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

Chapter 8. EVERYTHING SO CONSTRAINED ME

Teresa of Avila at sixty-one. Juan de la Miseria, 1576. Carmel of Seville. © Gianni Dagli Orti/Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.

“God forgive you, Brother John, you have made me look ugly and blear-eyed [me habéis pintado fea y legañosa]!” La Madre, at sixty-one years old, doesn’t think much of the portrait which fray Juan de la Miseria painted from life in 1576.¹ She would doubtless have preferred herself in the version attributed to Velázquez: refined, pensive, quite the “young intellectual.” But all is well: she has just “made a foundation” in Seville, celebrated in the streets with flower-strewn processions, music, and canticles. Her conquistador brother Lorenzo, back from the Indies, helped to purchase the house for the new convent and has entrusted her with his youngest daughter, nine-year-old Teresita. Her major clashes with the Church are still in the future, and there is as yet no question of a grateful posterity.

Whatever the Carmelite’s attachment to her interior castle, she was not one to neglect outward appearances. I think she was unfair to her portraitist, all the same. Framed by a white wimple under a black veil, her rosy face reflects her liking for fine fare. A long narrow nose balances the soft sag of the sixty-something jawline, while the pursed mouth conveys the strong will of the foundress and the authority of the “businesswoman,” skilled at real-estate operations and negotiating with Church bodies. The large, somewhat asymmetrical eyes shine with an insatiable, inquisitive intelligence. Teresa explodes on the painter’s canvas like modern stars explode on the screen. There is no sign of abandonment, that lascivious dejamiento for which she was alternately envied and denounced, and to which she herself laid claim, at times, in describing her union with the Spouse. This is obviously a nun with a mind: her gaze is quizzical and were it not for the prayerfully joined hands, I might almost have read recrimination or mistrust in the look she directs at the Beyond. To me her eyes are saying: “What’s going to fall on me next? Suffering for suffering’s sake, that’ll be the day!” A robust woman despite her ailments, she seems well acquainted with One who is invisible to me as I contemplate the scene here and now, excluded from their exchange. She looks at Him not without apprehension, yet ready to stand up for herself. This was the attitude captured by Velázquez (or an anonymous disciple) when he gave the saint that charcoal gaze that seems to hear and write more than it sees. On the other hand, there’s something sensual about the grave mouth depicted by Juan de la Miseria. Could that be why the dove of the Holy Spirit concentrates its attention upon the praying hands? How many women were there, inside Teresa of Jesus?

The portrait was commissioned by her very dear friend, Jerome Gratian; its author was an oddball born with the name of Giovanni Narducci. A peasant hermit from the Abruzzi mountains, he had been expelled from the minor orders, made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, became a sculptor’s apprentice at Palermo, and spent a year in the workshop of Spanish portraitist Alonso Sánchez Coello. He was good friends with Mariano de Azzaro, a brilliant diplomat falsely accused of murder and jailed before being put in charge of hydraulic works by King Philip II. Eventually Mariano retired as a hermit to the Tardón desert near Seville. Both friars became enthused by Teresa’s ambitious project to reform the Carmelite order, which at first only numbered two discalced White Friars: Antonio de Jesús and John of the Cross. In July 1569, Mariano, renamed Ambrosio Mariano de San Benito, and Narducci, now Juan de la Miseria, founded the second monastery for discalced friars at Pastrana, where they would produce silk. If these characters don’t seem entirely wholesome, well, everyone knows that the most proper folks don’t necessarily make the best reformers, and Teresa knew it too. She described the artist as a “great servant of God and very simple with regard to the things of the world.”² Posterity would note the casual detachment, for La Madre made use of the humble as well as the exalted — but never with her eyes closed. The profound kinship linking hermits, Carthusians, and Carmelites may also account for the ease with which the first were persuaded to sign up to the reformed Carmel.

Wholly taken up by her visions and foundations, Teresa would never have dreamed that more than four centuries after her death, people would be scrutinizing her portrait and trying to find her in the pages she saw fit to write about her life. No doubt it gratified her to imagine the Discalced Carmelites, as an institution, continuing down the centuries — for fulfilled though she was by that Other residing within, she was not immune to vanity. But from there to fancying that women who might doubt the existence of the divine Spouse, or deny it outright, could one day be fascinated by her far from cloistered life, crisscrossing Spain on a donkey to the outrage of the Inquisition, which nonetheless hesitated to burn her at the stake — never! Not a chance. For Teresa’s imaginings — entirely real to her, unseen by her eyes but felt with all her heart, which is to say her body, despite the fear of being a victim of holy madness — were indifferent to passing time, let alone therefore to modern times, and certainly wouldn’t care what we might think.

I say “we,” because I am not the only one puzzling over the portrait painted by Giovanni Narducci, alias Juan de la Miseria. Beyond Carmelite or pilgrim circles, where Teresian relics are prized as part of popular tours (run by Catholic business interests like memory trails, the Mysteries of Faith package), her writings have attracted a range of contemporary “sisters” as diverse and improbable as I am: Marcelle Auclair, Rosa Rossi, Dominique de Courcelles, Mercedes Allendesalazar, Alison Weber, Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Mary Frohlich…These unlikely exegetes came as a surprise to me. Teresa infuses them, infuses us, with her taste for the union with the Other in oneself. All of a sudden these modern women, perfectly at ease in the epoch of the Pill and raunchy sex, began to haunt the waters, paths, and castles of the Spanish nun. They became theologians, interpreters, or writers in order to follow the thread of her raptures, comas, and foundations. Men, too, men like Michel de Certeau, Denis Vasse, Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Américo Castro, Antonio Márquez, Joseph Pérez, and others, as lacking in circumspection as their female counterparts, have trodden the labyrinth of our philosophical sorority.³

It is my turn to travel through Teresa country, in the variegated company of these passionate loners who are not always acquainted with one another, don’t necessarily get along, may or may not know one another’s books, and have nothing in common but the writings of Teresa of Jesus. Could the saint’s texts provide a key to the enigma that is faith, the last stronghold of secrecy in our see-through, mediatized globalization, where everything is instantaneously divulged?

I bathe in the liquid imaginary of La Madre. I drink it in, filtered by the tastes and notions of the “specialists” on her, I glimpse it through the tracery of their interpretive ruminations. I build my own castle out of their dwelling places, I cultivate my dreaming garden in order to bring you a Teresa alive in us, coming alive again in you.

Buried at Alba de Tormes beneath a heap of soil, lime, and stones after her death on October 4, 1582 (or October 15, due to the switch to the Gregorian calendar that year), Teresa’s body was later exhumed in secret at the request of Jerome Gratian, who wanted very much to look at it. Her garments were moldy, but her flesh was intact. The body was taken to Avila and examined by Fr. Diego de Yepes, prior of the Hieronymites of Madrid, alongside legal advisers Laguana, of the Council of State, and Francisco Contreras, of the chancellery of Granada; both men had been dispatched from Madrid. Also present were two physicians, a handful of notables, and the bishop of Avila. Each witness concurred that the body was incorrupt. According to the medical report, “It was impossible that this be a natural occurrence, rather than truly miraculous…for, after three years, never having been opened or embalmed, so whole was it that nothing thereof was missing, and an admirable fragrance wafted from it.”⁴

With apologies to the pilgrims, I should say that I much prefer the vision of Teresa’s living body always traveling toward us to that of her uncorrupted corpse. I seek that body in her books — of which she herself only edited one, The Way of Perfection, helped by the archbishop of Evora, Teutonio de Braganza; it was published in 1583, a year after her death. I visualize that other incorruptible body through the commentaries of her recent interpreters; I appropriate it, dream it up, and restore it back it to you.

First of all, she was a wanderer. The apostolic nuncio Felipe Sega, hostile to her work as a foundress of monasteries, accused her of being a “restless vagabond, rebellious and headstrong, who invented twisted doctrines she called devotions and gave herself license to teach, which the apostle Paul had forbidden to women.” A woman, restless and wandering, that’s what you are, Teresa, and it’s a compliment in my eyes. But where does a life begin? And how many beginnings make up a lifetime?

The novel of Teresa of Jesus, suffering and sovereign, was slowly plotted in the destiny of Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada; but it was crystallized in a crucial event of 1533. I picture a young girl of around eighteen, pretty, elegantly dressed, enchanting — no portrait exists, but there are many testimonies to that effect, and she herself often mentions her good looks. Many pages written in a painstakingly pungent Castilian for the benefit of her confessors, thirty years after the fact, retrace this youthful period. Indeed, Teresa only completed the first draft of The Book of Her Life in June 1562, when she was forty-seven.

The young lady had just spent a year and a half at the Augustinian school of Our Lady of Grace, where her father, don Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, had sent her in hopes of safeguarding the honor of his bright, too-bright child. Her mother Beatriz had been dead for some years and her elder half-sister, María de Cepeda, was now married, after playing chaperone to the little one as best she could. Don Alonso, that loving, too-loving father, knew just how cute and seductive she was, better than anyone — except perhaps her cousin Pedro, one of the three sons of don Francisco Álvarez de Cepeda. Or perhaps Vasco, or Francisco, or Diego, one of Elvira de Cepeda and Hernando Mejía’s boys? A plotline takes shape. We don’t know the name of the elect, but Teresa was said to be dangerously in love.

In love, maybe, though without a dowry. The young beauty hesitated to take the plunge: “I also feared marriage.”⁵ Was she reluctant to share the fate of the countless women who passed away, sad and young, their bodies wrecked by an unbroken string of childbirths — her own mother’s fate? Teresa liked to have fun. She read novels about knights and ladies, like her mother, and adored masked balls, parties, flirting, and conversation. Her favorite interlocutors were the servant women, bent on improving this spotless soul with salacious stories, and her cousin Elvira, reputed to be vain and an airhead.

“I must warn you, Father, that Teresa is receiving instruction in wickedness from the servants. I can’t prevent it, she’s obstinate and won’t listen to sense.” María’s accusation only upsets the widower more, for he already suspects it.

“But what if I were to get engaged?” Teresa cautiously brings up the mirage of marriage, family honor oblige. María weighs in crossly:

“Don’t even think about it! I mean, you don’t seem to be thinking about it.”

“We are proud but of modest condition, increasingly modest, understand me, child.” Teresa frowns. Don Alonso cannot get his favorite daughter to see that a father has the right to expect strict decorum and total obedience from a young girl of such a condition.

Teresa shuts herself away with her secrets.

It’s the same old story: fathers have always relied far too much on convents or marriage to calm their daughters’ lusts. Don Alonso had no idea how easily love notes passed through the walls of the Augustinian school, via keyholes, furtive meetings in the parlor, the mediation of the airhead cousin…

The girl was on fire, and concealment being the rule, her young body soon fell sick. Palpitations, depression, continual weeping. Oh, to be free like Cousin Pedro, to sport velvet doublets slashed with gold, and buoyant ruffs, to twirl one’s cape and sword…Let him take her in his arms, let him be her and she be him, let them waft together from ball to ball, or sail away to the antipodes. They could follow Rodrigo and his New World dreams, Rodrigo her favorite brother, two years older and born on the same day, whom she overtook in maturity long ago. Wasn’t she cleverer, quicker, more intrepid than other little girls her age? The whole Cepeda-Ahumada clan agreed on that. The things they got up to together! Hardly surprising, when she stuck like a shadow to her likeness, her double, and he, although a boy, followed her lead in the peculiar games that so dismayed their parents.

One day, while reading the Lives of the Saints together, Teresa informs her brother that she aspires to be a martyr, like Saint Catherine or Saint Ursula.

“Or Saint Andrew or Saint Sebastian,” says Rodrigo.

“For the love of God!” cries Teresa, in imitation of her mother, the godly doña Beatriz.

It was after the sack of Rhodes by the Turks — an event that had all Christendom quaking, Spain above all. But not these two children, who resolved to go and get their heads chopped off in the land of the Moors, across the Strait of Gibraltar, where menacing foreigners lived who were completely unlike the Spaniards. They set off — for the love of God! — and were caught up with on the Adaja bridge, still inside the city walls. Phew.

“It was her idea!” Rodrigo opts for shameful betrayal, rather than undergo the father’s anger and the mother’s sorrow.

Teresa did not hold this against him: her masculine double had at last admitted that she was the brains and the heart of their partnership. Closer now than ever, the runaway pair turned into a pair of writers: their amazed family was very soon presented with a chivalric novel, The Knight of Avila, by Teresa de Ahumada and Rodrigo de Cepeda. In this osmosis between brother and sister, might the virtuous knight be a foreshadowing of that “virile soul of a monk” that some detected in Saint Teresa? In any case, here began her writer’s path.

But boys have a future ahead of them. If adolescence is excruciating for girls, it’s largely because it brings home to them that they don’t have such a future. This is not easy to stomach, especially for one who like Teresa has grown up among male siblings: coming after Fernando and Rodrigo into the world, she was followed by Juan, Lorenzo, Antonio, Pedro, Jerónimo, and Agustín, before the advent of another girl, Juana. How she longed to be a man, to set sail for the Americas like Fernando, the eldest, or like Rodrigo himself, who enlisted in Pedro de Mendoza’s expedition! All her brothers, except for Juan, became conquistadors. In reality, Teresa had no need to be jealous. She could make people laugh, she could beat them at chess, and she produced superlative embroidery — the last was less unusual, being an Avilan specialty. The family, bewitched, would celebrate the child’s witty sallies while fearing for her, given the impetuousness of her nature. “Our little charmer makes the most of herself, tastefully to be sure, but she overdoes it a bit: what a passion for baths and perfumes and jewels…”

Were you quite sure, Teresa, of what you later claimed: that you enjoyed yourself wherever you went, and that the least rag looked like a queen’s raiment on you? No doubt you were, since you sought out “pastimes” and “pleasant conversation,” indeed you were “strikingly shrewd when it came to mischief,” as you later wrote, with stern self-reproof. There’s nothing wrong with being at once the knife and the wound, and I guess this made you feel better. Your half-sister María’s marriage to Martín Guzmán de Barrientos was an opportunity to engage in “vanities” for the full three months of the event. How embarrassing! How shameful! All this “could not be achieved so secretly as to prevent me from suffering much loss of reputation.”⁶ Checked by your confessors, you said no more about it, Teresa, my love, but not because you, a connoisseur of mortification, were loath to flagellate yourself. Marcelle Auclair thinks your discretion was due, not to the wickedness of the alleged frivolities, but to their innocence. That’s plausible. I would also point out, though, that the honor of the Church forbade you to be more candid:

Since my confessors commanded me and gave me plenty of leeway to write about the favors and the kind of prayer the Lord has granted me, I wish they would also have allowed me to tell very clearly and minutely about my great sins and wretched life. This would be a consolation. But they didn’t want me to. In fact I was very much restricted in those matters. And so I ask, for the love of God, whoever reads this account to bear in mind that my life has been so wretched…⁷

Don Alonso knew that his favorite daughter was a magnet for the young and not so young people revolving around her — women and men both, needless to say. All the more reason to protect her, but how? Mysterious Teresa.

Her father did not know, however, that she had already come to terms with a fatal, irrevocable reality: the transitory nature of human love. “Para siempre, forever,” she and Rodrigo had sworn it: and now he was getting ready to start on his man’s life, away from her. Away from that role as her double, which he played so well under her direction — menial parts, it must be said, as an extra in the runaway scene and then as quill-carrier, all to his sister’s advantage. The word “forever” does not exist, there is no forever between men and women, neither with Rodrigo nor with Cousin Pedro. Nor between don Alonso and doña Beatriz, who died of love, poor thing, her belly swelling up again and again, her children being the death of her until she really did depart to the Beyond, and forever. So does “forever” apply solely to separation and death and Nothingness? Her mother was only saved by leaving them all behind, bequeathing nothing to Teresa but a passion for courtly novels and a holy picture of the Virgin in a bright blue cloak. Mothers are cruel. So are the men who drop you, who never love you enough, who’ve always got somebody else to love.

My father was fond of reading good books, and thus he also had books in Spanish for his children to read. These good books together with the care my mother took to have us pray and be devoted to our Lady and some of the saints began to awaken me when, I think, six or seven years old, to the practice of virtue.…

My father was a man very charitable with the poor and compassionate toward the sick, and even toward servants. So great was his compassion that nobody was ever able to convince him to accept slaves…

My mother also had many virtues. And she suffered such sickness during her life. She was extremely modest. Although very beautiful, she never gave occasion to anyone to think she paid any attention to her beauty. For at the time of her death at the age of thirty-three, her clothes were already those of a much older person. She was gentle and very intelligent. Great were the trials she suffered during her life. Her death was a truly Christian one.

We were in all three sisters and nine brothers. All resembled their parents in being virtuous, through the goodness of God, with the exception of myself — although I was the most loved of my father. And it seemed he was right — before I began to offend God. For I am ashamed when I recall the good inclinations the Lord gave me and how poorly I knew how to profit by them.⁸

Doña Beatriz de Ahumada was don Alonso’s second wife. The first, Catalina del Peso y Henao, who succumbed to the plague, was proud to be an Old Christian with connections to the Dávila family, a prestigious line of Castilian nobles whose coat of arms displayed thirteen golden bezants. Beatriz was Catalina’s cousin thrice removed; she was barely fifteen when she wed this widower of thirty. By the time Teresa arrived, she had already borne two sons and was taking care of her two stepchildren, María de Cepeda and Juan Vásquez. Seven more children were still to come. Exhausted by so many childbeds, the fine and delicate Beatriz commended her soul to Almighty God at the age of thirty-three: a Christlike sacrifice in female mode.

Nuns who complain of the monastic life “do not recognize the great favor God has granted them in…freeing them from being subject to a man.” You wrote this much later, Teresa, my love. Unfair, carried away, too much in love with Mother? With Simone de Beauvoir, the revolt of the “second sex” ought to acknowledge a precursor in you, who continued angrily: “a man who is often the death of them and who could also be, God forbid, the death of their souls.”⁹ An angel passes: it is the soul of Beatriz de Ahumada.

You were thirteen and a half when your mother died, and the only woman of the line accompanying your father, except for your half-sister María, the firstborn of the previous union. Surrounded by servants but responsible for the youngest children, you were probably tempted to become the center of this domestic circle, now that the mistress of the household was no longer around and the master was doubly appreciative of his daughter’s looks and brains. But was it possible? Not when one has imbibed, at the departed mother’s knee, so many tales of knights and martyrs. Doña Beatriz thus managed to instill in her eldest daughter the sense of another world, not in so many words, of course, simply by reading novels — as if there was no difference between such love stories and the lives of the saints, which her husband preferred. There is an elsewhere, my girl, innocent of childbirth and domestic drudgery, and that’s where salvation surely lies, beyond this earthly plane, beyond my bleeding maternal body, beyond bodies, beyond everything…

Teresa absorbed the message in her own way. Not only was she as beguiled by these knightly and saintly adventures as by the feminine charms of her aristocratic progenitor, but she had also developed a taste for freedom in the company of boys to whom she never felt inferior. After all, she’d reigned supreme over the Ahumada siblings.

As far back as she could remember, Teresa’s playmates had been boys, and she had been the domineering one. Look at how she dragged her darling Rodrigo, the best of them all, to be decapitated in the land of the Antichrist: no one ever tired of that story. She herself sounded tickled to recall it in her autobiography, years after the event. At the time, though, love unto death and a saintly end were in deadly earnest: cross my heart and hope to die.

She loved her mother, of course she did, and she prayed feelingly to the Holy Virgin, doña Beatriz’s beloved patroness, and kept the picture of her in a blue veil, with those large white hands crossed over her breast, until the day she died. But was the Virgin really a woman? Or was she a creature unique to her sex, as someone had suggested? In any case, the mischievous tomboy was not keen to be mothered. She preferred playing chess, she had no desire to spend her own life gestating, and one may wonder if she ever needed a mother at all, such was her individuality and independence.

“What a handsome girl she is, and prouder than a boy!” The neighbors either admire or deplore her for it.

A young woman afraid of woman’s destiny as exemplified by her own mother: it’s a rare phenomenon, but not unique. The fear is stifled, opaque, inescapable. Even the queens of the Golden Age were little more than wombs in the service of a monarchy and its political ends. From the birth of Philip II in 1527 to that of Charles II in 1661, the queens of Spain produced thirty-four heirs, infantes and infantas — not counting miscarriages. That’s to say one child every four years, seventeen of whom (exactly half) did not live to see their tenth birthday! Some queens died in labor, as did countless women who were not queens and did not play chess: it was their destiny. In 1532, girls had little choice in the matter. Since 1525, however, the alumbradas or “illuminated” women had been advocating celibacy, a state far superior to the indignity and enclosure of marriage, against which any freedom-loving spirit chafes. Women who were unwilling to be just another link in a dynastic chain, or who had no dowry, or whom no one wanted, did what the Ahumada girl did: they entered a nunnery. Their bodies sick with desire, often without a religious vocation, they took the veil. What else could they do?¹⁰

Now, if Teresa preferred the company of boys, it was also to turn their heads with the scent of her skin through layers of silk and velvet while she fantasized, just like those haughty males, of being a knight or a sailor or a conquistador across the sea: a combination which her cousin Pedro found alluring and alarming at once. I shouldn’t be surprised if Pedro shrank from her, maybe attracted to a different, more submissive girl, or maybe heading for the El Dorado that galvanized the whole of Spain at its apogee, a place known as Peru. That’s right, the boys will be peruleros, and the girls, well, they won’t be anything. “Too bad,” the schoolgirl said to herself, but her heart started racing, and the tears gushed all over again…

She likes this torrent, she drowns in tears, it’s so lovely to cry, as well as shameful! “Too bad,” don Alonso’s best girl doesn’t see herself wasting to death in one confinement after another. “Always bedded, always pregnant, always birthing,” was how Louis XV’s queen described herself. Teresa will be as worthy as any son, free and independent. Impossible for a woman, of course, but the family honor will be saved. Father is always so preoccupied with that: honor must be saved! She will do as her father asks, but in make-believe, that’s all that’s expected of a girl. All that’s expected of mothers, women, families. She’s one of them and she adores them, mothers, women, families. How else could she feel? It would be a long time before Teresa admitted to herself that the paradise of women, sisters, and mothers is also a kind of hell.

In the evening of her life, well past sixty and busy writing the Foundations, Teresa projects herself into a rather strange sister, Beatriz de la Madre de Dios. Now known as La Madre herself, she evinces a curious closeness to her subject when relating the story of this other Beatriz. A victim or a monster? It’s hard to tell. She was illiterate, and her mother used to beat her. She was variously accused of poisoning her aunt and seducing her confessor Garciálvarez, whom she saw alone, or even Father Gratian, that special friend of Teresa’s…She fancied herself on the road to sainthood, and reported visions and spiritual favors aplenty. Manipulated by another sister, Isabel de San Jerónimo, who was both crazy and in league with the calced Carmelites, who had it in for the reforming nun, Sister Beatriz accused Teresa — to the Inquisition — of maintaining sinful relations with the same Fr. Gratian and bearing several children by him, whom she slyly dispatched to the New World…What a scandal! But Beatriz retracted her story, Seville simmered down, and the Inquisition did not even open a file on the case.

Does Teresa’s concern for this abused and abusive child suggest an emotional affinity with a possible rival for Gratian’s affections? Or does it cast light, for the nosy posterity that we are, on just how hard it was to be a young girl or a young woman caught up in the vortex of desires and horrors that made up the world of other people, and how even harder this was in the ruthless ambit of female desires? A terrifying mother has a vile daughter. Which is the murderess, and which the manipulator? Who are these passages of the Foundations about — Beatriz de la Madre de Dios, Beatriz de Ahumada, or Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada herself? The “novel” left to us by Teresa of Avila muses on the crossed destinies of love unto death. How can one not be involved? And how does one cope?

On the whole Teresa preferred the company of women: she liked being under their spell, before imposing her sovereignty. Frivolous Cousin Elvira, for instance, the one execrated by don Alonso and his solemn daughter María — how sensual she seemed, how free, how different from the misery-guts who slunk about in corners, sniveling! Teresa also fell for the charms of María de Briceño, mistress of the young seculars at Our Lady of Grace, who had a way of talking about holy books and one’s own person that made a girl blush with pleasure. Briceño was living proof that not all women gave up their lives to a man, as Teresa’s mother had done, sacrificing herself for husband and children in the name of honor. There were women who became such admirable people in their own right that they deserved and received the love of the Lord Himself. Teresa’s dearest friend, Juana Suárez, had herself entered the Convent of the Incarnation, under the mitigated Carmelite rule, to follow that marvelous destiny alongside 180 other women — seculars, widows, undowried girls, as well as some genuine nuns who sounded rather jolly, by Juana’s account.

Teresa was at a crossroads. Her young body was not appeased, but who could satisfy it? Her brother Rodrigo, her cousin Pedro, her best friend Juana? All possible and all forbidden. Everything ends, everyone leaves; the nothingness of all things, all things are nothing. Except Teresa wasn’t as strong, yet, as María de Briceño or Juana Suárez; she wasn’t ready to embrace the veil as a vocation. Not ready at all.

Her mother’s devotion she found compelling, but her martyrdom was frightening. The dourness of her father’s faith held her back: what a bind, that “point of honor” he kept on about, when Teresa only longed for excitement and adventures sweeping her up, up and away, into the Beyond! She cried out for love with every fiber of her being, she lacked for love. She would sponge herself carefully all over several times a day, dab her skin with perfume and scented oils, making herself pure and desirable — ready for anything, yet always in the anticipation of failure. And still that aching heart, still those floods of tears. Was she depressed or elated? She could not tell, and neither could the sisters at Our Lady of Grace. Teresa fell seriously ill. Best to send the Ahumada girl back to her father: too fragile…

Already disappointed and yet offered up, Teresa obtained her father’s permission to convalesce at her sister’s in Castellanos, where María had settled after her glittering marriage. On the way she stopped off at Hortigosa, to visit her uncle Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda, the third of her father’s four brothers. Indisposition did not prevent her from wearing her red skirt with black braiding, black velvet bodice, and black lace shawl — an attire immortalized two centuries later by Bizet’s sultry Carmen. On some level she was aware that don Pedro, though still in mourning for his wife, responded to her youthful beauty. For her part she enjoyed his company, like a more lenient version of her father.

“So you’re not well, I hear?” inquires don Pedro, his eyes crinkling in a smile.

“Surrounded by dry rosemary bushes, and nobody to lean on,” Teresa says nervously, alluding to her disappointments.

“Of fair Don Juan the king that ruled us, / Of those high heirs of Aragon, / What are the tidings? / Of him, whose courtly graces schooled us, / Whom song and wisdom smiled upon, / Where the abidings?”¹¹ Don Pedro is being kind or mocking, it’s not clear which. He is said to be an Erasmist, something of an Illuminato. What could he mean? He’s awfully well-read…

“Pardon, Uncle?” She feels on the verge of tears, again.

“Jorge Manrique.” Don Pedro fetches the book from a library shelf; bibliophilic treasures outnumber worldly luxuries in this country manor. “Do you know him?”

Teresa likes to arouse desire, and yet the moment she senses the man’s interest she retreats, introspectively, feeling guilty and soiled. Pedro de Cepeda notices this, and goes no further.

“Are you uncertain about marriage?” He realizes he must talk to this niece as an uncle, almost a father. It had not been a good idea to upset her with the verses of this old-school but very famous poet, who had enthused the whole of Spain.

“I’m not ready for the monastic life either, Uncle. My remorse at my mistakes is so great, the doors of Heaven are closed to me for ever.”

“Mistakes, child?”

“My father suspects me, he can’t be sure, of course, but it’s true that I dissemble my desires…and I am incapable of understanding God, I am too hard-hearted. I am not like a woman in that way.”

“You dissemble, do you? You feel remorse…Is this a young lady speaking, or do I hear somebody speaking through you? You sound just like your father.”

He feels caught out, and doesn’t know how to pursue the conversation. Smart and pretty though she is, Teresa is clearly in a bad way. God alone could rescue a soul like that, a young woman like that. For this fresh-faced niece, scarcely more than a child, is undoubtedly a woman. Or is it precisely because of her febrile womanliness that…No, too confusing.

“Don’t cry, my dear, we’re all in need of consolation. I am myself, indeed I am, and without dissembling. I need…I need you to read…Here, read to me from Saint Jerome.”

He puts Manrique back and pulls the Epistles from the opposite shelf, before stretching himself out to listen.

And what happens then for Teresa? She feels violently assaulted. “For without my desiring it, [God] forced me to overcome my repugnance,” she wrote thirty years later.¹² She sits down by her uncle and fastens her dark gaze on the page.

Why Saint Jerome? Why was she reading, here in Hortigosa, the letters of the “learned ascetic” and first Christian translator of the Bible into Latin? Born in the sixth century on the border between Dalmatia and Pannonia, preoccupied with hebraica veritas, Jerome was the “author” of the Vulgate Bible, which replaced the Septuagint translation attributed in legend to the work of seventy-two rabbis. An accomplished rhetorician, he had studied in Rome, learned Greek in Constantinople and Antioch, and regarded himself as a disciple of Cicero. He had crossed polemical swords with Origen and disputed more amicably with Saint Augustine. What was his appeal for Teresa’s uncle? Was it down to the Bible itself, which was only permitted to be read by the ecclesiastical elite (and whose mere presence in certain homes was evidence to the Inquisition of heresy or covert Judaism)?

It could also be because the future Saint Jerome had thrown himself into the solitary study of Hebrew in Chalcis, Syria, and spent years translating the Old and New Testaments in Bethlehem, where a Jew visited him at night “like Nicodemus,” he said, had visited Christ. Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda, who was of converso stock, was very likely moved by the indefatigable Christian’s return to the source. He would have known that a number of Marranos had been eager to join the Order of Saint Jerome, because this brotherhood’s lenient rule allowed them to practice the Old Religion with impunity. Although their eventual condemnation on charges of “Judaization” had discredited the order, this would not have prevented Pedro from reading Jerome’s Epistles or having them read to him. Far from it. Nor would it stop him, a few years later, from becoming a Hieronymite himself.

Then again, perhaps he wanted his tormented niece to read from this saint because Jerome had spent his youth enjoying the baths, circuses, and theaters of voluptuous Rome, and not a few reprehensible relationships, before he became an ascetic. Early on, at the wealthy home of the patrician Marcella, he became involved with a set of highborn ladies and gained the affections of a widow named Paula, along with those of her daughters, notably Eustochium — all recent converts to the Christian faith.

The great Hebrew scholar had also championed the superiority of virginity over marriage so rigidly as to be accused of Manichaeism; the most hostile antagonists found him guilty of “perversion and sin.” His faithful Roman noblewomen came to join him in Bethlehem. All of them knew Greek and several applied themselves to Hebrew. Paula and Eustochium were later canonized. Why shouldn’t Teresa follow a similar path?

Pedro’s eyes are closed, but he is not asleep. He is trying to conjure up the monastery founded by Jerome in Bethlehem, with its great hall leading to the grotto where Jesus was born. Here Jerome translated, at a furious rate, the language of Teresa’s paternal forebears into Latin. He was ultimately buried in another grotto nearby, opposite the tomb of his friend Paula, where Eustochium would soon join them.

“Here, read me the letter to Eustochium, if you please, Teresa.”

“That epistle opens with Psalm 45, shall I begin, Uncle? ‘Hear, O daughter, and consider, and incline your ear; forget also your own people and your father’s house, and the king shall desire your beauty.’” Teresa’s throat tightens, she stifles a sob, and pauses for a moment before resuming her reading. “I have left the home of my childhood; I have forgotten my father, I am born anew in Christ. What reward do I receive for this?”¹³

Don Pedro watches her intently, his body trembling all over at the sound of her young voice. He leads a secluded life; for some time now, books in Castilian and the joys of the mind are all he has had. Saint Jerome’s letters would soon lead him, without transition, he thought, to become a friar.

He kept Teresa by his side for a few days more, soothed by her voice and by her hands as they turned the pages, talking to her about the vanity of the world.

The more Teresa read, the more she felt like throwing up. The more nausea she felt, the more interest she feigned: it was a point of honor. She had been torn in two. One part of her body dreamed of valiant knights and conquistadors like Rodrigo, and was mounted behind them, or being buffeted by wind and spray on the high seas. The other espoused the words of a father whose one concern was to save his soul and his children’s; then Teresa scolded herself for her vanity, her frivolous temperament, and her womanly senses, which she hated to death, all on behalf of that judgmental father. There was only one way out, it seemed: “to leave the home of her childhood.”

On the third day of her stay with her uncle, Teresa calmed down. She’d found that with him she could move between her conflicted states, casting off the divided self that sickened her and made her cry. It might even be possible to splice the two sides back together. Until she came to Hortigosa, Teresa had always seen the monastic option as a bastion against her low desires, while her intelligence discerned in this need for protection a sort of groveling, which put her to shame. But things were different with Uncle Pedro.

In the first place, he knew all about the vanity of the world, far more than other men she had encountered in the course of her young life. So much so that he had led her to forcibly overcome herself, as a protection against worldliness and against him, too — but in such a way as to introduce her to the pleasures of forcing herself. Uncle Pedro made her aware of passion and the inanity of passion at the same time; she discovered the allness and nothingness of the temptations that beset her at the nearness of Rodrigo, Cousin Pedro, Cousin Elvira, or her inseparable best friend Juana…And he had done more than this. As she daily steeled herself to read, for his sake, from the edifying book which made her sick with the boredom of subjection to his whim, she found to her surprise that she was glad. Glad to please him, glad to encounter Saint Jerome and his psalms…

Ah, that vigilant eye lodged deep in her young mind, which never ceased to observe, to judge, to comprehend what she was feeling in body and soul! She was beginning to get the measure of this night watchman inside, who never left her, who tormented and yet enhanced her! Was she really so glad to please Uncle Pedro? Or was she simply reveling in her own capacity to analyze what was happening on either side of this epistle by Saint Jerome: she, reading in the armchair; he, pretending to be half asleep on the couch? And between them this kingdom, Audi filia…

Her nausea gone, Teresa felt ready in heart and body to push this willingness to please to extremes. There was no virtue in this dissection, though, she knew that too; nothing but an utter lack of discretion, boundless ambition, the sin of omnipotence.

The more she was intoxicated by her spiraling thoughts, the more the girl felt that her uncle was inducting her into a universe in which guilty passions and debating with those passions were not mutually exclusive, but simultaneous: a delectable surfeit, a world in itself, salvation perhaps. Teresa wasn’t thinking about Jesus yet. She was simply afraid of her senses, while clinging to the sensuousness that Uncle Pedro allowed to the things of the mind. Blessed be voluptuous spirituality!

At this moment, he looked more like an Old Christian than a converso’s son. Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda somehow but unmistakably reminded the convent girl of her late mother, the woman whose pious black garb concealed a love of prowess and exploit, the kind that would be dubbed “quixotic” less than a century later, and which drew mother and daughter toward the martyrdoms of the saints, or was it the other way around? Meanwhile the patriarch, don Alonso, remarked sententiously over their bent heads that only “good books” deserved such absorption, and in general, it was best to avoid anything in Spanish. Teresa acquiesced meekly to her father, as she was bound to do, but it made no difference: she secretly devoured the abominable romances at night. Did she intuit, however vaguely, that true devotion lay in her mother’s impure purity, able to shed the same tears over the sweet pangs of courtly love and the agonies of decapitated martyrs? No man had ever seemed to live up to such completeness — not even Rodrigo, with his worthless vow of para siempre, still less the coveted cousin, and let’s not mention the others. But Uncle Pedro? Maybe. He was so unlike Alonso that Teresa would have taken him for her mother’s brother instead.

A strange alchemy took place in Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada during those days of 1533, while she was staying with her uncle. Her senses recognized her host as a more modern, knowledgeable, audacious version of her mother; but in her memory, he was indissolubly linked to her father by virtue of their shared ordeal. Were senses and memory converging? To accelerate what impetuous decision?

We have mentioned that the court case brought by the municipality of Manjabalago against the Sánchez de Cepeda brothers for their refusal to pay a modest tax (100 maravedís apiece) had outraged the whole family. Joseph Pérez disagrees: his research suggests that the affair was actually a put-up job engineered by the brothers themselves, to obtain legal validation of a status they already enjoyed in practice. Either way, the case was heard, and it can’t have been pleasant for the children. Castilian kids loved playing at Inquisitions in those days, even in the royal gardens. Avilan girls and boys piled up the logs for roasting heretics; one child once tried to strangle another who was playing the part of penitent, only with the noble aim of saving him from the stake! The town was abuzz with preposterous rumors, some branding the Sánchez brothers as criminals and apostates. The hearing was an alarming prospect in such an atmosphere. But what could it have meant to Teresa, aged between four and eight? Not a word was said at home, of course; the family honra was after all the highest value after God, if not on a par with Him. It was perfectly obvious that the Sánchez Cepedas were hidalgos, there could be no doubt about it, so the watchword must have been, walk tall and let tongues wag. Beatriz de Ahumada, a cristiana vieja by birth and proud of her lineage, would not have commented further, nor would the Sánchez de Cepeda brothers.

In fact Teresa was kept in the dark about the whole business, especially at the time. Her paternal grandfather, Juan de Toledo, was a converso merchant who dealt in silk and wool before moving into finance, where he handled taxes and tributes for a considerably juicier profit than before. In 1485 he fell foul of the Inquisition. In “reconciliation,” and to avoid the stake, he had voluntarily presented himself on June 22 before the inquisitors of Toledo, confessing to “several instances of serious crimes and offences of heresy and apostasy against the Holy Catholic Faith.” Juan was a Marrano, a “dirty pig” in popular parlance. The Marranos made a public show of Catholicism, and practiced the old Mosaic religion secretly at home. The monarchy decided that such people threatened a social cohesion founded on unity of faith and must be persecuted or eradicated. Between 1486 and 1500, the drive to flush out clandestine Jewry led to thousands of death sentences being passed down by the courts in Toledo.

Juan de Toledo escaped this fate. The merchant turned financier was treated with indulgence: he was nonetheless sentenced to do penance for seven consecutive Fridays through the city’s churches, clad in the tunic of shame — the dreaded sambenito that denoted conversos and recidivists. Goya, still appalled at this persecution in the nineteenth century, sketched in his Album a group of convicts wearing the sambenito under a coroza, or conical hat. His caption reads: “Por ser del linaje de judíos,” for being of Jewish descent.¹⁴

However “lenient” the punishment, it was symbolically devastating. Juan de Toledo’s family had been stripped of its honra, and the disgrace was to weigh heavily on future generations. Juan had the good sense to leave Toledo and ignominy behind, settling in Avila around 1493. The sign above the shop now announced a new name, “Juan Sánchez.” He prospered again, enough to buy a fake certificate of hidalguía that related him to a knight of Alfonso XI and exempted him from taxes, sequestrations, prison, debt, and torture. Had Teresa heard talk of this false certificate when she lamented her skill at “dissembling”? Juan Sánchez’s sons took the name “de Cepeda” from their mother, who was of the petty nobility and a genuine cristiana vieja. They dropped the patronym Sánchez altogether when their father passed away in 1543. The statute of limpieza de sangre or “purity of blood,” discriminating against both Jews and Muslims, was promulgated in 1547. Had they seen it coming? After the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, it was safer to be discreet.

At the hearing for nonpayment of taxes, held at the court of the first instance, the prosecution charged that the Cepeda brothers were not hidalgos but common taxpayers, or pecheros. The case was referred to the Ministry of Justice tribunal for disputes of hidalguía at Valladolid.

A procession of witnesses came to the stand. One of them brought up the disgrace of Juan’s sambenito in Toledo: duly recorded, but irrelevant, for his conversion was sincere, and besides, he had married that unimpeachable Old Christian, Inés de Cepeda. All the rest testified that ever since they arrived in Avila, the Sánchez family had lived like hidalgos: it was common knowledge. They owned warhorses and weapons and were prepared to serve in the king’s armies. Don Alonso had already proved himself…When at last the ruling came down it was favorable, and the Sánchez de Cepedas were publicly recognized as hidalgos, that is, members of the tax-exempted class. This status, duly inscribed at the close of proceedings, had the binding authority of res judicata. It could never be challenged, and the family honra was restored. But could a “trial” like that, a “secret” like that, ever be erased?

Ten years later, in 1559, the persecution turned brutal. In the wake of the discovery of pockets of Lutheranism, the Inquisition held two autos-da-fé, in Valladolid and in Seville, where thirty and twenty-four heretics, respectively, were burned at the stake. Lutherans, alumbrados, dejados, disciples of Erasmus, and nonjuring clerics were all thrown into the same bag, along with some prominent aristocrats; the penitents were paraded in the green and yellow sambenito Teresa’s grandfather had worn, plus miters decorated with devils and hellfire. The Carmelite nun, then embarking on her most prolific period of writings and foundations, would surely have been reminded of the court case endured by her family. If so, she never said a word.

Teresa the writer associates “these miserable little rules of etiquette [points of honor: estos negros puntos de honra],” “this miserable honor”¹⁵ with the “merit” of a self given to overestimating itself, with the “calculation” of an ego which today we might call inflated, with upward social mobility (“it is a point of honor that [one] must ascend and not descend”),¹⁶ with fear of public opinion or criticism from others, and with degrees of “rank” supposedly based on “laws.” Against this she sets what real “honor consists in”: attachment to God on the Cross unmarred by subjective or social criteria, nothing but an empty-handed alliance whereby I seek myself in You. “Help us understand, my God, that we do not know ourselves and that we come to you with empty hands; and pardon us through Your mercy.”¹⁷ Echoes of Saint John’s Gospel: “and another shall gird thee” (21:18).

To me, this stringent quest for “what honor consists in” is the effect of an equally violent loss of the other, false honra, the “miserable” kind that was alleged to be lacking from the converso lineage named Sánchez, then Sánchez de Cepeda, and on down to the Cepeda y Ahumadas. In sixteenth-century Spain, the word honra meant something quite specific: families and individuals lived in fear of being stripped of that honor should it ever transpire that one of their ancestors belonged to the accursed race. The purity of blood statutes, though promulgated by religious and social bodies and not as strong as Crown legislation, still left your honor at the mercy of anyone who could produce evidence of your Jewish ancestry. Of course, you were free to preserve your honor by dishonorable means — such as bribing other witnesses who would swear to the contrary. Until 1524, the Inquisition was only interested in rooting out crypto-Jews; only afterward did it extend its remit to pursue all sorts of heretics, from Lutherans to Erasmists and Illuminati.

Your writings, Teresa, are silent on the subject of your ancestors’ conversion and their stealthy Judaism or Erasmism; we find nothing about the court cases that stained the family honor. You never conceded that the dread of disrepute that haunted your family was less a feature of the old feudal aristocracy (indeed, Spanish nobles and royals thought nothing of frequenting Jews and converts) than an effect of the egalitarian sentiments of an Old Christian people eager to denounce the nonconformist ideas and conduct of those with “tainted blood.” You operated under caution from the Inquisition, which by 1560 suspected your own foundational labors of Illuminism. Only the obsessive harping on the word honor—honor lost, but yet desired — shows up, like a scar, the pain that racked you for so long, Teresa, my love, the pain of being on both sides at once: being the wound as much as the knife. Judged and judging. Harder on yourself than all the suspicions of the purifiers, bloodier inside than the wound inflicted on your kin by the trial. “The fear of losing my honor was stronger in me,” you say of the confused fourteen-year-old that you were.¹⁸

When I read the word honra, I decode as follows: here lies the accusation of marranismo. The cult of honor worked together with your upbringing to instill that fierce moral sense, that perpetual surveillance of oneself, of others, and of others in oneself. And you, Teresa, took advantage of this to transcend yourself. To escape from your origins but also from the society of those who would denigrate and persecute them. To the point of defying their world, the world, exiling yourself beyond “all things,” which are but “nothingness.” And finally — like a last flourish of honor that abolishes honor — by defying the Beyond itself, locating it inside you, where the Other resides. Is this a display of perfect humility, or of boundless audacity?

The fear of losing my honor was stronger in me. This sense of honor gave me the strength not to completely lose my reputation.…Would that I had had the fortitude not to do anything against the honor of God just as my natural bent gave me fortitude not to lose anything of what I thought belonged to the honor of the world.…

I was extreme in my vain desire for my reputation…I only had the fear of losing my reputation, and such fear brought me torment in everything I did. With the thought that my deeds would not be known, I dared to do many things truly against my honor and against God.¹⁹

Bizarrely then, but necessarily, the name of a great Hebrew expert, the scholar-saint Jerome, became associated with the quest for honor: as though to indicate that what was commonly judged dishonorable might become the very fount of honor, differently defined. The revision of tradition undertaken by the Erasmists (including Uncle Pedro, it seems), which led them to the rediscovery of Judaism, was a fillip for the supreme, unimpeachable honor constituted by the monastic life, or “taking the habit.” “Reading the Letters of Saint Jerome so encouraged me that I decided to tell my father about my decision to take the habit, for I was so persistent in points of honor that I don’t think I would have turned back for anything once I had told him.”²⁰

That confounded quest for honor! “Let any person who wants to advance and yet feels concerned about some point of honor believe me and strive to overcome this attachment”;²¹ “God deliver us from persons who are concerned about honor while trying to serve Him. Consider it an evil gain, and, as I said, honor is itself lost by desiring it, especially in matters of rank. For there is no toxin in the world that kills perfection as do these things.”²² That quest will now be replaced by self-exile in the Other, whom ultimately you will tuck deep inside your being. Does greater honor come with greater bliss? The interior castle in lieu and place of the hoarding of honor: a protected intimacy yet not a withdrawn one, an inwardness coiled in the Other, an impregnable space conquered and held in full view. Is this the revenge of those whose honor was impugned?

While staying with Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda at Hortigosa, Teresa was not sure of the path, but dimly felt her future taking shape. Did she have a notion that her father Alonso’s fortunes would dwindle steadily over the years, as if to disavow his own father, the canny merchant Juan Sánchez — that father who always came out on top no matter what and shamed his son? Did she foresee that don Alonso would cling to the hidalgo lifestyle at all costs, neglecting his store, his trade, his taxes, all unworthy of the coveted status that had finally been legitimized — but lacking the land and property supposed to bring in income for men of that rank; and all this para sustentar la honra, for the sake of keeping his good name? Uncle Pedro would snub the old Marrano patriarch in his own way, by devoting himself to the Christian faith as a Hieronymite monk, no less, this being an order that welcomed converts, even if they were known to perform Jewish rituals. Among all the Old Christians of Teresa’s acquaintance, she could not think of any more devout than this relative with his elegant synthesis of Saint Jerome and Jorge Manrique. Apart from her mother, of course; but she was a woman, an excellent custodian of honor in the admirable, terrible, female way: by the commitment of her womb and the illness that killed her. Teresa herself had the loathing of honra that we’ve seen, and the future nun would always make fun of those who spend their time “pretending” so as to hang on to it, instead of seeking another life, a loving life, a divine life, a life of divine love, a life divine with love, it’s all one.

But is it possible? At this moment, reading Saint Jerome aloud to her learned uncle, Teresa’s mind is made up. Here and now, beside don Pedro, with don Pedro, she has taken the habit already: she has entered the cloister, or claustro. In Spanish the womb is sometimes called claustro materno. Don Pedro has reconciled, for her, the monastic claustro with the maternal one.

Teresa was now ready to cloister herself in the maternal hollow, settle into the infantilism of faith, sink into the dream of dreams: the dream of love. Thanks to Uncle Pedro, or is it to Saint Jerome, reading would replace the weary alternation of pleasures and lonely regrets. “Audi, Filia…” (Ps. 45:10). She would not forget those words. As though the God-fearing scholar were authorizing her separation from the mother, that bond of love entwined with hate, and launching her search for sublimation — a paternal one, true, but as spiritual as it was sensual. Audi is Shema in Hebrew. Hearken to Israel and to Jesus, my daughter! They came together in Uncle Pedro. Did she know it? She could feel it. “Hearken, O my daughter, so shall the king greatly desire thy beauty; for he is thy Lord…” “All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad.” She closed the Poem for the Wedding of the King, no longer crying, smiling broadly.

It wouldn’t be easy. The tormented wanderer kept a strict eye on her wanderings: How was she to follow the path shown by don Pedro without betraying don Alonso? Because that’s what it would mean: leaving home, leaving her younger siblings Agustín and Juana, to whom she had been like a mother, and renouncing “dangerous opportunities” and worldly “vices” from then on. Yes, vices: whether pious rhetoric or considered judgment, that’s how Teresa defined her youthful longings in The Book of Her Life! Nor would she cave in any longer to her father’s blandishments. She would “dissemble” once again, she’d try to bargain. Anything to secure the assent of a patriarch who didn’t want to let his daughter go…

Until entering the Carmelite order, Teresa attracted quite some attention in Avila. Nobody would have predicted the nunnery for this fashionable young woman, gliding from one reception to the next, attending the festivities for the Empress Isabella in 1531, then those for Charles V when he stops over at the Dominican monastery in the spring of 1534. Both María de Briceño, her old schoolmistress, and Juana Suárez, happily ensconced in the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation, urge her on at every opportunity. Is don Alonso holding her back, or is it her own weakness? It takes guts to announce the resolve to withdraw from the world to a father who used to impose godly reading lists upon the whole family (has he forgotten?), but has let himself go since the death of his wife, so that the business goes to rack and ruin and the family falls into penury, while still he refuses to give an inch.

Teresa knows she can’t renege on her decision. “I was so persistent in points of honor that I don’t think I would have turned back for anything once I had told him.” But it’s no good, his response is inflexible: “When I’m gone, you may do as you please. But not before.”

She wonders whether her father has a genuine faith in God. Does he even believe that she does? A joust: point of honor against point of honor, daughter’s honor against father’s honor! Fortified by the loyalty of her Uncle Pedro, María de Briceño, and Juana Suárez, confident of the support of her father’s confessor, Fr. Vicente Barrón, Teresa stands her ground throughout the mortal struggle with her beloved father. Two years later she persuades her brother Juan (he is thirteen, she is twenty) to join the Dominicans the same day as she became a Carmelite. They will run away together, para siempre, like she did with Rodrigo to the land of the Moors…

A fresh, clear morning in October 1535. Avila is still asleep. A few shopkeepers setting out their wares; a few maidservants selecting fruit and vegetables. The plazuela Santo Domingo is almost deserted. Nobody notices the two young people. The breeze that cooled the summer air now seems a cold herald of fall. Teresa’s legs are numb; she strides through the hilly streets of the fortified town, under the Carmel Gate and north, toward the Convent of the Incarnation.…

When I left my father’s house I felt that separation so keenly that the feeling will not be greater, I think, when I die. For it seemed that every bone in my body was being sundered. Since there was no love of God to take away my love for my father and relatives, everything so constrained me [I was doing all this with such violence to myself: era todo haciéndome una fuerza tan grande].²³

How could I not bring this moment of weakness to bear on my profane reading of your way of perfection, my vagabond Teresa? Being at home with Father pushed you toward worldly pleasures, despite or because of his efforts to protect you from your own wayward impulses and infatuations, so as to keep you immaculate, all to himself and for a better future. That much is clear. Uncle Pedro came to the rescue, being at once a Marrano and a cristiano viejo, a sensual father and a spiritual uplifter, a man of the flesh and a connoisseur of perfection, representing the flawed, fallen world as well as the innocent world associated with Mother and the Beyond. You would no longer be the prodigal child who had suffered in “strange houses”—but did you feel like a stranger in your own land, Teresa, my love? And what about this swine-feed you refuse to eat, as you say forty years later in the “Second Dwelling Places”? Is this an allusion to Luke 15:16, where the prodigal son is denied even the “husks that the swine did eat”—or an unexpected reminder of the dietary prohibitions secretly observed by the Marranos? Perhaps “taking the habit,” the vocation that was being decided, was your intuitive, unconscious choice of a double allegiance, Jewish and Christian, whose unlikely and inimitable alchemy would be primed by your own mystical plunge into their depths.

You don’t actually say so, but the book of your Life hints that at the moment of decision, you were already at the bottom of yourself, outside yourself: you thought of nothing but the Other-world as suggested to you by that fatherly, motherly Pedro de Cepeda. Or more exactly, you suddenly saw the possibility of reconciling that Other-world with your father’s will: “For in this final decision I was determined to go where I thought I could serve God more or where my father desired,” as you put it so prettily three decades later. You elected to break with the father in the name of the Father, to leave Alonso in order to read Saint Jerome with Pedro, or ultimately to read by yourself. To overcome, to transcend yourself so as to content the ideals of men and women over and above their earthly needs. You hoist yourself up to Alonso’s superego, whose injunctions (to be a proper Catholic) he could not himself follow, then you espouse the ambiguities and metamorphoses of a Pedro who hardly suspected them (being an erudite, a humanist, attracted by Francisco de Osuna), and thus you will merit the love of the Lord whom your mother (a cristiana vieja) has gone to join. Your decision to be cloistered is at once a bid to unite the mother’s uterus (claustro materno) with the father’s ideals, and a total, hyperbolic, consummation of your Jewish ancestor’s conversion. By reuniting you with both parents, your adoption of the veil also reunites, in a paroxystic destiny, the Old and New Testaments.

Your kid brother Juan was stopped in time. He didn’t become a Dominican; Alonso dissuaded him.

Witnesses say that at the end, feeling death’s approach, you proclaimed firmly and proudly: “Lord, I am a daughter of the Church.” These words, unremarkable from a nun, have more traction when coming from you. Were there doubters to convince, even now? You are not the product of your origins, neither the Marrano nor the Old Christian strand. You constructed yourself with and against the Church, while keeping faith with your idea of its perfection, and that idea could only come to fruition by reforming the Carmelite order in a way that accented the intimacy of contemplation and the visionary approach to theopathy, or “undergoing God.” Because, in Hortigosa, at that crossroads of ascendancies and influences where the decisive days with Uncle Pedro had placed you, you realized that your terrible, your ravishing singularity could only blossom in that tradition, that institution: the Catholic, Roman, and Apostolic Church integrated by the New Christians. The fortuitousness of biography met the weight of history. Perhaps, too, it was an existential choice — one worthy of consideration, even today?

Neither tepid ecumenism, nor the domination of one group by another, your inner experience — at the heart of the Catholic Church — would enable you to translate your highly personal appropriation of both the secretive reserve of Marrano life and the feverish affects of the alumbrados. It enabled you to yoke a passionate monotheism, at odds with established institutions, to emergent rationalism and pragmatic humanism, by way of an unprecedented analysis of the amorous sentiment that lies at the root of our bonds with others and constitutes the secret of faith. Always faithful and yet unfaithful to the canon and to dogma, you were set to embark on a personal adventure that meant far more than a novation in the Catholic tradition. For while the sainthood bestowed on you did much to safeguard and lionize your oeuvre in the eyes of Catholics, the polyphony of your writing demands to be interpreted today as a universal legacy. You never pay the least tribute to your tacit Jewish background, but you don’t deny it either, while you express stout opposition to the exclusions prescribed by the concern for limpieza de sangre. Likewise you don’t espouse the dogmas of Catholic institutionality so much as humbly observe them, the better to get around them, with mischievous brio. Your inside-outside position, which proves to be one of irreducible vigilance, in other words, of a singular writing, is surely the best riposte to “the clash of religions.” This is not to hail it as a route map for the inevitably contentious communities of the future. It’s merely an invitation to experience, which is a boundless utopia.

Such considerations are far from your mind as you leave home, and yet your resolve appears to be unshakable. Nobody would suspect the battle being waged inside you and with your loved ones. Nobody but you, plus curious onlookers like myself, Sylvia Leclercq, who reads you almost five centuries later, intent on reconstructing your wanderings by way of your writings.

It took a year for don Alonso’s wrath to subside. On October 31, 1536, he undertook before a notary public to endow his favorite daughter with a supply of best-quality habits — nothing less would do — and religious books. He also would furnish her with bedding, and gift the Incarnation convent with twenty-five fanegas of grain per year, half wheat and half barley, or failing that, 200 gold ducats. On her side, Teresa gave up all rights to an inheritance.

She took the habit on November 2, 1536: All Souls, the Day of the Dead. She was in floods of tears, but we know how easily she welled up, like Saint Ignatius Loyola, whom she hadn’t yet encountered. The new novice was named Teresa de Ahumada, using her mother’s patronym. “I suffered greatly at first, and later came to enjoy it.”

The eternal issue of honor and pride kept her going to the point of pain, a pleasurable pain. Everything she did was “enveloped in a thousand miseries,” but wasn’t it all about being worthy of the Other? She liked to serve with trifling things, for the sake of it, like a “grain of sand” not yet lifted up by the waters of grace.

I didn’t know how to sing well. I was so worried when I hadn’t studied what they had entrusted to me (not because I wanted to avoid committing a fault before the Lord, since being bothered about that would have been virtuous, but because of the many that were listening to me), that just out of a sheer cult of honor I was so disturbed that I said much less than I knew.…I felt this very much in the beginning, but afterward I enjoyed it. [And so] I recited much better, and in the effort to get rid of the accursed honor, I came to know how to do what I considered an honor, which, incidentally, each one understands in his own way.²⁴

Meanwhile, miracles were being performed by a fellow sister of the Incarnation: the candles this fortunate one lit to the Virgin were not consumed. Could it be a sign from God? Another, though wealthier than Teresa, slept in the paupers’ dormitory. Ahumada felt very humble compared to them: but once she had left her cell, in 1543, she would not give up her two superposed rooms, an “oratory” and a chamber, where she received her numerous nieces and cousins while slapping her flesh with nettles!

One day, poor thing, you actually crawled on all fours into the refectory with a mule’s packsaddle full of stones on your back and a halter around your neck, led by a sister, like a beast of burden. What wouldn’t one do to humble oneself, to be worthy of Jesus’s Passion! After professing full vows, it was not until 1562 that you took the name Teresa de Jesús. A heavy patronym indeed. Jesus’s daughter, and also his spouse? At any rate, a fine promise of tortures and raptures, as we will see.

Your agonized, lacerated soul began to pass its malaise, again, to the body. Again you fell sick, more seriously than before: the time had come to mortify yourself to the point of bliss, of jouissance unto death.

Chapter 9. HER LOVESICKNESS

It began with a terror that literally broke you. You knew your health must suffer from this complete change of lifestyle, you remember losing your appetite. You were still a young woman who loved clothes and good food, but you went without. You threw yourself with gusto into all of the convent rituals. The practice of devotion brought contentment to replace the inner aridity of the unloved being you were, or thought you were. It opened you up to another life, the higher life of the true Christian, a full life much beyond what laypersons took to be plenitude — for as we know, their all, to you, was nothing. But with tenderness came fear; furtive rewards, dread of never being up to scratch. Courage and tears, tears and blood; your body became broken by pain.

You were brokenness itself, reduced to being nothing but the fault line that split you in two. Your heart pains (mal de corazón) grew worse, you kept passing out, and these fainting spells grew more frequent day by day.

By the fall of 1538, after three years of nunnery life with the Carmelites at the Convent of the Incarnation, you were in a pitiful state. The Mitigated Rule, which did not prescribe enclosure, left the door open to various sorts of “company” and, as a result, the life of the convent seculars blew hot and cold on impressionable souls. This could only aggravate your plight, torn as you were between the appetites of your thwarted body and the obedience demanded by a full life. The laxness of the calced order — preaching purity but inciting to the contrary, praying to God by day and smuggling the devil into the parlor by night — put you through months of excruciating pain.

The remedy? A stay with your half-sister María de Cepeda in the hamlet of Castellanos, the winter of 1538. You were carried there in a litter, and on the way you once more made a halt at Uncle Pedro’s, in Hortigosa.

It was probably he, and not your less persuasive mother, who taught you that “if one proceeds with detachment for God alone, there is no reason to fear that the effort will turn out badly.”¹ Artfully he centered you on the weakness that was rapture, the agony that was a choice. Having helped you to take the decision to join the Carmelites (though doubtless unaware of the part he played that day, when he made you read Saint Jerome), Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda was once more to be your guide. He gave you a book to keep: The Third Spiritual Alphabet, by the Franciscan friar Francisco de Osuna. This text taught you prayer and recollection, unleashing floods of tears, of course, and would remain a spiritual authority for you. For twenty years you practiced mental prayer in solitude, using the Alphabet and other “good books,” as you were an insatiable reader. It was a long time before any confessor was able to understand you, leaving Osuna’s work as your sole trustworthy compass: you read him against the Nothingness of the world.

Don Alonso was always there for you, too — but increasingly in the background, because you were trying to detach yourself, as you saw it: another cruel decision, but a firm one. Nobody would be allowed to question your will, you didn’t need company, you didn’t need a father or any man, you had made that crystal clear already. You weren’t even interested in making friends within the convent. Some sisters were offended by this aloofness, and registered complaints. But all you needed was the Spiritual Alphabet, your prayer book, your one, irreplaceable, and constant companion. Whenever you were without it, your soul “was thrown into confusion and [your] thoughts ran wild.”²

Naturally, I got hold of the famous Alphabet. It taught you the “art of love” as an exercise in yielding to the darkness of the sensible soul, which, unmoored from language and knowledge, and only on that extreme condition, may have a chance of fusing with the divine. Osuna’s “mental prayer,” as opposed to the vocal version prized by the Church, helped you to annihilate yourself, escape from yourself, cease at last to be an I or a she. You gave yourself up utterly to that new prayer in which personal pronouns and all forms of naming lose their outlines and surrender to the flux of affect: water of perceptions, oil of desires, tidal wave of feelings. Can this still be called prayer? Osuna writes: “This exercise is known as profundity with respect to the depth and darkness of the devotion, for it originates in the depths of man’s heart, which are dark because human understanding has been deprived of light. Seeing the heart plunged into shadows, the spirit of God comes over the heart on the waters of desire to proclaim his divine light.”³

To the understanding cherished by scholastics, Osuna opposes pure apprehension — not an all-engulfing affect, but an intelligence he calls immediate, a pure seeing “without looking,” granted to the person in prayer who succeeds in identifying with the object of love, the object of faith. His injunction is not “to quiet the intelligence but the understanding. According to Richard [of Saint Victor], the comprehension of invisible things belongs to pure intelligence; the intelligence is said to be pure when the understanding is fixed on a supreme truth without the intervention of the imagination.”

The shift from judgmental reason to the capture by immediate intelligence of every object as if it were an object of love was a thrilling game, at first, to our chess player: What could be more exciting for the mind? Very soon, however, these slippages began to chafe the inner wound: once more loneliness, weeping, nothingness of all things. Very soon Teresa let herself sink, abandoned herself. Did she pray with Osuna in the way that others sleep? She seems to have sought God as one seeks the comforts of sleep and was overcome with desire to nurse at the mother’s breast, to suckle in the arms of the beloved — no: of the Beloved, the supreme Being who combines the attributes of both parents. Her copy of the Spiritual Alphabet can be seen at the Carmel of Saint Joseph. It bears the marks of numberless perusals, revealing a particular liking for this passage:

Be especially careful of the time after matins, for that sleep is more for the soul than for the body, and never go to bed sleepy, but wide awake in desire for the Lord. Emulating the bride, look for God by night in your bed.…

Blessed are those who pray for a long time before sleeping and on waking up immediately begin to pray again, for they emulate Elias in eating a little, then sleeping, eating a little more, then sleeping again, and in this way they pass their time reclining, as it were, on the Lord’s breast after their meal, as children rest against their mother’s breast where they sleep after having sucked, wake up, nurse again, and then fall back to sleep. In this manner they spend the time for sleeping in these glorious intervals so that the time is more for prayer than for sleep because their primary intention was to pray. And they use the majority of time others spend for sleep in prayer, and even during sleep they realize as soon as they awake that the soul slept in the arms of their beloved.⁴

Who invented dreams as the royal road to childhood memory, archaic, loving memory? Was it Teresa of Avila, Francisco de Osuna, or Sigmund Freud? Taking over from Pedro de Cepeda, the Franciscan friar introduced the Carmelite nun to a Godhead who could be tasted and suckled, whom she could look for by night in her bed, or after matins, when she wasn’t sleepy. She ached all over with desire for love, hunger to be loved and to cuddle up like a child, like a bride, to dream…

Osuna leads Teresa to that white-hot spot where the “frivolous pleasures” that torment her intersect with the “thought of God” that reassures her: “For more than eighteen of the twenty-eight years since I began prayer, I suffered this battle and conflict between friendship with God and friendship with the world.”⁵ Indeed, when she was young, “as the sins increased I began to lose joy in virtuous things and my taste for them.”⁶ But her new spiritual master does not choose between the lusts of the body and the soarings of the soul, and neither does she. What his teaching achieves instead is to positively deepen the fault line the young novice had hoped to conceal in the convent. It immerses her in the unthinkable, and by instituting a prayer stripped of speech, it impells her to the prayer of abandonment (dejamiento) practiced by the alumbrados or Illuminati. What’s more, this spirituality makes room for visions and supernatural revelations. After all, wasn’t the Alphabet dedicated to the duke of Escalona, one of the foremost protectors of the alumbrados of Castile?

In contrast to the moralistic repression advocated by conventional religious instruction, the spiritual guidance of the illuminated Alphabet produces an effect of sustained, impassioned excitement that devastates the young nun, much like the first charged moments along the psychoanalytic journey. Lacking the interpretations of a therapist, not yet ready to trust in her own self-analytical lucidity, supervised by a string of confessors, Teresa settles into her crisis with Osuna’s encouragement and blessing. She surrenders unreservedly to the amorous delights suggested by the Franciscan: “It seemed to me…that by having books and the opportunity for solitude there could have been no danger capable of drawing me away from so much good.”⁷

But for the time being, after your stay in Castellanos and three months in Becedas with a healer who just made matters worse, these spiritual joys were helpless to check the advance of the mysterious illness that kept you bedridden for three years. The heart trouble you complained of since the start of your novitiate grew more acute: “Sometimes it seemed that sharp teeth were biting into me, so much so that it was feared I had rabies.”⁸

No, not rabies but extreme disgust afflicted you. You couldn’t swallow anything but liquids. Anorexic, burning with fever, this “inner fire,” as you called it — condensing into a single interiority both organic spasms and anguished thoughts — was so violent that it inflamed your nerves, clenched your body, stabbed it with unendurable pain day and night, while a deep and unshakable sadness also chilled it through and through. Perhaps you were tubercular?

“Pain of the nerves is unbearable, as doctors affirm, and since my nerves were all shrunken, certainly it was a bitter torment. How many merits could I have gained, were it not for my own fault! [y como todos se encogían, cierto — si yo no lo hubiera por mi culpa perdido — era recio tormento.]”⁹—as you recall years later in The Book of Her Life, with that scientific-poetic knack for rhythmic concision.

Did Alonso, the loving father, on seeing Teresa brought back to him by the nuns, detect an element of play-acting in her plight? An exaggerated hankering to join the divine Spouse? Doctor Charcot would have called this “hysteria.”¹⁰ Be that as it may, the father wouldn’t let her go to Confession, as she often liked to do. Too often.

“I will not let her have her way!” declares Alonso de Cepeda.

“Oh, the excessive love of flesh and blood!” responds the nun. (But to what love does she refer? Hers? Or His?) “How you have harmed me!”

That same night, Teresa “mounted” an almighty paroxysm that made her pass out.

Day of the Assumption, 1539. Your hands and feet are twisting in pain, there is no respite in Hell. Is it that you long too much for death? You lie in a coma for four days.

At this time they gave me the sacrament of the anointing of the sick, and from hour to hour and moment to moment they thought I was going to die; they did nothing but recite the Creed to me, as if I were able to understand them. At times they were so certain I was dead that afterward I even found the wax on my eyes.¹¹

Like most psychiatrists, not to say psychoanalysts, Charcot steered well clear of female saints, hastily dismissing them as “undeniable hysterics.” He didn’t leave any considered opinion with regard to your case.¹² However, we do have the diagnosis emitted by a Spaniard, Esteban García-Albea, who defines Teresa as an “illustrious epileptic.”¹³ More recently, in 2000, the French epileptologist Dr. Pierre Vercelletto contended that the saint’s later raptures amounted to “ecstatic crises” typical of “temporal epilepsy.”¹⁴ My colleague Jérôme Tristan has nudged me in that direction already, as readers will remember.

The temporal lobe is a hugely complex node, I realize: it’s the seat of sensorial, gustatory, and olfactory functions and is also involved in mnesic processes. Neuronal discharge can induce fleeting psychomotor phenomena in that area, experienced by subjects as “auras,” almost invariably painful or unpleasant. Epileptic discharges can become generalized to trigger a convulsive crisis resulting in coma, like Teresa’s four-day period of unconsciousness in August 1539.

The scientific term aura—applied to Teresa’s raptures — simply means “breath,” in an acceptation coined by Galen during the second century with regard to a patient who perceived “an impression of cold steam.” We are forever obliged to Dr. Vercelletto for having pointed out, in his discussion of the precise value of the term aura in epileptology, that motor crises (characterized by clonic shaking, diverse paralyses of limbs or jaws, and speech difficulties — all of which Teresa reports) are linked to neuropsychological gains “specific to each person”: in Teresa’s case, her sensory, intellectual, even metaphysical peculiarities, and of course her tendency to hypergraphy! Few people are as peculiar as Teresa, Vercelletto agrees. He cautions that while her saintliness can never be reduced to her temporal lobe, this factor should not be ignored. So, which is it, epilepsy or mystical marriage?

Other neurologists or psychiatrists would make short work of spotting in the young novice the specific symptoms of a hypersensitive predisposition, prone to regressions and exaltations, with a tendency to alexithymia. And what might that be? Don’t act baffled, google it! The term denotes the incapacity of certain subjects to express emotion verbally, entailing consequences such as nausea, anorexia, and occasional instances of atypical epilepsy. All the same, while science knows more and more about this kind of brain dysfunction, as Dr. Vercelletto confirms, it is still uncertain of how a subject utilizes it in order to be free of it.

They can but think you are dead, Teresa, all except for your father, who refuses to bury you right away. He finally gives in. Your body has been laid out, the sisters have dripped funerary candle wax on your eyelids. The grave has been dug. Your younger brother Lorenzo watches over you during that last night, dozes off, the candle scorches the coverlet…you wake up.

Let’s hear Teresa herself on the subject. In the light of her account I can confirm Dr. Vercelletto’s diagnosis without hesitation: I am familiar with these symptoms, I’ve seen them before.

Such were these four days I spent in this paroxysm…my tongue, bitten to pieces; my throat unable to let even water pass down — from not having swallowed anything and from the great weakness that oppressed me; everything seeming to be disjointed; the greatest confusion in my head; all shrivelled and drawn together in a ball. The result of the torments of those four days was that I was unable to stir, not an arm or a foot, neither hand nor head, unable to move as though I were dead; only one finger on my right hand it seems I was able to move. Since there was no way of touching me, because I was so bruised that I couldn’t endure it, they moved me about in a sheet, one of the nuns at one end and another at the other.…the lack of appetite was very great.…

I was very conformed to the will of God, and I would have remained so even had He left me in this condition forever. It seems to me that all my longing to be cured was that I might remain alone in prayer as was my custom, for in the infirmary the suitable means for this was lacking. I went to confession very often.…For if this patience had not come from the hand of His Majesty, it seemed it would have been impossible to suffer so much with so great contentment.¹⁵

Don Alonso is forced to face the facts at last and to grant his daughter’s stubborn wish to attend Confession. The ensuing Communion is accompanied by copious tears. Though “the pains that remained were unsupportable,” what a relief! And it is so frightening to see “how apparently the Lord raised me from the dead, that I am almost trembling within myself.”¹⁶

Almost trembling, and almost amused, Teresa, as you describe this hysterical coma thirty years after the event. It would happen again. Maybe you were secretly giggling about it under don Alonso’s nose, he wasn’t the kind to notice, but then again…Distraught, contrite, he determined to follow his brother Pedro’s example by becoming a monk. This is what you were waiting for: the relationship had come full circle! You hastened to foist upon your father the famous “good books” he had been the first to recommend — the books to which not he, however, but Uncle Pedro had introduced you with genuine passion, and which you had already explored more deeply than either man. Naturally you insisted on The Third Spiritual Alphabet: “Since I loved my father so much, I desired for him the good I felt I got out of the practice of prayer.”¹⁷

A great good indeed! Father and daughter, praying as one, “in the manner of Osuna.” But…but you dissembled, you kept other pleasures from his knowledge: after returning to the convent in late August 1539 and spending three years virtually bedridden, you rejoined convent life around Easter 1542, crawled through the refectory on all fours, entertained plenty of visitors as a result, and led a dissipated life, at least in your own view; you were not to tell him any of this. And since he appeared to believe in your purity, whereas you were busy “deceiving people,”¹⁸ getting away with sensual worldliness and the cultivation of “friendships and attachments that the devil arranges in monasteries,”¹⁹ you agonized even more deliciously over it all! In his Vida del buscón Pablo, Quevedo has great fun with the ruses people invented for the courtship of nuns, in defiance of grilles and cloisters.²⁰ Ah, the galán de monjas or nuns’ beau, what a menace! Is he prowling nearby, perhaps? You do say that the freedoms of some sisters led them to pass messages “through holes in the walls, or at night.”²¹

A sharp sense of the indignity of such behavior made you desist from prayer altogether, and you told don Alonso of this, though omitting to explain in what way you had offended him and God at once. Your father did not condemn you, however. He believed your excuses of illness and infirmity, your symptoms worried him, and his candid acquiescence highlighted the affection between you: “My father because of his esteem and love for me believed everything I said; in fact he pitied me.”²² The piquant trials of father — daughter “negotiations” were reaching their pitch when, typically, the father suddenly caved in — I’ve seen it all before!

You entered him, he entered you. It was entirely for his benefit that you performed all that body-theater, my playful Teresa, confirming the hypothesis of a friend of mine who maintains that the hysteric’s symptoms are directed at his or her spectator, whoever it may be. Another friend holds, on the contrary, that the hysteric prefers to bodily deliver himself or herself exclusively to the beloved. Don Alonso stood at the junction of both possibilities. He was more available to you than his brother Pedro, who merely fulfilled the ferryman’s role (in my view; but what a ferryman!), and he was prepared to follow his daughter on the road to a perfection that would bring him nearer to — who? His wife, Beatriz? Or his brother, Pedro? Nearer to both, no doubt, thanks to the conquered nearness of his daughter.

You succeeded; you persuaded your father Alonso to pray as you did, in Osuna’s style, as recommended by your Uncle Pedro. Full circle, I repeat. The daughter would teach the father to pray, in other words to love, as though she were her father’s father. Such was your first triumph over…men.

And also, I might add, your first triumph over the Inquisition — the institution that humiliated your grandfather Juan Sánchez, came close to prosecuting Pedro and Alonso, and was soon to take an interest in your own case. For the moment, you rejoice at having got your father to pray: the Marrano’s descendant is by way of becoming a mystic, a much more enviable destiny than that of cristiano viejo. A most remarkable success, in fact. He has at last been “integrated,” in today’s parlance, who knows whether on the edges or in depth, for both are possible once mysticism is accepted as an interiority external to, or exteriority internal to, true faith.

In fact, big brother Rodrigo, whom you coaxed into running away with you to court decapitation by the Moors (your first bid for sainthood!), was really just a twin, a double of yourself…and a provisional substitute for Alonso, perhaps? You father was, after all, now and forever, the first man conquered and in need of conquering, giving rise to evident “paternal” replicas in the form of that improbable string of confessors and other counselors whom you resorted to every step of the way. Early on in the book of your Life, you give the game away: “I was the most loved of my father.”²³ In return you would draw your father with you, back to the prayers in which Uncle Pedro and Osuna the alumbrado taught you to search for love. To put it more precisely, thanks to Osuna, whom you discovered thanks to Pedro, you can share the pleasure with don Alonso. Your father and you, you and your father, separately and together, snuggle into that bed where it is right and possible, asleep against the Other’s breast, to quench the eternal thirst to suckle that plagues human beings at night or after matins. Let time come to a halt: you are convinced your father belongs to you and you to him, the die is cast, and the man (Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda) is dead, transformed into a (religious) father.

Am I taking things too far? Not at all. It makes sense that at the very moment you relate your victory over him, you also mention the death of this man, the first man you ever wanted: “In losing him I was losing every good and joy, and he was everything to me.”²⁴ Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda passed away in December 1543, a full eight years after you entered the Convent of the Incarnation. Eight years of upheaval and trouble to mark the start of your monastic career, eight years during which you were constantly feeling and fighting a passionate attraction to men, to that man. And yet, when remembering him in your memoir in 1560, you announce his death just after reporting his alignment with you on the religious plane. Why such haste to erase his presence? Why this anticipation of his decease? Why exclude papá from the passionate ordeals that shook your interior castle during those years, diagnosed by Dr. Vercelletto as a string of “temporal seizures” accompanied by the perception of “auras”?

You give us the answer yourself, with the breathtaking intellectual honesty that forbids you to equivocate: porque le quería mucho, because I loved him dearly. This admission escapes at the end of a passage on how you had to force yourself to keep your feelings, particularly those toward your father, in check. Your resolve to cut loose from worldly vanities entailed — among other sacrifices? — making the effort to appear insensible in his presence: “I had great determination not to show him my grief and until he would die to act as though I were well. When I saw him coming to the end of his life, it seemed my soul was being wrenched from me, for I loved him dearly.”²⁵

Can you see what I’m getting at? I suspect you, Teresa, of keeping quiet about the guilty attraction you felt for don Alonso despite — or because of — his Marrano fiscal lawsuit, his way of getting your mother pregnant ten times over until she expired at age thirty-three, his delusions of grandeur, his impossible integration, and the nonchalance with which he cultivated a hidalgo’s lifestyle without the necessary assets, leading him to fritter away your grandfather’s fortune until there wasn’t even enough for a dowry. All the same, if the paternal cause of your hysterical conflicts remained in the shadows, you had plenty to say about some other sources of extreme emotion that seem to have pitched you repeatedly into a coma.

I want to pause on just two of them, which mesh so thoroughly with the father’s sway over your early steps on the path to perfection that the spiritual battles against the devil you credit yourself for in those days appear in an indisputably erotic light.

First, the woman with the open abdomen, to whom you became so attached. The sight of her at the convent sends you outside yourself. Then — as if to escape her ill-being, or perhaps, again, to indirectly cause it — that unhappy sinner you found so appealing, the Becedas parish priest, succeeded with the same ambiguous purpose by a “person,” an assiduous visitor to the nunnery, whose company you became “extremely fond of.” What dangerous places they were, those Golden Age Spanish convents! You had excellent reasons for wanting to reform them, Teresa, my love!

She hasn’t left her cell for three days. Each morning she is racked by vomiting fits, which make her unable to ingest anything until past midday. Her limbs contract, she cannot move, she is confined to her bed by absolute exhaustion.

“I am down to my bones,” Teresa sighs to the nursing sister, who looks in on her several times a day.

She refrains from mentioning what gladness can be had from such affliction, how glad she actually feels…In the evening, before darkness falls, Osuna’s disciple makes herself throw up with the help of a goose feather, failing which she will feel considerably sicker the next day. At midnight her heart sets to thudding again, her arms and legs are twisted by waves of rheumatism, her fever soars.

What tortures her most, since the onset of this immobilizing condition, is not being able to keep watch by the bedside of the nun with the open belly. The poor woman’s calvary is always on her mind, Teresa can see her, right here in her cell, though not of course with the eyes of the body. And yet she feels her bodily, she vomits her, loves her. The wretched sister’s intestines are obstructed and have burst through the skin, a veritable sieve, and anything she eats now oozes through those holes. Like dribbling mouths all over the surface, stinking anuses puncturing her flesh. The other nuns, aghast, have retreated from the abject spectacle. Teresa alone is determined to sit by the deathbed. Too bad if her bones are wrenched by convulsions; she drags herself as best she can into the cancer-sufferer’s cell, and there she stays.

“You’re very brave, sister,” gasps a Carmelite on a whirlwind visit, holding her nose and making for the door.

“I envy her patience in dying,” Teresa replies dreamily, outside herself.

Instead of holding her nose, she begs God to grant her equal patience and send her all the afflictions He pleases. Sure enough the Lord fulfills her wish, and blesses her with the vomiting attacks she knows so well, the retching she provokes when the need arises. He sends her bone ache, exhaustion, new bouts of fainting, and an ever more infirm heart. Does He do it to torment or to ravish her?

Teresa thinks back to her mother, to all those mothers who die in childbirth: What else can a woman succumb to but her womb, the womb that’s been impaired since adolescence, smelly and bleeding, a cancer in gestation for generations? If Teresa is a woman like her mother Beatriz, she will die like her, too, of her belly. Or like the cancerous nun, herself somehow a victim of that fertilized, fertilizable putrefaction, that sickening space every woman carries around inside. But how will you escape their fate except by being, precisely, sick; rejecting that matrix that inhabits you, that tumor, that pernicious motherhood, that mother, that mortality?

Teresa’s condition worsens by the hour. The nuns have deserted the cancer patient to crowd around Teresa’s pallet.

“She’s gone!” wails the nursing sister.

A false alarm. Teresa sits up, but how tired she is!

Don Alonso, not yet initiated by his daughter into the art of prayer, decides to send her to Becedas, a village famed throughout Castile for its healer, whose attentions no ailment could withstand. The stay in Castellanos hasn’t helped, and he can think of no other way to save his favorite child. Meekly obedient for once, the young novice sets off, accompanied by her half-sister María and the affectionate, loyal Juana, to endure three months of violent purges and other outlandish remedies at the hands of the curandera. Never mind, she’s deep in Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet, the book her uncle gave her; searching for union with the Spouse, regardless.

Now, this prayer of quiet might last only the space of a Hail Mary, but from the lofty summit of her twenty-three years, when body and soul attain the state of grace, the young woman feels she has “the world at her feet.” It seems to her that the yearning for perfect love is all that can lift her above the pestiliential stuff of human flesh; the stinking cloaca of the cancer-ridden nun, the puffy, flaccid, rotten female body.

Bones, bones alone have the dignity of hardness. Teresa enjoys the sensation of a hardening soul, it’s just that the body doesn’t follow suit. Or not yet. Her body is always going soft, and only stiffens as a preamble to collapsing senseless. The Lord has granted women one hardness, the hardness of bones. And even then, women can only appreciate them if they’re thin, as a result of fasting, perhaps. One can’t really feel that except through pain. Or by throwing up, which is simply a way of provoking pain in the deepest part of one. A way of emptying the belly, wringing it out, annulling it.

At Becedas church, a young priest catches Teresa’s eye. Mental prayer is voiceless; it stokes the desire for love, but keeps it encysted inside. Teresa’s body wants to be heard, it wants to empty its love-need into the ears of a man, a man of faith, of good faith: a man of God. Let voice break free of sickly flesh and climb to the heights of perfect love! How else to escape from her aching guts, as though tied by her own hand to those of the dying nun, which the healer was helpless to pacify? On the contrary, these viscera threaten to drag her into the female hell, into death. Teresa is overpowered by a sudden certainty: in order to escape the vicious circle of doomed womanhood, she must absolutely take this young priest as her confessor. It is a shining imperative.

“Of excellent intelligence and social status…learned, although not greatly so,”²⁶ the cleric in question is defenseless against the onslaught and soon falls for his penitent. Teresa, immersed in her quest for God as a bulwark against “noxious forms of recreation” (as she called them bitterly in 1560), against “mischiefs” and “frivolous pleasures” and her own palpitating body, talks to him of nothing but the Other. Her candid inebriation naturally fires him up still more, as she can’t but notice, later explaining shrewdly: “I believe that all men must be more friendly toward women who they see are inclined toward virtue. And this is the means whereby women ought to gain more of what they are seeking from men…”²⁷

The protagonists of their amorous skirmish swap roles along the way. When he begins to have feelings, he confesses them to the young woman, who finds his bashfulness increasingly seductive. Until the day this nameless man, this anonymous protagonist, makes a clean breast of his predicament: “I’ve maintained illicit relations with a woman for the last seven years, and yet I continue to say Mass.”

Teresa pounces on the opportunity to get even closer to the unfortunate sinner. After all, remaining true to an errant friend is a virtue. Excitement mounts to fever pitch: the misdeed arouses as much desire as compassion, and the existence of a rival peps up the love potion with an acid tang of Mother, that first competitor for the father’s love.

“What’s he like, how does he live?” Thoroughly tantalized by the young priest, Teresa is becoming nosy; she grills the servants.

“Who’d have thought it, Sister!” Conchita the housekeeper, full of false prudery, does not hold out for long. “That woman has him in her clutches thanks to some charms she’s put in a little copper amulet. The poor possessed creature wears the trinket around his neck, for love, and no one has been able to get it off him.”

Teresa needs no more encouragement to turn herself into a Good Samaritan for her confessor, who is clearly under the devil’s thumb:

I used to speak with him very often about God. This must have profited him, although I rather believe that it prompted him to love me greatly. [Note that our therapist is not unaware of the deep springs of her spiritual magic: a matter of “love” and “pleasure.”] For in order to please me, he finally gave me the little idol, which I then threw in a river. Once he got rid of this, he began — like someone awakening from a deep sleep — to recall everything he had done during those years.…Finally, he stopped seeing this woman entirely…Exactly one year from the first day I met him, he died.²⁸

Here is one love affair whose terminal denouement would seem to affect only one of the partners, the hapless priest! We would be wrong to think so, because Teresa is not immune to these conflictive passions herself. Her seizures and ailments return with a vengeance, punctuated by further dangerous liaisons.

The Carmelite’s body now turns into a veritable battlefield. Her impetuous desires clash constantly with her equally violent brakes on them. She wants to belong to a man…brother Rodrigo, cousin Pedro, don Alonso, don Pedro, a visitor here, a cleric there…she wants to yield to the tenderness of María de Briceño or Juana Suárez. Nothing doing, her defenses are unbreachable, everything — such as it is — will be resisted, honor will be preserved! That’s don Alonso’s first priority, isn’t it, as well as the wish of doña Beatriz, still being beamed down from the Beyond…Carnal pleasure debases us, sex is dirty, like any other vital impulse: we must punish our lips, our skin, our loins, we must pull back ever deeper into the soul, cleansed to God’s satisfaction by edifying texts. There, in that innermost self, reconciled with the Other, all is order and purity, luxury, calm, and chastity.* [*A variation on Baudelaire’s lines in “L’Invitation au voyage”: Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté.—Trans.] Teresa tries her best to lock herself into it, sobbing, sickened. But powerful as the prohibition may be, loudly as the voice of honor growls from above, and scrupulously as the vigilant conscience complies with the diktats of propriety, still the smothered drive sends its waves coursing through every fiber of her unhappy being. Hence another seizure, and another, in full view of both the sisters and the Lord.

The spasm grips her like the messenger of some secret, shameful pleasure, vibrating under the burning spear of a horseman, a double, an extraterrestrial, an angel, a Master. It starts with a helpless shuddering, the wringing of every muscle. It ends with a coma — a melancholy rerun of that osmosis with the lifeless mother’s lifeless womb. Teresa doesn’t want to get over her mother, she doesn’t think about her at all, not any more, for mother inhabits her smarting skin, her rigid body, her frozen blood, even the quivering chassis of her bones. The only corpse is hers, Teresa’s — the daughter who will never be a fertile woman, anything but that.

Given “the nothingness of all things,” there’s nobody to love and one is neutralized: there’s no sense, no sensation. But the refusal of life still constitutes a vital protest, combating refusal itself with an explosion of destructiveness. Impeded desire mutates into an electric discharge — vomiting, stiffening, paralysis, disconnection, annihilation of the flesh and the spirit. Thus provoked, Nothingness is a resistance, the only possible resistance to the death of desire, itself desired. Or rather to the death of desire imposed, and consented to, in the name of the point of honor, which purports to lead you to the name of God.

You know your way around that point of honor so well, Teresa, my love, that you always push it a step further, eager to make it stricter and more demanding! Not content with blaming it for all your ills — epilepsies, comas, pathologies, desires and counterdesires, all umbilically linked to that merciless point of honor — you up the ante, you want more, and more! Combating the superego, that frenzied ideal, with an excess of perfection, at last you will enjoy those conflicts, always the same, which it will command for you throughout your life; they will grow milder with time and age, less a matter of honor and more simply pleasant. As the years go by you break in your Commander bit by bit, you put yourself in His place, you understand Him and He understands you better all the time. His tyranny begins to soften, to feel increasingly familiar and salutary. You will be reassured by an Other who is not stern and judgmental, but kind and fair; an Other who loves you, His cherished spouse, who prays and writes for Him alone…But we have not got there yet. Just now the point of honor is making you ill, my Teresa of anguish and pain.

The Lord comes to the soul if we make the effort and strive to give up our rights in many matters.²⁹

God deliver us from persons who are concerned about honor while trying to serve Him. Consider it an evil gain, and, as I said, honor is itself lost by desiring it, especially in matters of rank. For there is no toxin in the world that kills perfection as do these things.³⁰

In one of those portraits you like to sketch of “certain souls,” you are highly critical of “one lady” whose great defect is the fuss she makes over points of honor behind a façade of humble piety. Knowing how censorious you are of your own frailties on that score, I wonder whether the lady with the neurosis about honor might not have something in common with the author of the below lines, who is perhaps taking a swipe at herself:

I shall tell you about one lady in particular, for it is not long ago that I spoke with her in a special way. She was very fond of receiving Communion frequently…[and] experienced devotion in her prayer…She had never married, nor was she now at an age in which she could…it seemed to me that [all these virtues] were effects of a very advanced soul and of deep prayer.…

After getting to know her I began to understand that all was peaceful as long as her self-interest was not affected.…I learned that although she would suffer all the things that were said against her, she would not tolerate anything said against her reputation even in some tiny point concerning her honor or the esteem she thought was her due. She was so overcome by this misery, so eager to know everything that was said against these and so fond of her comfort that I was amazed how such a person could spend even an hour alone.³¹

With matchless aplomb, aren’t you caricaturing here your own “hysterical narcissism,” to borrow dear old Jérôme Tristan’s pet term? It’s a failing you confess to throughout your writings: the “excessive pains about cleanliness” you took when young,³² the hunger for gossip and society (“This [frivolous] relative was the one I liked to associate with”), the concern with “the honor of the world,”³³ and the “calculation” that leads some to seek out honor, not realizing that if it exists at all it is granted by others, and besides, “honor is itself lost by desiring it.”

Another anonymous suitor, identified only as “a person” who visited the monastery, “distracted” her more than anybody before him, and offered a friendship of which she was, while it lasted, “extremely fond.”³⁴ Might the mystery companion have been Francisco de Guzmán, the eligible eldest son of a wealthy, aristocratic Castilian family? Her enjoyment feeling incompatible, once again, with the exigencies of honor, Teresa derived as much pain from this friendship as fun, despite certain associates “with great importunity assuring me that it was not wrong to see such a person.” That’s all very well, but how was such a perfectionist to cope with compromise?

At this point, Teresa, you experienced — for the first time? — a kind of seeing that is not owed to bodily eyes but to those of the soul, as you recalled twenty-six years later. Caught between fright and pleasure — halfway between your excitement in the person’s presence and your shame at infringing the paternal and religious interdict — the young woman that you were abruptly “saw.” With scientific exactitude, the writer of 1562–1565 details the nature of this vision and describes the two forms it took: the semblance of Christ and a toad.

With great severity, Christ appeared before me, making me understand what He regretted about the friendship. I saw Him with the eyes of my soul more clearly than I could have with the eyes of my body. And this vision left such an impression on me that, though more than twenty-six years have gone by, it seems to me it is still present. I was left very frightened and disturbed, and didn’t want to see that person any more.³⁵

But then you doubted what you had seen, Teresa, for you were a rational woman, even if tempted by “noxious recreations.” “It did me much harm not to know that it was possible to see in other ways than with the bodily eyes.” Had it been an illusion, a chimera conjured up by the devil? “Although the feeling always remained with me that it was from God and not a fancy,” you hesitated: “I did not dare speak about this with anyone.”

Truth to tell, your early “visions” were not exclusively of the Holy Countenance. A coarser brand of “character” also featured: the toad, for example.

Once at another time, when with this same person, we saw coming toward us — and others who were there also saw it — something that looked like a large toad, moving much more quickly than toads usually do. In that part where it came from I cannot understand how there could have been a nasty little creature like that in the middle of the day, nor had there ever been one there before. The effect it had on me, it seems to me, was not without mystery; and neither did I ever forget this. Oh, the greatness of God! With how much care and pity You were warning me in every way, and how little it benefited me!³⁶

Note that the writer does not attribute the toad to a vision; she says merely that “we saw” it, “we” being the couple she formed with her visitor and the others who were there. But she has the integrity to point out that no specimen of that size had ever been sighted before and that this abject apparition was without doubt a warning from God. The toad as the obverse, the other face in some sense, of Christ’s forbidding countenance as He appeared to her earlier?

Heads or tails: divine wrath and foul toad, prohibition and sex. The first visions related to us by Teresa crystallize at the intersection of her desire for the masculine body and her shame at falling short of the inevitable “point of honor.” She will have to banish guilt and secure her right to pleasure within a new construction, of which she will be the author if not altogether the inventor, since admittedly its inspiration lies in the Gospels.

Logically, necessarily, Teresa attempted to detach herself from these sinful attractions by becoming a devotee of the chaste adoptive father of her Beloved, Saint Joseph. The first discalced convent she founded, in Avila, was named for Saint Joseph and was followed by several more with the same patron.

I took for my advocate and lord the glorious Saint Joseph and earnestly recommended myself to him.…For since bearing the title of father, being the Lord’s tutor [subtext: this father is not a progenitor], Joseph could give the Child command.…I don’t know how one can think of the Queen of Angels and about all she went through with the Infant Jesus without giving thanks to Saint Joseph for the good assistance he then provided them both with.…He being who he is brought it about that I could rise and walk and not be crippled.³⁷

“Being who he is”—an ideal father, removed from sexual commerce — allows Saint Joseph to be the missing link in the chain of don Alonso — don Pedro — Francisco de Osuna, leading to the creation of a sublimated vision of the loving father according to Teresa. He soothes the desire-ravaged body and quells its symptoms: Teresa finds she can walk again.

The cult of Saint Joseph pervades the first pages of the Life, which tell how the novice effects a rapprochement with her own father via religion, a development parallel to the process whereby her erotic temptations and reactive health crises gradually give way before the emergent vision of an optimal father figure, at once sublimated (in Saint Joseph) and sensuous (in prayer as prescribed by Osuna). At that stage of the journey, her spiritual road will be to accept that a Father exists who neither judges nor desires her but is pleased to “adopt” her as she is, in all her love-starved, dolorous interiority — so much so that He acquiesces to her womanly passion for Him, thus releasing her from infatuation with attractive “persons” and from the concomitant dread of toads. This road will be a long one, and its stages will often need to be retraveled. Just now, however, battered by the physical and erotic storm, she hasn’t yet found the path, and her “visions” will be the occasion of hellish ordeals for some time to come.

How long had death been making its slow way in you, Teresa? Since your father’s lawsuit, with its diffuse threat of obliteration, the inevitable Marrano sacrifice? You met and desired death as a child, before trying to run away to be beheaded by the Moors; your encounter was more intimate when it came to the loss of your mother, Beatriz. After that you resolved to die to the world, by cloistering yourself in the Convent of the Incarnation. Your father’s death in 1543, a passing prepared by his induction into prayer, sounded the final knell.

Other events modulated your withdrawal and your rejection of the family. María, the offspring of your father’s first marriage, and her husband Martín Guzmán de Barrientos attempted to sue the executor of don Alonso’s estate; you squabbled over rings and bracelets, even over the parental bed, in between vitriolic arguments about your parents’ respective characters. The family hearth was left deserted: Lorenzo and Jerónimo departed for the antipodes in 1540, followed by Pedro and Antonio after Alonso’s death. “I am a daughter of the Church,” you would announce on your deathbed, in a statement that is, as I have suggested, only apparently banal. I do not only read it as the ultimate assertion of your monastic condition. Not even as a “refusal of origins,” because the modern concept of “origins” was not in your habits of thought and you had no need to allay the meaninglessness of life by a wager on the “nature” or the “history” that preceded you: in your day those forces were in gestation, they had not yet supplanted “fate.”

From that fateful day at Uncle Pedro’s, which decided you to take the veil, and through the first years of your novitiate, you plowed a singular furrow of your own: both submissive and recalcitrant toward both origins and institutions. A reformer within. You needed His Majesty, the God-man proposed by Christianity. Your longing for an ideal Father found echoes in evangelical and biblical texts, and was informed by new dissident movements as much as by the teachings of the Church. You appropriated all these, just as His Majesty became yours: He was part of you, you took part in Him. The wandering continued, but in new forms, centered on the ideal Father: a Father who was ever more loving, protective, absorbed, resorbed…

Chapter 10. THE IDEAL FATHER AND THE HOST

Teresa was not averse to self-mortification; but she would not be like those nuns of old, light-headed with fasting and pain, or like the teenagers of today who puncture their skin with nails and needles for the scary thrill of the forbidden. Teresa was not the sort of hysteric who deprives herself of feeling in order to avoid the agony of eternally unsatisfied desires. She certainly knew phobic moments of frozen affect, withdrawal from the world, nausea. But these alternated with hypersensitivity, and heightened perceptions craving words, from which she managed to extract formulations as poised and accurate as they were profuse.

She sought this rendering fiction, this verbal sap, in continual dialogue with her confessors. They struggled to keep pace with her at times, they flagged, they let her down; but they were the ones who urged her to write, the better to explain herself. If the Dominican friar Pedro Ibáñez reckoned she should commit her life to paper, that’s what she would do. After a quarter century of convent life, Teresa embarked on a first draft of The Book of Her Life.

Living in the bosom of the vast Cepeda y Ahumada tribe, she sensed early on that desires, helplessly intense because reciprocated, are condemned to remain unfulfilled in the game of supply and demand. Onto this incestuous trunk was grafted the insecurity of her converso ancestry. But it was the fervor of Christ’s message that activated the magnetism of the Word upon which that attraction in turn depended. In a sixteenth-century Spanish family mixing converts with Old Christians, utterance and writing were the ultimate bonds of a communication in which ineluctably lethal passions might take refuge, find clarification, and be relieved. Teresa’s lovesickness did not stop her embracing the dogma shared by her parents: if the Word was made flesh in Christ, it continued to be made flesh, or truth, in the everyday stuff of conversations whose inescapable falsehood or contentiousness endowed them with relentless immediacy. Teresa deftly conveys early on the importance of the truthfulness that makes for intimate unions and underpins familial desire: “My father believed [me when I said: me creyó] that my illnesses were the reason for my not praying; for he did not lie, and by this time, in accord with the things I spoke of to him, I shouldn’t have lied either.”¹

It’s springtime, a season for mellow dumbness and living life for its own sake; Jérôme Tristan is courting me, in his own peculiar way. My learned colleague tirelessly documents and enlightens me as to how he, at any rate, would tackle the subject of my saint. Last night, as we were coming out of a Psychology Society meeting, he lectured me as follows:

“As you are no doubt aware, dear girl, psychiatry has a word for hysterics who are emotionally unresponsive due to their inability to interpret their own feelings: we call them alexithymics. Their perceptions are conveyed by the senses and received by centers in the brain, as usual — there’s no neurological deficiency associated with this disorder — but the perceiving subject refuses to ‘read,’ if you will, the neuronal signals, and to create the psychical representation of them which normally forms the grounding of self-awareness and is the precondition for language. Isn’t that so, Sylvia?”

Oh well, I’ll walk him to his car, parked miles away, just to stretch my legs. As we stroll along the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens I am entranced by the horse chestnut candles and the sound of bees reveling in the pleasure of a job well done. We kiss goodbye next to the Observatoire. Drunk on the notion of alexithymia I dash for home, deep in cogitation, blind to the parade of automobiles, traffic lights, and bright, bare shop windows.

By excluding the spoken word, Teresa’s mental prayer may well have fostered the development of alexithymic states and even triggered the fits that plagued her during the first years of her novitiate; and yet her culture, education, temperament, and genius conspired to rebel against this verbal anesthesia. I am impatient to put Jérôme straight, and present him with the paradox that Teresa was actually hyperlexithymic. For not only was she a virtuoso at “reading” the least shiver of feeling and perception, she also registered in body and mind the cleavage (word vs. drive, language vs. affect, the verbal vs. the carnal) first displayed outrageously, inspiringly, by Christ — whose death and resurrection unfolded in and through the Word.

“And the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14). In her groundbreaking, personal way, Teresa recognizes herself in Christ’s incarnation and resurrection and appropriates them, using them as a template and retracing their stations in her fiction. Following in Christ’s wake, from the starting point of her family history and within the critical limits of her physiology, she rediscovers willy-nilly how intrinsic to the human condition is the capacity for representation-sublimation-idealization, and how perpetually under threat. Then she takes on board, illustrating it in her own impassioned way, the biblical and evangelical intuition to the effect that humanization — understood as the ability, always in jeopardy, to make meaning — depends on the celebration of an ideal Father.

I don’t suppose Jérôme will be following me down that road.

And yet he knows that Freud traced the “construction” of that ideal Father, Father of the Law or loving Father (the model was constantly being refined by the Viennese thinker) to the “prehistoric fable” of the murder of the father by his sons, the brothers of the primal horde. Only because they have killed him can they found a society in the name of his law. The ideal Father is the recto of the verso that is the dead Father. This fable expresses an anthropological truth that is confirmed by what we hear from our patients, right, Jérôme? Broadly speaking, Freud invites us to accept that the Bible and the Gospels reveal the truth of the psychic workings of countless generations of Homo sapiens for the last hundred thousand years. To acknowledge this truth might help us, Freud thought, not perhaps to believe in the ideal Father or to delegate ourselves in Him, but to make a go of reuniting words and drives with a view to moderating the latter and speaking more truth, indefinitely speaking.

Now, could this human-specific capacity for making sense “in the name of the Father” be on the wane, not to say on the way out? My learned colleague would certainly concur with me on that. If Dr. Tristan has a fault it would be to overdo the Lacan, working back from the Seminars to that “seminal essay,” as he calls it, “‘Family Complexes in Pathology,’ from 1938, Sylvia dear, do you know it? Bang in the middle of the rise of Nazism comes a text that emphasizes the determinism of psychosis as found in the failure of fathers, and hence mothers, to stick to their roles. Do you follow my gist?” (He’s asking me?)

Either way, many contemporary scholars — philosophers, anthropologists, and psychoanalysts, not forgetting the feminists whom he finds so annoying, including Aude, his therapist wife — are currently trying to work out the constructions-deconstructions of the paternal function by following the path of “eternal recurrence” toward myths, beliefs, and mystical experiences. They are interested in the maternal function, too, but that’s a different and rather trickier story.

Teresa of Avila contributes to this research with her own experiments in faithful infidelity to the dogma of the ideal Father; her testimony enables us to measure its necessity and probe its impasses, while opening up dizzy vistas of its overcoming, of freedom. So, what is an ideal Father?

I have been following his emergence in Teresa’s autobiography, observing the way family and personal vagaries combined with the dogmas of faith. The ideal Father is one who refrains from enjoying his children (in the sexual sense of jouissance), just as he refrains from sacrificing them, in order for frustrated desire (his and theirs) to metamorphose into a capacity for imagining and thinking. This myth goes back to Isaac’s aborted sacrifice at the hands of Abraham, and culminates in Christ’s Calvary on Golgotha, abandoned by his Father, before rising from the dead to sit at His right hand in Heaven; it rests on a complex perlaboration of Father — Son desire. First, this desire must be conceived as susceptible of deferral: it must be frustrated, suspended, forbidden, and yet sustained, indeed fueled. A late flutter of the amorous imaginary attributes this original suspension of desire to the Father Himself: unlike animal progenitors, this Father is already a Subject who cares about his offspring’s future and the quality of relationships among them. Freud tracks the formation of this figure through the mutations of the “father of the primal horde,” the sexual tyrant and omnipotent killer who, once dispatched by that band of brothers, his sons, is gradually transformed into a symbolic authority that no longer threatens but protects bonds that become, by the same token, cultural bonds.

At this point of my private novel, Dr. Marianne Baruch objects that this fanciful construction, invented by the celebrated founder of my discipline and updated by me with the help of Jérôme Tristan (not that she knows the last bit, she’s jealous enough already), which I’m running past her as a distraction from the rather tiresome routine of the MPH, simply adds to the myths she’s out to demystify.

“Look, Freud tells a story that repeats the story that certain anthropologists and psychologists got out of this or that myth. These days, they don’t even agree among themselves about the dead Father. It’s what you call the ‘unconscious.’ Whatever! Except nothing like that ever comes up on my MRIs. Scientifically speaking, I’m afraid all your precious Freud discovered was the power of fiction. People tell each other fictions and it makes them feel better, period.” Marianne shoots me a commiserating glance; she doesn’t want to lose me.

She’s had to postpone her Spanish trip by a month. Hardly surprising. Director Toutbon was never going to let her waltz off just like that, on a whim, with no notice. “Where’s your sense of responsibility? What about your patients?” Poor Marianne, the one time she had something other than the office on her mind! Disgraceful! But let that go, we’ll deal with it later.

So, our house psychiatrist reckons I’ve been snared by a fantasy, Freud’s and mine. She’s not wrong.

“A fantasy? And why not? Because fantasies think, like dreams think; and their thinking — which is not the same as reasoning — uncovers emotional truths that are opaque to reason.” I’d ask her to lie on the couch and try it out, but I’d be wasting my time.

Marianne makes a face. But, pill-pusher though she is, she can’t entirely fend off what she calls “your goddam psyche-schmyche stuff,” and lets me carry on. Why, the august Doctor may even be lending an ear.

“I’d go further,” I tell her. “What if the fantasy of the ideal Father wasn’t just a story, a fiction, a fantasy as you say, but the prototype of every fantasy?”

Or maybe she isn’t listening after all, just pretending. That business about her father, now there’s a story…Will she be able to understand, being so tied into her love-hate for dear Daddy, who’d wanted a boy? Too bad, on we go. The ideal Father is the fantasy, I say, being a gendered representation that rises above sexuality: he is a “father,” and so a progenitor, but “ideal” because defined by his symbolic function. A crossroads figure that stands between desire and meaning, passion and thought. By “fantasizing” over the “ideal Father” I’ve reached the same crux, the origin of imagination and thought.

Marianne stops teasing. She’s paying attention, for once. This ideal Father who spurs us to imagine and think, is he a sublimating father, then, after having been — or while still being — a procreative one? (I wonder if my crazy notions are initiating her into psychoanalysis. Unlikely. But she’s storing them up for her trip with Haïm, for sure!) He’s a “dead” father in the fathering sense, because having “lived” by begetting, he is now forced to find himself a new purpose, to be reborn, this time in a symbolic role: that of laying down the Law, forbidding what lies outside it, making us think in our turn. So, if we need the father who defers his desires in order to speak-imagine-think, it follows that for us — speaking-imagining-thinking beings — there can be no other father but the dead Father? I pause, to give Marianne a breathing space: her convoluted backstory with Aimé-Haïm, added to my talk of ideal Fathers who are, for good measure, dead, have shaken her. She is about to say something. But her pager goes off: a resident is having a fit.

I carry on with my novel in my head — accompanied by my roommate, naturally. The paperwork can wait: Paul is on an outing, and Élise is staying with her dismal father. I’ve got time.

The price of this fantasy of the ideal Father as dead Father can only be anguish. If, before and after becoming the I of cogitation, I is a fantasizing subject, and if I fantasize the ideal and/or dead Father, this means that I am owed at once to a desire and its frustration, a begetting and a sublimation together. How am I to keep my equilibrium over this foundational imbalance, this trial, this Cross?

Christianity leads the subject into this anguish as its own special truth, it fans and embeds it. Woven into the very structure of the desire for meaning, Christianity is the paradise of neurosis, lined with hopes for its appeasement. It will be sorted out in the fullness of time, for ever and ever, amen! With neurosis aplenty for eternity and beyond, Christianity is in no hurry. Especially as it is not satisfied with perpetuating anguish: it illuminates it. A procession of apostles, saints, martyrs, and mystics have mapped the highways and byways of love unto death. In these explorations of the heavens and hells of desire, anthropologists and psychoanalysts were quick to pick up that anguish is the compulsory tribute exacted by the very activity of fantasizing, in other words the imaginary buttressed by desire. You can dispense with the fantasy of the ideal Father and/or the dead Father, you can stop fantasizing, but you will thereby be deprived of the imaginary itself: such is the gist of the message sent down by these observers of the soul’s journey toward the Other. You are left to tick over in the realm of calculating, operational thinking. You become superhuman, you start somatizing, or you sign up as a suicide bomber.

Religion as an institution coalesced around the foundational fantasy of the ideal Father, embodied in a wide variety of complex hierarchical “father figures”: shamans, wizards, high priests, gurus, monks…The Catholics were especially proficient here, leading to a highly centralized papacy with aspirations to universality. By decanting the fantasy of the ideal Father into a class of men (the clergy), Catholicism conducted the paternal function through a doubling or splitting of male sexuality, with consequences that ranged from the glorious to the appalling. On the one hand, the erotic, channeled into human procreation; on the other, an ideal, sublimated fatherhood, steeped in death to self and haloed with eternity.

In so doing the Church authorities entrusted to the “Holy Fathers,” the men of God, the task of relieving ordinary men of that impossible and yet essential “paternal function” that presided over our humanization in some remote prehistory, and whose civilizing works are the milestones of history. It did not follow, however, that this exemplary figuration of the ideal Father exempted the mass of the profane from the effort required by civilization to shoulder, willingly or otherwise, this impossible, symbolic “paternal function” at the same time as carrying out the everyday chore of biological paternity.

With regard to the female religious state, where it exists (as in Christianity), it is predicated on the same sublimated renunciations as the male, with an added prohibition against acceding to higher office, the latter reserved for the paternal function. However, although treated as secondary, “spiritual maternity” does not appear, any more than the “maternal function,” to differ in specific ways from the “spiritual paternity” of the ideal Father. In fact, nuns are expected to turn themselves into homologues of this ideal paternity. Thus Teresa can be “the most virile of monks” without forfeiting her genius for springing very feminine, very personal surprises. But she strains toward the ideal Father, and it is with Him she seeks to be conjoined.

And what has this to do with us? A lot!

The current crisis of religion, and by extension of the priesthood, affects more than just the various churches and their congregations. Over and above the differences between the faiths espoused by the world’s populations early in the third millennium, regardless of bellicosities here or internecine quarrels there, it’s the very function of the ideal Father that is in jeopardy, and this can be observed even in the “neutral religions” constituted by the legal, pedagogical, and moral codes of the advanced democracies. The crisis is most patent at the everyday level: we need look no further than the oft-lamented “absent father,” now that men neglect their ideal role of head of the family in favor of professional success or the frantic pursuit of women — when they’re not risking their lives by having gay sex, or courting jail with an online pedophilia habit.

Such perversions have always existed, but today they impair the fantasy of the ideal Father while undermining the foundations of our societies, magnified by the joint effects of biotechnological progress and social permissiveness. There are reports from every quarter of this multiple collapse of the ideal Father along with his unconscious double, the dead Father. My own position at the MPH forces me to note how, in every single case study, we invariably come up against the same fateful “collapse of the paternal function.” Not even my Teresa, I suspect, was altogether untouched by this phenomenon: the “Fathers” often strike her as inadequate to their task! Her solution was to look to her Spouse. And I presently feel great admiration to see how my wanderer relied on the One who did preserve the function of the ideal Father, by restricting Himself to the sublimated version of paternal desire.

When Jesus was born, miraculously, from a virgin womb, when He performed miracles by the sole power of His Word, when He died only to be resurrected by the intercession of the Spirit in order to sit at His Father’s right hand, what was He saying? There is but one desire that counts, the desire for the name, for the representation of meaning. The intensity of this desire can and must be such that it merges with itself by renaming and representing itself: to desire will be to name, to represent. That is enough to revive us body and soul, or I should say for us to be reborn or resurrected, since our carnal appetites are not sacrificed so much as relayed by their representations. Are they thus mastered, or empowered? Mysterium fidei, from which the Church draws its strength. Writers know this: they experience it every time a new poem or novel endows them with a new body. I can’t convey this insight to Marianne, too great a leap for her.

Reading Teresa, I perceive Christianity — particularly in its apotheosis of Catholic monastic life — as the stimulation and simultaneous thwarting of infantile desires for the father, which must be compensated by being displaced, but to where? Marianne is definitely listening now. Teresa herself would back me up here, since throughout her writings she practices her faith as a source of anguish, ordained, continually fueled, and indefinitely allayed.

The neurotic can only bear this chiasmus between desire and sublimated creativity by escaping into the symptom: the chasuble of faith hides a host of psychosomatic disorders. Is there any way out? There may be, for the mystic of either sex who strives to identify with the supposed jouissance of the ideal Father, rather than with his function; a jouissance that fantasy locates at the junction of flesh and word. Mystics intuit that the same jouissance is universally accessible if — and only if — we experience it as the desire for representation-verbalization-sublimation. They are ready to mortify their bodies with artful refinements of masochism in hopes of deadening the sexual drive and attaining the purity of the ideal Father, while unconsciously (and with experience, increasingly consciously) aware that the more they try to deaden it the more the drive flares up, and the greater is the resulting jouissance. For their torture places them at the crux where the ideal Father stands, between here and the Beyond, body and spirit, desire and meaning.

It’s true, Marianne, I promise, Teresa soon realized that mortification doesn’t still the flesh: the excess of penitence is demonic. She wound it down, though without stopping completely, and warned her sisters away from it, as well as John of the Cross; I’ll tell you about that later.

The experience reconstructed by Teresa’s works amounts to a laboratory of masochism and sadism, of which the nun herself became rapidly aware. Might the devil not have a hand in these thrilling blends of arousal and pain? The answer is found as early as The Book of Her Life. Provided one maintains the humility of the link with God, demonic delights (by which are meant sexual or worldly ones) devolve back to Him:

If the quiet is from the devil, I think an experienced soul will recognize this because it results in disturbance…And if it is a humble soul and not inquisitive or concerned about delights, even though they be spiritual, but a friend of the Cross, it will pay little attention to the consolation given by the devil.…Anything the devil gives is like himself; a total lie. When the devil sees that in this consolation the soul humbles itself (for in this experience it must have much humility, as in all matters of prayer), he will not return often, because he sees his loss.²

If we don’t give them weapons against us, do devils truly exist? Demonic desires lurk within: “How frightened these devils make us because we want to be frightened through other attachments to honors, property, and delights!..For we make them fight against us with our very own weapons, handing over to them what we need for our own defense. This is a great pity”;³ for it is considerably harder to project the light of the Spouse into the interior castle. Pain must be “delightful” when sent by God, hateful and “melancholy” when it’s the devil’s work. But how do we distinguish? God’s “favor” brings a sense of joy and repose, emanating from a “region other” than the “outside” of our being, the devil’s domain. It is furthermore girded with “determination” and impressed with certainty, poles apart from any illusory “fancies.”

You may wonder why greater security is present in this favor [the gift of “delightful pain”] than in other things. In my opinion, these are the reasons: First, the devil never gives delightful pain like this. He can give the savor and delight that seem to be spiritual, but he doesn’t have the power to join pain — and so much of it — to the spiritual quiet and delight of the soul [mas juntar pena, y tanta, con quietud y gusto del alma, no es de su facultad]. For all of his powers are on the outside, and the pains he causes are never, in my opinion, delightful or peaceful, but disturbing and contentious. Second, this delightful tempest comes from a region other than those regions of which he can be lord. Third, the favor brings wonderful benefits to the soul…

That this favor is no fancy is very clear. Although at other times the soul may strive to experience this favor, it will not be able to counterfeit one.…There’s no basis for thinking it is caused by melancholy, because melancholy does not produce or fabricate its fancies save in the imagination. This favor proceeds from the interior part of the soul.⁴

However, it is not always easy to tell the gifts of God from the tricks of the devil. Albeit divine grace appears greater, “it can be more dangerous, and therefore I shall pause a little to consider it.” For God’s word is multiform: “There are many kinds of locutions given to the soul. Some seem to come from outside oneself; others, from deep within the interior part of the soul; others, from the superior part; and some are so exterior that they come through the sense of hearing, for it seems there is a spoken word.”⁵

How patiently you dissect yourself, Teresa, my love, along the road undertaken in the name of the Father!

Marianne has administered an injection to the patient in crisis; he’s asleep now, and she’s back in my office. She settles quietly into the easy chair, lighting a cigarette, a habit she knows I hate. She just wants my company, and lets me read in peace. I look up, leave her in her anxiety, pick up my own train of thought.

“The thing is, Marianne, Teresa gets as far as saying that only God is able to link the greatest suffering with the greatest joy and restfulness of the soul! She says that that can only come from God, not from the devil, because — and I’ll try to keep this short, but it’s major, just you wait — it is restful and does one good, in other words, it’s true to the teaching of the ideal Father. I mean, you wouldn’t expect such beneficial results from the devil, would you? This splendid reasoning, along with the experience you and I have had with our residents and other patients, authorizes me, in turn, to affirm that Christian mysticism feeds on perversion.* [*Spelled in the original as père-version, father-version. — Trans.] Calm down, bear with me, I know I’m repeating myself but I want to be clear. What I mean is that Christian mysticism is hard-wired for perversion, it depends on it, colluding with the father’s arousal as well as with his frustration of the child. Hardly exclusive to mysticism, did you say? Absolutely not, that’s why I find it so interesting. So we’re on the same wavelength after all! Now, mysticism pretty well exhausts the perversion or father-version by elevating it into an entirely imaginatory-meditatory-elucidatory pleasure. The ‘way of perfection’—a perfect image in itself, isn’t it? — when it leaves the fantasy of the ideal Father behind, can lead to the borders of atheism. Meister Eckhart asked God to make him ‘free of God,’ and Teresa says ‘My Sisters, you have the power to checkmate God.’ On the way to perfection, the mystic is the custodian both of the ideal Father and of the possibility of representing the father-version. Conversely, any thought that has broken with its fantastic foundations and their prototype, the fantasy of the ideal Father as a dead Father, is devoid of imagination, right? It’s been severed from its roots in the pleasure of words and the turmoil of desire. You know what? Such a de-imaginarized thinking may be fine for managing basic needs, but useless for desire. Mysticism testifies to the strenuous efforts of our civilization to keep hold of the ability to think, even if that way lies madness. Just look at Teresa’s amazing journey from Alonso to Pedro to Osuna, right up to that fabulous ‘checkmate’! She wrote that, you know, but she cut it from the authorized version in the end.”

Marianne is dumbfounded by this avalanche of assertion, which has surprised me not a little myself. She doesn’t say anything, so I go on.

“I know what you’re thinking.” She loathes that expression but I can’t help it, I’m getting carried away. “You’re wondering, and you’re right, about the equivalent mother-version that must shadow this journey toward the Father. You think I’m keeping mum about the mother-version perversion, because there’s a problem with it? Hold your horses. The furrows of that backcountry are even more hidden, more pungent, more dangerously authoritative and also, as it happens, more cheerful.”

Marianne crushes her cigarette in the saucer of my teacup (that really annoys me), lightly kisses the top of my head, and walks out. She’s done for the day; I, on the other hand, am staying all night on call at the home. Alone at last, with Teresa!

The Host is the one thing that can soothe the Carmelite’s commotions. The thin flake of unleavened bread is bland and tasteless, without nourishment, like a film placed between tongue and appetite. It tantalizes as if to trigger famished dreams of invisible presences, stealthy caresses, a feathery touch deep inside. Teresa likes her wafers large, the better to bait her hunger, to tease and subdue it. She parts her lips with glee to feel the brittle disc dissolve on her tongue without sticking to the dome of the palate. There’s nothing plump or maternal about it, nothing that smacks of nipple. Nothing feminine or pampered, no resemblance to meat or cake or cherries. A presence of nothing. The host is a sliver on the way to being a spirit, a substance that fades away to regale you with the taste of absence…no, to make you swallow the presence of an immaterial reality made of words, images, dreams. It produces the gustatory certainty (that most intimate and singular of certainties) of the way this world of voracious bodies and coarse gobbling creatures is in contact with a different place: an invisible, frustrating world and the more exciting for it, abuzz with daydreams, thoughts, silences, nothings. A far-off world where you are free to roam, not dependent like an infant on its mother, not oppressed by the species’ need to eat. This spiritual, eternal world is also the body of a man who was crucified and came back to life. You enter it by way of a wafer, a membrane, a substance that loses all consistency in contact with your tongue.

Teresa swallows this intangible world, gulps it down and takes possession of it. The stranger is inside her now, filling her. Swallowing gives her a clearer sense of what she often confusedly feels, and the wafer now underlines this at the back of her mouth and throat and then in the pit of her stomach. A glorious antibody is housed inside her body. Could it be that one’s heart of hearts is nothing but an elusive, fugitive presence? Whether grief or overflowing joy, image or thought, unquiet company. Could this be the Word that refuses to be uttered? A tasty Word at all events, pleasure incurved, incarnate. Is she savoring the source, the unnameable wellspring of every word and fear and wish?

“Corpus Christi,” murmurs the priest as he places the wafer on her tongue. All of a sudden the cloudy intuition that I is an other, that burning frontier Teresa has always sensed without being able to put a name to it, the summit where her flesh is elevated into meaning and where meaning rejoins the flesh, acquires the flavor of a cannibalistic feast: so it’s the heavenly Father, the Savior whom she is cradling in her mouth! “Whatever you do, don’t chew.” Teresa is filled by a man’s body while holding her appetite in check. If gluttony is a vice, restraint only intensifies the pleasure in her mouth. So long, mother’s breast, adieu the cookery of women! The Host links me to the substance of the ideal Man. I absorb a splinter of his hardness, his bones, his suffering, his impregnable Calvary. Do not say “of his sex”: I reject such devilish fancies. I consume the anatomy of Absence. I eat my fill of desire for the Impossible. No more absence, no more impossibility, we are together.

As soon as the Eucharist spread through medieval Christendom, the churches began teeming with women. Were they reveling in being fed at last, those women whose life was spent in feeding others? Did the nurturers find their own nurturing mother in the Church? A replacement for the mother they had lost forever, for whom every woman pined with a lifelong nostalgia when she married, or was forced to marry, in order to reproduce; the mother nobody wanted to know about?

The Church is a good mother, Teresa subscribes to that. The Virgin, always in tandem with Saint Joseph, remained a constant patron of the convents she founded. The Lord’s male breasts spurt “streams of milk,” a fat dry white drop lands on Teresa’s tongue: at that moment the thought of doña Beatriz flashes through her mind, and her soul empties out with a curious loneliness.

But already it is not the mother who lies upon the tongue that tastes the spirit of God. What this cannibal appropriates is the gaunt, drained, translucid body of Jesus; He is the one she ingests, the one she digests, who runs through her veins and pierces every cranny of her body like a white-hot spear.⁶ That’s it: the Host frees Teresa from her mother at last. She doesn’t depend on Mama any more, she has no need of maternal sustenance; she only pines for Him. “The Lord almost always showed Himself to me as risen, also when He appeared in the Host.”⁷ A man’s body for sure, a fountain of sperm-milk, an androgynous being equipped with the bountiful breast of the Virgin Mother when the praying woman reaches the holy of holies: “for from those divine breasts…flow streams of milk bringing comfort to all the people of the castle.”⁸

In her Meditations on the Song of Songs, La Madre addresses the sisters in her recently founded institutions. She imparts to these women the oral side of the love Catholics harbor for the Lord, evoking the succulent imagery of the Song with epicurean relish. Like an anti-Eve blithely biting into the apple and every other fruit, Teresa feels licensed to enjoy them: “All the soul does is taste, without any work on the part of the faculties [aquí todo es gustar sin ningún trabajo de las potencias].”⁹ Fully cognizant of the essential orality of the union with this maternally endowed Spouse, the writer celebrates it, and moves with disarming breeziness from the pleasures of suckling to the pleasures of utterance. “Previously, the soul says, it enjoyed sustenance from His divine breasts.”¹⁰ Teresa cites the famous first verse, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” and goes on: “I confess that the passage has many meanings [interpretations: entendimientos]. But the soul…desires nothing else than to say these words [desires none of them, but only: el alma no quiere ninguno, sino decir estas palabras].”¹¹ Pleasure of sucking, pleasure of saying: where’s the difference? Isn’t it one and the same jouissance? Teresa is on the path to perfection. Unless it leads rather to…psychoanalysis?

She’s not there yet; the symbolic assumption of the praying woman implies a strong identification with virility and a denial of the genital phase that replaces the joy of rebirth through the mouth. A veritable parthenogenesis occurs in this oral and verbal self-engendering — through the Eucharist and through the word, never one without the other.

What overflowing jouissance it is for the soul to receive this communion! It makes Teresa both a breast-feeding infant and a woman penetrated by the male iron, and what’s more it makes her a man, the same as all men! La Madre dislikes any whiff of femaleness, though it might be inescapable in a convent; she would rather see her charges transcend womanhood, doing away with those bleeding or infected wombs that haunted her own life as a novice. “Nor would I want you to be like women but like strong men.¹² For if [women do what lies within: que si ellas hacen lo que es en sí], the Lord will make [them] so strong that [they] will astonish men.”¹³ By the grace of Communion, what lies within is the presence of the Lord, who espouses our entrails. Further, if we in turn are faithful to Him to the point of espousing His Calvary, He will render us so manly that men will be amazed. And why not? If the Lord created us from nothing and bore us into the world of the Spirit like a mother, why should eating His body not turn us into men like Him?

The breast of Beatriz de Ahumada is forgotten, as swiftly glimpsed as it was dispelled by the grace of the Host into the sweet taste of Christ’s masculine body. Masculine, yes, but not as other men’s bodies are, for the Son of God’s is cavernous, like a woman’s: passionately wounded, punctured, tortured, and yet resilient, eternal, immortal. Male and female both? Superhuman, resurrected.

If she could gobble every one of those wafers, destined for the eager mouths of the nuns queuing behind her, she would. But she doesn’t go that far, she aspires only to receive the very largest crumb of divine Body and admits as much to her confessor. The amiable priest always saves the largest, roundest one for her. It’s their little secret, it brings them together, although in reality Teresa only communes with the Other. What harm can there be in wanting the biggest part, insatiable as she is for Jesus? It’s merely a sign of how greatly her devotion surpasses that of the other nuns. The man of God indulges her.

Only John of the Cross, much later, manifests any objection to the arrangement. In September 1572, Teresa invites her “little Seneca” to become resident confessor at the Convent of the Incarnation. Obsessed with asceticism and self-punishment, when this perfect Father tires of punishing himself he takes it out on Teresa. He shares her zeal for the reform of the order, and yet one day, when at the communion rail he sees those sensuous lips approach, radiant with expectation, instead of rooting out the largest Host — as is customary for this insatiable female — he proffers the first he finds. Then pauses, draws back his hand, breaks the wafer in two, and places a meager half on Teresa’s tongue, keeping the other half for the nun behind.

What’s come over him? There’s no shortage of wafers, is there? John is obviously bent on reprimanding her hedonism, but the rebuke backfires: since Jesus is wholly present in each particle of what exists, how much more must He inhabit the smallest scrap of Host! This is logic enough for Teresa, in whom reason will always be greedier than taste buds. She won’t give John the satisfaction of seeing her chastised, let alone allow him to deprive her of pleasure in the tiniest flake of wafer as though it were the largest. So long as she is replenishing herself with the body of the fatherly, motherly Jesus, nothing — within the bounds of discipline and obedience — can spoil her enjoyment.

And in the privacy of her soul the Lord appears, holding out His right hand pierced by a nail: “Don’t fear, daughter, for no one will be a party to separating you from Me.” How could it be otherwise, since she has just swallowed Him! And what’s the puny nail John has tried to drive into her soul, by denying her the best Host, compared to the nail in Jesus’s palm? Nothing. No deprivation can ever hurt the Carmelite, for every hurt brings her closer to the One who endured agonies beyond imagination! Every time she takes Communion — and Teresa loves that sacrament, as her father don Alonso had noticed — the Host reconciles her with the ideal Father while allaying her disgust at the maternal-feminine taint.

The teat and its milky streams are henceforth fused with the steely tip of the nail and with the thorn of absence, disgust has mutated into ceaseless hunger, and frustrated voracity into hunger for imagination. Teresa accepts her half of the wafer as yet another token of her osmosis with His double Majesty, father and mother in one. Actually, John of the Cross has given her the opportunity to celebrate her nuptials with Jesus in fine style. The union of the lover with the Beloved is the more unbreakable for being marked by a gash, a thwarting, a lack. John knows this, of course! He cannot fail to read his friend’s feelings. With humility, more than ever filled with the Other, La Madre moves imperturbably away, leaving the great spiritual poet to reflect upon sensual Teresa’s response to the lash of his rigor. It’s not the first time their paths have crossed and diverged, nor will it be the last.

Meanwhile His Majesty soon confirms His approval of the beloved daughter, in these words: “Behold this nail: it is a sign that you will be My bride from today on.”¹⁴