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

Chapter 11. BOMBS AND RAMPARTS

July 7, 2005. Castile is baking hot. Cracked earth, stony gullies, parched shimmer of yellow air; a lunar landscape under a sun of fire. Here water is a saint’s dream, a figure of speech. Madrid lies behind us; we’re heading to Avila in a bright-red rental KA from Hertz. I twiddle the dial for the midday news, they’re talking about bombs in London: explosions in subway tunnels near Aldgate, King’s Cross, Edgware Road, and on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square. Aldgate is also one of the stations for the area where the 2012 Olympic Village will be built. Is that significant? We speculate about the number of devices, of casualties, of missing people…The Madrid bombings were just over a year ago. Thirteen bombs, ten of which exploded in three minutes in four suburban trains coming from Alcalá de Henares toward Atocha station. There were ninety-one fatalities at a scene of twisted, gutted carriages littered with the dead and injured; Aznar’s party lost the elections and the Spanish troops were pulled from Iraq. Like every tragedy that feeds the global media machine, there is little sign of it today; only in the sorrowing hearts of the victims’ loved ones. One almost expects Al Qaida cells in Madrid. But in London! What was Scotland Yard doing? Where was James Bond? Where was Tony Blair?

“We were braced for it. It wasn’t a question of if but of when.” My Mexican pal Juan preempts the BBC and other globish media platitudes. Juan lives in London, and knows all there is to know about Spain’s Golden Age. Here, his voluble campiness irks the local studs: gas station attendants, waiters, and vendors look daggers at him, and we always get served last. I pretend not to notice.

“The Piccadilly line must be hell. The tunnel’s really narrow, you know, it nearly touches the sides of the train. Like hurtling at high speed through the eye of a needle, and in rush hour! To think I was on it the day before yesterday.” Andrew’s blood drains from his skin whenever something happens. He looks like a snowman in a heat wave.

I’ve lost all sense of time with him. How long is it since we met? “Young writer from New York,” that’s how he introduced himself at the Kristeva class we both attended at Columbia. Cocktails, dinners at the Top of the Sixes, the Nirvana, the Soho — all of them gone now. Memories, memories.…But the sexual attraction persists. Andrew is the only American I know without a jot of religious sensibility. His Methodist parents hammered him so hard with the Bible that his Oedipus obliged him to make a “clean break,” as he says wryly. His ruthless retaliation is becoming more ironical with age. He’s raw and sensitive the way I like them, while being outwardly cool, sexy, and witty. Just the ticket for an occasional flutter; each of us is irrevocably alone, but every time we meet it’s like we’d never been apart.

“Our pilgrimage to your Teresa,” as dear Andrew teasingly calls it, becomes shadowed by current events. The radio keeps updating the material damage and the number of fatalities, it’s unimaginable…Other countries are shaking off their torpor. Spain’s wounds are still fresh. France gloats: of course, Paris is smarting from the failure to bag the 2012 Games. And then there are the various “European opinions” conveyed by the referendums rejecting the Lisbon Treaty. We tried to forget that “they” were still around, but “they” reminded us, and how. Who are “they,” anyway?

“A bunch of fanatics, what else? The world’s full of ’em. One was even spotted in Avila!” Andrew’s jocularity falls flat. Juan and I don’t respond, and Andrew segues sideways: “I’ve always preferred Lazarillo de Tormes to weddings with God, and at this rate history’s bearing me out.”

On the road and around the table, alone and with friends, the erotic thrust and parry between him and me takes the form of scholastic disputes. The sex of angels, Bush and Chirac, Nietzsche and Heidegger, French politicians Villepin and Sarko, Le Monde versus Le Nouvel Observateur, the tele-evangelism phenomenon, the refurbishment of MoMA, the Hispanization of the Big Apple, the relative merits of Philip Roth and Philippe Sollers — nothing escapes us, and everything makes us laugh. Before we end up in bed, we never know how the sparring will pan out. We’re even in terms of weapons, but poles apart in style. I’m notoriously dogged and consistent. Whereas Andrew, who changes his mind as often as his shirt, will suddenly start defending an idea he trashed five minutes ago, just for the novelistic fun of trying a different character. I don’t sulk or cry foul, it could wreck the game. I catch the ball in the air, run to the net, smash! Or sometimes it’s the other way around, I’m not saying that never happens. On this occasion, I let the whole thing go.

Juan is hunched over his cell phone: none of his posh friends who work in the City around Aldgate can be reached. The radio says the phone signals have been jammed to prevent the terrorists from detonating a new wave of attacks. We’re scared.

“What of? Come on, there’s no use being scared!” Andrew’s blood has flowed back, now he’s red in the face with temper. At least the London bombings will have had the effect of concentrating my on-off partner’s mind on the faith wars. So far, the Teresian landscapes we’ve seen have only impressed him with their storks! “You wait and see, soon all will be revealed: Islamic suicide bombers,” he continues in a mocking drawl. “James Bond don’t know it yet, but when he finds out, he’ll be awful scared of scaring the populace. Dear me, bombers in our bosom! All those chaps flooding in from North Africa, Pakistan, the Philippines! Or even better, homegrown, from some run-down inner city, smart enough to become engineers or teachers, Her Majesty’s socially mobile subjects.…Remember 2001, how surprised we were at the high educational levels of the pilots, mostly Saudi, who crashed into the Twin Towers? And how that didn’t stop them identifying with the losers of globalization and turning themselves into human bombs? I say! Even the most phlegmatic Brit might ask himself a few questions. One point to me! And what about the G8, keeping awfully quiet back there; just as mad for God, and unlikely to change the opponent’s way of thinking, if you see what I mean. Because there’s a hair in the soup of the rich, and that’s religion. The rich are pretty keen on religion, the fuse of the human bomb! Can you see them deconstructing it?” (Besides the Kristeva course, Andrew has attended rather too many Derrida seminars for my taste.) “Another point to me! Nope, few takers for that job.”

Even an occasional lover is loath to admit that his partner has had the same insights as him, not to say before him! The jagged peaks of the Guadarrama are bristling with wind turbines in the distance, like a hi-tech version of the windmills Don Quixote mistook for giants. I kick the ball into touch.

“The suicide bombers are the windmills, you mean, and the politicians are our Quixotes? So we’re waging war on an unfindable enemy, attacking effects instead of causes, and hitting back with futile militaristic campaigns, like the Man of the Mancha charging forth on his Rocinante, instead of undertaking the necessary social reforms? We’d do better to change the wind than sit in judgment on the windmills. If the wind keeps blowing from that direction, it’ll drive all the world’s windmills insane, it really will.”

Juan and Andrew have stopped listening. Good old Sylvia, talking through her hat again. They turn up the radio. In fact I’m getting closer to Teresa, I never left her. Her wind, her sun, her peerless energy of Love with a capital L, which draws her irresistibly to the divine Spouse — did she construct or deconstruct them? In La Madre as in the Islamists, it’s their faith, the “hair in the soup,” the fuse that interests me, pace Andrew. That exaltation that makes a person ill with love, ill unto death.

“Forty-nine dead, 700 wounded, 350 still in hospital, of whom 22 are in a critical condition…” It’s enough to have the radio on: the same figures ride the airwaves in every language.

“And that’s just the beginning! Over to you, G8!” Andrew’s sarcasm is not funny anymore.

Ocher and gray, streaked with red, the ramparts of Avila rise before us like a brusque eruption of the arid land we are traveling, piously nestled in the heart of the Sierra de Gredos, ice-cold in winter and windblown in summer. Many peoples once settled this hilltop, but now all that remains of them are the stones and bricks packed into the two and a half kilometers of the majestic perimeter wall, twelve meters high and three meters thick, with nine gates, four disused posterns, and eighty-eight massive semicircular towers. The fortification raised between 1090 and 1093 by Count Raymond of Burgundy, don Raimundo, at the express command of Alfonso VI, recycled the rubble of earlier Roman walls that had been demolished and rebuilt by Muslims and Christians in a string of legendary clashes that foreshadowed the Crusades.

Our little red KA is unfazed. It speeds from gate to gate, whips through the steep and winding streets like a lizard, and is soon parked in front of the Parador. Strange how that dragon of a wall has taken over our bodies, pushing us in and out without our hardly being aware of it, like a constant swinging: Teresa’s birthplace is a vertigo. Getting as close as possible — my saint’s manuscripts themselves can’t be touched, sequestered under glass in the worthy museums of the Guía Teresiana—I come across pre-Roman altar stones, carved with geometric designs and the shapes of plants and fish; dressed stones; Latin inscriptions; funerary stelae adorned with primitive reliefs of human heads. Although the piling of histories one on top of the other added up to a citadel dreamily reflected in the Adaja River as if in a tale of knights and ladies, this Romanesque edifice looks brand-new to my eyes, like a flimsy set built to accommodate one of those “duties of memory” our contemporaries go in for. The Avilans are so proud of their fortress that they fix every damaged stone at once and repair the least crack as soon as it appears. The blinding Castilian sun makes the ramparts look as artificial as a pasteboard backdrop for son et lumière shows on summer nights. We remember the London bombings; we’ll observe a minute of silence later on.

As soon as you step inside the walls, you realize that the fortified space of the saint’s home city is the model for her moradas or Dwelling Places, misleadingly named The Interior Castle, as she described them late in life, in 1577, at the request of her friend and confessor Jerome Gratian. The moradas could not have been conceived without the Hekhalot and Avila: a haphazard agglomeration of little houses, plazas, and barrios, partitioned off from one another and yet open and permeable. By the monumental grace of those eighty-eight towers that bulge and snake rhythmically around the holy of holies, the moradas or “abodes” of Avila communicate with one another just as they do with the mountains, fields, and sky.¹ Avila “expands in its smallness” as an effect of those walls, wrote Miguel de Unamuno.² No, Avila is in no sense “small,” because all of its boundaries are membranes. Instead of enclosing and compacting it, that great concertina of a wall inflates and transcends it. Here, every indoors is halfway to being outdoors; Avila streams with greatness.

Of the family home and little garden, the place where Teresa is said to have been born, nothing remains to feed the nostalgia of her fans. Located on the plaza de La Santa, between the home of the Avilan notable Blasco Núñez Vela and that of her uncle Francisco Álvarez de Cepeda, whose sons were her first heartthrobs, it was once a stolid block of granite adorned with the Ahumada crest. In 1630 the Discalced Carmelites purchased the abandoned property, whose direct heirs had emigrated to the New World, and six years later an ostentatious church in the worst baroque taste was erected on the site.

I think about the inventory drawn up by don Alonso on the death of his first wife, Catalina del Peso y Henao, a victim of the plague in 1507. This document shows Teresa’s Papá in a different light than do her own sketches. We find a conscientious hidalgo who in 1512 rode off to fight in Navarre under the king of Aragon, ruler of Castile on behalf of his daughter, Juana. But did Alonso’s breastplate hide the soul of a collector? The list of tackle for mules and horses includes harnesses, saddles, girth-straps, stirrups, curb chains, halters, and bells. Mule blankets were “red, with dark green diamonds” or “white and red,” and there were “several Rouen coats in red and yellow” for the horses. Alonso rejoices in the enumeration of luxuries and seems to have had a fetishistic love of swanky textiles. He mentions a “crinkled doublet made of fustian from Milan, with aiguillettes,” another of “purple damask,” and another of “crimson silk.” He is no less precise about the wardrobe of his late wife: a “scarlet gown trimmed in black velvet,” a “skirt of zeïtouni—moiré satin from China — slashed with yellow taffeta, lined in red.” These treasures were set off by splendid jewelry: a pair of gold chains that encircled the neck four times, six chiseled gold bracelets, earrings of pink and yellow gold, and a crucifix inlaid with precious gems.

By the time Teresa came along, this sumptuous lifestyle was already, or nearly, over; she recalled her mother only ever wearing black. The modern setting for the cult of Teresa contains no hint of her father’s pampered tastes, any more than it suggests the raptures and tortures consigned in her writings. Inside the church, a plaster Teresa swoons for all eternity against a blinding gold background. Awed pilgrims shuffle past a display of relics, the sight of which makes me feel quite ill. There’s a finger from her right hand, a staff she used on her travels, her rosary, and — more endearing — the soles of her sandals. A medley that is supposed to authenticate the handful of letters kept in a jar, which have no need of such a reliquary.

“You wanted to see it, and here it is!” crows Andrew. This time I’m inclined to agree: the tacky mummification of La Madre marks the high point of Catholicism and the beginning of its decline. Scenting my tacit accord, Andrew launches into a rant. “Examples abound everywhere, obviously, but your Teresa takes the cake, and I think you know it! This religion is a model for all the personality-cult peddlers who dreamed of absolute Truth incarnate on earth: whether fighting it or inspired by it, it’s all the same, they dream of it. Royalists, Bonapartists, communists, Maoists, fascists, Nazis, fundamentalists, bin- Ladenists, evangelists, creationists, the lot. Every despot sees a pope in the mirror, I can assure you! The Sun King, the Führer, the Little Father, the Duce — and, right here on this dry plateau, General Franco, the grand sponsor of national tourism with specialism in holy sites, who never went anywhere without the left hand of your roommate packed snugly in his pocket, you told me so yourself. And further allow me to point out that it was your precious Counter-Reformation that sowed the seed of the interactive spectacle, thought by cretins to be a modern invention. Look around, this is where Disneyland got started — for the entertainment of the humanoids aka ‘children of all ages’ who’ve overrun the planet! Just look at the kitsch: here’s where the Spectacle finally vanquished the Spirit. And from then on, the way was open to mass hypnosis in front of the TV. That’s what you, Sylvia, have got to wake up to here, if you can open your eyes at all. How could Catholicism ever offer the antidote to the poison it pioneered so brilliantly itself? Because that’s what you want us to believe, isn’t it! But how could it?” His blue eyes stare at me with lover-like fixity; I’d rather interpret it that way than suspect he’s making fun.

“Take it easy, will you? You should follow my example and read more about it,” I tell him with mock severity.

“Later.” He pulls me close and we kiss in a less than saintly manner. I’ve got over Bruno, though my American writer is quite mean enough to bring up the subject sooner or later. Teresa herself was a saint in a very special sense.

Juan brings us back down to earth.

“The bombers were from the suburbs of Leeds. Seemingly well-integrated Brits, who had had some further education in madrassas in Pakistan. Blair must be so proud of his multicultural model!” As a former Maoist Juan has no time for Blairism, and is glued to the radio whenever the political juncture looks insoluble. What times we live in!

“Thank goodness for the storks.” I’m unreservedly on Andrew’s side in this; he films them obsessively. Another artsy video is all we’ll get out of this trip, no use whatever for my research, I should have known!

I prefer to go alone to visit the convent and church of Our Lady of Grace, outside the city walls to the southwest, where don Alonso sent his daughter to school after her mother died. It’s my favorite Teresian site, and it doesn’t even show up in the guidebook; a handful of Avilans come to Mass here as if seeking the safety of a swallow’s nest hooked to the eaves of the hillside. The sisters’ gliding forms can barely be distinguished through the grilles. Those elderly bodies, cloistered and unseen, emit a musical twittering like eternal adolescents, head over heels about everything and nothing.

Beyond the ramparts to the north, near the Ajates district where stonecutters, weavers, and market gardeners once lived, the Monastery of the Incarnation has become a special station for Saint Teresa’s pilgrims. A clutch of dignified storks nests above the ancient door, and the clatter of their beaks, like wooden sticks knocking together, imparts an inhuman tension to the triumph of the bells. Did these migrants ever come in Teresa’s day? She only seemed to notice the doves, she even called her convents “dovecotes.” Was this to compare them to cages, crowded confinements, prisons? Not necessarily; Teresa says that she felt “very happy and at ease” in her parents’ house. Oddly enough, all that remains of the family hacienda on the wide Morana plain, near Avila, is the dovecote.

There’s not a dove or pigeon to be seen at the Incarnation, any more than inside the fortified town; only solemn storks. They look like black-and-white Carmelites mounted on red stilts, clacking gutturally about their raptures. The rosebushes in the neat courtyard never knew Teresa. Nettles used to grow there, and she would make bunches of them into stinging whips, believing that only the soul must enjoy bliss. Gazing out at the ramparts, she dreamed of water in this courtyard — cool water to refresh her mortified inner garden.

The building where Teresa spent thirty years of her life is spare and simple in a rustic way that induces meditation, and must have attracted many souls that were, like hers, disappointed by the world’s stupidity. The cloister was built, it was said, on ground that once contained a Jewish ossuary. This was not the only fateful sign: the monastery chapel was inaugurated on the same day as Teresa was baptized, April 4, 1515.

In a reconstructed cell we are shown an austere cot, with a wooden pillow. Unlike many other religious houses, the Incarnation lacked wealthy patrons, and so the garden was surrounded by plain clay walls, and the rooms and tiny cells were whitewashed. A flimsy roof of abutting tiles covered the choir. Repairs, extensions, or modest improvements would drag on for years, and the nuns sometimes had to be housed elsewhere for works to continue. In winter, snowflakes would fall on their breviaries; in summer, they hid from the heat behind closed shutters, in a dark, damp purgatory where you could hardly see to read your holy book. Faith was invigorated by these trials. The call to matins came two hours before sunrise; lauds and prime were sung before first Mass, vespers in midafternoon, and compline at evening, before retiring. Terce, sext, and none were also chanted at their due hour, so that each occupation was part and parcel of worship. Holiness, cleanliness, decency: these humble premises sought to be worthy of Carmelite purity and to reflect it. Teresa, supremely mindful of cleanliness in both the literal and the figurative sense, made sure of it by setting exacting standards, before and after her appointment as prioress in October 1571.

A rough cherrywood bench, seemingly the work of a country carpenter, serves as the Communion table in the lower choir. Two grilles rise above it, like those in the parlor, from behind which the nuns can follow Mass. That narrow doorway to the left, generally used by cleaners and suppliers, is the one Teresa was forced to pass through when she returned to her former convent to take up her duties as prioress. Since the community’s susceptibilities forbade the reformer to use the main entrance, she had no choice but to take this lowly, humiliating alternative. Yet I want to think that she didn’t particularly resent it; on the contrary, she took every slight as a sign of being “chosen.”

A fifteenth-century painting hangs at the entrance to the choir in the lower cloister, a naïf work from an early Beguine establishment. I decide I like it. The Virgin is shown sheltering Carmelite monks and nuns under her cloak — a subject that was very powerfully treated, too, by Piero della Francesca.³ This Madre, protecting and dominating her sisters and confessors on the wall of the Incarnation in Avila, bearing the Infant Jesus in her heart and recalling a winged angel in her regal cloak, its tips outspread by two cherubs — is she only Mary? Or is she already Teresa, following her way of perfection from prayer to prayer toward a serenity fit for a queen?

Silence was the rule in the chapel, the choir, the refectory, and the dormitory. Compared to the majestic, frugal austerity that enveloped this tension-ridden little world during the Golden Age, the kitchens look cheerful and cozy, with ceilings that graze the tops of our heads. Copper pans hang next to musical instruments: the community of 190 women must have had great giggles and gossips behind the double bars of the parlors or between prayers.

Juan smacks his lips at the sight of the pots and pans.

“Oh, look! Everything they needed to rustle up a wicked salpicón!” Andrew chuckles, and I join in with slurping noises. Juan riffs on, inspired by the kitchen.

Since giving himself the title of Doctor of Low Food, our Golden Age specialist has got the bit between his teeth.⁴ Historians, it seems, recently discovered that before you can have any notion of what people thought, you’ve got to know what they ate. Sancho Panza, for instance, was partial to salpicón de vaca—cow’s meat salad — garnished with onions and seasoned with pepper, pimentos, or crushed peppercorns, and sometimes vinaigrette, with boiled calves’ feet on the side. Juan pauses, beaming, intent on making our mouths water. I demur: “That might be all very well for Sancho, and maybe the Don, but Teresa…”

This gets him going again, as if trying to block out the shock of Al Qaida with tantalizing evocations of food.

“Well, the ingredients varied according to class. Mutton cost more than beef, and a lot more than cow. Basically it’s easy, you chop it, salt it, and boil to a bit of a mush. Like what they call a ‘melting pot.’ So picture a conventful of nuns, what do they get up to after feeding their souls? They prepare a delicious salpicón, that’s what. A chunk of hock bacon and some chopped onion goes in with the boiled cow, then you add pepper, salt, vinegar, and some raw onion rings on top: delicious! With extra spices sprinkled on, it was a popular baroque delicacy very like the French saupiquet. Same root, yes. Saumure, saucisson, German sauerbraten, English sausage, sauce…From sau or sal-, salami, salmagundi, salmi, and so on. It’s all in the salpicado, isn’t it, the sprinkling. Which being a function of the weather and the mood of the cook, these ones here must have piled it on, in their low-ceilinged hole, either freezing or baking to death!”

What does he know? Between the fruits of the earth sustaining Teresa and the unappetizing stew described in the Quixote, I’m not hungry. I wander away. To each his drug, to each his taste wars…Juan isn’t done with it, though. He combs all the restaurants in Avila in search of salpicón. The waiters shrug pityingly: local cuisine means cured ham and sangría, you can whistle for the low food of the Golden Age. Even in Avila, globish rules!

But Juan does score one hit. Avilan bakers have not forgotten the delectable sweets the sisters used to make, and you can still buy yemas de Santa Teresa, a rich confection involving twelve egg yolks, 175 grams of sugar, fourteen spoonfuls of water, a stick of cinnamon, and the zest of a lemon.

The cloister Rule had been relaxed, as everyone knows, and one result was that it became easier to get permission from the mother superior for extramural leave. Since money was tight, an absent nun allowed significant savings to be made; at any rate, this was the argument used to justify the laxity the future foundress would condemn before reinstating the rigors of the Primitive Rule. Meanwhile Teresa herself took several, sometimes lengthy, breaks outside the convent (six months in Toledo staying with Luisa de la Cerda, three years in the home of Guiomar de Ulloa). Inside, it’s no exaggeration to say that the nuns were cloistered or locked away behind those finely wrought bars. Their dovecote was indeed a cage, allowing little squares of light and air to filter through the ingenious grilles behind which a Carmelite could see without being seen, leaving the visitor clinging to the sound of her voice. For extra security there was always a third, a chaperone nun who presided over parlor conversations. But, like every rule on earth, the Rule only existed to be circumvented, and the sisters at the Incarnation were good at circumventing it: the young Teresa couldn’t help but notice, as we’ve seen.

The Incarnation was not known to be particularly forbidding, then, and word soon got around town that a most agreeable Carmelite could be encountered there. The parlor became the site of maximum temptation, and also, now and then, of the most decisive liberation.

It was here that Teresa held her long confabulations with John of the Cross, whose “miraculous” chair, miraculously preserved, is a big draw for tourists: they picture it hovering in the air as it is said to have done one day when the two friends and reformers talked themselves into a state of ecstasy over the mystery of the Trinity. It was here, too, that the noble and influential lady Guiomar de Ulloa announced the arrival in Avila of the great Franciscan contemplative, Pedro de Alcántara. Doña Guiomar obtained leave for Teresa to spend a week at her house so that the saintly friar (one of whose self-imposed mortifications was never to lay eyes on a woman) might vouchsafe, by his righteous authority, that Teresa’s visions really did come from God. Many other visitors came here to meet her, some of them well-known, like Francisco de Borja⁵—who urged her to persevere in silent prayer despite the doubts of her current confessor — or certain princesses well placed at Court. And let us not forget the attentions of the “person” in whose company she saw the toad…

We continue our exploration of the old convent. This tidy museum and its piously exhibited relics mean little unless they send a modern visitor back to the writings. Well, do they? Not if Juan and Andrew are anything to go by, but it doesn’t bother me; let them be instructed, entertained, or bored by what they call my “fetish saints.” Everyone sees what they can or want to understand. Perhaps it was necessary to institute this baroque cult in order to protect La Madre’s works from creeping oblivion, and gold-sprayed mummification is, I’m sure, effective for enriching the faith of many weary pilgrims from Portugal or Valencia who follow in the footsteps of the saint inside their buses, on the trail of values that elude them. And yet it’s the living Teresa, alive though my reading of her books, that I am trying to conjure back — into this space between its stark walls, amid the murmurous bustle of mothers trying to keep their kids from stampeding, and even into the flight of those impertinent storks, not content with flapping slowly over these haunted halls but seemingly settled in the saint’s very lap.

“Those two-tone clickety guys were the only Carmelites around, in the end,” says Andrew, true to type. “No, I take that back: they were the only living creatures of any kind! Because those pilgrims of yours, frankly…Sacred space is fast turning into a desert, isn’t it?”

I don’t say anything. What space? Jokers, admirers, visitors, pilgrims, storks — Teresa tears us all away from our spaces, from space itself, to deposit us in time.

Teresa’s greatest “torment” as a novice was not undergone in that aseptic cell reconstructed around a few of her belongings. I can’t help smiling at her travails, but not callously. Let’s see. The young woman was mystified by the “special love” she felt for anyone who preached “well and with spirit,” but “without striving for the love myself, so I didn’t know where it came from.” At all events the pretty young recruit “eagerly” listened to every sermon, even when “the preaching was not good.” “When it was good, the sermon was for me a very special recreation.” A guilty one, she means. Why so? Perhaps because this pleasure was prompted by a human, an all too human, factor — the personal charms of God’s representative rather than the quality of his message. My poor, supplicant Teresa, ever torn between duty and pleasure, you won’t miss out on a single one of the “torments” so familiar to neurotics! “On the one hand I found great comfort in sermons, while on the other I was tormented…I begged the Lord to help me.”⁶

Teresa felt restless, inadequate, unsure of her vocation.

I didn’t understand that all is of little benefit if we do not take away completely the trust we have in ourselves and place it in God.

I wanted to live (for I well understood that I was not living but was struggling with a shadow of death), but I had no one to give me life, and I was unable to catch hold of it.⁷

Can this weary soul, impatient to be re-converted, ever find the extremity which will be her road? The great event takes place at last, after eighteen years spent “in this battle and conflict between friendship with God and friendship with the world,”⁸ one Lenten day in 1554.

Chapter 12. “CRISTO COMO HOMBRE”

One day entering the oratory I saw a statue [una imagen] they had borrowed for a certain feast to be celebrated in the house. It represented the much wounded Christ and was very devotional, so that beholding it I was utterly distressed in seeing Him that way, for it well represented what He suffered for us. I felt so keenly aware of how poorly I thanked Him for those wounds that, it seems to me, my heart broke. Beseeching Him to strengthen me once and for all that I might not offend Him, I threw myself down before Him with the greatest outpouring of tears.¹

This was not yet a vision; it was a carved image, a work representing the Beloved—“In this very place, Juan! You see, Andrew?”—which the approaching feast day caused to be placed in the oratory of the Incarnation, where it caught the nun’s eye. The sight of Jesus moves her, distresses her utterly [toda me turbó de verle tal]. What perturbs her so? His “wounds” and His weals, of course, His sweat and His grief. Teresa interiorizes this bleeding, hurting, body of a man: “Since I could not reflect discursively with the intellect, I strove to represent Christ within me [procuraba representar a Cristo dentro de mí]…it seemed to me that being alone and afflicted, as a person in need, He had to accept me.”²

It was not enough for Teresa to identify with a man in pain, underwriting her own feminine anguish. “I could only think about Christ as He was as man (Yo sólo podía pensar en Cristo como hombre).”³ She must bring him literally inside, and the man of the statue — far less tortured, incidentally, than a Christ by Matthias Grünewald — now dwells in the Carmelite’s entrails.⁴ But the God-man is also all around her, and His presence contains her “so that I could in no way doubt He was within me or I totally immersed in Him” [yo toda engolfada en Él]⁵.

The extravagance of this embrace is not only justified by the experiences of illustrious predecessors. Teresa is thinking about Mary Magdalene’s conversion, of course, as she weeps before the statue, but she laments the way “the tears I shed were womanish and without strength since I did not obtain by them what I desired.”⁶ She would retreat from female role models, and it was not until discovering Saint Augustine’s account of his conversion that she felt she recognized herself: “I saw myself in [the Confessions].”⁷ By the start of 1554 the Confessions were finally available — in Catalan — to the former boarder at the Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Grace, who responded to their content as to a clarion call from God.

As I began to read the Confessions…I began to commend myself very much to this glorious saint. When I came to the passage where he speaks about his conversion and read how he heard that voice in the garden, it only seemed to me, according to what I felt in my heart, that it was I the Lord called.⁸

Thanks to her identifications, first with Mary Magdalene and then, even more strongly, with Saint Augustine, Teresa’s transference onto Jesus was doubly validated and reinforced. Meanwhile the naive freshness of her effusions, as bookish as they were spiritual, did not preclude an analysis of her relationship with what can only be called a fantasy incarnate, apprehended through images, mental constructs, and imaginary representations. And, on top of all this, through something more: a genuine revelry of the senses, a feast for the flesh. The paroxysm of Communion.

Not as “immersed” (engolfada) as all that, the writer lays out, with peerless probity, the many facets of her experience.

She shares her love of images with us first, firing a sly shot at the reformed Church in passing: “Unfortunate are those who through their own fault lose this great good. It indeed appears that they do not love the Lord.”⁹ This leads to the admission that for her (and, perhaps, for most of us) the visual thrill of a likeness, be it of the Lord or of any cherished person, lies at the bottom of the feeling of love itself. The cells in hermitages, those secluded outdoor cabins or the retreat rooms in Carmelite monasteries, ought to be decorated with holy pictures, according to the foundress. Further, “try to carry about an image or painting of this Lord that is to your liking, not so as to carry it about on your hearts and never look at it but so as to speak often with Him; for He will inspire you with what to say.”¹⁰ To love seeing and to love were synonymous for Teresa in her process of re-conversion. Thus did a Carmelite of the Incarnation rediscover Plato’s Banquet!¹¹ Only to reconfigure it in her own, Catholic way, charging the images with love, before passing, with love, to the other side of the images, like Alice through the looking glass.

The vision of the suffering Man is thus an “amorous” one, leaving her “distressed” to a degree that corresponds to what is far more than a visual gratification. It is a sensation that, though linked to sight, at once kindles Teresa’s every sense and triggers an avalanche of ideas. More than merely seeing, the “vision” of the Beloved Other becomes a “tenderness” felt as a gift, but “neither entirely of the senses nor entirely spiritual” (un regalo que ni bien es todo sensual, ni bien es espiritual).¹²

Ideal and desire, both the one and the other, as that which is experienced by way of sight gathers the flesh back into the spirit. The amorous gaze transports the lover into her Beloved and vice versa, body-and-soul, inside-and-outside, presence-and-immersion. On this day in Lent, 1554, more than ever before, after the reproving Holy Countenance and on the heels of the outsized toad, the vision of the suffering Man would initiate a period of auras, levitations, and other transverberations.

Far from the macabre expressionism of Grünewald, the future Counter-Reformation saint only contemplated the Calvary so as to turn it inside out like a glove. If at first, admittedly, she tended to wallow in masochism, she cast this off bit by bit and her experience rapidly ascended its radiant beam of pure pleasure, climaxing in the exultation of the elect.

In Teresa’s work, Christ’s wounds appear free of the carnal abjection that attracted Grünewald. At one point they actually metamorphose into jewels. The Carmelite “sees” Christ take the crucifix from her hand, and when He gives it back, the presence of the Beloved so often sensed by her side (“It seemed to me that Jesus Christ was always present at my side; but since this wasn’t an imaginative vision, I didn’t see any form”¹³) has transformed the wounds into gems:

It was made of four large stones incomparably more precious than diamonds — there is no appropriate comparison with supernatural things. A diamond seems to be something counterfeit and imperfect when compared with the precious stones that are seen there. The representation of the five wounds was of very delicate workmanship. He told me that from then on I would see the cross in that way; and so it happened, for I didn’t see the wood of which it was made but these stones. No one, however, saw this except me.¹⁴

We know that the epileptic aura is prone to such extreme states of perception and imagination, and to their inversion, but even so Teresa seems to transform them into an unprecedented sensual intelligence. She links them to the glorious tradition of Mary Magdalene and Augustine, the better to appropriate them for her personal gallery of images, within the religious culture of her time, in a soft yet punctilious idiom, while subjecting them to the most honest introspection her levels of knowledge at the time would permit.

Carefully, tenderly, the writer probed her emotional state, dissociating this love from any hackneyed daydream or vision in the common acceptation of the word, and labeling her experience — for the first time — one of “mystical theology.”¹⁵

This did not occur after the manner of a vision. I believe they call the experience “mystical theology.” The soul is suspended in such a way that it seems to be completely outside itself. The will loves; the memory, it seems to me, is almost lost. For, as I say, the intellect does not work, though in my opinion it is not lost; it is as though amazed by all it understands because God desires that it understand, with regard to the things His Majesty represents to it, that it understands nothing.¹⁶

Chapter 13. IMAGE, VISION, AND RAPTURE

Loving recollection cuts loose from the gaze that prompted it, to excite all of the senses: from now on the Carmelite will be engulfed by an all-inclusive sensibility, in the fusion of touch and sight. “I tried as hard as I could to keep Jesus Christ, our God and our Lord, present within me.”¹ The efforts she had made from the beginning of her monastic life were finally crowned with success. Now she beholds Him, but not as an image; she alone sees Him thus, and her solitude curves ever more inward, toward that interiority where He dwells for her, immovable, inoperable, inseparable from her inner being; she is as though pregnant with Him, hollowed out inside where He unfolds: “The spirit may be shown how to work interiorly. One should strive earnestly to avoid exterior feelings.”² Teresa only formulated that assimilation of the Other, that led her to feel that she was the sacramental body, when she came to write The Interior Castle (1577); but the experience was already in progress, especially since her re-conversion in 1555.

In The Book of Her Life, the degrees of prayer (the prayer of quiet; ecstatic contemplation; spiritual marriage) would be catalogued with a care for self-analytical precision, but also with a view to instructing her “daughters,” like the ambitious reformer she was. In its untended garden, irrigated by the four waters, the soul first labors like a gardener toward mystical union. Humbly suspending the intellect the better to surrender to the Spouse, it nonetheless still strives to live out its fantasy while submerged in prayer. Next come the prayer of quiet and the prayer of union, until finally, with no more need of a gardener or the least “labor,” it reaches the fourth prayer, which is rapture. The union is henceforth sealed, as lover and Beloved merge into each other like water poured into the sea.

For thirty years, within the sheltering walls of the Incarnation, Teresa exhibited states of paroxysm at which some marveled, while others feared the devil’s doing; she was scrupulous enough to suspect them herself, veering between the possibilities and applying to both the scalpel of introspection and retrospection.

Thus she extols the perfection of prayer that is “union” with the Beloved while observing that here the soul, melting into Him, is still “upon our earth”;³ union, as opposed to rapture, remains always the liaison between two distinct identities, Him and me.

In the Way, warning against the separation of mental from vocal prayer, Teresa continues to advocate a “union” of differences: it is right “to consider whom we are going to speak with, and who we are.”⁴ Only in “rapture” can prayer reach the heights, and the dispossession of self be consummated in wholesale transformation: at that eleventh hour the osmosis with the Other causes one to be torn from oneself in excruciating pain, which blissfully abates into relief. Unendurable desire is thus transmuted into the ineffable jouissance of the transfixion⁵ immortalized by Bernini’s sculpture. The joy of mutual penetration spawns metaphor upon metaphor, she is a sponge soaked in the sacred liquid of the Trinity, which is impossible to contain, for it is He who captures and incorporates her into His sovereign presence:

There came the thought of how a sponge absorbs and is saturated with water; so, I thought, was my soul which was overflowing with that divinity and in a certain way rejoicing within itself and possessing the three Persons [gozaba en sí y tenía las tres Personas]. I also heard the words: “Don’t try to hold Me within yourself, but try to hold yourself within Me [no trabajes tú de tenerme a Mí encerrado en ti, sino de encerrarte tú en Mí].”⁶

The description and interpretation of such visions vary somewhat in the course of Teresa’s oeuvre, but there is no radical departure from the accounts given in the Life. The Dwelling Places make more of the “intellectual” character of these “images,” which are no longer either “sensible” or “imaginary.” Nevertheless, while that distinction is a feature of the raptures evoked in the Life, the moment the writer tries to express it in words the difference she finds between her “spiritual” visions and those that imbue the senses imposes a style that is helplessly sensible, metaphorical, metamorphic. Not even the purest contact with the Other can be written other than in image-laden fiction.

I prowl beneath the low ceilings of the mythic Carmel of the Incarnation, thinking about a woman happily in thrall to her visions. The Interior Castle was not written until 1577, far from here, in Toledo, and then revised in Segovia in 1580. The very last accounts of the future saint’s mystical trances testify to the maturity of her experience, inseparable from that of her artistry with the language of vehemence and lucidity alike. In the meantime Teresa has read much, learned much, and founded a great deal. Her theological knowledge has outgrown the Spiritual Alphabet of her early mentor, Osuna. And yet the original “tempest” of love is still there, whether in the practice of quiet, of union, or of rapture.

I like to think about her final virtuosity, here in the corridors of the Incarnation that saw her first steps. Time condenses for me, too, as through Teresa’s work I inhabit the dilated instant of thought. Before, now, and afterward no longer flow by but soar upward in a vertical eternity, suddenly lifting the vaulted ceilings, enlarging them, spinning them into the moradas of a fabulous interior castle. Hers and ours, in words, in text.

Here, with a biblical, scriptural sense of the unrepresentable vision, Teresa painstakingly expounds the way “imaginative visions” differ from “intellectual visions”:⁷ how the first “remain so impressed on the memory that they are never forgotten,” “inscribed in the very interior part of the soul,” whereas the second are “so sublime that it’s not fitting for those who live on this earth to have the further understanding necessary to explain them” (que no las convienen entender los que viven en la tierra para poderlas decir). These “intellectual visions” can only be spoken of “when the soul is again in possession of its senses.” Jacob’s ladder (Gen. 28:12–16) and Moses’ burning bush (Exod. 3:2–6) serve as examples, for even “if there is no image and the faculties do not understand,” it is possible to remember by the power of faith:

I do understand that some truths about the grandeur of God remain so fixed in this soul, that even if faith were not to tell it who God is and of its obligation to believe that He is God, from that very moment it would adore Him as God, as did Jacob when he saw the ladder.⁸

And further:

Nor did Moses know how to describe all that he saw in the bush, but only what God wished him to describe. But if God had not shown secrets to his soul along with a certitude that made him recognize and believe that they were from God, Moses could not have entered into so many severe trials. But he must have understood such deep things among the thorns of that bush that the vision gave him the courage to do what he did for the people of Israel. So, sisters, we don’t have to look for reasons to understand the hidden things of God.⁹

Now, no sooner has Teresa reserved for her ultimate union with the Beloved all these “hidden things,” which cannot be named and baffle reason, than she returns to her passion for explication and tries afresh to explain by means of some comparison. (Deseando estoy acertar a poner una comparación para si pudiese dar a entender algo de esto que estoy diciendo.) She begins by pointing out that, when the soul is in ecstasy, it “cannot describe any of [the grandeurs it saw].”¹⁰ But in order to make this experience intelligible (Is it “imaginative”? Is it “intellectual”?), the writer takes refuge, modestly, in her lack of “learning” and her “dullness” in order to avoid making the choice.¹¹ Unnameable as it may be, the vision is still fixed, impressed, or inscribed on the memory — like writing? Like a graven image? La Madre has already mentioned elsewhere the true, the living book His Majesty had so vividly impressed upon her: “His Majesty had become the true book in which I saw the truths. Blessed be such a book that leaves what must be read and done so impressed that you cannot forget!” (Su Majestad ha sido el libro verdadero adonde he visto las verdades. ¡Bendito sea tal libro, que deja imprimido lo que se ha de leer y hacer, de manera que no se puede olvidar!”)¹² Suddenly, in a startling flash of insight, the writer associates the unforgettable inscription with a proliferation of riches. The word camarín or “treasure chamber” around which her comparison revolves can also mean boudoir, or a closet for a holy statue’s accoutrements.

You enter into the room of a king or great lord, or I believe they call it the treasure chamber, where there are countless kinds of glass and earthen vessels and other things so arranged that almost all these objects are seen on entering. Once I was brought to a room like this…and I saw that one could praise the Lord at seeing so many different kinds of objects…I soon forgot it all.…Clearly, the soul has some of these dwelling places since God abides within it.…The Lord must not want the soul to see these secrets every time it is in this ecstasy.…After it returns to itself, the soul is left with that representation of the grandeurs it saw; but it cannot describe any of them, nor do its natural powers attain to any more than what God wished that it see supernaturally.¹³

Do you hold deep inside, Teresa, my love, a dwelling place of such a kind, a camarín crammed with treasures and other curiosities? Camarín: an alcove, an actor’s dressing room, a washroom, a study? A swarm of objects, elements, bodies in evolution, preparation, defenseless gestation? A chaotic emotional boudoir you will be compelled to inhabit, sort out, and move on from.

Quite explicitly, Teresa introduces the sensible into the intellectual in order to weave a third space, that of those “intellectual visions” whose task it is to rename and rewrite the felt experience of an invisible overcoming and dispossession: “[The soul] will feel Jesus Christ, our Lord, beside it. Yet, it does not see Him, either with the eyes of the body or with those of the soul.…Since she didn’t see anything she couldn’t understand the nature of this vision.”¹⁴ Moreover it is the very force of the sensation, “impressed” rather than figured, but distilled by the delicacy of the formulation itself, that constantly attests to the divine rather than demonic origin of such “sightless,” “suprasensible” visions. And the flesh becomes Word.

She felt He was walking at her right side, but she didn’t experience this with those senses by which we can know that a person is beside us. This vision comes in another unexplainable, more delicate way. But it is so certain and leaves much certitude; even much more than the other visions do, because in the visions that come through the senses one can be deceived [one might fancy it so: ya se podría antojar], but not in the intellectual vision. For this latter brings great interior benefits and effects that couldn’t be present if the experience were caused by melancholy; nor would the devil produce so much good; nor would the soul go about with such peace and desires to please God, and with so much contempt for everything that does not bring it to Him. Afterward she understood clearly that the vision was not caused by the devil, which became more and more clear as time went on.¹⁵

With a semiological finesse that is equally startling, Teresa distinguishes these images, which are her way of thinking metaphorically, from paintings and other ornamental objects. Her images when enraptured are “truly alive,” the fruit of an interior seeing: there is no pictorial effect but a fleeting dazzle, like a veiled sun, only communicable to those who have been granted the same favor.¹⁶

Finally, a discovery we might call pre-analytical: it is possible to translate the unnameable pangs of impassioned sight into a named image, an identifiable representation, if — and only if — the love object calms the sensory and potentially demonic violence of the praying lover by occupying it, fixing it, engaging it. The “loving words” of the Other (“Do not be afraid, it is I”) steady the soul and ratify the amorous meaning of its visions:

For if the will is not occupied and love has nothing present with which to be engaged, the soul is left as though without support or exercise, and the solitude and dryness is very troublesome, and the battle with one’s thoughts extraordinary [si falta la ocupación de la voluntad, y el haber en qué se ocupe en cosa presente el amor, queda el alma como sin arrimo ni ejercicio].”¹⁷

Only the love of the Other, that fixed and eternal object, can endow one with the “talent for discursive thought or for a profitable use of the imagination”¹⁸ whose absence Teresa bewailed when recalling her first stumbling steps in faith. Imagination, thus understood as existing in and by the love of the Lord, is now free to be the intelligence that transforms the sensory imprint into an “intellectual vision”: it can now be lived as the wonderfully “delicate” presence of the Other at the very core of subject Teresa. I understand that there were for her none of the “contradictions” with which some commentators have seen fit, by the lights of their own logic, to tax her. But the “fancying it so” (in which Teresa admits there can be a whimsical desire, an antojo) and the cancellation of delusion or subjective impulse are in action together. They touch like the front and back of the growing “certitude” of the praying woman, physically and mentally dispossessed of herself in the union with the Beloved.

Adjoining the “boudoir” of the soul, these visions — which must remain secret — lead to still more “interior” intimations: the spiritual betrothal that occurs in the “Seventh Dwelling Places.” Finally, dispensing with imaginary visions, there is nothing but an intellectual vision uniting the lover with the Beloved — the sheer light and unbridled joy of the pax vobis (John 20:21).

The soul, or “I mean the spirit,” becomes “one with God” in that “center.” Now, over a few concise lines, the rhetoric of comparison turns from the feeling body to evoke metamorphosis in the form of two candles close together. The image is developed, apophatic thought oblige, into a mingle of waters, and then into streams of light:

Let us say that the union is like the joining of two wax candles to such an extent that the flame coming from them is but one, or that the wick, the wax, and the flame are all one. But afterward one candle can be easily separated from the other and there are two candles; the same holds for the wick. In the spiritual marriage the union is like what we have when rain falls from the sky into a river or fount; all is water, for the rain that fell from heaven cannot be divided and separated from the water of the river. Or it is like what we have when a little stream enters the sea, there is no means of separating the two. Or, like a bright light entering the room from two different windows: although the streams of light are separate when entering the room, they become one.¹⁹

In the private deeps of her experience, Teresa thinks by employing sensorial images that are largely free of anthropomorphic or erotic connotations. By virtue of this ultimate, climactic surge toward sublimation of the state of love, this repertoire is like “thought in motion.” A highly wrought passage in the “Fourth Dwelling Places”²⁰ recalls how some four years earlier (we are in 1577, so this was in 1573, after undergoing “anguish” and “interior tumult of thoughts”) La Madre came to the realization that “the mind (or imagination, to put it more clearly) is not the intellect.” Against the numbing abstractions of the intellect she makes room for a certain imagination—or imaginative faculty — able to convey the truth of thought without completely severing its links to the body. Neither abstraction nor “imaginative vision”: what Teresa is after is an imaginary that is thought, a thought that is felt, and the sheer pleasure of metamorphoses.

How often, my philosophical Teresa, will you force me back to the dilemma that haunts scholastic masters past and present: intellect or imagination? Not to put too fine a point on it, is this thinking or delirium? Neither one nor the other, but always swaying between the two: that would be your answer, I reckon. Or rather you wouldn’t answer, you would continue weaving the a-thought of your letter addressed to the extremes of being: oscillation, flux, body and soul, flesh and word, the inception of the imaginative faculty and the ardent desire to share it.

Mercedes Allende salazar correctly notes that Teresa’s confessors were not all of one mind with regard to the area of thought she sought to explore.²¹ Where La Madre wrote “thought is not intellect,” adding “thought or the imaginative faculty” in the margin, Jerome Gratian attempted to clarify the gist of the argument by inserting between the lines: “thought or imagination, for this is how women commonly refer to it.” In contrast, the Jesuit Jerónimo Ribera grasped something of the distinction she felt inside and strove to verbalize as clearly as possible. He struck Gratian’s insert and wrote firmly at the top of the text: “Nothing to be expunged.”

I’m delighted by this disagreement, for it shows that there is indeed a “third way,” perceived (by Gratian) as feminine but accepted (by Ribera) as universal, which is no more nor less than thought. Distinct from both the alleged truth of abstract understanding and from imaginary fancies, a thought exists that only thinks inasmuch as it is an “imaginative faculty”; an infinite elucidation of fantasies, setting out from their amorous source, in the betrothal of understanding and imagination.

Thank you, Fr. Ribera, for not erasing a word!

Chapter 14. “THE SOUL ISN’T IN POSSESSION OF ITS SENSES, BUT IT REJOICES”

It is in the fourth degree of prayer, then, that what Teresa calls “this exile” of the soul [este destierro]¹ is accomplished. Banishment extirpates the person at prayer from the understanding, will, and memory that set so many traps for her, the very same as our desires set for the neurotic subjects we are — Andrew, Juan, Bruno, myself, to name a few.

Teresa deals with it differently from us. Or rather she doesn’t deal with it, she throws herself in, she plummets to the bottom, but she is then reborn by writing about it: writing the adventure of abandonment and exile for us. Inverting the fear of divine judgment into a mystical marriage, her “banishment” places her inside an oblatory Other, loving/loved; henceforth she becomes this Other. This bears no resemblance to the relationship between the lover and the Beloved in preceding prayers, for there they would simply and easily decant into each other, to the point of merging like twin fountains into a single stream. Here, in the fourth degree, there is no longer any “work” involved, only “rejoicing.” “In this fourth water the soul isn’t in possession of its senses, but it rejoices without understanding what it is rejoicing in [Acá no hay sentir, sino gozar sin entender lo que se goza].”²

There is a good that fills her with joy, but she does not know what it consists of. All of the senses are involved but without a precise object, interior or exterior. Intensity and self-perdition: no border, no identity can withstand this transport. And now the metaphor-metamorphosis of fire comes to join that of water to signify the blissful annihilation of the person at prayer: “the soul sometimes goes forth from itself…comparable to what happens when a fire is burning and flaming,”³ “for at the time one is receiving [these favors] there’s no power to do anything.”⁴ Deprived of “sensory consciousness,” the faculties “remaining for several hours as though bewildered,” the “bothersome little moth, which is the memory,” getting its wings burnt — the soul is lost to itself.⁵ Yet this annihilation is the source of “heroic promises, of resolutions and of ardent desires; it is the beginning of contempt for the world because of a clear perception of the world’s vanity.”⁶

The writer does not address the origin of this reversal conducting the soul from desiccation to water and fire. Modern neurologists are inclined to think that the trigger is an electric or hormonal dysfunction of the brain. Psychologists talk of hypomaniacal feedback from the fantasy of marriage to the ideal Father, turning depression into feelings of paranoid omnipotence. But one cannot reduce to scientific buzzwords the rhetorical power of the biblical and evangelical tradition from which Teresa drew the necessary authority to legitimize and reinforce her “states.” And were such medical concepts genuinely to designate the neuronal and psychological conditions of her experience — and as a psychologist myself, I wouldn’t argue with that — they still fail to explain the verbal re-creation achieved by the saint: What have they to say about the exactness and intensity of these metaphor-metamorphoses in perpetual reversal?

Teresa didn’t wait for Andrew and me to come along before indicating, with her usual clear-sightedness, the incommensurable hiatus separating the state of prayer (“very edgy, very borderline,” quips Jérôme Tristan) from the writing of it. Another state must arise to mediate between the two: “inspiration.” Not the same thing as prayer, then. You are not very prolix on this point, my secretive Teresa; you are content to say that you have God’s pattern before you and are following it, like an embroiderer does with needle and yarn.

I know you’re always delving into the books that are your faithful companions in solitude — the Bible, the Gospels, the writings of saints and churchmen. You never forget that your identification with Jesus relies on your remaining immersed in the intertextuality of canonical sources. Since these have become your vital environment, your prime reality, you are able to recast their rhetoric as though I were He. Your “inspiration” is thus an inhaling of the Other, a loving rewrite of His body — through the rewriting of His word in your imaginary, receiving it as something that sprang from an exterior seed. It is written in you, by you, foreign and penetrating without, private and bereft within. It was also essential to possess the genius of your language in order to pin it down, for failing this, prayer would remain a foreign language, like Arabic, say:

I write without the time and calm for it, and bit by bit. I should like to have time, because when the Lord gives the spirit [da el espíritu], things are put down with ease and in a much better way. Putting them down then is like copying a model [sewing: sacando aquella labor, a pattern, sampler: dechado] you have before your eyes. But if the spirit is lacking, it is more difficult to speak about these things than to speak Arabic, as the saying goes, even though many years have been spent in prayer. As a result, it seems to me most advantageous to have this experience while I am writing, because I see clearly that it is not I who say what I write; for neither do I plan it with the intellect nor do I know afterward how I managed to say it. This often happens to me.⁷

You leave it at that, Teresa, my love, but it’s precious enough, and I bet our modern Illuminati, who think themselves so smart, don’t know half as much as you do about writing. Do they, Andrew?

“Whatever. It’s her grand mal that interests me.” Andrew is very keen on the work of Dr. Vercelletto, that’s as far as he’ll go.

But still, from all the psychosomatic conditions propitious to prayer, Teresa did take a “magic recipe” unrelated to the temporal lobe, which looks simple, once the writer has formulated its application: He is an all-powerful lover, and their union introduces His omnipotent presence into her. We’re a long way from encephalograms, aren’t we, and much closer to the Song of Songs as rewritten by Teresa, right? “Serve Me and don’t bother about such things,” He tells her soothingly.⁸ Andrew’s not listening, he’s had enough of the Incarnation, of me, and of everything; he goes out for a smoke. I carry on with my monologue in silence, much better.

Was Teresa’s ecstasy a narcissistic triumph over depression, probably over postcomatose exhaustion as well? Was it achieved by means of manic exaltation, itself induced in her by the intromission of her ideal Father endowed with the strength of absolute love?

Certainly it was, but not only that. The Carmelite herself retraces this movement of the psyche with a psychological precision rich in sexual allusions. The rare libertines who venture into Teresa country are soon clamoring for more; the pilgrims, if ever they read her, discern only allegories. But Teresa holds out for both at once, honesty oblige!

You mustn’t think (this is for Andrew, outside in his smoky fug) that I’ve been dazzled by the sheer sensual perspicacity of a sick woman with a genius for self-analysis. My grand Teresa offers something more: the artistry with which she stages the fantasy penetration of her inwardness by the Other, and conveys it in a narrative as capacious as it is concise — in a word, convincing. Proof of this, do you agree, is her notorious jouissance at being run through by an angel disguised as a debauched aristo or Little Lord Fauntleroy, at least in Santa Maria della Vittoria. Those fabulous passages, the only texts of hers familiar to the educated public at large, make her into much more than a precursor of baroque art. My contention is that she invented it — before Bernini, before virginal Assumptions, before the whimsical undulations of Tiepolo!⁹

At the heart of the sixteenth century, from behind the iron grilles of the Convent of the Incarnation, this woman knew that the repression of desire can gnaw your flesh and snap your nerves, to the point of falling into coma. She came up with a stunning, because postmodern, analysis of the lethal nature of desire, and of jouissance as a firewall against lust. The frigidity of repressed women, the compulsive discharges paraded by their uninhibited sisters — together they spin the wheel of female hysteria into madness. Did Teresa know that from experience? Or did her restless vigilance spy the danger from afar? Did she find the solution?

The Carmelite naturally didn’t reveal the sexual sources of her distress, but nor did she content herself with a rational, reasonable censorship of such ill-being. At once true and untrue to monotheism, Teresa devised a “third way.” By the blending of the mind and senses into nothing but touch, the touch of the Other, she sought to “divert” desire, nothing more! She would put it down to that ideal of the self constituted by the ideal Father, the loving, loved magnetism* [*The author makes a play on the proximity in French of “lover,” amant, and “magnet,” aimant: “A(i)mant.”—Trans.] that penetrates her. The resulting jouissance is termed “elevation.”

Andrew advises me to save it for my publisher, Zonabend, who doubtless adores this kind of waffle. He’s off for a breath of air on the ramparts. If he knew how little I care for Bruno these days! Men spend more time thinking about other men than do the women allegedly concerned. I don’t say a word. Everything in my life conspires to leave me alone with my roommate, in our very own mystical marriage. That’s fine by me for now.

“And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! For then would I fly away, and be at rest” (Ps. 55:6). Teresa goes back to her Bible, taming it into a wondrous tale: “The flight is given to the spirit so that it may be elevated above every creature — and above itself first of all. The flight is an easy flight [vuelo suave], a delightful one [vuelo deleitoso], a flight without noise [vuelo sin ruido].”¹⁰

Unlike the psalmist, who implores the Other to give him wings, I note that Teresa already possesses them: secure in her status as the Bride, she is already aloft. The writer juxtaposes the New Testament to the Old in the image of the dove of the Holy Spirit, and she herself embodies the resulting amalgam. The experience Teresa describes is lived as a “spirit,” for the nun-dove seems to overlook the flying “body”: Is this the prudish evasion of a woman conscious of her religious vows? Or is it rather the sign of the intellectual probity with which she wants to be clear that this elevation is only a mental act, a “spirit’s-eye view,” a sublimation? Then again, perhaps spirit and body are all one to her? This last hypothesis is the strongest. Teresa’s experience differs as much from metaphysical dualism, which segregates spirit from flesh, as it does from the Spaltung of psychosis, which impedes the contact of the symbolic act with the instinctual energies and leads to delirium. Constantly revolving around dualism and desymbolization, steeped in metaphysics and a connoisseur of “borderline states,” Teresa (like other mystics) invents a different, incarnate psyche and a different body entirely devoted to the love object.

In the work of art that is the speaking subject thus recast, the “exiled soul” cannot suffer from isolation, hindrance, abandonment, division, or delirium, for is it not governed by the conviction of possessing the Other’s love? Were any of these misfortunes to befall her, she would only attribute them to her Guest, and thus set in motion the dialectical spiral of repentance and salvation: eternal promise of an eternal recurrence of the same elevation, the same inextinguishable jouissance.

An amphibious creation, an almighty alloy, ecstatic rapture is a sense of soaring above every creature, and “above itself first of all.” Ecstasy is like a doublet spiraling up: one (spirit-and-body) becomes detached from a part of oneself (also spirit-and-body), which remains earthbound, in order to “rise upward” (para levantarse). La Madre has a clear understanding (entiéndese claro) of the motion of this liftoff, in which the body-spirit helix coils around itself, manifests itself to the faculty of reason, is understood and is thought: “Entiéndese claro es vuelo que da el espíritu para levantarse de todo lo criado.” The soul, Teresa goes on to say, from up there both “beholds everything without being ensnared,” and at the same time is given “dominion,” being “brought here by the Lord.” Endowed with memory, the spirit-flesh doublet also surveys its own past, and as it contemplates from above its erstwhile distress, it/she marvels at its “blindness” at the time “when it was ensnared.”¹¹

No sign now of convulsions or vomiting. From now on it glides in the pure pleasure of touch and hearing: ecstasy is soft (es vuelo suave, es vuelo deleitoso) and noiseless, rapt in the silence of the spheres. Away from the world of the senses, the soul is more sensual still.¹²

Could Teresa’s rapture be a way to lift depression? Not in the sense of throwing off the weight of melancholy, but acting as a corkscrew auscultation-palpation, a highly charged annihilation? Against depression Teresa invents not an antidepressant but a “sur-pressant” that annuls her — not because she lacks the love object to the point of madness, as is the case with melancholics, but because He overwhelms her with His superabundant presence; body-and-soul together, over and above the absence of all the hes and shes who can possibly be imagined.

The saint’s celebrated beatitude may cause the hasty reader or the superficial lover of baroque art to forget that there are two aspects to this magical rapture. It is an excruciating bliss that transports the soul, for “it is the soul alone that both suffers and rejoices on account of the joy and satisfaction the suffering gives,”¹³ while the body is left racked and dislocated by pain: “Sometimes my pulse almost stops, according to what a number of the Sisters say who at times are near me and know more, and my arms are straight and my hands so stiff that occasionally I cannot join them. Even the next day I feel pain in the pulse and in the body, as if the bones were disjoined.”¹⁴

Seized by “anxious longings for death,” fearful “that it will not die,”¹⁵ the soul yet comes to take pleasure in the process. The love of the Lord means eternity, after all. More prosaically, Teresa has survived other epileptic fits and awakened from comas at death’s door. She has since arrived at the certainty that enjoyment is possible: the soul experiences itself as a construct dependent on this Love, just as much as on the comas that herald it. Teresa does not say it in so many words, but with that intellectual integrity that spares us nothing of her mental and physical states, she clearly implies it. The suggestion is indeed that pleasure is felt against the sick body, for at this stage the soul communicates only its torment to the body, keeping all the pleasure for itself: “The body shares only in the pain, and it is the soul alone that both suffers and rejoices on account of the joy and satisfaction the suffering gives.” It is the soul, in short, that makes the body sick by shifting anguish onto it, communicating torment to it, and loading it with ill-being. And if it, too, suffers in its way and for good, the soul is just as capable, in the same movement, of enjoying its suffering unburdened from fear of death. Is it always so lonely in bliss, detached from the tortured body, radiant and victorious without it? The transfixion causes us to doubt it, as do the metaphors-metamorphoses describing the exile of the soul in the Beloved by means of a cascade of sensations. As always it is your writing that speaks truth, Teresa. Your self-analysis told you that the soul alone, provided it be magnetized by the love Object, can reverse suffering into joy (in the name of the Other) — even if it means that this blessed reversal takes it out on the body, whether plunging it into a coma, as neurologists have observed, or exalting it to the point of orgasm, as shown by the baroque sculptor.

When you wrote, you did not say everything at once. Sometimes, too, you were writing under the eye of your fathers and counselors. Bernini himself must have grasped this double scene, for he displayed the Transfixion that dispossessed you of body and soul right in front of the cardinals of the Cornaro family, the patrons of the chapel where you recline. Their eyes are on you, and it must have been from the gazes of such fathers, rather than from ours, that you sought to remove yourself, to banish yourself. Who knows, perhaps the paternal and paternalistic surveillance you were under pushed you, even more powerfully than your own personal history would have done, toward that inversion of pain into pleasure that ravished you and took you out of yourself?

There were times when Teresa felt the union with the divine as an annihilation, a brush with death. I picture her pacing under these low ceilings, beside herself, down the corridors and narrow stairways of this modest Convent of the Incarnation with its burden of temptations and hostilities; body and soul on a knife-edge, shaking with epilepsy, hopelessly sad. Writing after the event, she feels able to say that it was the prayer of union with the Spouse that led to such a loss of all her “faculties.” Or maybe it was the other way around: maybe it was the seizures, the neurological dysfunction, that first put her vigilance into abeyance and melted the borders between herself and the Other? No understanding, no will, no memory; no communication, no words. This abandonment, which to her is beatitude, cannot possibly be conveyed. A senseless beatitude?

Here…the soul rejoices incomparably more; but it can show much less since no power remains in the body, nor does the soul have any power to communicate its joy. At such a time, everything would be a great obstacle and a torment and hindrance to its repose. And I say that if this prayer is the union of all the faculties, the soul is unable to communicate its joy even though it may desire to do so — I mean while being in the prayer. And if it were able, then this wouldn’t be union.¹⁶

This may be the description of a swoon induced by a comitial crisis; we are reminded of time standing still for Mohammed’s pitcher, in the epileptic euphoria evoked by Dostoyevsky in The Devils. Although “this suspension of all the faculties is very short” (half an hour “would be a very long time”), and it is difficult to know what is happening, since “there is no sensory consciousness,” even so, “these faculties don’t return to themselves so completely that they are incapable of remaining for several hours as though bewildered.”¹⁷

This is where the strength of the love union comes in. Thanks to this construct (an embodied fantasy, as I see it four centuries later), it is not I who speaks, but Him; I is Another, *[*“Je est un autre”: in a letter by Arthur Rimbaud. — Trans.] I is God, a Voice that makes me hear things, reassuring explanations — for God is a protective rationality in Teresa’s Catholicism. Unable to speak or to read, the soul (when united with the Other to the point of fusion) is nevertheless flooded with “the most marvelous and gentlest delight” in the most sensitive part of itself.¹⁸

Other elevations, more painful still, are like veritable trysts with death:

In these raptures it seems that the soul is not animating the body.…one understands and sees oneself carried away and does not know where. Although this experience is delightful, our natural weakness causes fear in the beginning. It is necessary that the soul be resolute and courageous — much more so than in the prayer already described — in order to risk all, come what may, and abandon itself into the hands of God and go willingly wherever it is brought since, like it or not, one is taken away.…At times I was able to accomplish something, but with a great loss of energy, as when someone fights with a giant and is worn out. At other times it was impossible for me to resist, it carried off my soul and usually, too, my head along with it, without my being able to hold back — and sometimes the whole body until it was raised from the ground.¹⁹

These brutal forces that “carry her away” suggest the violence of the electric discharges neurologists speak of, and only the divine “cloud” that conveys the lover to her ideal Father bestows mystic value upon the trauma. The sacred comes to the rescue of ill-being.

Embarrassed by these prodigies, Teresa forbade the other nuns to talk about the “carrying-off” effect when it happened to take place in public. Sometimes, feeling it coming on, she stretched out flat and asked the nuns to hold her down; “nonetheless, this was seen.”²⁰ At such times she is “greatly frightened,” then comes a “rare detachment.”²¹ Although playing no “active role” in the pain, Teresa feels stranded in a “desert so distant from all things” that she “doesn’t find a creature on earth that might accompany [her].”²² Union or no union, God then seems achingly distant from the soul; the dereliction is total. Mental pain coupled with physical pain provokes a catatonia compounded by an insuperable melancholy: “Usually when unoccupied [my soul] is placed in the midst of these anxious longings for death; and when it sees [the pains] are beginning, it fears that it will not die.”²³

Throughout these “clinical” descriptions, we can clearly make out a sequence: the detonator is anguish, accompanied by fits, followed by a neuronal disconnection, and ending in the physical relief that succeeds to fatigue. I shall not fail to deliver my novel interpretation of Teresa’s raptures to my colleague Jérôme Tristan. I am out to impress him, of course, by encroaching upon his professional terrain as a neuropsychiatrist, but I also plan to mention that my way goes further than science. I’m trying. So is he, but the poor fool holds back, with his cramped little life as a specialist in who knows what. With Teresa, the prodigious amorous construct of the lover penetrated by the Beloved is what downshifts the postcomitial distension. A micro-fiction of eroticism in fits and states that would have interested Andrew, if he weren’t acting the sniffy Voltairean, purely to annoy me.

Chapter 15. A CLINICAL LUCIDITY

Voice message from Bruno on my cell: “Hiya! Not too hot down your way? How’s it going? Found a title yet?” (Long pause. Clink of ice cubes swilled in JB. It’s probably not my book that’s on his mind.) “Everyone well, I hope…Listen, so what does a woman like your Teresa think about jealousy? I mean, no big deal, it just occurred to me. I imagine God comes in very handy for shielding her from that kind of human emotion, a bit too human, right?” (He can hardly expect an answer to this kind of provocation.) “Nobody’s jealous of God, are they? Or are they? Call me. Byeee.”

Bruno jealous, that’s all I needed. I have no intention of calling back. He’ll just have to wait till I give him the book.

Musing on the ways to take a woman, Marguerite Duras’s vice-consul says: “I should play on her sadness.”¹ He says. Marguerite says. She used love to help her die to life. Her pain was her cry, Hiroshima. Outlawed, out of reach. Anne-Marie Stretter confirms it with her absence, imprisoned in a sorrow too old to weep for. The ravishing of Lol V. Stein is not a pleasure either, passion suffocates her; unhappiness crushes Tatiana Karl, a woman never gets over it. “Destroy, she said,” cried Élisa, afraid of hunger, poverty, and truth.²

In the book that first brought Bruno and me together, I wrote — and it’s been held against me — that Duras is a witch. A witch who passes on to her female readers a boundless misery of which these victims endlessly complain in singsong voices, so badly infected that their only escape is often the psychiatric hospital of Sainte-Anne; I’m one, I know what I’m talking about. People resented my insight, but it was true. Bruno confirmed it to me: “You know what, Bruno darling, I recognize myself in Sylvia’s portrait of me.” That’s what she told him over a drink, Duras the survivor, who between a corpse and her own body saw only “similarities…screaming at me.”³

Nothing to do with my Teresa, all this, or very little…Bruno doesn’t understand much; Juan, my London pal, is happily grazing the sunny slopes of the Golden Age; as for Andrew, I’ve no idea, he’s too well barricaded behind his sarcasm to give a hint of what he really thinks. Pain is certainly the hidden face of philosophy, its mute sister, and Proust, who used to kill himself laughing while paying tribute to perpetual adoration, came close to making Albertine into a social suicide. Gomorrah is depressive and Sodom is criminal, as everybody knows, but writing in search of lost time replaces the amorous impasse with the narrative of jealousy. “Little Marcel” becomes a storyteller, after all, when he realizes that what was torture to imagine about Albertine (or Albert) was actually his own unrelenting desire to please new people (whether male or female is another matter), and even more powerful, his desire to sketch out new novels. “Only from one’s own pleasure can one derive both knowledge and pain.”⁴ Enough to perform the miracle of transubstantiation all over again, and contend that language, by the power of fiction, becomes flesh once and for all. At last this “fresh and pink” material, the work, can replace pale “substitutes for sorrows,” and compete with cathedrals.⁵ “I thought he was Jewish,” whispered Maurice Barrès, as he followed the Catholic funeral of a writer who had been among the earliest supporters of Dreyfus, while at the same time opposing the closure of cathedrals.⁶

Teresa, too, believed in transubstantiation, and my guess would be that she subscribed to it even more resolutely by the grace of her writing than by any submission to the dogmas of faith. What’s more, she managed to climb out of the frightening sloughs of despond that accompanied her epileptic episodes without lingering in the thickets of autofiction.⁷ Her own brand of fiction (hacer esta ficción para darlo a comprender⁸) aimed directly at exile in the Beloved, sidestepping — unlike Colette — the purity of plants and animals. The Burgundian writer wept as painfully as a man and savored her “idle” misery with something akin to greed. “What I lack I can do without,”⁹ proclaimed the high priestess of buds and blooms, despising the surface froth of some “good fat love.”¹⁰ Down she would go, pen in hand, into those “feeling depths” to which “love can’t always accede,” disguising herself as a female Dionysus, a dream-cat. “I swear to you it’s not really a mental thing,” the miscreant would say.¹¹ She never thought that Teresa was by her side in this crossing, this extreme pass where we “are burned,” because “we possess in abstention, and only in abstention”—hence the “purity of those who lavish themselves unstintingly.”¹²

But Dostoyevsky is the one who resembles my Carmelite the most, when he has Kirilov describe the sensations that precede a seizure, or indeed suicide:

“There are seconds — they come five or six at a time — when you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony in all its fullness. It is nothing earthly. I don’t mean that it is heavenly, but a man in his earthly semblance can’t endure it. He has to undergo a physical change or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable.…It is not rapture, but just gladness…Nor do you really love anything — oh, it is so much higher than love! What is so terrifying about it is that it is so terribly clear and such a great gladness. If it went on for more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and must perish.…To be able to endure it for ten seconds, you would have to undergo a physical change…”

“You’re not an epileptic?”

“No.”

“You will be one…”¹³

And yet Fyodor Mikhaylovich has no pleasure in transfixion; for him, the main thing is “despondency,” and this is the whole difference between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.¹⁴

Dare I admit it to my friend Marianne? Since spending time with Teresa, I prefer her way of crossing the Acheron: the fairy Mélusine’s cries drowning out the moaning of the saint.*[*An allusion to Gérard de Nerval’s 1853 poem “El desdichado.”—Trans.]¹⁵ I even dare say I understand her, which doesn’t mean that I recommend her solution to an age of surrogate mothers and homoparental families. It’s simply that Teresa knocks me out with the power of her self-destructiveness, as much as with the vigorous efficacy of her rebirths.

Let’s see, who invented the bitter joys of the inner life? I wager it was the melancholics, sucked in by their injured narcissism (“Negative narcissism, Sylvia dear,” Jérôme Tristan reminds me), so injured that it melts into Nothingness and thrives on denigration. The black sun of introspection is something Teresa knew well. She liked to distill this knowledge, as did medieval monks before her with their acedia. But the self-destructive energy of my roommate goes much further than that of her predecessors or imitators, for at the same time as sweeping body and soul away in the comitial crisis, it sublimates itself, with renewed and no less impetuous violence, into exile in the Other, a magnified ex-portation. And I never get tired of tracking her in the microanalysis of her desires.

Although she speaks of the “impossibility” of conveying the force of her transports, the Carmelite convinced herself, with the corroboration of visions, that the very brutality of the epileptic fit was proof of its divine source: who but a loving Spouse would inflict such violence upon you? And so the malady of love undergoes a metamorphosis: without really departing from the letter of the Gospel (“God is Love”), the writer inscribes her personal story into it so as to transmute — through the Passion of Christ — the most unbearable suffering into indelible grace.

Strongly felt, but fleeting, is another aspect of rapture: the certainty of oneness with God surrounds the writer with the aura of a glorious identification that “lasts only a short time,”¹⁶ for “rapture is experienced at intervals,”¹⁷ but the soul, lifted up “to the highest tower,” unfurls the “banner for God…as someone who in a certain manner receives assurance there of victory.”¹⁸

Teresa is conscious of the twofold nature of this regenerative alchemy. The combination of “pain” with “glory”¹⁹ is a source of rapture as much as of peril. The influx of ambivalent, excitable affects ultimately blows up the castle of intimacy, that haven where the nun, deep in recollection, succeeded in more or less conquering her centrifugal desires. The passing safety of purity cannot resist the magnet, it shatters to smithereens and sweeps away, along with conscious understanding, the confines of the very self: “The soul is suspended in such a way that it seems to be completely outside itself”;²⁰ “nothing satisfied me, nor could I put up with myself; it truly seemed as if my soul were being wrested from me.”²¹

The capacity for introspection that Teresa seems to have displayed since childhood was blunted by the practice of prayer in Osuna’s mode; perhaps she sought to elude the vigilance of that merciless night watchman, the judging conscience, always discoursing, dissecting, condemning, making her miserable. The drawbacks of such a retreat did not escape her, however. For eighteen years, she remarked lucidly, silent prayer was the occasion of undergoing “this trial, and in that great dryness”: the ordeal of “being unable as I say to reflect discursively” (por no poder, como digo, discurrir)²² But any trials were gladly accepted, since they came from the Lord, and Teresa readily recognized the advantages of such regressive pleasures; the benefits of narcissistic jouissance (as Jérôme and I refer to it) in the masculine-feminine bosom of the combined parents whom she projected by exiling herself, powerless and speechless, in the Other. And yet in the same stroke of writing, the nun also indicated the advantages she expected from Confession. Shared speaking and listening offered far more than a “shield” against importunate thoughts; they put her through a veritable initiation process, which paved the way for writing. That need to “reflect discursively,” satisfied by Confession, throws light on the inexhaustible eagerness with which the future saint was always seeking guides (who were for their part conquered by her paroxysms and verve), confessors whom she hassled, subjugated, and cast aside. Reading, confession, and writing fell gradually into place to mobilize rapture, to provoke it and push it to the limits of endurance. And to provide her with the optimum framework for surviving and sharing.

Family tradition, Augustinian schooling, personal culture and flair, all helped her to find in books the concrete reality of the grace she awaited from the Beloved: armed with a book,

which was like a partner or a shield by which to sustain the blows of my many thoughts, I went about consoled. For the dryness was not [invariably] felt, but it always was felt when I was without a book. Then my soul was thrown into confusion and my thoughts ran wild. With a book I began to collect them, and my soul was drawn to recollection. And many times just opening the book was enough; at other times I read a little, and at others a great deal, according to the favor the Lord granted me.²³

When this love of books came to feed the writing of Teresa’s own works, her pitiless self-analysis reached a peak of rigor, grace, and wit. The solitary reader, the frustrated talker, would begin to hone sharp insights — often connected with utterance itself, the secret object of her desire — that anticipated Madame de Sévigné by a hundred years: “So often do we say we have this virtue that we end up believing we have it.”²⁴ I cannot decide, my voluble Teresa, what I envy more: your aptitude for transfixion, or your skill at converting your discurrir into chiseled maxims.

However much the writer stigmatized the “faculties” of intellect, imagination, and will that were not propitious for “mystical theology,” she made use of them for getting to her own personal truth. It was a truth that only emerged, for her as for us, gradually, through the process of committing herself to paper.

For the first time, a person — a woman, what’s more — describes with clinical lucidity the states of depersonalization caused or aggravated by epilepsy, along with their transcendence through faith in, and love for, the Other. It is generally agreed that Moses (maybe), Saint Paul, Mohammed, and Dostoyevsky (certainly), had similar experiences. But with how much more discretion and abstraction they reported them! Going well beyond the restitution of symptoms, basing herself on Judeo-Christian passions, Teresa exacerbates the melancholic moods attendant on the seizures and traces the successive stages whereby she has managed to turn them into exaltations of subjective omnipotence. The fact that the latter never hardens into delusions of grandeur, a paranoid structure, or harmful enactments in the real world is not the least mark of Teresa’s genius. She took care to soften that triumphant self-affirmation into a concern for better relations with others, through the moral, sensorial, and intellectual perfecting of herself — without being blind to her own tendencies toward père-version.

This alchemy took shape here, at the Incarnation, in a very intense fashion from 1554 to 1562, until an inspired confessor (the Dominican Pedro Ibáñez) asked the nun to write down this folly, this heresy, this novelty. Predecessors like Francisco de Osuna, Luis de Granada (with his Treatise on Prayer), Bernabé de Palma (Via spiritus), Juan de Ávila, and Pedro de Alcántara had already challenged the split between the “natural” and the “supernatural,” the created and the uncreated, on grounds that in faith, dualism merges back into one: only through faith could visions and prophecies operate, only through faith could divine illumination be received.

What Teresa added to the service of faith thus understood by this earlier current of mystical theology was her neuropsychic pathology and her feminine sensuality, her melancholy and her hysterical passions, her literary artistry and psychological acuity coiled around bodily agony. Thus she affirmed in a wholly new way — humanly forceful, as well as politically necessary by the end of the sixteenth century — that to take the love of the Other to its logical extremes constitutes the bedrock of Christianity and, even more intensely, of Tridentine Catholicism. And it casts light well beyond that moment of the Church, onto the various monotheisms fighting today over our globalized planet.

Chapter 16. THE MINX AND THE SAGE

“Intellect, Sister, what have you done with the intellect?” (Her confessor, Fr. Vicente Barrón, treading carefully.)

Bruno is not altogether in error, I’m making progress. This trip to Spain with Andrew and Juan has helped me gather up the threads of Teresa’s story, which continues to haunt my reading and my dreaming. Her encounters are fleshed out before my eyes, I can feel her living her life.

Teresa has need of the spiritual direction of Fr. Barrón, on condition of diluting it with the more amicable advice of Francisco de Salcedo, who picked up the relay of her young soul from Uncle Pedro. Salcedo also assures a constant supply of aloja, a magic potion made from honey and spices, that soothes the fevers to which Teresa is so often prey. This “blessed and holy man, with his diligence, it seems to me, was the principal means by which my soul was saved”;¹ not only does he practice prayer, like Uncle Pedro, but prior to his ordination in 1570, he was romantically involved with the same Pedro’s wife’s cousin. No, Salcedo is not one to drone on about intellect. The mercurial Teresa nonetheless proves a handful, far exceeding his capacities. Maybe he should pass her on to Maestro Gaspar Daza, a close friend he had already told her about? Maybe not. She’s more up the street of Diego de Cetina. Sure enough, this twenty-five-year-old Jesuit makes her very happy: here at last is someone who understands! She determines to follow Cetina “in all things.” He finally persuades her to concentrate on Christ’s Passion, and to set her face against unsuitably personal mystic graces…This judicious young man is destined to go far, all the way to the chair of theology in Toledo.

“Poor intellect, it has gone strangely astray in me!” (Teresa loves to discurrir in the confession booth. Her respect for the young padre does not inhibit her from blurting out all the truths that pop into her mind. “I want to tell, tell, tell, tell all I know, all I think, all I guess, all that enchants me, and hurts, and surprises me,” sings the nightingale in Colette’s memoir.²) “This intellect is so wild that it doesn’t seem to be anything but a frantic madman no one can tie down. Nor am I master of it long enough to keep it calm for the space of a Creed. Sometimes I laugh at myself and know my misery, and I look at this madman and leave him alone to see what he does; and — glory to God — surprisingly enough he never turns to evil but to indifferent things: to whether there is anything to do here or there or over yonder. I then know the tremendous favor the Lord grants me when He holds this madman bound in perfect contemplation.”³

“You must be sorely tried…” The confessor is doing his best to slip in a word edgewise, to show this woman the right path, to fulfill a most difficult duty.

“Sometimes I am sunken in a foolishness of soul.”

“Hmm!”

“Yes, I think my soul then is like a little donkey eating grass, almost without perceiving that it does so.”

“No movement or effects by which you might perceive this?”

“It seems not, Father. On the contrary, in the other states I have told you of, my desires are restless and impossible to satisfy. And then great impulses of love make the soul like those little springs I’ve seen, which never cease to move the sand upward. ‘This is a good example of, or comparison to, souls that reach this state; love is always stirring and thinking about what it will do. It cannot contain itself, just as that water doesn’t seem to fit in the earth; but the earth casts it out of itself. So is the soul very habitually, for by reason of the love it has it doesn’t rest in or contain itself.’”⁴

She makes his head spin, this loquacious nun, in ceaseless motion! She shows distinct promise, but still…After racking his brains, Diego de Cetina advises her to meet Francisco de Borja next time he comes through Avila.

You are a minx, Teresa, for the more you act the sage, the more you aim your seductress’s beam at the objects of your love, the more your confessors — and your readers — want. Some take fright, naturally, and there was even a move to have you exorcised.⁵ But your spells deceive others, not yourself, and while keeping a low profile as befits those inquisitorial times, you dose your feverish outbursts with bitter bouts of soul-searching. How well I understand you!

“The soul must strive above all to represent to itself that there is nothing else on earth but God and itself.” Diego de Cetina is slightly taken aback, but does not argue. After all, you are no more “united” with your Master than the Sulamitess was with her Spouse, in the Song of Solomon! So what’s the problem?

The good fathers wish earnestly to believe you. But you move too fast for them. Diego de Cetina and Gaspar Daza have time only to wonder whether it is really seemly for a charitable soul to shrink from the world as much as you do. Beware the sin of pride, the fault of disrespect…Is this behavior licensed by the canon? You’ve gone beyond that already, you’re in a rush.

You are well aware, for that matter, that the presence of the Lord both inside and around you is pure grist to your ego. Your raptures often take place, as if accidentally, in public,⁶ and you worry far too much about what people think. Some disapprove in whispers, others praise the Lord for granting you the favors that you claim. Either way “would be advantageous to me” (que entrambas cosas eran ganancia para mí).⁷ There’s no avoiding narcissism if you’re set to be the Other’s great love, and you know it, my perceptive Teresa. Your harshest critic will always be yourself, isn’t that so, my implacable one? For much as you profess humility and devoutness, temptations assail you and, shamefaced, you feel “I was deceiving everyone.”⁸ Fair enough! “Such a subtle self-dissection is not without benefits on the side,” smirks Dr. Tristan. “Your roommate got more than her share of ganancias, did she not!”

Next, by a fresh and by no means final twist of watchful lucidity, you realize that the “appearance of humility came from serious imperfection and from not being mortified.” Because if you had truly surrendered to your Spouse, you wouldn’t care what people said about you, good or bad. You would have been ready for any amount of persecution. Talking of persecution, you expected it! You foresaw it, and it did not spare you, right to the end. Isn’t that always the best gift for a…persecutee? You don’t need telling, Teresa, all’s fair in this cohabitation with the Almighty that you created for yourself with so much pain and rapture!

And all is for the best in this best of all possible out-of-the-worlds. There is no outlet for zealousness, vanity, or simulated seduction. You knew, long before we did — we of the Parisian Psychoanalytical Society — that there’s no outlet for narcissism. Negative or positive, narcissism is understood, foreseen, and justified by the love between the two of you, the Beloved and the woman who prays, the Lord and His Bride. “Everything seems to be a heavy burden, and rightly so, because it involves a war against ourselves. But once we begin to work, God does so much in the soul and grants it so many favors that all that one can do in this life seems little.”⁹

I like your quip about the world down here being like a “bad inn.” Your triumphant narcissism thus spares you from both the utter disconsolation of earthly life and from the suicidal urge that can tempt the depressed to think that there is only safety in the Beyond. Nothing of the sort afflicts you, Teresa, my love: a temporary visitor to our squalid hostel, you couldn’t care less for the conditions, since He is waiting for you.

“Let us not desire delights, daughters; we are well-off here; the bad inn lasts for only a night [Bien estamos aquí; todo es una noche la mala posada].”¹⁰

Fond though he is of you, Diego de Cetina frowns at this. You notice.

“Never think, Father, that I am not pained by the sins of our fellow men. Of course I am! And yet I ask myself: what if it was another temptation?” (Intelligence tells you that it would be a good thing to step back from the exclusivity, so prized by you, of the bonds between you and the Lord, and take an interest in other people. So many sinners, after all!) “But then again — might it not be another kind of vacuous hankering for honor, when one tries to do too much for others?” (You switch directions in a flash, like a will-o’-the-wisp; the young Jesuit is getting dizzy, he’s not sure whether to breathe deeply or try once more to bring you back to earth. He sighs.)

“Are you quite well, Father? Now, doesn’t this bid to save our neighbors, like every other effort of the kind, betray an excess of zeal? It’s a sin of pride, perhaps? A want of humility? I would have done better to open my eyes to myself, I should have been more circumspect.” You have an answer for everything, vigilant Teresa. Fortunate confessors!

“Very good, carry on with your prayers and penances.”

Did Cetina get you to study the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola? Nobody knows.

Chapter 17. BETTER TO HIDE…?

Teresa is agitated, sure, she’s into splitting hairs, that’s clear; at the moment, however, the excesses of body and soul are far from being the chief cause of her unhappiness. In 1547, the chapter of the Cathedral of Toledo, soon followed by other powerful authorities, had decreed the estatuto de limpieza de sangre, the Statutes of Purity of Blood, which banned the descendants of converted Jews from holding ecclesiastical office.¹ Anybody might suddenly be required to prove the limpieza of their ancestry and their soul! But who is truly pure, sin mancha, “without stain”? An Old Christian? Don Quixote, the creation of a man with converso roots, described himself mischievously as a Christian from the land of the stain: “En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quero acordarme…”² “In a village of La Mancha, whose name I have no desire to call to mind…” One can guess why.

Among the Illuminati or alumbrados were many converts from Judaism, and many women. Shunned by official institutions, they were positively welcomed by more unorthodox congregations in search of spiritual renewal. For some ten years, from 1550 to 1560, Teresa too had been influenced by new spiritual masters, in addition to Osuna. She had engaged in an intense dialogue with herself so as to adjust her experience to their teachings; but for all her commitment to honesty and truth, she could not confide in anybody about this development.

The first of these masters was Juan de Ávila, the “Apostle of Andalusia,” born, like Teresa, to a converso father and an Old Christian mother, and the author of a book about and for women, Avisos y reglas cristianas sobre aquel verso de David: “Audi, Filia.”³ Teresa had of course devoured the first edition, in 1556. Audi, filia! For her, this title would always be associated with the Epistles of Saint Jerome and his commentary on Psalm 45: “Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear: forget also thine own people, and thy father’s house; so shall the king greatly desire thy beauty.” These were the words she read out loud to Uncle Pedro, the words that were so important in her decision to take the veil. But the preacher Juan de Ávila was suspected of Illuminism, something the inquisitors tended to confuse with interior spirituality and the whiff of Protestantism; Teresa had to tread carefully. Audi, Filia was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559.

The Inquisition also prosecuted the Franciscan friar Pedro de Alcántara, because that holy man took it for granted that God could reveal himself to the weaker sex. He had gone as far as teaching that Heaven was for the poor and the rich could never be saved; he called the victims of the Inquisition “martyrs” and disapproved of the term “dogs” to describe converts from Judaism or Islam. Dangerous, again. The Book of Prayer and Meditation—signed by Luis de Granada⁴ but a vehicle for Alcántara’s ideas — was also placed on the Index in 1559. Pedro de Alcántara himself was acquitted, with a warning to moderate his tone.

Bernardino de Laredo was also a Franciscan, and a personal physician to João III of Portugal. Although he had no scholastic training he went further than his master Osuna in the Ascent of Mount Zion, a work that fascinated Teresa — but she balked at Laredo’s rejection of any human representation of Christ. After all, she could never dispense with the humanity of the Crucified One. So, let’s thrash it out! What a splendid time to be discurriendo!

On second thoughts, better not. The chief inquisitor, Fernando de Valdés,⁵ and his right-hand man, the Dominican Melchor Cano,⁶ were on the warpath. In 1551 they drew up an Index of Prohibited Books, revising it in 1554, ahead of the Index vaticanus promulgated by the pope in 1559. It had become imperative to eradicate crypto-Jewish and Muslim practices, to repel the advance of Lutheran propaganda on the wings of the new technology of printing (already in 1517, the Ninety-five Theses pinned up in Wittenberg by Martin Luther were printed),⁷ and to censor both the production and the possession — the reading — of heterodox works. “They” banned all spiritual treatises in the vernacular and any complete editions of the Bible that were not buffered with duly authorized commentaries.

Teresa’s new friends the Jesuits were also targeted, due to their links with Rheno-Flemish mysticism. It was whispered that “they” had attempted to arrest the archbishop of Toledo himself, Bartolomé de Carranza, an ally of the Jesuits and a friend to the champion of inspired faith, Juan de Valdés, who had died in 1541.⁸ These controversies were a great topic of conversation among the best of the Carmelites, and Teresa drank in knowledge, steeped herself in it, constructed herself with it. A new Bible had been circulating since 1522, published by the recently founded University of Alcalá, which had retranslated the Old Testament from the Hebrew and the New Testament from the Greek, after Chief Inquisitor Cisneros had embraced the humanist point of view.⁹ As a matter of fact, Friar Luis de León — your posthumous editor, my audacious Teresa — went further still. He stood up for Arias Montano, the scholar protected by Philip II who directed the literal translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Latin, and an interlinear Latin translation of the New Testament from the Greek.¹⁰ One thousand two hundred copies (far more than those issued by Alcalá) of the eight-volume Bible rolled off the Antwerp presses of the king’s typographer, Christophe Plantin, in 1573.¹¹ Luis de León had the gall to maintain that the Vulgate and the Septuagint texts were not always faithful to the original Hebrew; he translated the Song of Songs into Castilian and was jailed for four years. “They” were well aware, besides, that the future philosopher-poet was of Jewish ancestry: his great-great-great grandmother on his father’s side, Elvira, was a conversa. Undaunted, on his release, he wrote The Names of Christ, a work that delved into the literal meanings of the Hebrew texts and attacked the statutes on purity of blood.

You, too, would be in “their” sights. An early charge of Illuminism was refuted by your confessor, the Dominican Pedro Ibáñez, in 1560. Posthumously, the scourge of the alumbrados in Extremadura and inquisitor in Llerena, the Dominican Alonso de la Fuente, denounced you as a “mistress of Illuminism” before the Council of the Inquisition in 1589. Thanks to God, there are no passages of yours that genuinely challenge religious discipline or dogma, and the affair petered out. Later, another Dominican, Juan de Lorenzana, denounced you to the Holy Office, as did the Augustinian Antonio de Sosa and, in 1598, Canon Francisco de Pisa, the historian of Toledo. None of these accusations were followed up.

How were you supposed to handle all this, as the ignorant woman you pretended to be — which of course you were, but one endowed with high intelligence and a sense of history? Fierce arguments opposed grammarians and humanists to some (but not all) theologians: the Jesuit Mariana advocated a return to the literal meaning of the Bible, directly based on the Hebrew, while a number of Thomist Dominicans appointed themselves the guardians of dogma.

You would hardly have been eager to draw down on your head the lightning bolts of any sort of “trial,” in view of your family history. Undoubtedly passionate, you were also shrewd. You cited the innovators with diffident humility; when the innovation was yours, you presented it bravely or diplomatically, depending on the circumstances. The Council of Trent, launched in 1545, was still in full swing, and its lengthy debates would give rise to new ways of confronting heresy, Protestant or any other kind. Since the Church was a corpus mysticum, a notion the unfolding Counter-Reformation took very seriously, it would have to provide the populace with saints: these were to fortify the sacrament of Communion, facilitating a suprasensible union with Christ while inspiring a communal solidarity able to compete with that of the Protestants or the humanists, strong enough indeed to outdo them. Meanwhile, all things considered, people in Avila were not cut off from such issues. Your services will be needed, Teresa. Just not yet….

Meanwhile, there’s good reason to fear lest the spiritual favors you report be seen as demonic temptations, or heresy, or insanity…How reassuring to have a trustworthy confidant in Diego de Cetina, a man who understands you, and knows his Juan de Ávila as thoroughly as his Francisco de Osuna!

“Father, I have been released from my captivity on earth.” Teresa wants to shout it out, but warnings have been “raining down on her” in these troubled times; she’d rather be reasonable.

“That is not the humblest of sentiments, Sister, as they must have told you already.”

“I only wish to explain myself to those I love! Truly, the transport lifts me up, as the clouds or the sun draw up the vapors of a stone.”

Diego de Cetina is doubtful, he doesn’t trust your double spirals. Evidently this Carmelite is no hoaxer, though Lord knows there are enough of those in these dark times, especially in women’s convents. Is she like the beatas with whom rustics and aristocrats alike, rightly or wrongly, are so besotted? She says what she feels, with beautiful precision. But there are limits.

“I would advise you to concentrate on the Passion of Christ, preferably on a single aspect, without haste. Follow The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, it will teach you discipline. I sometimes feel that you undertake too much at a time.”

“I am willing to do everything you say, Father. But it’s stronger than I am. ‘The more I strove to distract myself, the more the Lord enveloped me in that sweetness and glory, which seemed to surround me so completely that there was no place to escape.’”¹²

“Resist, Sister, resist. Willpower too comes from God, and He has given you a great deal of it. Stand fast against these mystical graces, humility must be preserved.”

Even this young, modern priest, a member of Loyola’s Society of Jesus, even he tries to hold her back. He’s not wrong, certainly, and Teresa vows to do her best.

She abandons prayer for a year, with the sole result of “putting myself right in hell.”¹³ “In sum, she is a woman; and not a good but a wretched one” (En fin, mujer y no buena, sino ruin).¹⁴

She tells him so, because she thinks it’s true, and because she thinks he thinks so, too. Teresa thinks that more women than men are blessed by grace. She has noticed this independently, and Pedro de Alcántara will confirm it to her: women do progress more rapidly along the spiritual path.¹⁵ A holy man who mortifies his body to the point of death, Alcántara is so knowledgeable about the female soul that he reckons it preferable for a woman to marry again, below her social rank if necessary, than for her to take the veil without a genuine vocation to serve God. There are excellent reasons for this, according to Alcántara, and also according to Teresa, who is not as erudite as the Franciscan but feels it in her heart.¹⁶ Let it go for now; all will be addressed in good time.

Five years have gone by since that memorable, and incontestably genital, communion with Jesus, when standing in front of a carved effigy of the Suffering Man and sobbing harder than the Magdalene, Teresa knew that “the Lord was certainly present there within me” (como sabía estaba allí cierto el Señor dentro de mí).¹⁷

On June 29, 1559, a quite different vision comes to her: more disturbing, more incisive, more decisive in fact, given the absence of any form of pictorial, sculptural, or textual support. She hears the One she seems to see:

I saw that it was He, in my opinion, who was speaking to me. Since I was completely unaware that there could be a vision like this one, it greatly frightened me in the beginning; I did nothing but weep. However, by speaking one word alone to reassure me, the Lord left me feeling as I usually did: quiet, favored, and without any fear. It seemed to me that Jesus Christ was always present at my side; but since this wasn’t an imaginative vision, I didn’t see any form. Yet I felt very clearly that He was always present at my right side and that He was the witness of everything I did. At no time in which I was a little recollected, or not greatly distracted, was I able to ignore that He was present at my side.¹⁸

Later, Pedro de Alcántara assures her that this kind of vision is “among the most sublime.”

For if I say that I see it with the eyes neither of the body nor of the soul, because it is not an imaginative vision, how do I know and affirm that He is more certainly at my side than if I saw Him?…The vision is represented through knowledge given to the soul that is clearer than sunlight. I don’t mean that you see the sun or brightness, but that a light, without your seeing light, illumines the intellect so that the soul may enjoy such a great good.¹⁹

“Without being seen, [this vision] is impressed with such clear knowledge that I don’t think it can be doubted.” It is not so much “visible” as “impressed,” that is, already inscribed, carved, sculpted, and she also compares the Holy Presence to effortless sustenance: “as though the food were already placed in the stomach without our eating it or knowing how it got there.”

What’s more, it is as though she was pregnant with a child that is her own internal composition, that has no need to enter from outside, and that is “there,” regardless of her awareness of or desire for it. An unconscious creation? “It is clearly known to be there, although we don’t know what food it is or who put it there. But in this case I do know, yet not how it got there; nothing is seen or understood, nor was the soul ever moved to desire it — nor had I been informed that this was possible [entiende bien que está, aunque aquí no se entiende el manjar que es, ni quién le puso. Acá sí; mas cómo se puso no lo sé, que ni se vio, ni se entiende, ni jamás se había movido a desearlo, ni había venido a mi noticia podía ser].”²⁰

Whenever she tears herself away from her inner being in order to envisage an external agent of love, it is aurally — as for the Mary of the Visitation — that the nourishing inscription enters in.

God makes the intellect become aware — even though it may not wish to do so — and understand what is said; in that experience the soul seemingly has other ears with which it hears, and God makes it listen, and it is not distracted.…It finds everything prepared and eaten. There is nothing more to do than to enjoy, as in the example of someone who without having learned or done any work to know how to read, and without having studied anything, would find that all knowledge was possessed inwardly, without knowing how or where it was gotten since no studying had been done.…The soul sees that in an instant it is wise.…It is left full of amazement.…Even without signs, just by a glance, it seems, [God and the soul] understand each other.²¹

Like a book, engraved and heard by the soul — that other inside her — thanks to Him? The book has still to be written.

There ensues a series of repetitions of that experience, with precise physical and spiritual variations that merely assure the Carmelite of her visual, tactile, aural, and gustatory interpenetration with the Beloved’s presence. The hands of the Lord appear to her, then His “divine face,”²² then the lovely whiteness of the whole person. Will she be ravished by this, or fall to fear and trembling? On June 29, the feast of Saint Paul, “this most sacred humanity in its risen form was represented to me completely, as it is in paintings, with such wonderful beauty and majesty.”²³ Teresa is exultant:

If I should have spent many years trying to imagine how to depict something so beautiful, I couldn’t have, nor would I have known how to; it surpasses everything imaginable here on earth, even in just its whiteness and splendor.…God gives it so suddenly that there wouldn’t even be time to open your eyes, if it were necessary to open them. For when the Lord desires to give the vision, it makes no more difference if they are opened than if they are closed; even if we do not desire to see the vision, it is seen.²⁴

A resplendent whiteness, a vision without form, Jesus has impressed himself indelibly on her; the Spouse has become her embodied phantasm, on the way to becoming…her double.

Conscious of this absolute identification with the object of her worship, the praying woman at the peak of her mystical experience described herself as “transformed into God”; the censors — whose job it was to protect her from her own heretical leanings and so assure the publication of her testimony with the imprimatur of the Church — struck out this phrase and replaced it with “united in God.” The attentive reader will gather, however, that, more than a “union” between two distinct beings, Teresa’s raptures enact a veritable assimilation of the divine into the praying woman.²⁵ Needless to say, she never enters the castle without being impelled to do so by the Other: “I understand this union to be the wine cellar where the Lord wishes to place us when He desires and as He desires. But however great the effort we make to do so, we cannot enter. His Majesty must place us there and enter Himself into the center of our soul.”²⁶ And yet, since “there is no closed door”²⁷ between the Fifth and Sixth Dwelling Places, the soul at last reaches its “center” where “the main dwelling place” is found,²⁸ and becomes “one with God” (una cosa con Dios).²⁹ Dispossession of the self, transport into the Other, absorption of the Other into the self, in the infinite round between dwelling places.

Teresa sometimes implied, misleadingly, that she had cut down on paroxystic prayer; on the contrary, it remained essential for the molding of La Madre’s position with respect to her faith. What did change over time and with the benefit of maturity was that her undeniable Illuminism, continually revisited, questioned, and imparted by her writing, ceased to be a source of confusion and distress and evolved into the fantastical support of a matchless entrepreneurial realism, the impulse that led her to found a string of reformed Carmelite religious houses. The Book of Her Life and the Foundations retrace the meticulous elaboration of this cleavage and this equilibrium.

The most extreme consequence of the identification underway — of the beloved turning into her Beloved — will be that “in the enjoyment of that divine presence the vision of it is lost. Is it true that it is forgotten afterward? That majesty and beauty remain so impressed that they are unforgettable.”³⁰ “Our effort can neither do nor undo anything when it comes to seeing more or seeing less.…The Lord desires us to be very clearly aware that this is not our work but His Majesty’s work.”³¹ Teresa takes leave of herself in the living image of the Other whom she carries inside. After having seen, the time comes for hearing. At the junction of these two perceptions, truth is written.

Although her raptures made Teresa one of the elect, La Madre was anxious to disclaim any of the “pride” that lesser souls might feel to possess such a gift. She only felt the indignity of it, especially when her confessors hinted at that aspect. As time went by, penitence changed into a delightful restoration of triumphant pride; manic emotionality was calmed by the omnipotence of the Resurrected Lord, if not by the authority of a spiritual Father; in the last instance she bowed, serenely, to therapeutic necessity. And so she received that plenitude as a “truth,” her truth, and advanced two reasons for the “certainty” she felt.

First, the Jesus who surrounds her and delights her is no longer a “comparison” but a “living image,” because He radiates the majesty of the risen Lord, which faith dictates to the believer and which dissolves her being:

I don’t say this example is a comparison—for comparisons are never so exact — but the truth. The difference lies in that which there is between living persons and paintings of them, no more nor less. For if what is seen is an image, it is a living image—not a dead man, but the living Christ. And He makes it known that He is both man and God, not as He was in the tomb but as He was when He came out of the tomb after His resurrection.…Especially after receiving Communion…He reveals Himself as so much the lord of this dwelling that it seems the soul is completely dissolved, and it sees itself consumed in Christ.³²

And then, since it is to Him that she owes her spark of certainty, hers cannot possibly be a subjective truth but only the Truth:

Within this majesty I was given knowledge of a truth that is the fulfillment of all truths. I don’t know how to explain this because I didn’t see anything. I was told without seeing anyone, but I clearly understood that it was Truth itself telling me…“Do you know what it is to love Me truthfully? It is to understand that everything that is displeasing to me is a lie. By the beneficial effects this understanding will cause in your soul you shall see clearly what you now do not understand.”³³

Strangely but logically, Teresa perceives this truth as an inscription etched into her physical and psychic being, like an “indescribable” trace that remains to be translated, uttered, retranscribed ad infinitum. Far from “dissolving” her, indeed, the Truth that invades her by virtue of Love for the Other invites her to make It known, by setting down her truth. Confessors did not suffice: the writer needed to ask a spiritual master who was himself suspect in those dark times — the author of the reflections on Audi, filia—to approve her decision to translate the “inscribed” or “impressed” into “fiction.” She sent the manuscript of her autobiography to Juan de Ávila, whose letter of April 14, 1560, was already highly encouraging: hearken to Christ’s words, the master told her in a nutshell, for He did not offer His counsel to men sooner than to women.

Is there any point in hiding, then? Not really.

Chapter 18. “…OR ‘TO DO WHAT LIES WITHIN MY POWER’”?

When Teresa’s Dominican confessor, García de Toledo, asked her in 1565 to complete the second draft of the Book of Her Life, the author replied that since she had had no time to re-read it, he must feel free to proceed “by tearing up what appears to you to be bad”; meanwhile she would “do what lies within my power” (hacer lo que es en mí).

I ask you to correct it and have it transcribed if it is to be brought to Padre Maestro Ávila, for it could happen that someone might recognize my handwriting. I urgently desire that he be asked for his opinion about it, since this was my intention in beginning to write. If it seems to him I am walking on a good path, I shall be very consoled; then nothing else would remain for me than to do what lies within my power. Nevertheless, do what you think best, and remember you are obliged to one who has so entrusted her soul to you.¹

Later, she wrote: “For if they [women] do what lies in their power [si ellas hacen lo que es en sí], the Lord will make them so strong [manly: varoniles] that they will astonish men.”²

This concern to be faithful to “what is in her power” or, more literally, to “what is within,” evolved with maturity into the “center of our soul,” an immutable “certainty,” a “peace” that persists through “war, trial, and fatigue.”³ At that moment, though, her fidelity was strained by fear of betrayal: “As for what I say from here on, I do not give this permission [to Toledo and other confessors]; nor do I desire, if they should show it to someone, that they tell who it is who has experienced these things, or who has written this. As a result, I will not mention my name or the name of anyone else, but I will write everything as best I can to remain unknown.”⁴

And yet, the feeling she had of having begun a new life did nothing but grow. It dated from her re-conversion, of course, and was reinforced by the act of writing itself, which “freed” her from herself and made her a subject of the Other — in times to come, and in the time of others.

I now want to return to where I left off about my life, for I think I delayed more than I should have so that what follows would be better understood. This is another, new book from here on—I mean another, new life. The life dealt with up to this point was mine; the one I lived from the point where I began to explain those things about prayer is the one God lived in me—according to the way it appears to me — because I think it would be impossible in so short a time to get rid of so many bad habits and deeds. May the Lord be praised who freed me from myself [que me liberó de mí].⁵

The first draft of the Life being lost, all we have is the one written between 1563 and 1565 for the Dominicans García de Toledo and Pedro Ibáñez, and with the blessing of Francisco de Soto Salazar, her Inquisitor friend (believe it or not); Salazar also urged her to send a copy to Juan de Ávila. The Inquisition was naturally packed with skillful diplomats and subtle theologians…Three years later, in April 1568, despite the misgivings of Fr. Domingo Báñez, who was reluctant to let the book stray beyond a restricted circle, Teresa finally sent her autobiography to Juan de Ávila by the intermediary of her good friend Luisa de la Cerda.

Much later, in 1574, the Grand Inquisitor Cardinal Gaspar de Quiroga opened a copy of the same book with great interest. He had received it from the princess of Eboli, who had borne a grudge against La Madre ever since her spoilt ways had gotten her expelled from the Pastrana convent. This act of revenge misfired: the “Great Angel,” as Teresa dubbed him, told Luisa de la Cerda of his admiration for the writer. Six years later, in 1580, when Teresa’s reforms were beginning to prevail and she called on Quiroga for permission to found a Carmelite community in Madrid, he confirmed his appreciation of the book. However, the manuscript was not to leave the precincts of the Holy Office until 1588, when her executors Ana de Jesús and Luis de León retrieved it for publication purposes.

However subjective, the Truth the nun sought to transmit by articulating her own small truth turned out to be highly shareable, and shared it was. Teresa was thrilled to discover that García de Toledo had actually had his own religious experience of the states she described. Pedro Ibáñez, too, the alert, faithful companion of her mystical experience as much as of her projects for reform, was to retire to a contemplative Dominican monastery. Domingo Báñez, Teresa’s confessor and director of conscience during the years of writing the memoir (1562–1568), lecturer in theology at Saint Thomas of Avila, professor at Salamanca, and consultant to the Inquisition in Valladolid, tried to impress on her that she should not confuse God’s action in her with her own action in His name, for each was “complete in its way.” Speaking as a witness for Teresa during her beatification proceedings in 1592, Báñez declared that mysticism and theology, the desire for God and the knowledge of God, albeit two distinct things, came together in her. Was the truth according to Teresa on the way to becoming the truth, validated as such by the highest echelons of the Church?

The unstinting support of the Dominicans did not prevent La Madre from expressing her gratitude to the Jesuits.

Since His Majesty desired now to enlighten me so that I might no longer offend Him and might know my great debt to Him, this fear increased in such a way that it made me diligently seek out spiritual persons to consult. I had already heard about some, because they had come to this town and were members of the Society of Jesus, of which — without knowing any of the members — I was extremely fond, only from hearing about the mode of life and prayer they followed. But I didn’t feel worthy to speak to them or strong enough to obey them, and this made me more fearful; it would have been a difficult thing for me to converse with them and yet be what I was.⁶

And again: “I have been reared in, and given being, as they say, by the Society.”⁷

In the highly competitive wasps’ nest that was religious life under the eye of the Inquisition, every support was precious; the inner book had great need of it, and so did the books to come. Teresa, with unbeatable pragmatism, made sure of surrounding herself with every “network” in sight to fend off the suspicions, calumnies, and persecutions that were a perennial feature of her life. But if these powerful shields kept her safe from the Inquisition, a more important factor was the intimate persuasion that acted like the magical spring of her pragmatism: she was convinced of having attained and incorporated the Absolute, the “centella de seguridad,” even if only intermittently.

The sun is blazing hot this afternoon, my traveling companions are sated with sightseeing and running out of speculations about the terrorist attacks in London. Andrew has been reduced to leafing through Teresa’s letters (volume 2 of my French edition of her Complete Works), while lending half an ear to my expoundings. As usual he only wants to be contrary, and now he pounces, with an evil grin.

“So Teresa only made it into odor of sanctity because she turned her neurosis around by barricading herself behind a demented exultation?” He doesn’t pull his punches.

My friend is too impatient to discern the nuances of the multihued biography I am trying to refashion, in my fashion, of my roommate, or to explore her kaleidoscopic frames of mind. Otherwise he would have seen how in the icy furnace of Teresa’s psychic life, the traps of paranoid delusions of grandeur were dismantled one by one, step by step, finding compensation elsewhere. This came about thanks, firstly, to the woman’s humility, real or feigned, revealed by her many depressive doubts and by that quickness to berate herself in which masochism vied with irony. But it was no less due to the more or less friendly harshness, the more or less harsh friendship, of her spiritual guides. Lastly and above all, it was due to writing, her indefatigable lookout by night and by day; the writing she did not neglect from the 1560s onward, with or without the input of ecstasy. Thus contained behind a triple security barrier, her raptures restored her to health and the pleasures of hard work. The Carmelite mystic was reborn as a businesswoman.

“Andrew, listen to me.” I’m groping for clincher arguments to awaken my wayward American to the benefits of heeding a long-dead Catholic saint; no easy task, in all the rawness of that fundamentalist outrage in London. “Look, Teresa knows that this ‘living water’ she’s submerged in, to drowning point, and I’m talking about depression inverted into stimulation by way of comatose states and epileptic auras — so, this living water is called desire. She knows that ecstasy is a disconnect that interrupts that unbearable arousal and transforms it into jouissance, a rejoicing in self-abandon, relaxation, a therapy-jouissance. That’s her weapon against the deadly violence of desire. How do I know? Listen to this,” and I pick up volume 1 of the Complete Works. “Here, Way of Perfection, chapter 19, section eight. ‘The love of God and the desire for Him can increase so much that the natural subject is unable to endure it, and so there have been persons who have died from love.’ That’s what she says! The fact that the desire is for God doesn’t alter the fact that it’s desire. Real desire, whose object is nowhere, the objectless kind — you know the sort, as well as I do. The divine aspect only makes it greater. She goes on: ‘I know of one’—she often uses that formula to talk about herself—‘who would have died if God hadn’t succored her immediately with such an abundance of this living water, for she was almost carried out of herself with raptures. I say that she was almost carried out of herself because in this water the soul finds rest.’⁸ So, are you listening, Teresa is the vessel and God is the glassmaker who blows it into the shape he wants, but also the man who fills the vase as he pleases. This coupling, whose sexual symbolism surely hasn’t escaped you, is analyzed by Teresa in all its ambiguity. Pain and sweetness, nourishment and penitence, dissembling and longing — divine perfection meets human imperfection, in short. Teresa analyzes herself in the language of the Gospels, but once she inserts this into a semi-novelized introspection, it becomes a prefiguration of psychoanalysis. Well, yes, I take that as a compliment, it’s an occupational hazard! Here’s more, a bit farther on.

“‘However great the abundance of this water He gives, there cannot be too much in anything of His. If He gives a great deal, He gives the soul, as I said, the capacity to drink much; like a glassmaker who makes a vessel a size he sees is necessary in order to hold what he intends to pour into it.

“‘In desiring this water there is always some fault, since the desire comes from ourselves; if some good comes, it comes from the Lord who helps. But we are so indiscreet that since the pain is sweet and delightful, we never think we can have enough of this pain. We eat without measure, we foster this desire as much as we can, and so sometimes it kills.…I say that anyone who reaches the experience of this thirst that is so impelling should be very careful, because I believe he will have this temptation. And although he may not die of thirst, his health will be lost and he will give external manifestations of this thirst, even though he may not want to; these manifestations should be avoided at all costs.’”

While “mortal life” makes her breathless with desire and this asphyxia horrifies our nun, the desire to possess the ideal Father comes to her rescue once again, giving her another enjoyment to savor. This one, unlike desire, is not deadly, for sensual plenitude is here relieved by being ideally transferred onto the amorous ideality of Man. Some (in Lacan’s line, as we’ve seen) think today that this “other jouissance” is accessible only to women. Others contest this. There are writers, for example, male to all intents and purposes, who are not so far from opening up to it, from expressing it, and more.

Andrew looks skeptical — just to annoy me, I guess. I give up, and resume the discussion with Teresa: It’s easy, she exists but doesn’t answer. Like God. “Like my father,” said Paul, my favorite patient.

By contrast with the average suicide bomber, you believe, Teresa, that the celestial glassmaker formed you as a vessel whose size is commensurate with what He wishes to pour into it. Loving as He is, and albeit flattered by your penances and mortifications, He will not summon you to die, let alone to blow yourself up. Your mating is thus so divinely tuned that the water He provides will never be too much, even though you sometimes drink an awful lot of it, don’t you, Teresa! The female “vessel,” mouth agape, hollow-bodied, is begging to be filled, for your desires are still childishly, archaically oral, I’ve told you before. Your arousal calls for food, nourishment without end. Alternating bitter grief with sweetness, you are “so indiscreet” as to castigate yourself relentlessly, my black-browed Teresa, you can never have enough, your voracity (or frigidity?) is unassailable, you were made for dying of desire. And would that be a blessed death, or a stratagem of the devil? Good question, and one that your various mortifications, succumbing to the same demonic impetus as your pleasures of the mouth, are not about to answer!

You are no longer fighting anorexia but its flip side, the secret, untold cause of many anorexic or bulimic behaviors: the “desire that kills,” unquenchable thirst, the avidity you feel as an empty female vessel. In this battle you are your own best doctor, a complicated one you’ll admit, downright dangerous at times, but as effective as most other medics. When you were writing that chapter 19 of the Way, you thought that “losing your health” was to be “avoided at all costs.” You’d learned the futility of trying to conceal the symptoms, “for we will be unable to hide everything we would like to hide.” Not only because it’s God’s love that wills all this, but also because “our nature at times can be as much at work as the love.” Something of an Illuminata, certainly, but no less a woman of the Renaissance, you are aware, my searching Teresa, unschooled as you claim to be, of the role of human nature as an adjunct to God’s: “There are persons who will vehemently desire anything, even if it is bad.”⁹ To whom do you refer? Do you know these persons from the inside, as you know yourself? Suppose you do. What then? Should these persons be penalized? Should their vehemence be brought within limits?

Not at all. You have come to a different answer, which I imagine you trying out on Francisco de Borja in an effort, no doubt successful, to convince him. He sums it up.

“In short, you are seized, like Paul, by a strong desire to live a bodily life while at the same time longing to be delivered of the prison of the body in order to be united with God.” This former grandee of Spain, duke of Gandía and marquis of Lombay, titles he has renounced by joining the Jesuits, could never be called unschooled. He quotes from the letter of Saint Paul to the Philippians, which he knows by heart: “For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful…”¹⁰ Borja is a man of the world. He does not preach, so much as rely on the easy charms of conversation.

“And the pain of it can be so dreadful that it almost takes away one’s reason, Father.” You enter into the game at once, introducing a little story, novelistic Teresa. “Not long ago, I saw a person in this affliction. She was in such great pain, and made such an effort to conceal it, that she was deranged for a while. Yes, quite delirious.” Your diagnosis is correct, Teresa; you fear for your own reason.

The Jesuit grandee smiles in silence, glad to note that the authorization he gave you to continue in the practice of prayer was not taken lightly: you keep a scrupulous eye on your own progress. But he never expected you to outwit him at the game of casuistry.

“For my part I don’t believe it is a matter of cutting off desire, only of moderating it.” What a finely poised performance as a moralist, prefiguring those of the eighteenth century, my mutant Teresa! “That’s right, it’s good to create diversions, and I do mean diversions: to divert desire. To transmute it, if you like, by the power of thought (que mude el deseo pensando).¹¹ Don’t you agree, Father?” You desire in thinking, Teresa, you are a thinker of desire. Could Borja have been one of the first to notice?

For three years, from 1555 to 1558, you borrowed your friend Guiomar de Ulloa’s confessor, Fr. Juan de Prádanos. Your soul, you wrote later, was not strong but very fragile, “especially with regard to giving up some friendships I had. Although I was not offending God by them, I was very attached.” To Prádanos, as to the friends he was warning you from, you were “very attached, and it seemed to me it would be ingratitude to abandon them.” How well I understand you! Prádanos was not so distant from your substantial states and words, he did not forbid anything, he simply abandoned you to…God. Were you expecting it? Between these two father figures, human and divine, came “the first time the Lord granted me this favor of rapture.” The long-awaited moment of “mystical nuptials” has arrived, it is Pentecost 1556, you are forty-one years of age. “I heard these words: ‘No longer do I want you to converse with men but with angels.’”¹² Here is a grace that will reliably protect you from that manly Fr. Prádanos, not yet thirty…but never from his angelic side! Still, that is nothing to guard against, since the Lord Himself enjoins you to converse with his like. Honest as a person and sincere as a writer, you say so fair and square: “These words have been fulfilled, for I have never again been able to tie myself to any friendship or to find consolation in or bear particular love for any other persons than those I understand love Him and strive to serve Him; nor is it in my power to do so.”¹³ Fortunate Prádanos!

Young Fr. Baltasar Álvarez, also a Jesuit, stepped in to help you draw up the constitution and rules for discalced nuns. From 1562 to 1565, he was your confidant in Avila before being appointed rector at Medina del Campo. “I had a confessor who mortified me very much and was sometimes an affliction and great trial to me because he disturbed me exceedingly, and he was the one who profited me the most as far as I can tell”;¹⁴ “I knew that they told him to be careful of me, and that he shouldn’t let the devil deceive him by anything I told him.”¹⁵ But shouldn’t so solemn a letrado follow you with ecstatic transports of his own? You write: “I saw some of the wonderful favors the Lord bestowed on the rector of the Society of Jesus whom I have mentioned…Once a severe trial came upon him in which he was very persecuted and found himself in deep affliction.”¹⁶ Is this a reference to Fr. Álvarez, as Fr. Gratian notes in the margin, and as Fr. Larrañaga believes? Or is it to Gaspar de Salazar?¹⁷ Later on, a few months before the death of Baltasar Álvarez, you sound a more personal note, writing to Isabel Osorio: “You should know that he is one of my best friends. He was my confessor for some years.…He is a saint.”¹⁸ Finally, a year before your own death, you write sadly from Palencia: “Nonetheless, regarding matters of the soul, I feel alone, for there is no one here that I know from the Society. Truly, I feel alone everywhere, because before, even when our saint was far away, it seems he was a companion to me, because he still communicated with me through letters. Well, we are in exile, and it is good that we feel this life to be one.”¹⁹ He must have been pretty special.

What you invented, Teresa, my love, was neither censure nor sublimation, but a transfiguration of desire and its mutation into jouissance. The future saint Francisco de Borja must have been somewhat startled, but I think that he listened and heard you. His benevolent presence was enough for you to pursue your train of thought. The pair of you met at least twice, and this “great contemplative” helped you to tie Martha and Mary, the monastic and the active life, together.²⁰ Later he became general of the Society of Jesus and you wrote to each other for eighteen years, a fact that was taken into account during the process of your beatification. Those letters have unfortunately not survived; what a testimony they must have contained! The former nobleman’s encouragement, you let it be known, reinforced your conviction that it was possible to modulate desire between action and contemplation in the way you did, since “he answered…that it had happened to him.”²¹ Good gracious!

Today, listening to your nun stories, Borja holds his peace. Silence is as much part of the father’s role as of the analyst’s.

“Do you remember the hermit that Cassian speaks of?” (You like to impress the good fathers, my strategical Teresa, and that includes Borja. I can see why: they love it!) “The one who threw himself into a well, in order to see God sooner.” Like a suicide bomber in Baghdad, Tel Aviv, or London? Or like one of the “consumed” whom Colette dwelt upon, those men and women who are even more numerous today, junkies of desire unto death by way of hard sex? “Well, if that hermit’s desire had been faithful to God, he would not have put himself forward like that. For everything that comes from God is discreet and measured, I mean, luminous. Therefore we must be on our guard, always on the lookout! And we must curtail the time of prayer, no matter how enjoyable we find it. For otherwise our bodily strength will falter and our head will start to throb, trust me. I’m sure that moderation is necessary in all things, Father. And I dare to hope Your Honor will pardon me for thus advancing my humble opinion.”

A father, still more a father of the Church, cannot but approve of such sensible opinions, Teresa. Which neither add nor detract, of course, from your intimate conviction of harboring the Lord at the center of your castle — like a precious jewel, you say later.²² Your written ecstasy is a syncope that soothes you so as to link you to everybody, for “the Lord invites all [convida el Señor a todos].”²³ Your precious, blissful solitude is kept intact by weaving a net in the external world, like the “circumference” around your “center.” Is this what you are telling your learned, blue-blooded Jesuit? He hardly needs to be told, surely, that any excess is always a fault! But “perinde ac cadaver” and “AMDG — Ad majorem Dei gloriam”!

Borja knows that you reprise Matthew (“Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden” [11:28]) in your own way. The divine feast you enjoy is obviously not intended for you alone: “If the invitation were not a general one, the Lord wouldn’t have called us all.”²⁴ Indeed, the more inclusive the invitation, the greater your jouissance. How so? Because the spiral of narcissism is so constructed that it sweeps the beloved toward grandiosity the moment he or she sets foot on it: we have touched on this already. It is in order to spread out this feast for everybody that you make yourself a writer in your castle-laboratory, at the same time as you set forth on the highways and byways of Spain, bringing reform to the Carmelite order.

“You of all people should understand, Andrew, as someone who’s only interested in politics in order to get out of it! Teresa’s grandiose perversion, her père-version, demands far more of her than the conventional charity that’s enough for the average neurotic nun, trying to do good left and right so as to merit the sufferings of Christ. Politics as a form of connection has always been a magnet to paranoiacs, as you’ve often said yourself, and when it does not breed tyrants, it offers vast building sites to reformers and benefactors of humanity. Today’s tyrants have dwindled into virtual clowns of the generalized spectacle. So what? They’re still running after power and glory, aren’t they? Going back to Teresa, her transports of ecstasy are just one side of a coin whose other side commands her to act politically. Ravished by the heights of her elevation in the Spouse, dazzled by union with Him at the heart of her castle, her only concern now is to grasp hold of the religious link that subtends the power of Church institutions, in this case the Carmelite order, and adapt it to her very own style of jouissance. After all, she is the Truth of the Other! Luckily this wild certainty only possesses her on and off. Not letting it hold her up, she manages to domesticate the incommensurable desire for the Other — paranoia, if you like — and exhibits her appeasement in institutionalized form, as an example to the whole world. She’s saying: have a go, and then we’ll talk! By founding a new monastic order, the Discalced Carmelites, Teresa proclaims to all and sundry that it’s possible to infinitely transmute the meaning of the bond with others, and that this is what life, properly lived, is about! In all humility, needless to say. That’s her ambition, don’t you think? Stop harping on her pathology, this is a patient who has intuited your clinics already. She says in the “Sixth Dwelling Places”: ‘Through experience we have seen that it’—the jewel, or vision of Our Lord—‘has cured us of some illnesses for which it is suited.’²⁵ Her faith is her therapy, and she spells it out.…Come on now, quit grumbling and let’s read some more.”

Chapter 19. FROM HELL TO FOUNDATION

We are in 1560, and Teresa, despite being taken out of herself in raptures and overwhelmed by the love of the Lord, is not at peace: she frets about whether she is truly fulfilling her vocation. The Convent of the Incarnation seems awfully big, despite its cramped conditions, and far too agreeable: the Mitigated Rule, that governs the Carmelite order following the papal bull of 1247, is downright lax. And yet some find the regime too frugal: meat no more than three times a week, a single meal on other days, fasting during Lent and Advent — to hear them complain, you’d think it was draconian. But why? Can this really be called a life of abstinence, abstention, and poverty? What about the day trips, and the callers, and the semi-authorized socializing? Only the ordeal of Calvary is worthy of God, and by that standard, there’s certainly nothing Christly about the Incarnation! Why was the Primitive Rule ever relaxed? Are they so wrong, the men and women who practice a more austere and demanding spiritual code, abroad and in Spain too, and call for an end to the laxity of this modern, rather too modern, Catholicism? Laxity, who said laxity? The sisters are all for it. Here’s one now, returning from the parlor, her mouth full of cake — yes, didn’t you know, there are splendid refreshments to be enjoyed at the Carmelites’ place, along with good talk!

“Beware the vice of gluttony, Sister!” Teresa rebukes her with a smile, not sure of being immune to that temptation herself.

“Small fry compared with your outings, Sister,” comes the swift retort. (These nuns can be nasty. Ill feeling reigns until nightfall, when there is singing and dancing after dinner between prayers. Even then, some persist in resentment against the Ahumada woman, who thinks she’s a saint.) “Everyone knows that certain high-ranking persons, whose requests and alms no mother superior can refuse, apply to have you stay with them? Tee-hee…”

“I only go when I am ordered to do so.”

“Oh, of course, but go you do. You go all steeped in God, they say, unless the devil’s hand is in it!”

Teresa swallows back her anger. The girl is cheeky, but not completely wrong. Ahumada has an intimate circle of her own: her cousins Ana and Inés de Tapia, for example, and, at the moment, the young widow, daughter of a first cousin, who has become a lay sister and faithful companion, María de Ocampo. All these women admire her, and love to hear her tell the lives of the saints; sometimes she confides her own torments and the parts played in them by God and the devil.

Last night, for instance, Teresa had a vision she plans to share with her friends. They will surely understand, for the Lord often sends such terrifying images to women in particular, so as to deflect them from the temptations that are legion even here, in this mitigated convent where outings are allowed.

“I saw before my eyes, before falling asleep — and so it was not a dream, but truly a vision, of those that God grants not to our eyes but to the visceral depths of the soul — I saw, Sisters, the frightful punishment of some vices (de algunos vicios el castigo).¹ Yes, vices. Oh, no, I can’t name them, they are so iniquitous that the words would burn my lips. I saw, I tell you, with the eyes of the soul, the terrible spectacle of those sinful creatures chastised. God did me the favor of sending me that vision with the sole intention of frightening me.”

“A vision of Hell!” exclaims María de Ocampo.

“No, María, for the Hell to which one may be conveyed by means of prayer, as I have been, is impossible to describe: nothing but excruciating agony and nothing to see. But in this vision of the vices, the images seemed even more frightening than the tortures of Hell. I saw the pincers the demons use upon the damned, and other Dantesque horrors. There are plenty of descriptions in our good books, I have often read them to you, and altarpieces have been painted on the subject. Is it not strange, Sisters, that I experienced neither fear nor pain at the sight of such torments? Is it because those vices and their punishments did not concern me? But I felt a great revulsion, as I used to when I was a novice. Ah, Satan is a wondrous painter, my dears, he plays his tricks and sets his traps in the imagination, and we know that he does so the more with women.² Everything can be harmful to those as weak as we women are.”³

“But Teresa, you have no cause to undergo the pain of such punishments. There are many here who would deserve them more! God forgive me for presuming to give Him ideas! After all, the Mitigated Rule itself ushers us into the path of temptation.” Like many young widows, María de Ocampo struggles against depravity with an almost excessively high moral sense.

“We can’t be angels down here, María. On the contrary, we have a body.”⁴ Does Teresa want to appear less intransigent toward human vices than her cousin?

“I’m very scared of the devil!” says Ana de Tapia, who is apt to be hard on herself. And yet she goes out less than many other young nuns, and her daydreams can hardly be very salacious.

“Are you, indeed! I fear a discontented nun more than many devils.”⁵ She hasn’t the heart to chide her companions; she would always rather make them laugh.

But today, she is not in the mood for pleasantries. The jibes from the greedy sister, plus this conversation about vice and temptation, have plunged her back into the unspeakable Hell that God was good enough to let her glimpse, in order to set her free. She was not there for long, just long enough to understand that the Spouse wanted to show her the inconceivable place the devils had prepared for her, the fate she had earned by her sins.

Hell has no images because it is without space. That’s what Hell is, first and foremost: no space, no location, no extension. You yourself hardly exist, either. You are present, fully inhabiting time, but deprived of space. Can one conceive of a place without space?

That impossibility is called Hell. A kind of unthinkable, nameless hollow, scooped out of a filthy wall. Only Christ has known this, as the psalmist foretold long before, and Theresa can’t but follow her Spouse: “He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made” (Ps. 7:15). Not for the first time, however, the Bride outdoes the Groom. In her vision, there is no measure at all; Teresa’s Hell is pure constriction.

If seeing were possible in this nonexistent space, Teresa would have seen nothing but ghastly walls crushing her under their weight. In the absence of all light, she senses or feels what would have appalled her sight. A long, narrow alleyway enclosing her on every side, its floor muddy and foul smelling, swarming with putrid vermin; this pipe is a sewer. At the end of the stinking bowel, a cupboard in which the Carmelite finds herself confined. No reality can give the least notion of what she endures, her soul consumed in a furnace, while a thousand miseries harrow her cramped body.

Hell. It cannot be compared to the agonies Teresa has already been through, racked by nervous crises whose ferocity every doctor had recognized, nor to the torments visited on her by her demons.

Devoid of space and representation, is this journey to the underworld, this Sheol, a tearing apart? On one side anguish, oppression, the flesh stabbed through and through; on the other boundless desolation and despair, a terrible grief, impossible to convey. That your soul is being torn out of you would be an understatement; it splits of its own accord, while somebody else takes your life away. Thus cut in two, the writhing spirit converges with the body’s frightful pain. Suffocated, cramped, damned, she is on fire, dislocated into pieces. Long alleys, pitch darkness, an entrance like the smoking mouth of an oven, a foul and slimy cul-de-sac, a crawling heap of maggots. Oh, my distraught Teresa, at the far side of night.

Did you dream your own birth? Does this body and this soul, squeezed almost to death, reenact the irrevocable expulsion from the womb, that one-time haven turned foul cloaca? “I found it impossible either to sit down or to lie down, nor was there any room,” “unable to hope for any consolation.”

Or is this perhaps a disgusted perception of your own body, a fetid prison from which you are “unable to hope for any pleasure,” from which the only thing to do is escape, fleeing away from yourself into the Paradise of the ideal Father?

Or again, perhaps this infernal vision dramatizes the painful coming-to after a comitial cataclysm, recalled only as experiences of asphyxiation, discharge of stinking matter, glutinous sphincters, feverish larval teemings? It could well be the aftermath of exhaustion, prostration, the memory of desperate gagging that is no longer a torrent of woeful tears, but rather the epileptic strangulation of “a fire in the soul that I don’t know how to describe…I don’t know how to give a sufficiently powerful description of that interior fire and that despair.”⁶

This truth branded on your whole being, my martyred Teresa, cannot be laid at Satan’s door. Paul Claudel trembles with you when you are reduced to being a worm in this Hell; for all his precious rhetoric, he is one of your secret admirers.⁷ Between tapeworm and turd, neither male nor female, neither beast nor monster, a paltry, stubborn abjection, you are ground down to the degree zero of life in this spaceless Gehenna: merely a lump of horribly compacted flesh. So terrible a trial could only have been imposed on you by God, in order to make you see with the eyes of your whole body the hideous abode from which His mercy will, without a doubt, deliver you. Isn’t this a sovereign gift, the ultimate sign of His concern for you?

But perhaps you are guilty, as much as the sinners who were atrociously punished for their vices in that vision you shared with your friends. Let’s see. Temptations, like the ones in that nightmare, are not unknown to you: you mention them often enough. But the toad thoughts you beat out of your body with the help of bunches of nettles, preferably lashing the sores inflicted by a hair shirt — can they really be called vices? Possibilities, perils, certainly. But vices? As basely vulgar as that?

Not you. You deserve more, you deserve better: you are worthy of a far worse punishment than any God reserves for ordinary reprobates. You merit nothing less than the Truth of Hell, in its total, crushing, absolute version. Because God loves you more, He cares more about your fate than about that of common sinners, and so He strikes fear into you with a condensed season in His worst Hell. Conclusion: He loves you the best!

By one of those blessed reversals you are so deft with, you, the unworthiest of all, deem yourself to be the favorite; you are the most tested and rejected, because the most cherished. It’s a maneuver of genius, my unsinkable Teresa, informed by the impregnable logic of the Catholicism that precedes and sustains you, anchored in the extravagant belief that the Other exists, whose name is Love. Whatever else may happen. But a love that is inseparable from the twin that fuels it: suffering. Or perhaps this twin is hate?

The little group around Teresa continues their discussion. At some point the sisters notice that Ahumada is abstracted: engaged in prayer or meditation, who can tell? That’s how she is — a holy woman, whatever her detractors say. They respect and love her. She’ll come back to earth when she’s ready.

“And what if we became discalced?” says María de Ocampo suddenly. “Like Saint Francis, or the Poor Clares? They had no truck with the worldly pleasures we Carmelites indulge in.” She seems agitated by the very idea, unless it is the thought of the infernal compressor that’s upsetting her.

The others are surprised and a little disconcerted. What does Teresa think? A silence falls. A silence from Hell. Does it cause her to waft up from the abyss or to descend from glorious summits? Immortalized by Velázquez, or perhaps by a pupil of his, her holy gaze is lifted upward, the better to plumb her own depths. A double interiority. The small company holds its breath.

“What do you mean, María?” Ahumada does not immediately grasp the scope of the proposal, but it does not surprise her: in it she hears an echo of her own wish.

“We could set up a new convent! With stricter rules!” María bursts out.

Dreamy Teresa can be briskly efficient when required. No more thoughts of Hell! No time to waste.

“The first thing to do is find a source of income for the future convent!”

Is this project unfeasible? Ahumada is too pragmatic not to think so at first. Then, one day after Communion, our Lord chips in, ordering her to pour all her energies into getting the initiative off the ground.

A foundress is born.

Andrew has quit teasing me. Oh, I know he’s a long way from coming around to Teresa’s virtues, and his sardonic asides will always be the best way of proving he exists while loving me. But he’s now prepared to continue the trip — a change of plan on his part.

“So we just follow the trail of your saint’s foundations, okay? We start with Saint Joseph of Avila. What’s next, remind me, Medina del Campo? Malagón? Valladolid? Toledo? Pastrana? Salamanca? And then Granada? I’ll drive, Juan can twiddle the radio. What’s the latest on the human bombs?”

I never know whether he’s kidding or writing a novel. Will it be my novel this time? Will it be Teresa’s? Anything can happen. Personally, I always travel best in the company of books.

We’re off!