE I AM

“If I didn’t dream, I wouldn’t exist. I dream, so I’m alive.”

Paul has just unleashed one of his breathtaking aphorisms. Where did he get that from?

“But it’s true, isn’t it? I dream, so I’m alive.” Here we go: he’s going to keep on repeating it until I say something.

Eventually I figure out that the source is our director, Dr. Toutbon. Paul had just told him that he wasn’t planning to join in with any more MPH activities until Ghislaine came back. Ghislaine, his best friend, the one he used to kiss the most, left the home over a year ago when she moved with her parents to the United States. Paul knows perfectly well she’s not coming back. Toutbon, for some reason that escapes me and must relate to his personal hang-ups, decided that our young in-patient needed bringing down to earth. “He shall place his finger on the borderline between the real and the imaginary!” Our dear director loves to talk in such terms.

“In your dreams, Paul! Quit dreaming!”

It was thanks to this inspired phrase of Toutbon’s, whose first blunder it wasn’t, that Paul hit on the formula he has just recited, and which is already doing the rounds of the home. Every one of my colleagues is raving about it from a philosophical and, need I say, therapeutic angle. At the director’s expense, and serve him right!

Paul hands me the milky tea he’s brought from the dispenser and sits down next to me, holding an espresso, visibly itching to develop his idea. I adore him. Oh no: here comes Marianne like a whirlwind into my office.

“Am I interrupting? Yes I am, I see.” She only hesitates for a second. I shoot a meaningful glance in Paul’s direction, but nothing doing. Ker-pow.

“You idealize your patients and your books in the exact same way your saint idealized her divine Spouse. What’s the difference? Do you see a difference?”

She looks badly upset. I ask Paul to go wait in the games room, this won’t take long, there’s an emergency Dr. Baruch needs to discuss with me. His wide green eyes empty out, rake me blindly as he turns to leave. I don’t know how I’m going to repair the damage done by this sudden separation Baruch has provoked.

“I’m going on a trip,” says Marianne more soberly. She sits down, removes her glasses and rubs her eyes.

I sip my tea. I’m waiting.

“I’m going to Spain!”

“Really!?” I know she hates flying, is scared of trains, and refuses to drive.

“Nothing to do with you or your precious Teresa.” I deduce the contrary. Silence.

“I’m going with my father, who’s doing some research into our family background, you know.”

I don’t know. Marianne never talks about her family, and I’ve even wondered whether her attachment to me wasn’t a way of detaching from them.

“Well, you see, Dad’s gone back to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Our ancestors lived in Cuenca, right in the middle of Castilla-La Mancha. He’s set his heart on going there, to find out something or other important in the local archives. Looking for himself, I guess. So, seeing as he’s not exactly young or fit any more, I felt I couldn’t let him do it on his own. That’s why I’m going along.”

I understand now. Marianne is letting me know that this journey is her way of going into analysis, without admitting it to herself or lying on a couch. Today I’ll listen to whatever Dr. Baruch can or wants to tell me. Too bad about Paul, I’ll pick up that thread tomorrow.

Marianne’s father (whom I’ve seen a couple of times at her house: faint smile, elaborate politeness) is the youngest son of wealthy Jewish parents. Haïm Baruch was born by the Danube, in Ruse, Bulgaria. His family spoke Ladino and Bulgarian at home, but could communicate in every European language. They held the faith of their forebears in moderate respect, its observances reduced over time to a few culinary traditions and keeping of holidays. The sons were packed off to universities abroad — one to Austria, one to Germany, one to Russia, one to France. Haïm, the mother’s favorite, was sent to live with some cousins of hers in Nancy. He entered law school under the innocuous French name of Aimé, “Beloved”—a whim Marianne had not forgiven him. “Just because the French pronounce it ‘Em’ instead of Haïm, dropping the aspirated aitch and the diaeresis, Dad couldn’t find anything stupider than to call himself Aimé!”

As luck would have it, Aimé was on vacation in Bulgaria when Vichy ordered the first roundups of Jews. Since Bulgaria was the only country besides Holland to oppose the Nazis’ deportation drives (or that’s what they say), he escaped the Holocaust. During the war years he married Maria, a Bulgarian childhood friend, and took her back to Nancy, where she would give birth to Marianne.

I still couldn’t see the Teresa connection, but Marianne said it was coming. Firstly, my psychiatrist chum had always been at odds with her “Beloved” progenitor, aware of his disappointment at getting a girl when he’d wanted a boy. He had named her Marianne in honor of the Republic, despite the darkness of the Occupation years. Secondly, this great Francophile, who had wept for the German destruction of Oradour but was forgiving of collaboration, felt increasingly less beloved in his adopted land as he grew older. Though a staunch secularist, he began to study Hebrew, and on retirement he decided to reconstruct the family tree.

Now, having traced the itinerary of his ancestors, he wanted to look into the sources. Aimé Baruch knew too much about the history of his people, and history in general, to expect to find reliable archive material this side of 1492 relating to such a modest merchant household. He did, however, hope to glean some earlier data about a family that had, from the twelfth century, been well-integrated and indeed respected in Cuenca — until finding itself summarily expelled by the Inquisition. Cuenca appeared to him now as the golden age of integration, the diaspora’s Eden in Europe. But was it? This is what he sought to know.

“He dreams of finding proof of the peaceful coexistence of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Spain on the eve of the expulsion, which would imply that it could happen again, sooner or later.” Marianne has softened, she seems positively tender toward her father. Is she telling me that she harbors dreams of a peaceful coexistence with Aimé?

The first effect of the research undertaken by Baruch senior was to make him re-adopt his old name, Haïm; before long the good jurist had become a fount of expertise on Spanish Jewry before the expulsion and their survival after it. He was particularly interested in the diaspora of southern Europe, where his family ended up: Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria — not forgetting the conversos, the Marranos who stayed in Spain.

“Converts such as Teresa’s paternal family, the families of Ignatius Loyola and John of Avila and maybe even Cervantes.” I’m chucking twigs on the fire of Marianne’s newfound erudition, just to show that I understand, in my own way, her rapprochement with Haïm.

“Well, that’s the trouble. Some Jews were expelled and went elsewhere, like our ancestors. Others were collaborators, basically. Or pretended they were, but even so! Teresa betrayed her people, just as her forebears did by converting. Except she went further still by becoming a Catholic saint. Do you see what I’m getting at? She betrayed her father to side with her mother, didn’t she?”

It’s not the right time to say that matters are considerably more complex, in my view. But Marianne isn’t asking for my view, she carries on without a break:

“Anyhow, Haïm wonders whether all those mystics Spain claims such credit for weren’t simply the craziest among the Jews who stayed behind. People who could come up with nothing better than to annoy the Church, then in the pits of decadence, with the exaltation of their constricted little souls. He calls it ‘delirium,’ he doesn’t mince words, unlike some…You know he calls himself a rationalist. Or used to…Can you see it?”

I can see that Marianne is the one feeling guilty of betraying her people by her silly war against her father, by her tomboy — or is it bachelor — existence. I see that she’s taking on Haïm’s guilt as he attempts to pick up the threads of tradition in his own enlightened style. As for Teresa…

Marianne doesn’t let my silence last.

“Guess what? My dad now knows as much as you do about your blessed saint! He’s just read a book, a study or something, by a Professor Yovel, do you know him? A Spinoza specialist who’s into Marrano mystics, very original!³⁴ So, Haïm is impressed by Teresa’s hallucinations, of course he is. But of course he doesn’t believe in them either. He’s a man of reason, he doesn’t make the allowances you do, right?” Or wrong; I wait. “So, he says that the more she tried to integrate, the more Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was humiliated by all those Spanish grandees and prelates around her. The more she played at being the crafty diplomat, the more they used her raptures for their own ends, if they didn’t just make fun of her. Even when they saved her from the Inquisition and let her start her gang of barefoot Carmelites, they went on undermining her to the end.”

“Is Mr. Baruch retraining as a theologian?” I’m trying to jolly this courtroom drama along, uncertain whether it’s Teresa or myself standing in the dock.

“You’re kidding! Haïm has only looked into the Foundations texts, Teresa’s business end, if you will, and all the bad karma she got from her delusions of grandeur. He says the hierarchy treated her like a Jew, until they realized it would be more profitable to make her a saint. What do you think of that?”

How should I know? Her father, her mother…a Jew, a Christian…Is Christianity a refutation or a continuation of the biblical message? Was Teresa an alumbrada recruited by the Counter-Reformation to close down the Christian faith, or on the contrary to open it up? And open it up to what? True enough, she was marked by inquisitorial Spain. And rehabilitated by the Council of Trent, that’s true, too. Maybe she did profit from the decline of royal power in the wake of the conquests, which only benefited the Golden Age — a flamboyant moniker and a fair description of the era’s arts and letters. But what if Teresa’s experience had rendered Marianne’s claims downright obsolete all the same? Obsolete at the time, and more so today, even when such claims about identity are making themselves heard again in the context of the Middle Eastern conflict or 9/11? Teresa was far from dealing with such issues, simply displacing them in the mad intensity of her singular quest. But surely there’s no other way of moving beyond identity politics, which are necessarily conflictive, than by displacement — toward this amazing, unprecedented singularity that somehow succeeded (but how?) in living in an open, shareable, foundational way. How did she do it? That’s what I want to find out: concretely, step by step, how did she know, how did she manage? With what gains and what losses?

“You’re right to go with him.” (I’m evading, dodging backward.) “This trip will teach us a lot, to me too, I mean. When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What!”

“I know, I should have told you. I’ve been preparing it for a while, I didn’t know how to tell you…”

“No harm done. See you in two weeks!”

I spend the vacation alone in Paris, as is my wont, with my roommate. I gaze at the city lights through the great window my father loved so much, et cetera. And I haven’t forgotten Paul, who still resents me, I know, for putting Marianne before him the other day, but he’ll wait for me. “If you don’t dream, you don’t exist. I dream, therefore I’m alive.” Certain journeys are dreams. Certain readings, too.