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

Chapter 20. THE GREAT TIDE

Now the tide’s breath gusts over the island, there’s a confetti of rose and wisteria petals whirling toward the waters of the Fier, the birds have vanished, and I am looking out from my veranda, which defies the winds as stoutly as the Baleines lighthouse. Here on the Île de Ré, the late August storms tear through the nonchalance of summer, and none too soon. I’m used to them. Is it because my roommate never leaves me for a second? I tend increasingly to the view that repose is not a thing of this world, and everything else is a lie.

I buy magazines to read on the beach, I listen to the radio, I watch TV. All sorts of dramatic events are happening. Nothing is happening. The culture pages pretend to get worked up about the imminent literary season. The new pope reassures the synagogue (somewhat), and tries to rationalize (elementary) faith, or vice versa, while the president of all the French jets off to foist our national compassion on someplace in the Hexagon or in the world: one deed of republican charity is worth two pledges on paper. Tide for tide, the surge powered by the media is lapping these days around the feet of the sacred — or of its absence. That’s my opinion, anyway. I won’t mention it to Andrew (who sends me cryptic, i.e., besotted, daily e-mails), or to Marianne — who since her return from Cuenca has been studying Hebrew and Freud, and is planning to go into analysis in September. Happy news! I can guess what they’re both thinking, differently and spontaneously: Oh, just another of Sylvia’s obsessions, an optical illusion created by the saint’s works, in league with the bad weather that’s keeping her on her island. No two ways about it. Unless…

This fall’s literary season, with apologies to my publisher Mr. Zonabend, I mean Bruno, is pure marketing, considerably more so than usual, in fact. I’m not one of those who bemoan the extinction of Literature with a capital L, plaintive aesthetes left high and dry by the tsunami of the spectacle. I’ve sweated long enough in the august precincts of Jussieu and Columbia, and then over my Duras book, to know that literature has got to roll with the breakers. The smart wave to which I made my own modest contribution has ebbed. Adieu well-wrought language, high-flown style, writerliness, textuality! Too hard and too slow. Now that form is dead, courtesy of TV, long live the platform! A few fastidious mourners for the world of belles-lettres bleat on about the philistinism of the “society of the spectacle,” but they don’t mind raking in the profits. Nobody has yet read the novel already labeled the best seller of the rentrée, but every arts-and-leisure reader knows that it cost millions, as befits a fine sci-fi synopsis written in French for Hollywood; they know the author is ready to trot his pooch up the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival or the Élysée Palace, and that lawyers for Muslims, Jews, women, and God are lining up to sue him.

As a matter of fact, everyone will get hauled over the coals around this probable Prix Goncourt and the scandal it’s bound to create. Destroy, he said, she said, with a jaundiced laugh; some laughter is just a dressing over the inability to have a good time. And a way of stirring up the sex wars that in turn drive many a righteous female memoir of rape and abuse — poor little girls who loved it, really.

In the past, the masses wanted fascism. No longer. Today, in our leaderless civilization, the masses only aspire to a dismal smirking. What masses, anyway? The survivors of the class struggle have adopted the mores of the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeois have traded their cultural pretensions for the artificial paradises of instant gratification. The spectacle numbs and revolts us, and yet the exploits of technology have captivated our dreams, and some of the brightest brains are researching the regeneration of this tawdry species to the point, perhaps, of immortality. So it doesn’t take much for the most apocalyptic of despairing scribblers to push us over the edge, doped by a chain of promoters with scores to settle and profits to make — we laugh fit to bust, we buy the product. Jaded, depressed, without a future, sulky as spoiled kids full of rancid grudges and aimless lusts, we wallow smugly in the consumption of bitter disenchantments and mirth without catharsis. I understand you, clones of toxic nihilism that you are: you relish the ultimate pleasure of lording it over manipulated spectators of whom you’re one, as am I, with only the forlorn hope of getting the hell out, clutching your loot, sooner than put an end to it all.

And yet your Hell is just a cry to Heaven, which must exist someplace not far away, otherwise the earth would not be round. Sure enough, while I glance through the splutterings of the so-called literary press, the pageantry of World Youth Day in Cologne is being broadcast on TV. A dazzling multilingual show of flawless intellectual mastery over the need to believe! Baby Jesus at the wheel and holy wafers on arrival, in a choreography of chaste young bodies, beatific smiles, and the jazzy lilt of postmodern hymns. The Vatican could not have achieved a more universal triumph.

On another channel, Jewish settlers wearing yellow stars brandish babes in arms, as if that would stop the Israeli army evicting them from their moshavs in the Gaza Strip. Muslim guerrilla groups, meanwhile, divided into pro- and antisuicide tactics, are at each other’s throats, and it ends up in slaughter either way. Next there will be footage of car bombs in Baghdad, Hamas shooting up Fatah and vice versa, Hezbollah wreaking havoc in Lebanon…one humanitarian disaster after another.

Who said there were no more masters at the helm, no great mentors anymore?

There is one: Jesus Christ Our Lord, relayed by his deputy on earth. Humanity needs a Lord who loves it, and needs still more a Child-Lord, a Loving Child-Lord. This crying need had to be discovered, had to come forth, and now it has. It doesn’t have to be satisfied. It is enough to manifest it, to make it apparent, to voice it. Be content to receive the message: fulfillment will follow in and through the mere hope of fulfillment. Waiting for God may be like waiting for Godot, yet this festive imagery of tambourines and trumpets is a world away from parsimonious Protestant patience, Beckett style. The need for love is a need for unbridled communication, and communication is a rich promise of love: Catholicism has never revealed the secret of its message better than in these popular fêtes punctuating our planetary age. These adolescents in quest of love — which is to say, every single one of us in the four corners of the world — have yielded to the one true religion, the faith that has come to dominate all others (which are green with envy!) and outlived the ideologies (which succumbed to terminal totalitarianism, and good riddance): the religion of Love.

I gaze at the trusting, well-behaved, well-policed crowds. The mystery of love subjugates all these young people, and smoothes its balm through the screen onto the hurts and desires of the world’s viewers, who were all Catholics for a day — remember? — when John Paul II was buried. The essence of communication, especially when it adopts the guise of a spectacle, is Catholic: childish, affectionate, clinging to the Father and prepared to suffer unto death, to destroy itself, the better to resume the search magnetized by the promise of a possible Good, for later or for never. Irrespective of the decline in vocations and the emptying churches, this promise of and patience for love is all that survives in these dark times, transmitted by the evidently “catholic” magic of Christianity, to the whole of a humanity that has lost its way and needs to believe.

I’m not denying that the citizens of the consumer society are slower to sacrifice themselves for their fellow man — whether out of love for the latter or for the Lord — than the saints and martyrs of old. Or that the pleasure — pain tandem that once underpinned both self-mortification and the spirit of charitable giving has noisily decamped into SM clubs and backrooms. Is the love imperative that communicants and spectators seek here compatible with the work upon oneself, and for the democracy of proximate community, which Christian morality demands, or demanded? We may well wonder. The Holy Father, himself an exacting theologian, is sufficiently preoccupied by the question to impress on his splendid, young, festive listeners that the time has come to “give yourselves.” It was the right moment. Is it still?

The chortling nihilist and the incestuously abused seductress of the new literary season are not beyond rescue; they could still be fished out by that universal net. A believer in Evil is simply an orphan of Good. This hardly prevents such a one from devoting himself or herself, body and soul, to personal advancement. Fine. But when they are the first to say so, while delivering themselves into the jaws of the spectacle, are they not aching for a word from the loving Father? As graceless depressives, or tireless officiators at the altar of one-night stands, such artists could well be Catholics in waiting. They receive indulgence even before they get the Prix Goncourt.

The most pathetic need of all, the most impossible to satisfy, the need to believe is unlike other needs in that it links biological survival to the pleasure of making meaning. It became entwined, two thousand years ago, with the love of an ideal Father inseparable from a Virgin Mother; this is a dogma that contains plenty of involuntary wisdom, nuggets of which come across in the stories my patients tell me. I would go so far as to contend that human beings owe many achievements to this need to believe, and particularly to the Christian and post-Christian versions of that amorous, fretful logic: infinitesimal calculus, Picasso, Joyce, Cantor, the hydrogen bomb, and the space shuttle, to pick a few at random. Provided we tear ourselves away from it with infinite subtlety, because if it is done too abruptly, blunders ensue, and then Terror — we have seen it often enough.

I don’t think I ever underestimated the presumptuousness of my loving desire to understand Teresa of Avila. Faced with the spectacle of devotion this late-August storm has forced me to watch, cloistered indoors before the TV, the enormity of my absurd ambition comes home to me more forcefully than ever. In the world that’s hardening into shape today — on one side, this youthful embrace of faith, whose most peaceful, most triumphal, most irritating (after reconsideration of its long history) manifestation is doubtless the Catholic faith; on the other, the shrill misery of a would-be iconoclastic culture of success — there seems little room for my “third way.”

Here are the options. One, you are an eternal adolescent mooning after love, in which case, knowingly or not, you are a believer: you need that ideal Father in whom you shall recognize another eternal adolescent, not to say the Infant Jesus himself, who a good father who knows his business will not fail to advise you to cultivate in your innermost being. That’s how it goes, faith is a dialectical spiral, and the logic of the same name lost no time in giving it an extra twist. At this point you take refuge in the bosom of the Virgin Mary, whose orthodox icon you may parade along the banks of the Rhine in order to scare Protestants, for example. You trust in the pope, a Holy Father who utters truths you had not been aware of, truths your dreams had been awaiting, all impatient, in the dark. You are saved.

Two, you know a bit more about sex. In which case Love — as preached by the churches, and, in a different key of virtual salvation, by the media — does not strike you as being the basis of everything, the cornerstone of morality, society, and progress. Your experience tells you that this pesky Love tends to break down into numberless splinters of lust and hatred. You succumb to the vertigo of being the last person standing in a vile, debased world. One hope left: to snigger all the way to the bank when your novel proves a hit. Alternatively you might heed the president’s summons, and join the club of power. Anything is possible, but whatever it is it will be televised.

No room for a third way, then? I fear not, especially when I look around me, rather than skulk in a tower immersed in the writings of a Counter-Reformation saint, a junk-shop curiosity of no interest to anyone except a handful of oddballs like me.

All the same, I’ve been following that third way myself for a while. Forty years of a woman’s life is not nothing, even if it’s not very much, counting back from Bethlehem! I’ve got no choice. Love, that is, faith, is not something I “stepped in,” as the sniggering author said, being a depressed rationalist and egregiously scatological, just to warn everybody off. But I don’t ritually bend the knee before Eros or Agape, either. With Freud I listen to them, lie them on the couch, question them. With Kafka I sidestep, estrange myself from the ranks, analyze. Does the essential remain? What remains is the movement, and the eyes open to the road, which is also open.

Since I count myself a Freudian, I’ve obviously taken seriously the question of whether we are a sect, a sort of die-hard branch of post-Judeo-Christianity. And if we are (it’s not inconceivable), are we living through one of those metamorphoses of love’s call and response that aspire to the renewal of infinite truths? Our tenets do not posit the “death of God” in the sense dear to the zealous disciples of “pleasure with no strings attached,” of self-loathing, of terror painted as revolutionary and Nothingness painted as philosophical — and I’d rather forget the stalag-cum-gulag exterminators who appointed themselves to decide which human beings were surplus to requirements. Are we carrying out, on the contrary, with our psychoanalytical way of comprehending and doing, one of those endless queryings of the divine? Or should I say, queryings of the very lucidity of love — of its elucidation?

Putting Teresa back on the agenda, Lacan thought that Catholics couldn’t be analyzed. I, Sylvia Leclercq, have the gall to contradict that wild-eyed post-Catholic post-Freudian. Backed up by my cherished research, much of which has been conducted at the MPH (for my sins!), I hereby declare that it is possible to put the mystery of the Lord Himself through the scanner, and analyze the need to believe in love.

In this cavalier adventure you are, investigative Teresa, my unwitting accomplice in lunacy.

The tempest over the Fier is abating, and through the window the bell tower of Ars stands placidly outlined against the horizon. Me and the old salt-marsh worker down there, perfecting his pyramid of crystals, we live in a Christian land. I’m not sure he either knows or cares. It doesn’t matter. Next to him, with my geraniums on the wall, I lose the sense of time. But when time catches up with me again, like an inescapable occupational hazard, I get back to the magazines and the TV, to history swinging by. That’s when there’s nothing to beat you, Teresa, my love, for keeping me connected — and completely unplugged.

Chapter 21. SAINT JOSEPH, THE VIRGIN MARY, AND HIS MAJESTY

To found her house of God: Teresa’s desire, irrepressible and majestic, had altered course. But what house, hers or His? The difference is a matter of voice: henceforth Teresa hears His Voice becoming hers. No longer is there a loving Spouse, the vision of whom carries her toward exile in Him body and soul, and whose presence envelops her here and now — both things simultaneously and alternately. Instead a third person intervenes, more overwhelmingly than ever: His Majesty or the Lord speaks to the foundress at crucial moments of the enterprise and buoys her up; indeed, He often dictates the plans of battle. The sight and touch of the Spouse is increasingly superseded by hearing, the most intellectual of the senses, tailored for decisiveness and action. In Teresa’s case, that is; I could name a few (in my workplace, as it happens) whose experience of hearing voices does nothing to bring them back to reality, quite the opposite — but that’s another story.

Teresa did not lack for logistics advisers. There was her confessor, the Jesuit priest Baltasar Álvarez, and the Dominican Fr. Pedro Ibáñez, and her Carmelite superiors, including Fr. Gregorio Hernández and the ecclesiastical provincial Angel de Salazar, as well as the rectors of the Society of Jesus: Dionisio Vázquez, followed by Gaspar de Salazar. There was that affectionate Franciscan and loyal accomplice, Friar Pedro de Alcántara. But over and above these it was the word of His Majesty that carried most weight with the nun, imposed itself upon her confessors and counselors, and, having become indistinguishable from the word of La Madre, held them all under His sway. This imperious Third Person — the Voice of the ideal Father converted into Teresa’s ideal superego — was a resolutely interior Other, with whom Teresa would not lose a contact that was ever more vocal as she continued to analyze herself through writing and through making foundations.

Mind you, to be agreeable to His Majesty did not simply mean jouissance, it also involved hearkening to the ideal Father’s words as constructed by Teresa in her readings and prayers. More precisely, to please Him was to respond to His teachings: to embody them in acts, in works. She would have to adjust her thoughts, her body, and her transactions in the world with that ideal Other who spoke within her.

And thus you set forth on a new stage of the journey, my attentive, my realistic Teresa.

To hear that Voice transcends listening, it is rather a new kind of enjoying: a matter of com-prehending the Voice in Itself without self. Of being agreeable (agradable) to it outside oneself, at the same time as pleasing the Other in oneself as though pleasing another self. An altered self that begins to stir, to strain toward the Other without cease, to almost merge with It at times; nothing would stand between them were it not for the tympanum, her hymen as it were, like a fine Dutch linen or a translucent diamond partition filtering the Master’s light through the psyche and body of the nun turned foundress. The Dwelling Places tirelessly accumulate metaphors that might convey this mysterious alteration-cohabitation with His Voice. For it is only by co-responding to the Voice of the Third Person incorporated inside her that Teresa de Ahumada can consider herself worthy to become Teresa of Jesus. Thus and only thus persuaded of the truth of her task, the future Madre feels unassailable, irrefutable, armed against all obstacles or conflicts — for that correspondence demotes them to the rank of lies.

The Voice of His Majesty speaking through her mouth is certainly categorical: “Do you know what it is to love Me truthfully? It is to understand that everything that is displeasing to me is a lie [entender que todo es mentira lo que no es agradable a mí].”² In this comprehensive hearing and understanding, “truth,” “love,” and whatever is “pleasing” are synonymous, provided it is the ideal Father, identified with Teresa, who is speaking. Or, to put it another way, provided Teresa is projected into Him by way of that vocal Third Person, His Voice. From now on she is more than protected, she is untouchable. “Paranoid visions”: my colleague Jérôme Tristan pounces straightaway, it’s his job, the symptom is patent, “too patent, Sylvia dear.” Of course it is, who does he think I am? Ah, the amiable paternalism of men…La Madre “sees” in visions “all kinds of people” who are “preparing to attack her,” to “persecute” and “harm” her. I could hardly fail to spot it, my anxious Teresa. All you can rely on is God, the God you hear while He speaks through your mouth!

Not content with savoring His penetration and habitation of her, from around 1560 Teresa heard Him and made His Voice heard urbi et orbi. Persecuted as she perhaps or certainly was, the praying woman was far from being left all alone with her visions, as she had recently written. In aid of her ambition to be agreeable to His Majesty, two supportive figures stepped forward: Saint Joseph and the Virgin. With them by her side, her metamorphosis took the form of a re-foundation, a reformation of the Carmelite order.

One day after Communion, His Majesty earnestly commanded me to strive for this new monastery with all my powers, and He made great promises that it would be founded and that He would be highly served in it. He said it should be called St. Joseph and that this saint would keep watch over us at one door, and Our Lady at the other, that Christ would remain with us, and that it would be a star shining with great splendor. He said that even though religious orders were mitigated one shouldn’t think He was little served in them; He asked what would become of the world if it were not for religious people, and said that I should tell my confessor what He commanded, that He was asking him not to go against this or hinder me from doing it.³

But how to get this vocal injunction, this new understanding of the nun with the divine, publicly acknowledged? After all, she could hardly inform Fr. Baltasar that what she heard was not the fancy of a poor deluded woman, but the utterance of His Majesty Himself! Teresa’s quandary was not induced by her awareness of being a woman in a man’s world, nor by her dependence upon validation by a higher authority, as feminist commentators have suggested. The Voice that dwelt within her was rooted in psychic depths way more radical than the perception of such restrictive imbalances of social power. Teresa wavered, dreading as was natural the reaction of her confessor; yet, with still greater lucidity, she also feared the “lights of reason” that the good man strove to share with her and that she was conscious of betraying by her “understanding” with the Voice. On the borderland of reason, like a chess player she assessed the risks she incurred with this business of voices, and gambled on controlling the game. A Jesuit, therefore a Tridentine, Fr. Baltasar did not contest the existence of Voices from the Beyond, but he was not about to offer a blind endorsement on the mere strength of Teresa’s word; let her discuss it with the superior of her own order! Where foundations were concerned, he advised Teresa to ask doña Guiomar to write to Rome in support of the project.

Teresa sought in vain for a confidant to whom she might expound her new way of being with His Majesty. She knew from experience that even old friends are not always trustworthy, particularly female friends. María de Ocampo was only a lay sister as yet, and even though the foundation idea was originally hers, she was merely contributing a “legitime”; it would be a further ten years before she took full Carmelite vows under the name María Bautista. And when this same cousin was appointed prioress of the Valladolid monastery, she was noticeably sympathetic to the calced persecutors of Teresa’s discalced tribe, enough said! All in all, few people can be counted on in this world.

Thanks to God, doña Guiomar de Ulloa undertook to help out in launching the longed-for overhaul of the Carmelite regime. She submitted the foundational project to the Carmelite provincial, who, man of faith though he was, would be more amenable to a petition from a wealthy noblewoman than from a humble nun. The idea of a monastery housing thirteen Carmelites in accordance with the Primitive Rule of poverty and enclosure appealed to him; he pledged his full support. Guiomar sent the official request in his name and started the paperwork with the Vatican to obtain the permissions; they even dared hope for the endorsement of Francisco de Borja, whom Pius IV had summoned to Rome not long before. But the story leaked out in Avila. The Convent of the Incarnation took umbrage and advanced jealous objections: How was any foundation possible in the absence of a secure source of income? Other orders grumbled that alms intakes were skimpy enough already, so imagine an extra convent without a cent to its name! All this was enough to unnerve the provincial, who changed his mind.

Teresa was not especially disappointed: such was her confidence in His Majesty within, she never doubted she would prevail. On the other hand, she was not at all sure whether the others believed in her claim that He spoke through her! Judiciously she examined her predicament from every angle, and opted for prudence:

Sometimes I gave them explanations. Yet since I couldn’t mention the main factor, which was that the Lord had commanded me to do this, I didn’t know how to act; so I remained silent about the other things. God granted me the very great favor that none of all this disturbed me; rather, I gave up the plan with as much ease and contentment as I would have if it hadn’t cost me anything.…and I remained in the house, for I was very satisfied and pleased there. Although I could never stop believing that the foundation would come about, I no longer saw the means, nor did I know how or when; but I was very certain that it would.⁴

The problem lay, she thought, in her being as it had been gradually forged by prayer, for “there is a great difference in the ways one may be”—habéis de entender que va mucho de estar a estar.⁵ Henceforth her being would be defined by this experience of alteration-cohabitation with Him: Jesus is His Majesty within, speaking though her in order to act through her. “Seek yourself in Me,” the Master would command in years to come. For the moment, it was imperative to convince everyone who was anyone in the Church that she had been chosen by the Third Person, chosen to be and to found as though she were He.

Teresa of Jesus, or Teresa as in Moses? God speaks through her, the Voice inhabits the burning bush that she is. I can picture from here the frowns of the Carmelite fathers, the contortions of the Jesuits, and the hairsplitting of the Dominicans who now endorsed her, now deplored her, depending on moment and individual temperament. And I’m fascinated by the “theological” seduction La Madre worked on them. She managed to get them onside without neglecting to cover her back by creating personal networks of useful friends of both sexes, establishing practical bulwarks, and organizing a solid intendancy to tide her over everyday setbacks.

Teresa was well aware that the subtle variations of her being, which were the strong points of her praying and its modulations, were weaknesses in the eyes of the world; the challenge was thus to continue to cultivate them, but secretly, silently, shrouded in caution, while she conducted a diplomacy of prudence and influence, even — or especially — with prelates. Like the psychologist she was, she began by probing the difference between the Voice of His Majesty as heard inside and her own reason: the ideal Father turned into the ideal enamored Self was not the same as the self.

Many of the things I write about here do not come from my own head, but my heavenly Master tells them to me. The things I designate with the words “this I understood” or “the Lord said this to me” cause me great scrupulosity if I leave out even as much as a syllable. Hence if I don’t recall everything exactly, I put it down as coming from myself; or also, some things are from me. I don’t call mine what is good, for I already know that nothing is good in me but what the Lord has given me without my meriting it. But when I say “coming from myself,” I mean not being made known to me through a revelation.⁶

In the current state of her being, this myself without a self, governed by the Other, is shorn of personal will and consciousness, and yet by virtue of this very alteration feels more certain than ever of its sovereign governance:

There come days in which I recall an infinite number of times what St. Paul says — although assuredly not present in me to the degree it was in him — for it seems to me I neither live, nor speak, nor have any desire but that He who strengthens and governs me might live in me.⁷

And then sometimes this assurance collapses into stupor. Teresa goes through periods in which the bright transference, the revelation, have gone: “It happened just now that for eight days it seemed there wasn’t any knowledge in me — nor could I acquire any — of what I owed God, or any remembrance of His favors; my soul was in a terrible stupor and in I don’t know what kind of condition.”⁸

But there are also moments in which the fusion with the ideal Father reaches its apogee, so that His truth becomes “hers” in perfect exaltation:

And what power this Majesty appears to have, since in so short a time He leaves such an abundant increase and things so marvelous impressed upon the soul! O my Grandeur and Majesty! What are You doing, my all-powerful Lord? Look upon whom You bestow such sovereign favors! Don’t You recall that this soul has been an abyss of lies and a sea of vanities, and all through my own fault?⁹

Even so, in a final twist of self-observation, the analysand Teresa is skeptical enough to wonder whether the entire experience might not be a dream, after all. A wonderful dream that will only become reality once she has confronted the humdrum chores and travails of foundation, the “business affairs” she mentions in Letter 24.¹⁰

The first of these travails would be the foundation of the Convent of Saint Joseph. Teresa was just beginning to invent that blend of vocation and pragmatism, the supernatural and the efficient, whose permutations would underpin the sixteen further foundations accomplished over the twenty years she had left to live. Some people applauded the reformer, others attacked her. On balance, however (and she was a compulsive balancer of accounts, whether in direct relationships or by means of letters), our chess player felt so bolstered by her exchanges with His Majesty that she could only laugh at her adversaries and persecutors of every stripe:

Likewise the devil began striving here through one person and another to make known that I had received some revelation about this work. Some persons came to me with great fear to tell me we were in trouble and that it could happen that others might accuse me of something and report me to the Inquisitors. This amused me and made me laugh, for I never had any fear of such a possibility. If anyone were to see that I went against the slightest ceremony of the Church in a matter of faith, I myself knew well that I would die a thousand deaths for the faith or for any truth of Sacred Scripture. And I said they shouldn’t be afraid about these possible accusations; that it would be pretty bad for my soul if there were something in it of the sort that I should have to fear the Inquisition; that I thought that if I did have something to fear I’d go myself to seek out the Inquisitors: and that if I were accused, the Lord would free me, and I would be the one to gain.¹¹

Thanks to God, the practice of silent prayer had penetrated into every milieu; even the Dominican priest Pedro Ibáñez was a keen practitioner. The great theologian retired for two years into a monastery of his order so as to freely immerse himself in that mental prayer of union with God that was so important for Teresa, thanks to Osuna and in part also, let’s not forget, to Uncle Pedro. Could the experience be contagious? There is a great difference in the ways one may be.…

As a further sign from Providence, the Society of Jesus appointed a new rector. Father Dionisio Vázquez, who had reservations about Teresa’s project, was replaced by Fr. Gaspar de Salazar, “another very spiritual one who had great courage and understanding and a good background in studies.” Her confessor urged her to confide in this man, especially as her conflicts with the authorities who resisted reform meant her soul “couldn’t even breathe”; was it out of anguish?¹²

The first meeting between Teresa of Avila and Gaspar de Salazar was a rarefied moment of pure love that she, naturally, distilled in writing:

I felt in my spirit I don’t know what that I never recall having felt with anyone, neither before nor afterward; nor would I be able to describe what this experience was, or draw any comparisons. For it was a spiritual joy and understanding within my soul that his soul would understand mine and that mine would be in harmony with his; although, as I say, I don’t know how such an experience was possible. For if I had spoken with him or had heard enthusiastic reports about him, it wouldn’t have been a great thing to experience joy in knowing he would understand me. But he hadn’t spoken one word to me, nor I any to him, nor was he anyone of whom I had any previous knowledge. Afterward I saw that my spirit was not deceived, for in every way it did me and my soul great good to speak with him. His attitude is very suited to persons whom it seems the Lord has already brought very far along, for he makes them run rather than walk with measured step. His method is to detach them from everything and to mortify them, for the Lord has given him the most remarkable talent for doing this, as well as for many other things.¹³

The beneficial effects of this “incomparable” rapport with Fr. Salazar were not long in coming. The conversation with the ideal Father promptly resumed, and His Majesty (obviously residing “in heaven,” far above the effusions of the two soul mates, but speaking through Teresa’s mouth) “urged” the nun to return to matters of foundation:

A little while after I had got to know [Salazar], the Lord began again to urge me to take up once more the matter of the monastery and to give my confessor and this rector many reasons and arguments why they shouldn’t impede me from the work. Some of these reasons made them fear, because this Father Rector never doubted the project was from the spirit of God, for through much study and care he considered all the consequences. After much reflection they didn’t dare venture to hinder me from carrying out this work.¹⁴

Although she was deeply attached to this Jesuit (who would later, under suspicion of Illuminism, suffer persecution and imprisonment), from a business point of view my political Teresa was always grateful to the Society as a whole for the support it gave to her reformist designs. Despite the tensions and severe exigencies to which the Jesuits had often subjected her — trials she had the sense to appreciate as formative — she gave them a flattering role in some of her prayerful visions:

I saw great things concerning members of the order (of the whole order together) that this Father belonged to, that is, of the Society of Jesus. I saw them in heaven, sometimes with white banners in their hands, and, as I say, other very admirable things about them. Thus I hold this order in great veneration, for I’ve had many dealings with them and I see that their lives are in conformity with what the Lord has made known to me about them.¹⁵

The Dominicans were equally petted, for Teresa was always at pains to preserve the balance between the two orders. Humbly and without favoritism, she acknowledged the help and support her reforms had had from priests like Pedro Ibáñez, Domingo Báñez, and García de Toledo. His Majesty was kind enough moreover to send her premonitory visions that reassured her about the brilliant future of their order at a time when it was “somewhat fallen”:

Once while I was praying near the Blessed Sacrament, a saint [Saint Dominic] appeared to me whose order was somewhat fallen. He held in his hands a great book. He opened it and told me to read some very large and legible letters. This is what they said. “In the time to come this order will flourish; it will have many martyrs.”

At another time when I was at Matins in the choir, there were shown or represented to me six or seven members — it seems there were that many — of the same order, holding swords in their hands. I think this meant that they will defend the faith. For at another time when I was at prayer, my spirit was carried off to where it seemed to be in a large field in which many were in combat, and those belonging to this order were fighting with great fervor. Their faces were beautiful and very much aglow. They conquered many, throwing them to the ground; others, they killed. It seemed to me this battle was against the heretics.¹⁶

Clearly, a battle plan was taking shape: with His interior Majesty on one flank and sympathetic priests on the other, Teresa’s strategic weapons were primed. Every element was in place for the next step, although money was still short. Her reason “governed” and “fortified” by His Voice, Teresa was soon to discover that the Carmelite Primitive Rule actually prescribed making foundations without an income — thus neutralizing her adversaries’ major argument at a stroke. But she did not know this yet. She was alone with His Majesty, attentive to that Other who was renovating her soul; estranged from herself, reassured and at peace in this new, sonorous love, less psychic, more active, enterprising, and detached. True, she lacked resources. To be realistic, though, she had the support of some highly influential clerics. In the solitude and grandeur of enthusiasm, the ecstasy of transfixion here mutates via a new alchemy. In it are mingled the exaltation of knowing she must act and the fear of being unable to do so: ambition and persecution. Despite the obstacles, the dread, the dead weight of so many difficulties, a female self triumphantly convinced of being the Other’s mouthpiece gains self-awareness over the course of these pages. And aspires to become…freer still!

“All the rest of the trouble was mine [y todo el más trabajo era mío], trials of so many kinds that now I’m amazed I was able to suffer them. Sometimes in distress I said: ‘My Lord, how is it You command things that seem impossible? For if I were at least free, even though I am a woman!’.”¹⁷

And, as if the better to embody Teresa’s vow to operate through His Majesty’s Voice, a triangular construction comes to her aid, composed of Teresa, the symbolic Father (Saint Joseph), and the Virgin Mother:

Once when in need, for I didn’t know what to do or how to pay some workmen, St. Joseph, my true father and lord, appeared and revealed to me that I would not be lacking, that I should hire them. And so I did, without so much as a penny, and the Lord in ways that amazed those that heard about it provided for me. The house struck me as being very small, so small that it didn’t seem adequate for a monastery…And one day after Communion, the Lord said to me: “I’ve already told you to enter as best you can.” And by way of exclamation He added: “Oh, covetousness of the human race, that you think you will be lacking even ground! How many times did I sleep in the open because I had no place else!” I was astonished and saw that He was right. I went to the little house and drew up plans and found that although small it was perfect for a monastery.¹⁸

On one of those same days, the Feast of the Assumption of our Lady while at a monastery of the order of the glorious St. Dominic, I was reflecting upon the many sins I had in the past confessed in that house and many things about my wretched life. A rapture came upon me so great that it almost took me out of myself. I sat down; it still seems to me that I couldn’t see the elevation or hear Mass, and afterward I had a scruple about this. It seemed to me while in this state that I saw myself vested in a white robe of shining brightness, but at first I didn’t see who was clothing me in it. Afterward I saw our Lady at my right side and my father Saint Joseph at the left, for they were putting that robe on me. I was given to understand that I was now cleansed of my sins.…

The beauty I saw in our Lady was extraordinary, although I didn’t make out any particular details except the form of her face in general and that her garment was of the most brilliant white, not dazzling but soft. I didn’t see the glorious St. Joseph so clearly, although I saw indeed that he was there, as in the visions I mentioned that are not seen. Our Lady seemed to me to be a very young girl.¹⁹

In order for you to hear the Voice of His Majesty within, Teresa, my love, you had to transcend the paternal seduction that was so disturbing and malign as to send you into coma. You had to persuade yourself that your “real father” was a symbolic one: Saint Joseph, the non-procreator, the paradigm of all symbolic fathers, who dispels the fantasy of seduction, oedipal rivalry, and incest. And your mother had to be a virginal young girl. But was this an idealization of your mother in her youth, before she was worn out by her many pregnancies, or was it rather a vision of yourself, projected in the place of this ideal because untouchable woman, this immaculate body? Either way, you truly live out the being in which I discover you at this point of your adventure (and of mine). You write it as the deliverance from your limited condition as a begotten creature. Because of the way they transmute father and mother into ideal figures, Mary and Joseph will always accompany you in your upward flight toward eternal othernesses, eternal and yet possible, for when you are outside yourself these ideal constructs burn on, inside: “I remained for some time…almost outside myself. I was left with a great impulse to be dissolved for God [un ímpetu grande de deshacerme por Dios].”²⁰

Chapter 22. THE MATERNAL VOCATION

Now everything can be speeded up, it’s time to leave the footdraggers, the ill-wishers, the antagonists behind: let’s get moving!

On August 15, 1561, Teresa settled her sister Juana and brother-in-law Juan de Ovalle into a small house she had bought in their name, located west of Avila outside the walls. The couple would live on the ground floor — the future chapel — while thirteen monastic cells were planned for the upper story, as well as service areas. The first Convent for Discalced Carmelites, to be called after Saint Joseph, was about to see the light. Money had been found: Aldonza de Guzmán, Giomar’s mother, had given 30 ducats and Jerónima Guiomar de Ulloa had given whatever she could spare, on top of the dowries of two of Teresa’s nieces (200 ducats from Isabel de la Peña, and maybe from Leonor de Cepeda) and the 200 ducats sent by brother Lorenzo from Peru.

It was a modest building, unworthy perhaps of being a monastery, and Teresa was frustrated by the cramped spaces that cruelly belied the magnificence of her project. Still, we must take things as they come, we’ll improvise, just get it done, we’ll do better next time. Surprise attacks and shows of strength became the “trademark” of La Madre’s campaigns. Where foundations were at stake, she was not above taking possession at dead of night of premises disputed by her enemies!

This, the first of the works to be dictated by His Majesty’s Voice, was coddled by Teresa like a newborn babe. She drew up the plans, whitewashed the walls, designed the close-grilled jalousies that would enable the nuns to see without being seen, directed the workmen. Her sister Juana’s family seconded her efforts, as did old friends like Francisco de Salcedo and Fr. Gaspar Daza. Did she notice them at all? Was she aware of the lives around her? Or was she simply hovering over the taut thread of the Other’s Voice?

One morning Teresa stumbles over the body of her little nephew Gonzalo lying unconscious on the floor beside the door. From the heights of her mirage with His Majesty she descends precipitously to earth, sweeps the insensible body into her arms, rubs her face against his, warms him under the rough cloth of her veil. Gonzalo rapidly revives in her arms.

“You resurrected him!” cries the boy’s mother, sobbing with joy at the miracle, while doña Guiomar and Salcedo clasp their hands together, awed to witness such a sign from God.

“Stuff and nonsense,” retorts Teresa briskly, batting away the sin of pride. Or is she just more reasonable than the others, always lucid in the midst of her dream?

Juana’s firstborn, so early snatched from the jaws of death, will soon be presented with a little brother. Does Teresa, the perceptive midwife, recognize his frailty straight away? While others celebrate the birth, the aunt’s worried diagnosis cuts through the theological platitudes required by the occasion: “If you are not destined to be a man of God, I pray God to take you, little angel, before you come to offend Him…”

The child does not live long. Far from being moved, let alone upset, by this death, Teresa goes into raptures: “Praise God for the sight of one of those little souls ascending into Heaven, and the throng of angels gathered to welcome it!”¹

Since life in the Beyond trumps life down here, Teresa, my love, you must have thought that the child was well “saved,” spared the journey through this vale of tears. Fair enough. And yet I feel, along with your biographer Marcelle Auclair who picks up on the story, that you behaved heartlessly toward that baby and toward Juana, who might have preferred to see her sickly son alive at her side rather than buried beneath the earth, angel or not. But you don’t really like mothers, do you, and deplore still more the motherhood of your younger sister — almost as much as you disliked your own mother when she was surrounded by a gang of pestering brats.

Furthermore, La Madre has a horror of imperfection. Years later you explain in a letter to one of the great benefactors of your foundations, María de Mendoza, sister of the bishop of Avila, that you will not accept a certain postulant into your Valladolid establishment, on grounds that she has only one eye. You proffer a somewhat glib excuse: “In a house where there are many nuns, one can overlook whatever defect there may be; but where there are so few, it makes sense to be selective.”² Teresa envisions her discalced nuns as akin to an elite corps, in the image of La Madre herself, who suffers, to be sure, but also causes suffering. She expects vocations to be ironclad, constitutions to be robust, and minds to be keen. Lord preserve us from birdbrains, melancholics, and females possessed by the devil! Pitiless she undoubtedly was, at times. “I am not at all like a woman in such matters, for I have a robust spirit [a tough heart: tengo recio corazón].”³ I shall always remember that remark, for it does not express regret. Yours was undoubtedly a merciless pride — the logical outcome of your fusion with His Majesty and an indispensable condition for your work. A superhuman, inhuman, mesmerizing hardness: such was the price of the diamond of your soul.

Life treads water and the longing gets fiercer, as the brief from Rome authorizing the foundation of Saint Joseph’s has still not arrived. Anguish, cramps, and vomiting ensue. Intense exchanges with the confessor Pedro Ibáñez: he proposes to Teresa that she write about her life. She enjoys frequent stays at the house of doña Guiomar, who continues to activate her high-society network: “For more than four years we have been…closer than if we were sisters”—but the true family is that of the works, the Work. Teresa naturally mobilizes all of her most successful relatives to help with the Carmelite reforms, first among them the conquistador of the family, her younger brother Lorenzo, who has married a wealthy woman in Quito, Ecuador. As befits the gravity of the circumstances, she addresses him as señor—later on, she will exert a steely spiritual direction over him. But just now the date is December 23, 1561, the señor has generously offered 40 pesos, and she is overcome:

Señor.…Certainly all those to whom you sent money received it at such an opportune moment that I was greatly consoled.…

I have already written you a long letter about a matter that for many reasons I could not escape doing, since God’s inspirations are the source. Because these things are hard to speak of in a letter, I mention only the fact that certain saintly and learned persons think that I am obliged not to be cowardly but do all I can for this project — a monastery of nuns. There will be no more than fifteen nuns in it, who will practice very strict enclosure, never going out or allowing themselves to be seen without veils covering their faces. Their life will be one of prayer and mortification…

That lady, doña Guiomar, who is also writing to you, is a help to me. She is the wife of Francisco Dávila, of Salobralejo, if you recall. Her husband died nine years ago. He had an annual income of 1,000,000 maravedís. She, for her part, has an entailed estate in addition to what she has from her husband.…For more than four years we have been devoted friends, closer than if we were sisters.…At present she is without funds, so it is up to me to buy and prepare the house.…But then His Majesty comes along and moves you to provide for it. And what amazes me is that the forty pesos you added was just what I needed. I believe that St. Joseph — after whom the house will be named — wanted us to have the money, and I know that he will repay you. In sum, although the house is small and poor, the property has a field and some beautiful views. And that’s sufficient.⁴

With regard to papal briefs, the one received in August will not suit, because it has to derive from the ordinary authority, that is, the authority of the bishop of Avila, and not that of the Carmelite provincial, who has declared himself incompetent. On Christmas Eve of 1561, the same provincial commands Teresa to go to Toledo: the daughter of the duke of Medinaceli, doña Luisa de la Cerda, is in a bad way. In fact she is delirious, and only Teresa can help her. While awaiting permission to found, the future saint will act as a “psychological cell,” and failure is not an option.

Despite her six children, doña Luisa remains inconsolable for the death of her husband Antonio Arias Pardo de Saavedra, marshal of Castile, nephew of the archbishop of Toledo (and General Inquisitor) Juan Pardo de Tavera, and one of the richest men in Spain. The grieving widow has lost her mind, ceaselessly repeating “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh.” Teresa, a woman of faith if ever there was one, recognizes the emergency of the situation. For it is the Carmelite provincial, Ángel de Salazar himself, who has “sent an order, under precept of obedience, to go immediately” and minister to the unhappy soul! Besides, there is great “consolation” and “security” in the fact that by the grace of God, she can also count on a house of the Society of Jesus established in Toledo, near the home of the bereaved noblewoman! Teresa is not the sort to hesitate in such circumstances.⁵

Toledo was far away, however. You need only look up a map of Spain, and recall that in 1561 there were neither trains nor planes nor cars. It was winter, snow was falling, the roads were slippery and impassable. Accompanied by her brother-in-law Juan de Ovalle and her good friend Juana Suárez, Teresa reached the town of her ancestors by early January. She could not have failed to think of her disgraced grandfather in his sambenito, the rich merchant Juan de Toledo, alias Juan Sánchez, who fled the town to save his honra. Who mentioned honor? We will see what we will see!

Teresa stayed for six months. Six months of luxury living, of exquisite female friendships, of rubbing shoulders with grandees and making useful contacts with eminent churchmen and highborn ladies. Luisa de la Cerda turned out to be a conscientious person of great piety and kindness. Deeply attached to Teresa, she followed her like a shadow, lavishing elaborate attentions upon her and even a set of diamonds, to the amused indifference of the recipient.

Once, when I was with that lady I mentioned, I was ill with heart sickness; as I said my heart trouble was severe, although it isn’t now. Since she was very charitable, she gave orders that I be shown some of her jewels of gold and precious stone that were very valuable, especially one of the diamonds that was appraised highly. She thought they would make me happy. Recalling what the Lord has kept for us, I was laughing to myself and feeling pity at the sight of what people esteem.…In this way the soul has great dominance, so great that I don’t know whether anyone who doesn’t possess this dominion will understand it. It is the detachment proper and natural to us.”⁶

At Luisa de la Cerda’s you meet the cream of Toledan society, Teresa, my love, and these people impress you, but not at the expense of your critical sense or knack for making use of them at the right time: the duchess of Escalona, the duchess of Maqueda, the duchess of Medinaceli, the duchess of Alba. You also make the acquaintance of doña Luisa’s niece, Ana de la Cerda de Mendoza, princess of Eboli, who will denounce you to the Inquisition; but that’s another story, in which animosity between women plays its part, a far trickier business to handle than the skirmishes with your confessors, whose fingers you slip through, by now, like a fish. We will return to that later.

For the present, in Toledo, you proceed to analyze these Spanish grandees with the inexorable delicacy hitherto reserved for your musings on yourself. Immersed in His Majesty, you’re used to mortifying yourself or stepping “outside yourself”; but also, as I know, to conducting a meticulous dissection of your experiences, in terms commonly regarded as “mystical.” Now we see this strenuous introspection turning its hand to reportage! The glittering circle around sweet, sad Luisa de la Cerda inspires passages of high dramatic realism. Your feats of social psychology, my novelistic Teresa, are doubtless less amusing that those of Cervantes, and never plebeian in the manner of Lazarillo de Tormes. Refusing to be either duped or dazzled by these celebs avant la lettre, you portray them with lofty feminine exactitude:

I realized that [Luisa de la Cerda] was a woman and as subject to passions and weaknesses as I, and how little should be our esteem for the status of nobility, and that the greater the nobility the more the cares and trials. I observed the solicitude they had for preserving their composure in conformity with this status, which doesn’t allow them to live, obliging them to eat without rhyme or reason because everything must be done in accordance with their status and not with their bodily constitution. (They have often to eat food that is more in harmony with their position than with their liking.) As a result I totally abhorred any desire to become a lady of the nobility…This is a kind of subservience that makes calling such persons “lords” one of the world’s lies, for it doesn’t seem to me that they are anything but slaves to a thousand things.⁷

Could it be the very luxury you enjoy in this milieu that awakens in the hardness of your heart an unprecedented “compassion for the poor”? Unless I am very much mistaken, it is here, in the Cerda palace stuffed with gold, wrought furniture, fine porcelain, and precious stones, that for the first time in your life you notice the existence of paupers and register the hellish existence of outcasts whose misery doesn’t need the spur of penitence:

It seems to me I have much more compassion for the poor than I used to. I feel such great pity and desire to find relief for them that if it were up to me I would give them the clothes off my back. I feel no repugnance whatsoever toward them, toward speaking to or touching them. This I now see is a gift given by God. For even though I used to give alms for love of Him, I didn’t have the natural compassion. I feel a very noticeable improvement in this matter.⁸

During these six months in Toledo you also find the necessary seclusion to write, something that will prove crucial both for you and for history. But you have not forgotten the little discalced Convent of Saint Joseph, back in Avila. And since your mystical life takes the form of a series of coups de théâtre, like a picaresque novel of the soul’s pilgrimage toward the Other, recast as His Voice in you — so, before building your inner mansions, you continue to have extraordinary encounters that move the action forward.

A pauper, excuse me, a beata, knocks on the door of the palace: her name is María de Jesús Yepes. Born in Granada, widowed when still young, this bizarre, freewheeling character had become a Franciscan beguine (or beata) after giving away all her worldly goods. She had then trekked to Rome on foot and obtained an audience with Pope Pius IV himself. To what end? To implore him on her knees to let her found a Carmelite house under the Primitive Rule. (The same idea you had, and on the same day: isn’t that funny?) Flabbergasted, the Holy Father called her “a mannish woman”—he had his reasons — and ordered his entourage to comply with her request, referring her to Cardinal Rainucio, who gave the authorization. Once she returned to Granada, however, the local Carmelites and the population at large were all for flogging her in public! Princess Juana, the kingdom’s regent, advised her to speak to a Jesuit whom you, Teresa, know very well — Fr. Gaspar de Salazar — and he in turn dispatched her to see you in Toledo. María laid before you her project for a Carmel governed by absolute poverty; eventually she would found the reformed Carmelite Convent of Alcalá de Henares.

Illiterate but gifted with a prodigious memory, María knows the Primitive Rule by heart, rather better than you do, admit it. Historians today even suggest that you were thoroughly ignorant of this first Rule, composed at the beginning of the thirteenth century by Saint Albert of Jerusalem. I can inform you that it went through two subsequent versions: the Rule was amended and approved by Pope Innocent IV in 1247, and then softened by the mitigations Pope Eugene IV granted in 1432.

María de Jesús Yepes’s most important revelation is that, according to the Primitive Rule, the nuns must live without patronage, subsisting on their labor alone, and not give way to any power, whether of bishops or secular rulers. This lesson does not fall on deaf ears! Between ourselves, the beata also imparts a few lessons in Vatican diplomacy that will not come amiss for the task in hand.

For two weeks you observe each other, admiring, agreeing, and disagreeing. The beginning of the Discalced Carmelite Constitution gradually takes shape. Your supporters are impressed, and at the same time concerned: can one rely on Providence alone for such an ambitious work?

Father Pedro Ibáñez himself has some misgivings and writes you two pages of theological objections. You understand that further supporters are called for, more powerful than Ibáñez and possessors of a bold, ascetic, saintly spirituality. An idea comes: you could consult Brother Pedro de Alcántara. You are well acquainted already with the authority of this ideal arbiter, the only man capable of cutting the Gordian knot in which you are presently caught between the plaudits and critiques elicited by your reforms. He is already a great partisan of the project, given his fervent endorsement of the desire for poverty — an evangelical principle he will have you commit to — and to the dignity of women, whom he declares equal to men in the love of Christ. Admit it: Pedro de Alcántara was extremely helpful to you when he wondered why you were consulting letrados, those jurists or theologians who might be excellently qualified for legal disputes and cases of conscience but knew nothing of the life of the spirit! Thus comforted, you are able to parry the theological arguments deployed by Fr. Ibáñez against your notion of foundations without funds.

Backed up by some, contested by others, you assert your own authority more and more, my resistant Teresa. No woman before has been seen to stand up to her superiors the way you do in the text you will shortly deliver to Fr. Ibáñez, in which you address all your confessors — whose greater knowledge and competence you acknowledge in all humility, for it stands to reason that you need them, every one.

On the one hand, you like to draw them toward prayer:

I told [Fr. Gaspar de Salazar] about [my trials of soul] under the seal of confession. He seemed to me wiser than ever, although I always thought he had a great mind.…As soon as I see a person who greatly pleases me, with longings I sometimes cannot bear, I want to see him give himself totally to God. And although I desire that all serve God, the longings come with very great impulses in the case of these persons I like; so I beg the Lord very much on their behalf. With the religious I’m speaking of, it so happened to me.⁹

On the other, you sleep with one eye open:

Since I believe that my confessors stand so truly in the place of God, I think they are the ones for whom I feel the most benevolence. Since I am always very fond of those who guide my soul and since I felt secure, I showed them that I liked them. They, as God-fearing servants of the Lord, were afraid lest in any way I would become attached and bound with this love, even though in a holy way, and they showed me their displeasure. This happened after I became so subject to obeying them, for before that I didn’t experience this love. I laughed to myself to see how mistaken they were.¹⁰

It is a source of satisfaction to you that Luisa de la Cerda likewise visits, and often the dignitaries of the Carmelite order, including the provincial father, Ángel de Salazar, come to call. The latter informs you around this time that a new prioress is to be elected at the Convent of the Incarnation; you are free to return there or not, as you please. In such a conundrum, of course, it falls to His Majesty to have the last word, and as usual His Voice promptly comes through. Your ideal superego commands you to leave! By the grace of God, the papal brief so long awaited by doña Guiomar arrives on February 7, 1562: a coincidence, no doubt.

The moment has come to act with even greater celerity than usual, especially in the wake of that long sojourn with Luisa de la Cerda. Not that the interlude was one of pure repose, as we have seen: rather, a flexing of soul sinews before the great leap. It was at her house that you completed the first draft — since lost — of the book of your Life. Enough writing for now! You hasten back to Avila, where trouble awaits, as one might expect after the absence of the foundress.

Juan de Ovalle has fallen prey to double tertian fever, which strengthens the case for his return to the convent house he and his wife Juana moved out of after Teresa’s departure. But consent is required from the bishop of Avila, don Álvaro de Mendoza. Nothing doing! Such a man cannot conceive of a monastery without money!

“I don’t want penniless nuns,” complains this noble lord to Pedro de Alcántara, summoned to the rescue by Teresa yet again. After writing to Mendoza, the friar has journeyed on mule-back all the way to El Temblío to meet the intransigent bishop face to face.

Alcántara (who was to die on October 18, 1562) must have moved don Álvaro all the same, for the bishop turned up, it seems, at the parlor of the Incarnation. It was up to the foundress to play the charisma card, and Teresa of Jesus dispelled any last doubts he may have had. From that day on, the bishop of Avila, grandee of Spain and of the Church, acted as a staunch and efficient champion of the discalced reform.

As for Pedro de Alcántara, did you intuit the nearness of his death, Teresa? Before seeing the indomitable Franciscan on his way, you, the intermittent anorexic, made a point of rustling up the most delicious dishes for him, recipes inherited from that excellent housewife, doña Beatriz de Ahumada. The Rule strictly forbids the consumption of meat, except for unavoidable reasons of “necessity.” What greater necessity than the entertainment of so dear a friend? An Old Christian saying held that after the Friday fast, the next best certification of Catholic orthodoxy was to tuck into eggs and bacon on the Saturday. The erudite Juan assures me that you would have made him some olla podrida, my lip-licking Teresa: a hearty potpourri of mutton, beef, and bacon with plenty of white cabbage, turnips, onions, and garlic, smothered in spicy coriander, and cumin. One could even throw in the heads and feet of birds! (A bottomless well of knowledge, that Juan.)

I don’t buy it, too over the top, and what about her Marrano background…

“Meat was banned? If you say so.” My Hispanist is trying his best to oblige me. “Well then, La Madre would dish up some caviar. Absolutely! Sturgeon eggs imported from the Black Sea! I swear! Okay, that particular delicacy might not have reached Avila, but Don Quixote…” (Oh, him, I might have known: Juan thinks of nothing else all day long.) He’s off again: “Don Quixote and his sidekick thought nothing of quaffing down at least six skins of wine to lubricate the local caviar made of gray mullet, sea-bass, and chub roe all mashed together.¹¹ Honestly, Sylvia, in those days people all along the north Mediterranean coast were total fans of this confection. It made a change from boring old ham and cheese, pieces of which, and I quote, ‘if they were past gnawing were not past sucking. They also put down a black dainty called, they say, caviar’—cabial in the Spanish—‘and made of the eggs of fish, a great thirst-wakener.’ You see? Verbatim, I assure you!”

Juan preens, he’s got me, bravo, I give in. In fact he’s on my side: “A woman like that, who gets off so jubilantly on her writing, she can’t have been anorexic for long, eh, Doc?”

I say that Teresa may well have enjoyed that black dainty, I like the idea, it suits her. As it suits her friend Alcántara, like black lights in interior castles.

And so it was that Pedro de Alcántara’s last memory of you, my tongue-smacking Teresa, was a “seraphs’ banquet.”

By this point, your staff was eager and ready for the consecration of the first discalced convent. Julián de Ávila would be the chaplain, Gaspar Daza would say the first Mass. Four novices were preparing to receive their habits from Teresa’s own hand: Antonia de Henao, one of Alcántara’s spiritual daughters, who took the religious name of Antonieta of the Holy Spirit; Úrsula de Revilla de Álvarez, of Daza’s circle, who became Ursula of the Holy Angel; a lady-in-waiting of doña Guiomar, María de la Paz, renamed María of the Cross; and the sister of chaplain Julián, María de Ávila, now María of Saint Joseph.

On Saint Bartholomew’s day, August 24, 1562, the bells of Saint Joseph pealed out to all of Avila the creation of a “monastery” in obedience to the so-called Primitive Rule. Among those attending the ceremony were Teresa, Daza, Juana Suárez, Inés and Ana de Tapia, Juana and her husband Juan de Ovalle, plus Francisco de Salcedo, the “saintly gentleman” who had “helped in every way.”¹² Also present were don Gonzalo de Aranda and, of course, Teresa’s faithful, indispensable, inevitable, noble “sister” and benefactress, Jerónima Guiomar de Ulloa — dressed like a poor person, in accordance with the Primitive Rule.

Yesterday you were so emotional that you vomited before the inaugural Mass. The day before, you were stitching habits, veils, and bonnets. Today, your cup spills over…And yet, on reading your account four centuries later, I find that you’re not easy in your mind, for there are threats looming over the foundation. In the very lap of success you’re still a persecutee, Teresa:

Well, for me it was like being in glory to see the Blessed Sacrament reserved…and to see a work accomplished that I knew was for the service of the Lord and to the honor of the habit of His glorious Mother — for these were my concerns.…

After all was over and about three or four hours had passed, the devil stirred up within me a spiritual battle…He brought doubts to my mind about whether what I had done was wrong; whether I had gone against obedience in having made the foundation without my provincial’s orders.…And all the virtues, and my faith, were then suspended within me without my having the strength to activate any of them or defend myself against so many blows.¹³

The happiness of August 24, 1562, did not last long. The Incarnation felt betrayed, and anger mounted against Teresa. Her insolence had to be punished. It was a serious error, surely, to seek to undo the Mitigated Rule and go back to total enclosure, penitence, silence, fasting, and bare feet? Positively medieval! That Ahumada woman is not keeping up with the times. Who does she think she is? She has committed a serious fault, clearly, but is it merely “serious,” “more serious,” or “extremely serious”? Does she deserve two strokes of the scourge, or life imprisonment, sorrow, and abstinence forever?

Avila was abuzz with rumors.

Despite fear, distress, and melancholy, those “devils” that embattled you, you held firm, Teresa, His Majesty being duly at His post inside you.

The prioress of the Incarnation, Mother María Cimbrón, orders you to come back “at once” to her monastery. Julián de Ávila, that faithful squire and chaplain, escorts you to the meeting. A veritable tribunal: your sisters don’t mince words. On top of that, the Carmelite provincial, Ángel de Salazar, deals out a “serious reprimand.” Allegedly you “gave scandal to the people” and were “promoting novelties.” What have you to say for yourself? Fortified, once more, by His Majesty’s Voice, you stick to your guns. And like the Machiavellian diplomat you are, you confound your adversaries by feigning to bow to their wishes, my crafty Teresa: “None of what they said caused me any disturbance or grief, although I let on that it did so as not to give the impression that I didn’t take to heart what they said.”¹⁴

Father Salazar, as smooth an operator as yourself, is playing a double game: on the esoteric side, he reassures you; on the exoteric side, he pretends to espouse the mood of the institution and the city. “Afterward I spoke to him more freely, and he was very satisfied and promised — if all went well — to give me permission to go there once the city quieted down, for the clamor throughout the whole city was vehement.”¹⁵

Formidable measures are taken. The consistory meets with the corregidor (the mayor or highest city authority, representative of the royal power), and leading members of the chapter. It is a Grand Tribunal, practically the Last Judgment! All the participants call for the destruction of your monastery.

Only one member, a presentado of the order of St. Dominic [Fr. Domingo Báñez], although he was opposed (not to the monastery, but to its being poor), said that it wasn’t something that had to be suppressed, that the matter should be considered carefully, that there was time for this, that such a decision pertained to the bishop [Álvaro de Mendoza, bishop of Avila since 1560] and other things of this nature. What he said was very helpful, for they were so furious that it was a wonder they didn’t carry out their decision straight away.¹⁶

The story didn’t end there. Royal constables were sent to Saint Joseph’s to evict the novices manu militari. The girls refused to let them in; not without an order from the one who had brought them here, period! The alguaciles did not dare break down the door.

On August 30 all of Avila’s political authorities gathered together to deliberate, notables side by side with Church delegates, and the hostility was unanimous; some were for appealing to the Council of State, as though the convent threatened the security of the realm.

I can see you from here, Teresa, swaying between your devils and the unfailing Voice of His Majesty, which fortunately proved the stronger: “‘Don’t you know that I am mighty? What do you fear?’”¹⁷ Confident in that unswerving Third Person who expresses Himself in your style, as we know, you went on to deal as one must with earthly men, my subtle Teresa. Given that several of these powerful individuals were theologians, it was important to approach them:

Afterward, when the negotiations were on their way toward a settlement, another person, a very zealous servant of God, came to me saying the matter should be put into the hands of learned men. As a result I had many worries. Some of those who were helping me agreed with this proposal; this snarl in the affairs, which was caused by the devil, turned out to be the most complicated tangle of all. The Lord helped me in everything; for in a summary like this you can’t explain all that took place in the two years from the time this house was founded to the time the litigation ended. This last phase and the first were the most laborious.¹⁸

As for the provincial who had promised to support you, he was now backpedaling, cowed by the animosities and rancors you aroused. You, somewhat fed up by now, have the nerve to remind him that it’s not Teresa talking, but His Majesty. How can he not realize?

“Consider, Father, that we are resisting against the Holy Spirit!”

Who can resist a majesty like yours? It was the big bazooka. Your biographers are keen to highlight this, and I’m happy to go along.

After the rain, here comes the sun. Spring 1563. With official permission to leave the Incarnation, you move to Saint Joseph’s in the company of four more discalced postulants eager to follow you: Ana de los Ángeles, María Isabel, your cousin Isabel de San Pablo, and Ana de San Juan, daughter of the marchioness of Velada.

You have prevailed, Teresa, but this is only the beginning. Sixteen more battles of this kind remain to be fought and won, all different and yet similar, an extravagant amalgam of foundations and persecutions.

The representation of Saint Joseph will stay with you for good. His image will preside over all your creations, like a prototype of the ideal Father you always strive to see in your spiritual fathers on earth (an effort of faith leading to much fervor and disappointment) — those confessors and other ecclesiastics whose approval and support you seek.

Inseparable from Joseph, the portrait of the Virgin your mother left you is another permanent companion. On the day of the Assumption 1561, in the church of a Dominican monastery, you prayed to a “very young” Mother of God for her help, whereas you “didn’t see the glorious St. Joseph so clearly.”¹⁹

Now that you have founded Saint Joseph’s, in August 1562, Jesus Himself crowns you as a reward for what you did for His Mother:

Christ…seemed to be receiving me with great love and placing a crown on my head and thanking me for what I did for His Mother.

Another time while all were at prayer in choir after compline, I saw Our Lady in the greatest glory clothed in a white mantle; it seemed she was sheltering us all under it. I understood how high a degree of glory the Lord would give to those living in this house.²⁰

In this homage of yours to the Mother of God I discern the supreme elevation of your own maternity: the promotion of your personal fervor hoisting you up to the rank of Mother. Don’t you experience the glory of Mary’s virginal, royal Assumption as though it could be yours, provided you suffer enough?

One day, the feast of the Assumption of our Lady, Queen of Angels, the Lord desired to grant me the following favor: in a rapture He showed me her ascent to heaven, the happiness and solemnity with which she was received, and the place where she is. I wouldn’t be able to describe how this happened. The glory my spirit experienced in seeing so much glory was magnificent. The effects of this favor were great. I was helped in having a deeper desire to undergo difficult trials, and I was left with a longing to serve our Lady since she deserved this so much.²¹

When in the next paragraph you evoke the vision of “a very richly made pallium” hanging over the heads of the Jesuit Brothers at the College of Saint Giles in Avila, is this not a vision of the pallium formed by Mary’s robe, as it is often represented in painting, like a protective canopy over the servants of the Church? The “longing to serve our Lady” makes you feel her “glory” and “trials” in lieu and place of the Mother of God herself.

Henceforth you are in no doubt: you, the Lord’s spouse, His beloved lover, are also the Mother of the Man of Dolors, as much as of the divine Child. That infant appears to you in the penumbra of the convent, and your idolaters were quick to immortalize the vision in stucco — in order to “plaster” maternal piety into place for ever and ever?

The circle has closed: you are a daughter, wife, and mother. The Other within you is a son, husband, and father. But He can just as easily take on the attributes of His Virgin Mother, since He showers you, you don’t know how, not with His sperm (you have a horror of toads, but you don’t mind lizards; in time, you will let them dart under your habit!), but with the mother’s milk overflowing His bountiful breast:

And notice carefully this comparison; it seems to me very appropriate: the soul is like an infant that still nurses when at its mother’s breast, and the mother without her babe’s effort to suckle puts the milk in its mouth in order to give it delight. So it is here; for without effort of the intellect the will is loving, and the Lord desires that the will, without thinking about the matter, understand that it is with Him and that it does no more than swallow the milk His Majesty puts in its mouth, and enjoy that sweetness. For the will knows that it is the Lord who is granting that favor. And the will rejoices in its enjoyment. It doesn’t desire to understand how it enjoys the favor or what it enjoys; but it forgets itself during that time, for the One who is near it will not forget to observe what is fitting for it. If the will goes out to fight with the intellect so as to give a share of the experience, by drawing the intellect after itself, it cannot do so at all; it will be forced to let the milk fall from its mouth and lose that divine nourishment.

This is the way this prayer of quiet is different from that prayer in which the entire soul is united with God, for then the soul doesn’t even go through the process of swallowing this divine food. Without its understanding how, the Lord places the milk within it.²²

Nevertheless, in this blissful kaleidoscope of the soul’s permutations of attributes, your chief role will be the maternal role. You will perfect it over the course of the twenty years you still have to live before meeting the Other face to face: death, so dreaded by unbelievers, is for you the absolute event.

It’s not easy, it’s impossible to step into the role of symbolic Mother. Modern women are just beginning to realize this fact. Perhaps they are getting wise to how after more than a century of assorted feminisms, the mystery of maternal passion remains more obscure than that of gestation — pretty well mastered by science — or that of in vitro fertilization, or cloning, or artificial wombs. Nothing in contemporary culture prepares them for the mystery of motherhood — no more than anything prepared you for it, Teresa, back in the heyday of the Church Fathers during the Spanish Renaissance. The books you wrote after the Life are continually tackling the question: How to be a mother? How to conduct another person, man or woman, toward self-transcendence in affective bonds that are both strict and open, and all the while affirming your own transcendence, because that is what confers the most credible authority: the authority of the ability to start again?

You know from experience that suffering is an inescapable part of our bond with others, even more, and otherwise, than in the transcendence of the bond with the self-as-other. But you deny the exaggerations of that suffering, to which your friends are more prone than you — not that this prevents you from overdoing your mortifications (pardon me for bringing that up again) while attempting to invert them into joys, and succeeding! There is no miracle recipe for being a good mother, as you will discover over the course of your foundations. However, from the moment you shoulder the new role of Mother on top of the role of the Spouse’s beloved lover, you grasp that the essence of the maternal vocation lies in the balance to be found between jouissance and will. You will enjoy the ideal more than ever, but without abandoning yourself to it, for it falls to you now to accomplish the ideal with a well-tempered will, deferred away from self into the “third person”—into His will. Could this be a path to self-forgetfulness, a way of “depsychologizing” oneself, as my colleague Jérôme Tristan puts it, of effectively thinking from another person’s point of view?

Thus the exile of jouissance outside oneself is compounded by the exile of the will as exerted on behalf of self and of others, upon self and upon others. The first exile transports you into the Other, the second gathers His Majesty into the fluidity of an acting soul. Forever in an altered state, reassured or preoccupied, transparent and decisive, the mother lives off the other and acts for him or her. To the prayer of abandonment, to the fetus or baby bathed in the waters of ecstasy, the fabulous dynamism of the businesswoman is now added, my disappropriated Teresa. Motherhood appropriates nothing, it delegates itself through the Other to engender new life. The will to abandon oneself to the Other’s will in order to found a new creation just as if it were one’s own, while knowing it is not: that is maternal.

A few days after the experiences mentioned above, while thinking about whether they who thought it was wrong for me to go out to found monasteries might be right, and thinking that I would do better to be always occupied in prayer, I heard the words: “While one is alive, progress doesn’t come from trying to enjoy Me more but by trying to do My will.”²³

Autoeroticism is no longer enough for you, any more than the words that force women into the background. The Mother is one who is “considerate of others”: she thereby becomes the equal of the Lord, and nobody can “tie her hands.”

“The Lord said to me: ‘Tell them they shouldn’t follow just one part of Scripture’ [1 Cor. 14:34: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law’] but that they should look at other parts, and ask them if they can by chance tie my hands.’”²⁴

This point in your thinking helps me to divine the meaning of your reform: you, Mother, Madre, are not content to be a woman in ecstasy. You become a gangway between that singular jouissance acquired in the love for and of the Other and the possible transmission of that jouissance to others. It begins with an amorous dialogue with the Spouse who creates for you an imaginary incarnate, relieved of your will: I (man or woman) am nothing but the spouse of the loving Beloved who wants me. It goes on with the sensorial identification with the Other, of an intensity such that I want to and can assume His will — the will that by being no longer outside of me, or judging me, but invested and thus agreeable, speaks through me. Our ideal Father who art in Heaven, Thou art henceforth in Me divest of myself who am transfused into Thee in the love of Thee.

“Another I,” “God naturalized,” the nun proclaims, here enjoys an extraordinary “sharing” or participative freedom. Integrated with the Other because penetrated by Him (cuando te entrañares con este sumo bien), this “other I” protects itself from the risks inherent in “free will” with its threat of sin and hence of “enslavement,” preferring to be “fastened” [nailed: enclavado] to the exploration of love and fear toward the Other: a jouissance that for Teresa seems to be the only truth worth knowing.

May this “I” die, and may another live in me greater than I and better for me than I, so that I may serve Him [Muera ya este yo, y viva en mí otro que es más que yo, y para mí mejor que yo, para que yo le pueda servir]. May He live and give me life. May He reign, and may I be captive, for my soul doesn’t want any other liberty.…

O free will, so much the slave of your freedom if you don’t live fastened with fear and love of your Creator [O libre albedrío tan esclavo de tu libertad, si no vives enclavado con el temor y amor de quien te crió]! Oh, when will that happy day arrive when you will see yourself drowned in the infinite sea of supreme truth, where you will no longer be free to sin! Nor will you want to sin, for you will be safe from every misery, naturalized [naturalizado] by the life of your God!

He is blessed, because He knows, loves, and rejoices in Himself without any other thing being possible. He neither has nor can have — nor would He be a perfect God if He did have — the freedom to forget Himself or cease loving Himself. Then, my soul, you will enter into your rest when you become intimate with this supreme Good [entrarás en tu descanso cuando te entrañares con este sumo bien],²⁵ understand what He understands, and rejoice in what gives Him joy. Now, you will find you’ve lost your changeable will; now, there shall be no more change! For God’s grace will have done so much that by it you will be…a sharer in His divine nature [particionera de su divina naturaleza].²⁶

Have you become a…creator, on a par with God himself?

Who am I, then? Not merely a lover, not really the ideal Father Himself, I am the Mother. Obviously, I surround myself with scholarly fathers whose counsels I follow and to whose authority I submit, and yet it is I, Teresa of Jesus, alone with His Majesty, who take the initiative of realizing His Truth in and by an “I” empty of me. The rebirth, the re-foundation of His new houses in me will unfold in the dwelling place that I am — that is, in Him — but I can build the place and dwell there, indeed I “will not have finished doing all that [I] can” when “to the little [I] do [mi trabajillo], which is nothing, God will unite Himself, with His greatness.”²⁷ The world will understand that truth is newness, and that newness is a rehabilitation of tradition at the auspicious moment I have just now seized. And that this reorganization of Time is simply my way of hearing the Other’s Voice: I, the foundress, the Mother. To be a mother is to found; or rather, to re-found. Indefinitely.

Has your depression flipped into erotomania? Has the paranoid fear of other people drained away in love suffering, in loving suffering, in warlike dominance? Of course. And yet, all the facets of your new way of being—“there is a great difference in the ways one may be”—are defused in the detachment from others and from self, in relinquishment and dispossession: the more I abandon myself before the inanity of power, money, honors, the sharper grows my will to shatter or circumvent all obstacles by means of cunning, stubbornness, or sweetness, and reach my goal. Which is not my goal, you understand, but the Other’s…of Him who resides in me empty of me!

We are at the heart of the alchemy that constitutes the speaking subject: the alchemy of amorous alteration. The contrary of alienation, or its other side. The entrepreneurial singularity of the individual shaped by monotheism — especially the Catholic version — highlights and hardens its universal logic. But it is Teresa who unabashedly explores it in the paroxysm of her extravagant passion for the Other.

Teresa, my love, I cannot leave you in that year of 1563 without mentioning two events that, by revealing the seriousness of the first foundation, vouchsafed it a fabulous destiny.

First, as I have already pointed out to anyone who has come with us this far, the striking coincidence between the completion of your first book, the Life, and the achievement of your first foundation. You founded because you wrote, and you wrote because you founded. We find a staggering overlap between, on the one hand, the dangerous and delightful dispossession of yourself in Him, the wretchedness and rapture of writing, and, on the other, your lucid pragmatism, astute charm, and skillful toughness. This high-wire balancing act did not make you the first modern female writer, if we understand by modernity the valorization of a text or a written oeuvre becoming a value in itself. Nor do I consider that the test you set yourself, to restore the Carmelite order to its Primitive Rule, was the mark of an archaic age, the symptom of a masochistic renunciation of modernity in favor of a purity derived from the higher spiritual authority with which you identified.

But what if you were the precursor of a way of being, already obscurely sought in those days and still being sought — through writing among other means — between self and non-self, self and other, self with others? Neither art nor politics, neither religion nor social activism, but something through, with, and against all of that? The everything which is nothing, as you so well put it; sought for with the (feigned or genuine) unconcern you expressed to your mentor and “editor” (if you’ll forgive the anachronism), Fr. García de Toledo, shortly before completing your text:

I believe your Reverence will be annoyed by the long account I’ve given of this monastery, but it is very short in comparison with the many trials we suffered and the wonders the Lord has worked for it. There are many witnesses who are able to swear to these marvels, and so I beg your Reverence for the love of God that if you think you should tear up what else is written here [romper lo demás que aquí va escrito] you preserve whatever pertains to this monastery. And when I’m dead, give it to the Sisters who live here that when those who are to come see the many things His Majesty arranged for its establishment by means of so wretched and dreadful a thing as myself, they might be greatly encouraged to serve God and strive that what has been begun may not collapse but always flourish.²⁸

Myself is wretched, but His Majesty — whose will is henceforth mine, His Majesty that I am here below by virtue of my works of writing and foundation — is only attached in a special way to this piece of writing; feel free to destroy what you like of it, except the trace of the “account” I have provided of all that “His Majesty arranged” to establish “this monastery,” that I founded. Speaking, writing, working through me and in me, His Majesty broke new ground. For after my death, for those who will come after us, preserve if you please the trace of that innovation.

All that interests me is to reverse Time. By writing and/or by founding, I place myself in the infinity of Time, as the Other’s Bride, in order for His presence to begin afresh. Since under the Primitive Rule the Other’s presence is more desirable than it is, by now, under the Mitigated Rule, more stimulating than it is among those who let it wither, then my innovation, infinitesimal as it may be, suffices to spark the Other all over again. So will my reformation be, minuscule and magnificent — in response to the Erasmists whose humanism brings me to appreciate Christ’s humanity all the more, and in response to the Lutherans whose harshness fills me with holy rigor against the laxity of my side. By restoring to the present the infinity of the past I am doing far more, for that matter, than to combat or crush my enemies: I am inviting them to welcome into themselves the infinity of the Passion in the infinity of time. Such is my reformation: a counter-reformation. The Counter-Reformation will eventually recognize the intentions that drive me, although as I write these lines to Fr. García, I cannot be certain of it. We shall see.

All I know is that what I’ve written has no importance in itself. Change the letters, the handwriting, whatever you like, but preserve that relationship to time which I have founded for myself and for those who may wish to follow me. The point is to open up the course of time to a return of that Time in which we lose any care for our needs, in which we lose ourselves, merging with the infinite Time of His Majesty, or again with the outside-time of my desire, when I coincide with His Majesty the ideal Father, with the ideal tradition.

During the two years it took to found Saint Joseph’s, I lived at the intersection of ordinary time and the outside time in which my will merges with the Ideal. I succeeded in implanting His Majesty, a Third Person, my outside-time chimera, my ideal, in the worldly time of human relationships. The world’s time already registers this graft: my scandalous innovation is being combated, denounced, or approved. As for me, I fearfully observe my own folly, but I also triumph over it. I can see that I have embedded a new Time in time, bent the flight of time into multiple spaces that lodge in people’s souls, to enhance them and make them live. In these tragic times of religious war — but isn’t every worldly time rent by religious wars? — what is there to do but to let His Majesty live, that ideal Other who dwells in our soul, who is our soul? Please keep, Father, the meaning of this fiction, the account of this adventure; I care little about the text itself, you may tear up the rest (romper lo demás que aquí va escrito).

What “rest,” Teresa? Do you mean whatever does not concern the small Carmelite house of Saint Joseph? There is no surplus to your excesses. Everything forms part of the adventure, writing included, and García de Toledo (like your later publishers) understood this very well. They jealously preserved the “account,” word for word, even if they made certain deletions or alterations here and there where your more audacious formulations made you an emulator of the Lord, not to say an advocate of gender parity; after all, somebody had to save you from the claws of the more zealous witnesses at the court of the Inquisition!

The second event of this new beginning in your life was the visit you paid to the Basilica of San Vicente, after leaving the Incarnation on your way to perpetual seclusion in Saint Joseph’s.

Halfway between the two, outside the city walls, Saint Vincent’s is a commemorative shrine on the spot where in the year 306, three Christian siblings, Vicente, Christeta, and Sabina, were martyred. Perhaps you knew the legend, Teresa: they say that a snake came to guard the bleeding, tortured bodies from wild beasts. Such devotion on the part of so repulsive a reptile was clearly implausible. But there’s more: a wealthy Jew who hiked up there, intending to desecrate the corpses, was himself stopped by the snake coiling itself around him. Deeply shaken, he converted to Christianity there and then, causing the frightful snake, or phallic monster, to release him. This converted Jew built the first temple on the crime scene dedicated to the three martyrs. In the seventeenth century, when Raymond of Burgundy was beginning the reconstruction of the dragon wall that encircles Avila, the Basilica of San Vicente was erected on the site of the old temple, following a design inspired by the architect Giral Fruchel, who had built Avila’s cathedral.

At this pivotal moment of your life, it wasn’t the majestic and highly official cathedral that drew you; you headed instead for the basilica. You went down into the crypt, took off your shoes, and prostrated yourself before the Virgin of Soterraña. This statue is supposed to have been brought to Spain by Saint Peter as an offering for San Segundo, then bishop of Avila. It is a Romanesque sculpture carved in walnut, housed in the central baroque chapel of the crypt. A side chapel exhibits the stone on which the three early saints were put to death.

The Book of Her Life often evokes the white veil worn by the Virgin Mary, something many commentators associate with this “subterranean” Virgin, Virgen de la Soterraña. But they seldom mention the converted Jew, the first founder. I picture you kneeling before Mary, your holy patroness inseparable from Saint Joseph, and I can’t imagine you not sparing a thought for the builder of the first temple, the Jew of the snake.

Today, you’re the founder. Not you alone, mind you, His Majesty is still within, but you have just said farewell to Teresa de Ahumada along with her Toledan ancestors, her father, and her mother. You are outside yourself, Teresa, in the conjugation of ecstasy and will: no longer Teresa de Ahumada, you are Teresa de Jesús.

Nonetheless, rarely and discreetly, the past seeps through:

One night, being so ill that I wanted to excuse myself from mental prayer, I took my rosary in order to occupy myself in vocal prayer. I tried not to recollect my intellect, even though externally I was recollected in the oratory. When the Lord desires, these devices are of little avail. I was doing this for only a short while when a spiritual rapture came upon me so forcefully that I had no power to resist it. It seemed to me that I was brought into heaven, and the first persons I saw there were my father and my mother. I saw things so marvelous — in as short a time as it takes to recite a Hail Mary—that I indeed remained outside myself; the experience seemed to me too great a favor.²⁹

You went to San Vicente because here, in this Romanesque basilica, the memory of a virgin awaited, a cristiana vieja. And the echo of a converted Jew of whom you never spoke. You could not have done otherwise than to visit this crypt. Without a word. Pure rapture.

Chapter 23. CONSTITUTING TIME

To make foundations, to constitute, to write a constitution: but how? In the event, your reform of the Carmelite order would rest on two pillars: constitution and fictions. On one side, the strict regulation and jurisdiction whose great purpose was to guarantee the right conditions for the outside-time of contemplation in worldly time. On the other, the “account” or narrative of inner experience, linking the journey toward the infinity of the Other with the humdrum trials of dealing with the passions of women and the history of men.

On completing the Constitutions by writing (yes, that again!),¹ The Way of Perfection,² then the Foundations,³ you imbued your sequestered sisters — whom your tongue often did not spare — with a psychic and indeed political life that was utterly without precedent, not only in the religious world but in any community of women, and perhaps of men, at that time. The story of your interior experience, resonating with the experience of your sisters and the other protagonists of the foundations, helped to literally unlock these cloistered souls. The narrative tenor of your writing (labeled “account” or “fiction”), which falls outside “genre” by mixing them all, appeals to the freedom of the spirit with an audacity, humanity, and distinct mastery of the moderns that contrast with the searingly rigorous texts of Ignatius Loyola, your senior by twenty years,⁴ as much as with the skepticism of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, your junior.⁵ And it’s precisely this theological and philosophical “ignorance,” this “unlettered” freshness that would turn The Way of Perfection and the Foundations into a breviary and a chronicle at once, mingling sensual delicacy and pragmatic intrepidity in a thought whose universal historic range and scope have still not been fully fathomed.

Just now, however, in 1566, you are contemplating the idea of constituting with María de Jesús Yepes, drawing on her knowledge and borrowing from her experience. It is to all appearances a bid to bring the Carmelites back to stricter standards. Is this to combat the laxity and drift of the Mitigated Rule and the whole epoch itself? To stand up more effectively to Lutheran rigor? Your implacable severity signals a far grander ambition, Teresa, my love, than any feebly moralistic design: you are intent upon inscribing into the accelerating time of history the outside-time of your understanding with the Other. Enclosure, poverty, and austerity are but three ways to convey the love of war and to acknowledge the war on love.

So now, along with María de Jesús Yepes, do you seek to return to the Primitive, ascetic Rule, the way she observed it at the Carmelite convent in Mantua where the nuns are, it is said, “walled up”? In a way; but it is rather more a matter of returning to that point in order to rethink, to recommence anew. “Constitution,” for you, will contribute to inaugurating that other time that inhabits you already, the one I have read and seen taking shape in you.

The cornerstone will be enclosure, a shield against the levities and licenses you observed at the Incarnation, which it is high time were abolished, now that France has fallen prey to calamity, thanks to the “havoc” wrought by that sect of “miserable” Lutherans, as you put it.⁶ María de Jesús wants to add on another cornerstone that is just as necessary for embarking on the way of perfection: absolute poverty.

“Until I had spoken to her, it hadn’t been brought to my attention that our rule — before it was mitigated — ordered that we own nothing.” This was something that “I, after having read over our constitutions so often, didn’t know.”⁷ A descendant of wealthy merchants like you, Teresa, can’t do less than begin to “constitute” by renouncing, firmly and finally, the chattels of this world! Before, “my intention had been that we have no worries about our needs; I hadn’t considered the many cares ownership of property brings with it.” So far so natural, and so Christlike. To cap it all, María nudges you toward the third principle of your reform: the discalced nuns are to live from their labor alone, and forgo all private income and allowances. Nothing but alms and personal effort!

Saying Mass, preaching, teaching, even tending the sick — these are tasks for men; your “daughters” will be encouraged to spin at the wheel, weave, sew, embroider. As a purist, you ban the more elaborate forms of needlework. Spinning and weaving are fine, but beware of lacy fripperies, guipures, and tapestries, for too much sophistication (labor curiosa) leads minds to stray from God! And no working with gold or silver, that’s forbidden above all.

Between the Carmelite provincial, Ángel de Salazar, who disapproved of such austere, impoverished convents; Bishop Álvaro de Mendoza, who took you under his wing; the Dominican Domingo Báñez, who supported you; and the Franciscan Pedro de Alcántara, who inspired you, slowly but surely you drew up the future constitution. In 1567, with the approval of the Carmelite general, the Italian-born Juan Bautista Rubeo, the new rules were written out with the assistance of María de Jesús, before she went off to found the Imagen convent at Alcalá de Henares. The text was then passed on to John of the Cross for him to use as a template for the discalced male regime. As the original has been lost, the only version we have has been reconstituted from the Alcalá copy and the rules for the Carmelite friars. To my mind, this short text (twelve sixteen-page chapters, of which you authored only the first six), regulating solitude within group life by dint of a wise balance of asceticism and tenderness, is the very condensation of your art of founding time.

After all, can anything be regulated without regulating time? How to make best use of time has always been a concern for monastic orders. Hence chapter 1, rule 1:

Matins are to be said after nine, not before, but not so long after nine that the nuns would be unable, when finished, to remain for a quarter of an hour examining their consciences as to how they have spent the day. The bell should be rung for this examen, and the one designated by the Mother prioress should read a short passage from some book in the vernacular on the mystery that will serve as a subject for reflection the following day. The time spent in these exercises should be so arranged that at eleven o’clock the bell may be rung to signal the hour for retirement and sleep. The nuns should spend this time of examen and prayer together in the choir. Once the Office has begun, no Sister should leave the choir without permission.⁸

Matins at nine, “examen” for fifteen minutes with meditation in Spanish upon a particular mystery, all “together in the choir.” Alone and together, meditation and work; the hours of the day are planned in such a way that time does not elapse but stands up straight, vertical, the frozen present of the contemplation of the Other. There are no distractions: your authorization of the vernacular tongue is not a license, it merely helps familiarize each nun with her Spouse and assimilate Him to whatever is most “her own,” both infantile and maternal. Likewise with chanting: to forestall possible backsliding, you prohibit the seductive runs of Gregorian notation, stipulating “a monotone and with uniform voices.” As for the rest of the rite, even Mass will be “recited,” to save time, “so that the Sisters may earn their livelihood.”⁹

Thus set up, the absolute present of contemplation will be paced according to the rhythms of the seasons and the movement of the sun. The bell rings out the calls to prayer, morning, noon, and night, and organizes the space of solitude with others: indoors or out, chapel or cell, garden or kitchen. The hours of the divine office (matins, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline, lauds) and the milestones of the Catholic calendar (Christmas, Lent, Easter, saints’ days) divert the quantitative flow of “passing time” into the outside-time of contemplative suspension.

The reform of time imposed by your Constitutions, Teresa, does not create a new calendar. Obviously not, since you are consciously aware of not founding a new religion. To take refuge in Catholic time as it exists (your Spouse’s calendar, the holy feasts and liturgies) enables you to better hollow out this time in which you recognize yourself, and of which you demand that it recognize you — the better to shoot it like an arrow deep inside toward the amorous intensity, carried to extremes, that will help you to detach from the world in order to cleave to the Other until “participating” in Him. Recognition and exile: never one without the other. Your genius lies in this paradox, which conformists (traditionalist and modernist alike) refused to accept, and could only be admitted by bolder dialectical minds in the wake of the Council of Trent.

This headlong rush into the worlds of business, diplomacy, funding, this accumulation of ruses, affinities, seductions, and humiliations — what were they for? To hollow out places beyond place, enclosures harboring an outside-time, protecting the Infinite. The discalced universe founded by your Constitutions is your last oedipal assault, a cold disavowal of the world of families, wealth, secular honor. Could it be in veiled resonance with the secrets of the Marranos disclaimed by your father and uncle, though they “participated” in them? Silent prayer welded a secret world inside you, which the Carmelite reform will institutionalize. In that world, the parents’ world, you make a kingdom that is not of this world. At the gate of the discalced houses you leave the Cepeda y Ahumadas and everything to do with them behind. Because from now on, you’re plain Teresa of Jesus.

Taking your vows thirty-five years ago at the Incarnation, with the secret complicity of Uncle Pedro and the support of your readings of Osuna, had not been, after all, enough of a break with the order of families, of family, the law of management-gestation-generation. From now on, there’s no ambiguity: at the cost of the sadomasochism that your joyous lucidity ceaselessly modulates into willpower or serenity, you are free. But at what a cost! It’s another paradox, my baroque Teresa, and it won’t be the last.

Before throwing yourself into the race that will keep you busy for the next fifteen years, the time of Infinity thus negotiated with ephemeral, worldly time nudges you to etch a thousand meticulous details into your regulations. The most essential are as follows.

Enclosure, you say That means solitude, silence, and detachment from the world.

No nun should be seen with her face unveiled unless she is with her father, mother, brothers, or sisters, or has some reason that would make it seem as appropriate as in the cases mentioned. And her dealings should be with persons who are an edification and help for the life of prayer and who provide spiritual consolation rather than recreation. Another nun should always be present unless one is dealing with conscience matters. The prioress must keep the key to both the parlor and the main entrance. When the doctor, barber-surgeon, confessor, or other necessary persons enter the enclosure, they should always be accompanied by two nuns. When some sick nun goes to confession, another nun must always be standing there at a distance so that she sees the confessor. She should not speak to him, unless a word or two, only the sick nun may do so.¹⁰

Outside-time in time demands total dispossession from the outset: nothing for oneself. The sisters cannot own anything, not even a book:

In no way should the Sisters have any particular possessions, nor should such permission be granted; nothing in the line of food or clothing; nor should they have any coffer or small chest, or box, or cupboard, unless someone have an office in the community. But everything must be held in common.…the prioress should be very careful. If she sees that a Sister is attached to anything, be it a book, or a cell, or anything else, she should take it from her.¹¹

You who were once such a stylish young thing, you now bear down on every sign of caring about appearance or comfort. Attire will be austere, with rope-soled sandals made of hemp, habits of coarse cloth or rough brown wool, hair chopped short under the wimple; no colors, no mirrors, Spartan cells, and straw pallets.

A fast is observed from the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, which is in September, until Easter, with the exception of Sundays. Meat must never be eaten unless out of necessity, as the rule prescribes.

The habit should be made of coarse cloth or black, rough wool, and only as much wool is necessary should be used.…Straw-filled sacks will be used for mattresses, for it has been shown that these can be tolerated even by persons with weak health.…Colored clothing or bedding must never be used, not even something as small as a ribbon. Sheepskins should never be worn. If someone is sick, she may wear an extra garment made of the same rough wool as the habit.

The Sisters must keep their hair cut so as not to have to waste time in combing it. Never should a mirror be used or any adornments; there should be complete self-forgetfulness.¹²

For those who haven’t grasped that this detachment is the imperative condition for belonging to the Other, The Way of Perfection sets out, in greater psychological detail, the implications of your juridical-constitutional rigor:

I am astonished by the harm that is caused from dealing with relatives. I don’t think anyone will believe it except the one who has experienced it for himself. And how this practice of perfection seems to be forgotten nowadays in religious orders! I don’t know what it is in the world that we renounce when we say that we give up everything for God, if we do not give up the main thing, namely, our relatives.¹³

Once nature, that is, “the relatives,” has been dealt with, there naturally follows the need to guard against any special affection between sisters. Teresa is careful to put bounds on female passions, veritable poisons that she compares to the tumultuous feelings between siblings and to a “pestilence”:

All must be friends, all must be loved, all must be held dear, all must be helped. Watch out for these friendships, for love of the Lord, however holy they may be; even among brothers they can be poisonous. I see no benefit in them. And if the friends are relatives, the situation is much worse — it’s a pestilence!¹⁴

Let no Sister embrace another or touch her on the face or hands. The Sisters should not have particular friendships but should include all in their love for one another, as Christ often commanded His disciples. Since they are so few, this will be easy to do. They should strive to imitate their Spouse who gave His life for us. This love for one another that includes all and singles out no one in particular is very important.¹⁵

The inevitable pleasures between sisters (female homosexuality is endogenous!) must be closely watched out for, then. Beware elective affinities! Transform them into “general” bonds, into the cement holding the group together! Is that your message? Sooner said than done!

With rather more finesse, your Motherhood — sensual and prudent — softens these rigors by drawing attention to another, more delightful Cross that afflicts those who care for others, and know them down to “the tiniest speck [las motitas]”: “On the one hand [these lovers] go about forgetful of the whole world, taking no account of whether others serve God or not, but only keeping account of themselves; on the other hand, with their friends, they have no power to do this, nor is anything covered over; they see the tiniest speck. I say that they bear a truly heavy cross.”¹⁶

When, in situations of mystical ascesis and the acquisition of this insight into human relationships, penances seem called for, you are careful to qualify them: “Should the Lord give a Sister the desire to perform a mortification, she should ask permission. This good, devotional practice should not be lost, for some benefits are drawn from it. Let it be done quickly so as not to interfere with the reading. Outside the time of dinner and supper, no Sister should eat or drink without permission.”¹⁷

Moments of relaxation — an innovation of yours — will be allowed:

When they are through with the meal, the Mother prioress may dispense from the silence so that all may converse together on whatever topic pleases them most, as long as it is not one that is inappropriate for a good religious. And they should all have their distaffs with them there.

Games should in no way be permitted, for the Lord will give to one the grace to entertain the others. In this way, the time will be well spent. They should strive not to be offensive to one another, but their words and jests must be discreet. When this hour of being together is over, they may in summer sleep for an hour; and whoever might not wish to sleep should observe silence.¹⁸

It goes without saying that delicacies are forbidden: the menu is meager, and fasting lasts for six months. The Constitution for Saint Joseph’s bans meat, save in cases of absolute necessity, as we have seen, but it does allow for fish and eggs, as well as unlimited bread and vegetables. Positively mouthwatering! Lest we forget, there’s nothing like frugality to condition the detachment from self that solitude is expected to foster.

Good spiritual nourishment, equally under surveillance, will feed the souls whose stomachs have thus been purified:

The prioress should see to it that good books are available, especially the Life of Christ by the Carthusian [Ludolf of Saxony], the Flos Sanctorum [a collection of lives of the saints, including the Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine], the Imitation of Christ [Thomas à Kempis], the Oratory of Religious [Antonio Guevara], and those books written by Fray Luis de Granada [the Book of Prayer and Meditation, the Sinners’ Guide] and by Father Fray Pedro de Alcántara. This sustenance for the soul is in some way as necessary as is food for the body. All of that time not taken up with community life and duties should be spent by each Sister in the cell or hermitage designated by the prioress; in sum, in a place where she can be recollected and, on those days that are not feast days, occupied in doing some work. By withdrawing into solitude in this way, we fulfill what the rule commands: that each one should be alone. No Sister, under pain of a grave fault, may enter the cell of another without the prioress’s permission. Let there never be a common workroom.¹⁹

I see that the list of books authorized by the prioress is short but edifying, and the cleverest of the discalced nuns would be able to commit their salient passages to memory, so as to form part of a duly indoctrinated, elite corps.

I also note that this austerity wisely applies to one and all, fomenting a kind of equality between the sisters that even includes the mother superior:

The Mother prioress should be first on the list for sweeping so that she might give a good example to all. She should pay careful attention to whether those in charge of the clothes and the food provide charitably for the Sisters in what is needed for subsistence and in everything else. Those having these offices should do no more for the prioress and the older nuns than they do for all the rest, as the rule prescribes, but be attentive to needs and age, and more so to needs, for sometimes those who are older have fewer needs. Since this is a general rule, it merits careful consideration, for it applies in many things.²⁰

Over the years, the various foundations would show that it was better to establish the prioress’s authority from the start and enshrine total respect for the hierarchy; for the moment, however, Teresa refers to herself as an “older sister.” Such were the optimistic beginnings of an institution that dreamed of equality. When at length she realized that the human animal, even behind the bars of a cloister, requires steering by an unambiguously firm hand, La Madre would duly take this into account.

But this is still only the start of an unimaginable adventure. The goal was no more or less than to found, in this world, the interiority of an absolute love beyond the reach or ken of this world; to noise abroad the work of this love by isolating it, rendering it invisible and indeed untouchable, and by the same token infinitely desirable. Nothing could have gone more against the grain at this time, the apogee of the Renaissance, as colonization was spreading and industry beginning to develop. But the repercussions of the Council of Trent subsumed this Teresian casuistry into the cultural revolution that was the Counter-Reformation, without anyone knowing where exactly this would lead: to the impasse of an archaism in whose swamp of supernatural manifestations Renaissance or Protestant progress would find itself mired? Or to the awakening of unsuspected energies and fruitful singularities, as enigmatic and confounding today as they ever were?

In The Way of Perfection, the three points that summarize the Constitutions allude to a Paradise located at the intersection of the “inward” and the “outward”:

I shall enlarge on only three things, which are from our own constitutions, for it is very important that we understand how much the practice of these three things helps us to possess inwardly and outwardly the peace our Lord recommended so highly to us. The first of these is love for one another; the second is detachment from all created things; the third is true humility, which, even though I speak of it last, is the main practice and embraces all the others.²¹

The fundament is love according to prayer: in these days of religious war, you must pray (inwardly) and make it known by taking up as much space as possible (outwardly). Recollect yourself at the very heart of your interior castle, but swarm through the mountains and valleys. In a Carmel harking back to the old ways, contemplation amounts to a warrior kind of love. Are some “unfortunate heretics” attacking the Catholic fortress in which La Madre desires to house her reform? To arms, to war! But one cannot gallop into battle without first outlining the Paradise of love; without exploring in every direction love’s exaltations, which only thus, accepted at last, open up into Nothingness.

Let us return now to the love that it is good for us to have, that which I say is purely spiritual. I don’t know if I know what I am saying.…For I don’t think I know which love is spiritual, or when sensual love is mixed with spiritual love, nor do I know why I want to speak of this spiritual love.…The persons the Lord brings to this state are generous souls, majestic souls. They are not content with loving something as wretched as these bodies, however beautiful they may be, however attractive…. And, in fact, I think at times that if love does not come from those persons who can help us gain the blessings of the perfect, there would be great blindness in this desire to be loved. Now, note well that when we desire love from some person, there is always a kind of seeking our own benefit or satisfaction…

It will seem to you that such persons do not love or know anyone but God. I say, yes they do love, with a much greater and more genuine love, and with passion, and with a more beneficial love: in short, it is love. And these souls are more inclined to give than to receive. Even with respect to the Creator Himself they want to give more than to receive. I say that this attitude is what merits the name “love,” for these other base attachments have usurped the name “love.”²²

Who said enclosure? Inwardly and outwardly, you constitute whatever is necessary to harbor love, to set it ablaze with ecstasy, indifference, endurance. You are ready, Teresa, to confront the world from the vantage point of that nonworld. Comfort does not sit well with prayer, ecstasy is not a pampered but a painful act, incompatible with easy living: “regalo y oración no se compadece.”²³

Are you, like Angela of Foligno, perpetually engaged in a “twofold immersion in the fathomless depths of the divinity”? Not really. What you do instead is to walk it, explore it, elucidate it. The idea is to create the optimum conditions for attaining, through recollection, the intimate secrecy, the “closet” (Matt. 6:6) of prayer, the prayer “all night” (Luke 6:12) engaged in by Jesus himself, for “it has already been mentioned that one cannot speak simultaneously to God and to the world.”²⁴ Time to withdraw from the world, then, to step back from its “frenzy”; but also from “bad humors” or melancholia, on “days of great tempests in His servants.”²⁵ To stand never so far from the Master “that He has to shout,” close enough for the person at prayer to “center the mind on the one to whom the words are addressed.”²⁶ This pact with the Other should neither be a fusion, nor an obstacle to comprehension: “It will be an act of love to understand who this Father of ours is and who the Master is who taught us this prayer.”²⁷

And yet, with no striving on the part of the spirit, a transfer of intimacies is what occurs, an outpouring of pleasure between communicating vessels. The “divine food” of happiness, then,²⁸ the understanding of the “nothingness of all things,” which together transmute the “pain” into “joy.” Let “reason” itself “raise the banner”!²⁹ The “interior” of every person will thus find itself appeased: “If the soul suffers dryness, agitation and worry, these are taken away.”³⁰ In a word, the soul is returned to bliss. “The delight is in the interior of the will, for the other consolations of life, it seems to me, are enjoyed in the exterior of the will, as in the outer bark, we might say.”³¹

Severed from this “exterior life,” the cloistered soul — which Teresa reveals and instructs in the Way—will not allow itself to be held back by any obstacle. Of course, La Madre laments those “scattered” souls who behave like “wild horses…always restless,”³² and this remonstration could just as well apply to herself. However, the enclosure of Heaven, irrigated by the Other’s water or milk, is not impervious to the “active,” “powerful” fire, “not subject to the elements,” whose inability to extinguish its opposite, water, “makes the fire increase!” Far from being passive, the soul Teresa summons up in her writing is a blaze of love, tantamount for La Madre to the fire of “liberty”: “No wonder the saints, with the help of God, were able to do with the elements whatever they wanted.”³³ The “poor nun of St. Joseph’s” licenses herself to wage war in order to “attain dominion over all the earth and the elements.”³⁴ War against herself, by practicing “interior mortification”;³⁵ war to “conquer the enemy,” meaning the body first of all. Once souls have become “lords of our bodies,”³⁶ they wage war against the last enemies, among whom must be counted those “learned men,” who “all lived a good life — incomparably better than I,”³⁷ but who have not been blessed with true “consolations [pleasures, refreshment: gustos] from God.”³⁸ Or against what she calls the “night owls” or “cicadas,” those Carmelites of the observance who haven’t gone along with Teresa’s reforms.³⁹

Thus inflamed, the soul on its path to perfection never encounters a “closed door,” for its state of “suspension”⁴⁰ makes an invincible combatant of it. Cloistered but not tied down, its deep refreshment in itself, at once water and fire, compels it to brave the antagonism of those who are content with the “exterior life,” the “outer bark”:

I had no one with whom to speak. They were all against me; some, it seemed, made fun of me when I spoke of the matter, as though I were inventing it; others advised my confessor to be careful of me; others said that my experience was clearly from the devil. My confessor alone (even though he agreed with them in order to test me, as I came to know afterward) always consoled me.⁴¹

Not even devils can scare you anymore, Teresa. Fortified by your union with the Beloved, you ignore them, like so many pesky flies! “For although I sometimes saw them, as I shall relate afterward, I no longer had hardly any fear of them; rather it seemed they were afraid of me. I was left with a mastery over them truly given by the Lord of all; I pay no more attention to them than to flies.”⁴²

Contemplative and secluded as you are, you harbor a military vision of the world, my dear Teresa; the Parisian Psychoanalytical Society crowd would call it paranoid, and they wouldn’t be completely wrong. Witness this vision:

I saw myself standing alone in prayer in a large field; surrounding me were many different types of people. All of them I think held weapons in their hands so as to harm me: some held spears; others, swords; others daggers; and others, very long rapiers. In sum, I couldn’t escape on any side without putting myself in danger of death; I was alone without finding a person to take my part. While my spirit was in this affliction, not knowing what to do, I lifted my eyes to heaven and saw Christ, not in heaven but quite far above me in the sky. He was holding out His hand toward me, and from there He protected me…

This vision seems fruitless, but it greatly benefited me because I was given an understanding of its meaning. A little afterward I found myself almost in the midst of that battery, and I knew that the vision was a picture of the world…But I’m referring to friends, relatives, and, what frightens me most, very good persons. I afterward found myself so oppressed by them all, while they thought they were doing good, that I didn’t know how to defend myself or what to do.⁴³

How lucky you are: your ideal Father still protects you! What’s more, his protection has modulated. The ecstatic union has already become a matter of listening and hearing. From now on, and more and more, His Voice does not simply comfort and reassure you: it reasons, judges, ponders, counsels. You would never have succeeded as a foundress without pulling back from the Beloved a little. Where previously you were enclosed in a garden irrigated by pleasure, cut off from a world you perceived as rejecting you, His Voice has opened up an evaluating distance; the love-rapture has been amplified by understanding and a kind of mastery. In professional jargon, I’d say that the ideal of the ego has become endowed with a reasonable, domesticated, sympathetic superego. To build the little Convent of Saint Joseph’s, you followed David’s example: “I will hear what God the Lord will speak: for he will speak peace unto his people, and to his saints” (Ps. 85:8).

And with time, indeed, you will outdo David. Is that an overstatement, brought on by a fit of feminism? In 1577, the Voice you hearken to in prayer is that of Jesus himself as he tells you to “Seek yourself in Me” (Búscate en mí).⁴⁴ Listening to the Other is not the same as seeking oneself in Him. Your inner experience is renewed; you are searching, you are a seeker; not content with hearing voices — divisions-hallucinations—you recompose, modulate, compose them. You write. David played on his harp while waging war, and he was a king. You are a warrior with no sovereignty beyond that of fiction in the Castilian vernacular. I can’t help thinking that your writing has more than one string to its harp.

Four years, the quietest and most restful of your life, had gone by in the company of the select group you gathered together at Saint Joseph’s,⁴⁵ when a missionary friar fresh from the Indies told you of the horrors being perpetrated on the natives by the glorious peruleros whose adventurous freedom you had once envied.

Then the father general of your order, Juan Bautista Rubeo (Giambattista Rossi) arrived from Rome on his first visit to Spain. You were in dread of his opinion — but he only encouraged you to undertake further foundations, further afield. You acted surprised, but you were as ready as can be. It’s all you were waiting for. You got a little band of three of four nuns together and hopped into a wagon, under canvases stretched over a frame of rushes so nobody would see you, enclosure oblige—and off you went!

Did someone say “enclosure”?

And they’re off! At a trot, at a gallop, never at a walk, with detours, ruses, and ambushes galore, you’re a racehorse, Teresa, valiant and highly strung. A nun, with such a passion for the road? For the next fifteen years you will crisscross Spain, trudging on foot, mounted on a mule, rattled boneless in a coach. Escorted by a few devoted sisters and obliging men — secular priests who double as technical advisers, the occasional infatuated confessor — all undaunted by the hardships of nature and the iniquity of humans. Your energy as an epileptic prone to migraines astonishes your contemporaries, as well as posterity; from here, four centuries further on, it’s your tempo that fascinates me: you are a true composer of time.

Your impetus in this dash is loving and warlike. “Grant me trials, Lord, give me persecution!” Let’s go! Trotting, cantering, on horseback, on mule-back, in a coach, on foot! Bring your quills, your contacts, your wallets, your kind hearts! You, devout noblewomen, and you, knights and merchants, bishops and courtiers, kings and queens, let us mount and sally forth together in a glittering cavalcade, for the insidious enemy is on the prowl. But how to tell friend from foe? It’s war, the war of love.

If your blows fall short of the frail rampart, let’s sally forth again, to arms! I watch, I think, I burn, I complain, O love that fortifies my heart. Quick, each man to his post! The journey is in me, the battle too, brutal and furious: they alone can bring me peace. Peace, what peace? There is no peace. One hand alone cures and wounds me. And because my suffering never reaches its limits, a thousand times daily I die, and a thousand times am born, so far am I from my salvation. Here we go again, to horse, to horse, to horse, every soul a horse, there is no soul if not loving and warlike, warlike and in love.

All of a sudden the Babel of times and languages carries me away, too, me, Sylvia Leclercq, a therapist in my spare time, and suddenly Teresa’s tempo comes back to me in Italian: it’s the loving warlike gallop of Monteverdi,⁴⁶ born fifty years after you, Teresa, my love; it’s his beat I hear drumming through your writings, rising, resonating, and harmonizing with you. Suddenly he supplies the sound I felt was missing as I read your texts. To lend meaning to his runaway music, the conductor at Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice borrowed lyrics from Petrarch⁴⁷ and from Giulio Strozzi,⁴⁸ the first translator into Italian of Lazarillo de Tormes.

I hear you clearly now, Teresa, speaking to me in the voices of Petrarch, Strozzi, Monteverdi, all three Catholic Latins, and you excel in the race of love unto death:

E E E E G E C

Tut-ti tutti a ca-val-lo…

E E E E G E C

Tut-ti tutti a ca-val-lo…

C G G G G G C G G G G G

Tut-ti a ca-val-lo a ca-val-lo a ca-val-lo a ca-val

Quick, love is near, as near as the enemy, every man to his post, not a moment to lose, to your souls, to your souls, to your souls, there is no soul but one that’s warlike and in love:

E E E E G E C

Tut-ti tutti a ca-val-lo…

When I was young I dreamed of writing like that, galloping off on a text by Strozzi or Petrarch to the rhythms of Monteverdi. Quite recently — had he sensed this hidden attraction? — a president (but which?) blurted out to me: “Sylvia Leclercq is a racehorse!” This strange compliment, which I received with a proud gratification that baffled the friends who were present, brought me back to you, Teresa, via my Italians:

E E E E G E C

Tut-ti tutti a ca-val-lo…

But it’s no good, I will never, ever, neither in body nor on paper, possess anything like your fever; your velocity, suppleness, abrasiveness, and cunning; your jubilation, humility, and perfidy; your sharp claws and soft lethargy; your dexterity with a deathblow; your violent triumphs and grievous defeats, simplicity and glory, suffering and sadism, annihilation and perseverance, carelessness and obstinacy, serenity and anguish, toughness and tenderness; your spiteful kindness, amorous indifference, and desperate tenacity. Nor will I ever have that furious, caressing lucidity and unflagging watchfulness, always on behalf of that infinite Love of the Other, infinitely unfindable, infinitely imbued in you. Never, Teresa, my love! You were, they said, a true “spiritual conquistador.”

It’s raining, snowing, blowing up a storm. You’re feverish, you throw up, you scourge yourself, you mount a bad-tempered mule that bucks you off, the axle of your coach snaps on a rutted road, you fall over, you hurt yourself, you break a leg, you feel cold, you feel too hot, there’s nothing left to drink, you haven’t had a scrap to eat since goodness knows when, you were promised great things but it’s all fallen through, never mind! You’ll find another way in, a different path; you’ll prevail on one of your accomplices, quick, no time to lose; your purse is empty but you always find money somewhere; it matters and it doesn’t, the re-foundation has no need of a steady income, as you explain to all and sundry, and also they — sisters, brothers, creditors, friends, or foes — don’t matter either. What matters are deeds, what’s needed are works and more works.

Your love leads the dance, that sole, single, inexhaustible love, on the trot, at a gallop, no love but in the loving warlike soul, and for that soul, your soul, galloping along the highways and byways of Spain, of the world, of perfection, of the interior castle, of everything, of nothing:

E E E E G E C, E E E E G E C.

Tu-tti, tutti a ca-val-lo, tut-ti, tutti a ca-val-lo

Religious houses founded by Teresa of Jesus.

1562 Saint Joseph’s in Avila

1567 Medina del Campo

1568 Malagón

1568 Valladolid

1569 Toledo

1569 Pastrana

1570 Salamanca

1571 Alba de Tormes

1574 Segovia

1575 Beas de Segura

1575 Seville

1576 Caravaca

1580 Villanueva de la Jara

1580 Palencia

1581 Soria

1582 Burgos

1582 Granada

Chapter 24. TUTTI A CAVALLO

I’m daydreaming, eyes wide open beneath their lids: I can see and hear her now, Teresa’s on her way, twenty years stretch ahead, counting from the first lines of the Life, and the only thing that will stop her is death. She’s got clean away from the family, from yesterday’s sisters, from the fathers of here or there, in order to be exiled in the Other and to carve Him a new place — invisible, impregnable, segregated from the world — in the world. She writes of transforming herself into God, uniting with God. At any rate, His Majesty cannot be winkled out of her. Neither “I” nor “we,” this dual entity sets off, arrives, struggles, founds, sets off again, battles with itself, starts over. Nothing but new beginnings. Let’s try to follow.

1567. Medina del Campo: a large market town with an international fair. Unexpectedly, wealthy converso merchants such as Simón Ruiz are prepared to back these nuns determined to live on nothing but alms and their humble crafts of embroidery and needlepoint…Did such fledgling entrepreneurs seek a place in the sun of the Church? Was it easier, more exciting, more promising to obtain this via innovators like Teresa, instead of hoary notables “who have the fat of an old Christian four fingers deep on their souls,” as Sancho puts it in Don Quixote?¹ La Madre could not fail to interest them, for she did not comply with the estatutos de limpieza de sangre that excluded converted Jews from the more prestigious convents, as well as from university colleges and town councils.

Since she began making foundations, La Madre has been blessed with more than visions: voices, too, are heard, whose messages she eagerly transcribes. The difference is that visions induce states of rapture, whereas voices spur to action. The voices — obviously the Lord’s — speak disparagingly of human prescriptions and laws: they convey the Word of the Beloved differently from how the world’s kingpins understand it. To speed things up — and Teresa is moving faster every day — it seems that thanks to these voices she, too, stands against the law, against the world, against the grain. “You will grow very foolish, daughter, if you look at the world’s laws. Fix your eyes on me, poor and despised by the world. Will the great ones of the world, perhaps, be great before me? Or, are you to be esteemed for lineage or for virtue?”²

At Medina, then, a new house opens on August 15, 1567: cousin Inés Tapia, now Inés de Jesús, will be the prioress. There are malcontents in town who grumble that this foundation is a fraud. Let them say what they like, God has given Teresa some true friends here: Pedro Fernández, the Dominican principal; the Jesuit Baltasar Álvarez, who accompanies La Madre in her spiritual life; and the Dominican García de Toledo, of course, dependably busy and protective, almost affectionate. No sooner has this inauguration been celebrated, than permission arrives to found two male monasteries under the Primitive Rule! Where should they be located?

Antonio de Heredia (Antonio de Jesús), a Carmelite of the Observation from Medina, takes an interest. But he’s too old, too difficult, Teresa balks, no. Let’s speed up:

tutti, tutti a cavallo

tutti, tutti a cavallo

tutti a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a caval

tutti, tutti a cavallo

tutti a cavallo

Father Antonio introduces to the discalced nuns a bright young man fresh out of theology school at Salamanca, twenty-five-year-old Juan de Yepes, ordained as Juan de San Matías. Short and skinny, round-skulled and sharp-faced, he is the son of a rich weaver from Toledo (Toledan forebears and of Jewish stock, it seems — just like Teresa!), the hidalgo Gonzalo de Yepes, who was reputedly ruined by marrying Juan’s mother, a woman of Moorish and hence Muslim blood. This Juan de San Matías is an ascetic, disillusioned by the calced life; he yearns to withdraw from the world in the mountains of Segovia. He has shining eyes, an elliptical wit, and the fieriness of the Carthusians he wanted to join. He’s the one! Onward!

No, hold your horses, wait!

Luisa de la Cerda, Teresa’s generous patron and friend, slows things down again. This noble lady, who aspires to Heaven above all else, insists, absolutely insists that Teresa found a branch at Malagón, a little hamlet in the sticks. Teresa can’t see the point of dispatching her nuns to the middle of a field, when all they know is weaving and sewing. But Báñez is keen as well, and it’s hard to say no to him. Aha! Malagón, as she recalls, is not a million miles from Montilla, the home of Juan de Ávila. Doña Luisa, who often visits Andalusia, could deliver to him the manuscript of the Life, which Báñez has just returned to the author. Shush, not a word to Báñez, who doesn’t want the text to circulate and might feel sore if the other priest were roped in; best to take responsibility oneself and entrust the precious pages to Luisa. The foundress has embarked on a new chase. How to make sure her manuscript will reach its destination? It would seem writing a book is no less complicated than founding a new religious order!

To begin with — she’s always beginning — she must get in touch right away with Juan de Ávila, tell him of her forthcoming visit to the area, and send him the book in advance through Luisa. Although she dared to hope as much, Teresa is thrilled when the learned sage replies without delay and even looks kindly upon her journey: “You can better serve the Lord with this pilgrimage than by staying in your cell.”³ No hesitation, she’ll go to Malagón.

Meanwhile there’s no end of checking, finding out, keeping up to date: they stop in Alcalá de Henares on the way, at the discalced convent founded by María de Jesús. Poor woman, she hasn’t got a clue: too tough, too many penances. María is an innovator whose notions came in useful for the Constitutions, to be sure, but only on condition of being revised through and through, adapted to inner virtue, stripped of external rigors. That’s also what it means to be a foundress: the readiness to start over, over and over again, relying on one’s powers alone — besides the Voice of His Majesty, of course!

The problems pile up at Malagón. Where to find a spiritual director for a new monastery in this godforsaken spot? How about getting Tomás de Carleval from Baeza, Bernardino’s brother, a disciple of Juan de Ávila…But Bernardino was arrested by the Inquisition back in 1551. It might be reckless, a way of courting trouble.

On the other hand, attentive to the guidance of the master of Avila, Teresa doesn’t think twice before accepting converts at Malagón, that is, sisters in white veils, and starting a school for local girls. The young recruits have got to learn to read, otherwise they haven’t a hope of donning the black veil one day and reading the holy office!

And then, since troubles never come singly, how on earth is one to eat fish, as stipulated by the Constitutions, when there’s no fish to be had in Malagón? Never mind, let them eat meat, we’re in Spain after all, a carnivorous country if ever there was one, and too bad for the Constitution, decrees Teresa. Off they go again.

E E E E G E C

Tut-ti tutti a ca-val-lo…

E E E E G E C

Tut-ti tutti a ca-val-lo…

C G G G G G G C G G G G G

Tut-ti a ca-val-lo a ca-val-lo a ca-val-lo a ca-val-

C G G G G G

lo a ca-val-lo a ca-val

But it’s not that simple. La Madre does not for a moment forget about her manuscript: the Business she must attend to amongst her business.

May 18, 1568. Letter to Luisa de la Cerda: Why has she not yet sent the book of Teresa’s Life to maestro Ávila?

May 27. Another letter to Luisa. “Since you are so near him, I beg you…” Not to mention that Fray Báñez is also waiting on it, and since there is no way to photocopy the original, and Báñez must not find out about the author’s contacts with Juan de Ávila, “I’m distressed — I don’t know what to do.”⁴

June 9. Fresh bid to jog her ladyship’s memory. “In regard to what I entrusted to you, I beg you once more…”⁵

June 23. “Remember, since I entrusted my soul to you…”⁶

November 2. At last! “You have worked everything out so well…So I’m forgetting all the anger this caused me.” Juan de Ávila has emitted a positive verdict, the future saint “is satisfied with everything. He says only that some things should be explained further and that some terms should be changed.”⁷

Good grief! It took all of five letters to Luisa de la Cerda during that summer of 1568 to set the ball of the Life’s acceptance rolling: not that Teresa was really “attached” to the text, at least she claimed not to be; but it’s not that simple. Was it not essential for her to write down (or to “communicate,” as we say today) the “treasure” she concealed in her “center,” so as to found an interior Time within time as it flies by?

Summer 1568. To Valladolid. A great Mendoza, Bernardino of that name, wishes to settle the Discalced Carmelites into a house there, with a garden and vineyards. She cannot refuse, when the gallant gentleman is brother to the bishop of Avila, Álvaro de Mendoza, who blessed the foundation of the Convent of Saint Joseph’s in Avila!

Teresa stops off at Duruelo to visit the little house additionally offered by Bernardino, with a view to setting up the first convent for discalced monks. She makes a detour to Medina to bring back Juan de San Matías, promoting him to the rank of associate founder in the Valladolid venture.

Let’s see, how are we getting along in these noble lands so handsomely lavished upon us? There are so many mosquitoes in this lovely countryside that the sisters get malaria and die like flies. Teresa won’t be bullied, enough is enough, we’ll move into town. Álvaro’s sister María de Mendoza donates another house, it’s just what we need, we’ll put up all the fittings ourselves: cells, chapels, grilles, Teresa won’t settle for less than perfection; María Bautista will be the prioress. La Madre wants everyone to know that a convent must be to La Madre’s taste, she won’t bow to pressure from any quarter, whether the Mendozas or some estimable Jesuit such as Fr. Ripalda.

Four years later, on March 7, 1572, Teresa writes to inform María de Mendoza that she will not accept two postulants recommended by that lady. Is it because by her high standards, the young ladies showed an insufficient vocation? She’s a perfectionist, as we’ve seen: she doesn’t want one-eyed or sickly girls in her convent.

You’re hard-hearted, Teresa, and you know it, you’re proud of it, you’re not as Christlike as your voices make you out to be. A masochist overall, you are not above being a sadist at times, I will remind you of that. It helps, certainly: the times are as tough as you are, the Carmels hard to control, one has to fight, to keep tense as a bow in order to keep making foundations. But still!

The previous year, an auto-da-fe was held in Valladolid. Men and women accused of Lutheranism were burned at the stake. Most were conversos with connections to the Cazalla family; Agustín Cazalla, preacher to the king and his mother, was among them. There had been some contact between these circles and doña Guiomar, involving Teresa herself: although they were no longer in touch, prayer continued to link them. The world was coming down hard on the new paths she was trying to clear, it was out to silence His Voices, that much was clear. Oh well. Just distrust everyone and everything, follow your way of perfection more and more perfectly, and we’ll be off again,

E E E E G E C

E E E E G E C

Blessed be His Majesty, this hostile world is not only composed of enemies: some pure souls do exist, like that young Juan de San Matías. Might His Majesty have created him expressly for Teresa’s project? His is a life devoted to intelligent thought and great penance; “I believe our Lord has called him for this task.”⁸ In November 1568, Juan and Teresa, now a close-knit team, founded the masculine Convent of Duruelo. A shabbier, more frugal holy house can scarcely be imagined. Teresa stitched with her own hand the habit of the young monk who now took the name of Juan de la Cruz, John of the Cross.

And yet you are going to abandon him in the dark night of this utterly impoverished place, Teresa, my love, a pang of sorrow and pride in your heart, admiring him, but already a little distant. For he is passionately in thrall to the realm of the invisible, whereas you are committed to scattering the glints of the diamond of your soul, which encases the Third Person. John of the Cross will lose himself ever more in the purity of agonized contemplation, whereas you pursue your furious cavalcade for God.

F F F F A♭ F D♭

F F F F A♭ F D♭

D♭ A♭ A♭ A♭ A♭ A♭ A♭ D♭ A♭ A♭ A♭

A♭ A♭ D♭ A♭ A♭ A♭ A♭ A♭

F F F F A♭ F D♭

F F F F A♭ F D♭

Yes, I hear you clearly: after every conversation with John of the Cross, your gallop is slightly faster and yet slacker, dampened by melancholy. No, John’s nothingness will never crush the jewel of your inner dwelling places, it can only unleash a shiver in that heart of yours, which wants to be hard, which has to stay that way.

Now then, time to pull yourself together, to check your first foundation and tighten the bonds with the sisters at Saint Joseph’s in Avila. Indeed, but it’s impossible! A fresh proposal has arrived, supported by your new Jesuit friend, Pablo Hernández: to found a house in Toledo.

Toledo, is it? The city where grandfather Juan was traduced, where the sambenito embroidered with the Sánchez family name was hung up in the church of Santa Leocadia. A metropolis that presently numbers no fewer than twenty-four monasteries! A foundation in such a place is a crazy gamble! Maybe so, but that’s what La Madre likes about it.

A rich trader named Martín Ramírez has engaged to bequeath his worldly goods to the discalced institution at Toledo; in exchange, he wants to be buried in the chapel. Is this acceptable? A commoner giving himself the right to be buried in a convent, as though he were a nobleman? It goes without saying, however, that they will welcome the daughters of converso Jews. But Toledans are sharply divided over the fate of Archbishop Bartolomé de Carranza, arrested in 1559 and slammed into a Roman jail due to his friendship with Luis de Granada and other “spiritual” adepts of mental prayer; he has numerous enemies here. Some pious women nevertheless club together to have him freed, defying the Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés. As though this were not enough to torpedo the Toledo venture, it soon transpires that the Ramírez bequest is no longer available; the permission to found keeps being delayed, and conservatives rail against the cheek of this little woman who proposes to found a religious house by cutting deals with tradespeople! Can anything else go wrong?

No need to panic. Teresa, who can be sweet and gracious when she chooses, pushes on with the works. Finally the ecclesiastical governor of the diocese, don Gómez Tello Girón, agrees to guarantee the project, on one condition: in order to avoid infection by the taint of trade, the convent must have no revenues and refuse any donation or patronage (thus shutting the vulgar Ramírez out of the picture; was he the problem all along?) The foundress feigns surprise. But Father, who suggested anything else? Our Constitutions impose a strict rule of poverty, I thought you knew.

Mother Teresa has three or four ducats to her name, enough to buy two straw pallets and a blanket. A mischievous pícaro who goes by the name of Alonso de Andrada offers help, in the form of the keys to a building he’s wangled who knows how. Teresa prefers not to inquire about such details, especially when they give off a whiff of irregularity. She is physically attacked by a neighbor, who hates the discalced movement. None of this prevents her from persevering with the work in hand — sweeping, repairing, and decorating the premises. At this point the owner of the place changes her mind, decides she doesn’t want the newfangled style of convent either. But at last Tello Girón returns from a trip, and the council grants permission. The happy ending is courtesy of the Voice of the Lord, who has demanded superhuman obstinacy from Teresa, mixed in with a degree of machination and shady dealings, it must be said.

On May 14, 1569, the first Mass is said in the new foundation at Toledo. More than a foundation, it has been a brilliantly forced passage, a seduction strategy, a feat of errancy and endurance. Nothing can resist you, Teresa. Perhaps your poverty is a form of high ambition? Your humility, a piece of brazen chutzpah?

E E E E G E C

E E E E G E C

This gallop might have been smoother had it not clashed with other equally bold and no less brash schemes, usually from women. At this precise juncture, your soaring energy came up against that most formidable of Spanish grandees: Ana de Mendoza de la Cerda, princess of Eboli, wife of Prince Ruy Gómez — the most powerful personality after King Philip II — and great-granddaughter of don Pedro González de Mendoza, cardinal and archbishop of Toledo, dubbed “the third king of Spain.” Quite a package! She was a haughty, peremptory woman, minus an eye (could that be another reason why you didn’t want that sort of defect in your convent, Teresa?), capable of setting fire to everything around with “just one sun,” as the saying went, a spoiled and spendthrift princess. You were about to find this out, unfortunately, for here she was, nagging you to drop everything and go to Pastrana to found another convent, there’s no end to it. Off you went, willingly enough, since in the intoxication of your status as the go-to foundress, giddied by your ascent, you were still blind to the traps the Eboli woman would set for you, my naive Teresa.

No question of a wagon this time, it’s an unworthy vehicle for a Madre like yourself. The princess sends a stately coach, a fairy carriage! Along the way, your gallop — a golden gallop now — draws breath at Court, in Madrid! We know that His Majesty’s Voice is essential to your foundations, but that of King Philip II is not to be sneezed at either, is it?

The great ones of this world are solicitous, they promise to help. The great ladies are not to be outdone: Leonor de Mascarenhas, for instance, introduces you to a pair of hermits who will become your disciples, or almost. One can never be sure of seeing eye to eye with such original characters, but you’re an original yourself, aren’t you? The characters in question are Mariano de Azzaro and his friend the painter Giovanni Narducci, of whom more later.

At Pastrana you are given a suite in the Eboli palace and showered with treats, fueling the gossip of evil tongues: what behavior from a woman who always purports to be holier than thou! And yet sparks have flown between you and your hostess Ana de Mendoza from the beginning of your stay. You of course have no time for the courtiers and their “artificial displays” of lordship (autoridades postizas),⁹ and you say so bluntly. For her part the princess insists on an Augustinian sister to keep you company, although it is common knowledge that you only care to frequent nuns affiliated to your own discalced Rule. And so on. Eventually you settle on a prioress: Isabel de Santo Domingo, the spiritual daughter of the great reformed Franciscan Pedro de Alcántara who was such an inspiration to you, as we’ve seen. And a second monastery for men takes shape not far away, this time under the auspices of the prince of Eboli.

A change of decor is noticeable here: luxury congeals into morbidity and the atmosphere is sepulchral. As at Duruelo, the monks’ cells are adorned by crosses and death’s-heads. The hermits you recently met, Azzaro and Narducci, have renamed themselves fray Ambrosio Mariano de San Benito and fray Juan de la Miseria — that’s right, the painter whose portrait of you you weren’t too pleased with. These two introduce the practice of perpetual worship to Pastrana: night and day, the Holy Sacrament must be attended by two praying brothers! This overwrought asceticism is as distasteful to you as that of young John of the Cross. The mournful rituals at Pastrana and Duruelo are beyond you; impressed but already somewhat detached, you think only of continuing the journey.

E E E E G E C

Tut-ti tutti a ca — val — lo

E E E E G E C

Tut-ti tutti a ca — va — lo

Her Highness of Eboli can stay put, she’s got what she wanted, her very own Carmel, like her relatives María de Mendoza and Luisa de la Cerda; in fact she’s got two of them. Let her stay in Pastrana, you won’t be climbing into her golden coach again, that’s a solemn vow; there have been too many compromises already.

The galloping is far from over, and you are more and more attentive to His Majesty’s Voices so that they might speak through your lips. Voices that dictate the proper balance between the gruesome penances favored by the recently discalced, and the worldly temptations entailed by princely palaces, but also by convents with questionable standards: between macabre skulls and the licentiousness of paradisiac illusions. The followers of Juan de Ávila and the Jesuits are alone in hearkening to those voices in your mouth; they alone hear you at this time, one of the most testing of your whole itinerary. Isn’t that enough encouragement to press on?

Meanwhile, family ties must be reorganized. You relegate the family of your sister Juana de Ovalle to its rightful place: too much familiarity is damaging. On the other hand you empower the role of your brother Lorenzo, who has returned from the “Indies” with a splendid fortune and a burning faith. It’s a good time to regulate your relationship with money: not too much but more than none, just enough for peace of mind and galloping on, but even so…Whatever the precautions, money comes at a price, and one that’s always too expensive. “Miserable is the rest achieved that costs so dearly. Frequently one obtains hell with money and buys everlasting fire and pain without end.” (“Negro descanso se procura, que tan caro cuesta. Muchas veces se procura con ellos el infierno y se compra fuego perdurable y pena sin fin.”)¹⁰

Fall 1570. Departure for Salamanca, this time. Another Jesuit, Martín Gutiérrez, has asked Teresa to start a house in this city of students and high-flown culture. Where can premises be found to rent in such a densely populated place? The Dominican Bartolomé de Medina is displeased: from the heights of his university chair, he advises the “little woman” to “stay at home.” Teresa trusts in her powers of persuasion. All she needs to do is pay a call to this snooty academic, and he’ll drop into the bag of her rhetoric like so many others.

Done: the inauguration is scheduled for November 1. The locale has not yet been decided, everything is provisional, but the main thing, the foundational gesture, has been achieved. The rest will follow. Ana de Tapia, now Ana de la Encarnación, has been chosen as the prioress.

Tut-ti tuttia ca-val-lo tut-ti tuttia ca-val-lo

tuttia caval-loa caval-loa caval-loa caval-loa caval

E E E E G E C, E E E E G E C

No chance of going to sleep on one’s laurels. At Medina, a new prioress must be appointed. The Carmelite provincial, Ángel de Salazar, uneasy about the reforms from the start, is opposed to the re-election of Inés de Jesús. He would prefer to have an unreformed nun from the Convent of the Incarnation; he is, moreover, backing the claims of the family of Isabel de los Ángeles, Simón Ruiz’s niece, fearful lest her fortune — money misery again! — be handed to the convent at their expense. Salazar angrily orders Teresa off the premises: what an excruciating humiliation! There will be no more galloping for a while, as she slinks crestfallen out of Medina on the bony back of a water-carrier’s donkey. She goes for succor to John of the Cross, and together they set off to make a foundation at Alba de Tormes.

January 1571. An accountant at the court of the dukes of Alba, prompted by his wife Teresa de Layz, had already called on Teresa to establish a convent in the rural surrounds of Alba de Tormes. By now, the foundress has learned the hard way that some minimum income is necessary, simply for the convent to exist and the sisters to live: in those days, many succumbed from their penances but also from starvation. She strikes a bargain: you will provide for food, clothing, and the needs of the sick, and accept all vocations without inquiring into “purity of blood.”

As always, La Madre travels to the sound of His Voice. Tested to the limit, but more than ever sure of the Other, Teresa is definitively a Third Person, you can’t miss it. A writer who outlines her own character, combined with a pragmatic woman — that’s what you call a foundress. Martin Gutiérrez, a few years younger, the rector of the Society of Jesus college in Salamanca,¹¹ understands and supports her; but doesn’t their intimacy jeopardize her liberty? Since, she tells his Reverence, “I don’t think I’m attached to any person on earth, I felt some scruple and feared lest I begin to lose this freedom.” The Lord’s Voice responds promptly to this attachment anxiety, and reassures the troubled woman beneath the Carmelite habit: “Just as human beings desire companionship in order to communicate about the joys of their sensual nature, so the soul desires when there is someone who understands it to communicate about its joys and pains; and it becomes sad when there is no one.”¹² Communication between souls, on a par with the sensual joys, is therefore not altogether banned between the Jesuit and the nun. That is certainly good news. Otherwise, how could she possibly proceed with making her foundations?

The Dominicans prove more resistant, this time, to Teresa’s charms. Pedro Fernández, the illustrious theologian who defended Teresa in the early days of her project, has gone over to the side of the provincial, Ángel de Salazar, who remains suspicious of it, as we’ve seen, and has begun to express his own reservations. Fortunately the Voice of His Majesty is once more on hand to confront the Dominican father who has become such a père-sévère: every time Fr. Fernández reproaches her for some failing, the Voice brings Teresa back to life. It’s perfectly true that I am incompetent and a sinner, Father, is the gist of her retort; but your objections help me to improve. I am profoundly grateful to you, for if I surpass myself it’s thanks to you, please don’t stop, it’s going rather well, don’t you agree? It’s going well, and better, and faster. Dash on!

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a caval

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

October 1571. As the apostolic visitator to the Carmelites, the same Dominican father, Pedro Fernández, appoints Teresa as prioress to the Incarnation in July 1571. Such a strange idea must be the brainchild of Provincial Salazar — that would make sense. Being so deeply opposed to her foundations, it would suit him to nail her down inside a convent of 150 nuns, while appearing to honor her with a promotion! It’s nothing but a punishment, and Teresa sees right through it, as she writes to Luisa de la Cerda: “Oh, my lady, as one who has known the calm of our houses and now finds herself in the midst of this pandemonium, I don’t know how one can go on living.”¹³

The investiture ceremony goes horribly wrong. Afraid to lose their freedoms as calced nuns, the conservative Carmelites won’t let Teresa in. Protests, booing, and jeering greet the provincial when he utters the name of the Incarnation’s new prioress. “No!” shriek the incensed sisters. The only contrary opinion comes from Catalina de Castro, who pipes, almost inaudibly: “We want her, we love her!”

This staunchness is all it takes to rally a small, timid group of supporters. The antis grow heated; the timid camp grows larger. Scuffles break out. The constables are called in. At last the controversial prioress manages to slip inside the choir by the side door. Clutching an image of her father, Saint Joseph, Teresa sits down in the same stall she had occupied for twenty-seven years, when she was just a little nun. A blunder, in the daze of emotion? Or, on the contrary, a clever diplomatic ruse, a conscious diffidence that is sure to pay off? No, rather a divine inspiration. And that’s just the beginning.

You are a mistress in the art of mise-en-scène, Teresa, my love. Oh yes, don’t misunderstand me, the right judgment of mise-en-scène is an art, like music, a kind of sanctity. Then you disappear for a moment, and return with a statue of our Lady, dressed in embroidered silk. Slowly and solemnly you place her in the prioress’s stall. You give her your official keys, you kneel at her feet and say in a soft voice (yours or His Majesty’s?):

“Behold our Lady of Mercy, dear daughters. She will be your prioress.”

Your words fell the rebels like a bolt of grace — a coup de foudre, indeed. From that moment on, the Incarnation was yours. No more insistent visitors, sensual dissipations, flirting in the parlor. During Lent, even fathers and mothers are excluded.

All the same, this new and unaccustomed rigor is not accepted by your subordinates without a struggle. It’s only human. A party of enterprising young blades decides to have it out with you: Does this prioress think she’s God? You receive their spokesman and continue spinning, without looking at him, through a torrent of cavalier eloquence. Finally you cut in:

“Henceforth Your Grace will kindly leave this monastery in peace. If Your Grace persists, I shall appeal to the king.”

Notwithstanding such smart raps on the knuckles, you are still a good mother who knows how to feed her daughters, I grant you that, my fixer Teresa. Francisco de Salcedo is in charge of provisions: sixty head of poultry, plenty of pulses, lettuces, and quinces. Your sister Juana is going to send some turkeys. All of the ingredients for some ollas podridas, as well as salpicón, perhaps, and endless supplies of yemas, my chum Juan would be delighted! The fine ladies of your acquaintance — the duchess of Alba, doña María de Mendoza, doña Magdalena de Ulloa — will contribute as much and more.…You are not anorexic, Teresa, or not any more, it’s a false rumor extrapolated from your early days. But you forbid jewelry and profane dances, it’s the least you can do. His Majesty knows only the music of angels and the spirit, and you do likewise.

The one thing lacking in this refashioned Carmel is a good confessor, and you know just the man. Summoned from the college in Alcalá where he was teaching the prince of Eboli’s novices, John of the Cross takes the post. The ideal circumstance for conversing with this holy man: among mutual ecstasies and levitating chairs (phenomena certified by the nuns who keep an awed eye upon the sayings and doings of the two protagonists), the pair of you advance together and yet on different tracks toward your respective sainthoods, divergent but forever convergent.…The sort of love you share, lucid and remote, is only possible this way.

The moment of spiritual marriage has arrived at last. We are in November 1572. The holy humanity of Jesus inflicts wounds on you that match His own, and lavishes immeasurable joy upon you, since you’ve succeeded in pleasing Him by your prayers as by your deeds, in ficción as in obras:

While at the Incarnation in the second year I was prioress, on the octave of the feast of St. Martin.…His Majesty…appeared to me in an imaginative vision, as at other times, very interiorly, and He gave me His right hand and said: “Behold this nail; it is a sign you will be My bride from today on. Until now you have not merited this; from now on not only will you look after My honor as being the honor of your Creator, King, and God, but you will look after it as My true bride. My honor is yours, and yours Mine.” This favor produced such an effect in me I couldn’t contain myself, and I remained as though entranced. I asked the Lord either to raise me from my lowliness or not grant me such a favor; for it didn’t seem my nature could bear it. Throughout the whole day I remained thus very absorbed.¹⁴

Throughout all this you make an excellent prioress, ergo your mission has been accomplished. But Avila does not suit you, the climate is icy, you’re surprised you could ever have been born here. It’s time to go on the road again.

New foundations await you.

Fussier than a Lutheran, more illuminated than an alumbrada, you are a magnet for condemnation but also for hope, hopes of all kinds. You are a pioneer of the Counter-Reformation and a saint; they don’t know that yet, but they will after your death. But there are some who suspect it and go out of their way to smooth yours. People like the duchess of Alba, who obtains permission in February 1573 for you to leave the Incarnation for a few days and go stay with her. Shortly afterward you receive authorization from Pedro Fernández, the apostolic commissary, to establish a house in Segovia.

1573. One of Teresa’s confessors, Fr. Jerónimo Ripalda, comes to Salamanca as La Madre is passing through, in the course of her three years at the Incarnation; he instructs her to write down the story of her foundations. Following on your autobiography, now tell us about your work. How impatiently you had waited for this! The text had been flowing ever since the final chapters of the Life. The Voice had suggested you write the book in 1570, and nothing had come of it. Now, you feel founded enough to be able to pass on the art of founding.

Ten years ago, after all, the act of writing had spurred you to make foundations. Conversely, now, the creation of your godly houses redirects you to writing, a different writing in which psychological subtlety, a hardheaded sense of reality, and the lucidity of rapture are intermingled. You begin work on August 24 and compose the first nine chapters of the Foundations. One certainty bolsters you: having managed to flesh out your visions in the real world, you are confident they don’t come from the devil. “So after the foundations were begun, the fears I previously had in thinking I was deceived left me. I grew certain the work was God’s.”¹⁵

From 1573 to 1582, the Foundations relate the loving and warlike adventures of Teresa the politician. They are the visible face of another adventure, the one that invented the depths of intimacy, as related in The Interior Castle. In 1577, at the request of Fr. Gratian and the order of Fr. Velázquez, her current confessor, the Carmelite penned the latter text, which would “found,” effectively, dwelling places that appear, with hindsight and against the background of the Foundations, to be the antithesis of the worldly business of the militant traveler. Or were they instead the ultimate condition for the success of those pragmatic endeavors? Perhaps it is a case of a foundation of the foundations, since at this point — halfway through the time it will take to reform the Carmel and at the very heart of Teresa’s personal experience — the demons confronted and trounced on the outside had not disappeared altogether. In her private and most intimate depths they teemed, in the form of numberless mental and emotional resistances to be overcome, walls of the soul to be broken through, an inner mobility to be made suppler. The exterior war was sustained by interior analysis. She had no shield, it was simply the elucidation of the inner self, made fluid and habitable, that enabled Teresa to live in the present, past, and future time and world. “To live” henceforth meant to overcome the fear of hatefatuations that cannot be other than diabolical, and the agony of obstinately morbid symptoms, in order to be continually reborn inside, while tirelessly forging ahead outside. At the sunset of the Golden Age, the foundress’s constant peregrinations across the arid lands of Spain, her conflicts with Church institutions, all of which were pretty well obsolete and derelict, and her wrangles with their convoluted administrations drew strength from that interior journey, which achieved the construction of a space of wholesale serenity: “a jewel,” she calls it in a letter to Fr. Salazar.¹⁶ And The Interior Castle closes upon Jesus alone, among enamels more delicate than ever, gold and precious stones — mystical graces unseen, hidden in anonymity, and yet flashing forth. Tensions and charms of the…baroque: barroco, an irregularly shaped pearl.

Once again it was in writing that Teresa erected her ultimate habitat, entered into so it might be publicly revealed. Here is an irregular space if ever there was one, made of antitheses, strong images targeting the senses and aiming to dazzle, to unbalance, to set in motion, to celebrate the inconstancy of feeling in a perpetual mobility that can only be appeased by profusion and the eternity of the ephemeral. The recesses in the cut of these precious stones, these luminous diamonds studding the fabric of Teresa’s text, render them surely more decorous, less boldly ostentatious than the institutional work of reform? More private, allegorical, and polyphonic than the very real epic of the foundational race?

That’s not how Teresa saw it. From early on in the Life, by dint of prayer, she was always struggling to extricate herself from “the teeth of the terrifying dragon,”¹⁷ the devil, so as to sing the praises of God’s goodness and mercy; “that I may sing them without end”!¹⁸ By the time of the Interior Castle, secure in the knowledge of being the loving and loved spouse, she builds an interior space of impregnable riches that, opening up room by room in parallel to her race, is capable of withstanding real setbacks in as much as it challenges Hell itself — that placeless place, that gash in the soul, that unrepresentable trauma that makes you die of fear and diffuse excitement, whose horrors La Madre once described at length to her sisters at the Incarnation.

Today, as her race through the world crosses with her surge toward the Beloved within, at the intersection of Foundations and Dwelling Places, Teresa has just made a “baroque” discovery — as we will understand later — which enchants her: bliss beats torment if, and only if, the soul manages to inhabit itself in such a way as to perceive itself as a generous polytope, a kaleidoscopic mobility sustained by the Other’s love. Thus at ease in her spacious interior, she can defy the cramped Gehenna as well as the demonic alleyways of worry in which the couples and groups of creatures confront one another. With its dwelling places thus equipped and made good for enjoyment, the soul can endow itself with a new imagination, fertile in strong and serene ramifications within and without. The antics of the devils, by comparison, appear as what they are: deadly substitutes spawned by another imagination, the kind Teresa calls “weak,” illusory because constrained, intimidated, frozen by the fear of external or internal aggression, wearisome and worn out, defeatist — in a word, melancholic. The soul in love with the Other and loved by Him at the core of itself well knows that the Enemy, that is, the devil, has no reality beyond this wretched counterfeit imagination. But rather than exhaust itself in sterile wrestling, the fortified soul in its dwelling places transmutes that cringing imagination into a triumphal one, deft at assimilating the infinite facets of the logics of love.

“For even though it may seem that good desires are given [by the devil], they are not strong ones.”¹⁹

It is in the imagination that the devil produces his wiles and deceits. And with women or unlearned people he can produce a great number, for we don’t know how the faculties differ from one another and from the imagination, nor do we know about a thousand other things there are in regard to interior matters. Oh, Sisters, how clearly one sees the degree to which love of neighbor is present in some of you, and how clearly one sees the deficiency in those who lack such perfection!²⁰

How can we identify the souls with a high degree of “love of neighbor”? The judgment of the inside-outside traveler is instant: those incapable of true love are those she observes as “earnest” and “sullen,” who “don’t dare let their minds move or stir.” “No, Sisters, absolutely not; works are what the Lord wants!”²¹

Bestir yourselves, then, get moving, body and soul, send your thoughts on a journey: tutti a cavallo, inside and out! Be swift, don’t ever stop, don’t fasten on anything, neither on yourselves nor on the one you love, for the Other is always elsewhere, a bit further on, a step ahead, go on, keep going! Do something not for the love of this or that person, but because that’s how it is, a given, given by the good Being himself, it’s the will of our Master, if you like, for the Good runs through us. “It” is beyond our ken because it loves us. That is why, if we are truly to participate in the will of the good Being, it is important to seek, always and above all, that delicious and peaceful gladness that disconcerts our exterior being and thwarts all those chicanes, which can only be external, minor, and thus deceptive. There is a great difference in the ways one may be, the infinitely good Being desires its own bounteousness and appropriates itself indefinitely, penetrates and travels its own being, like the time of the characters in Proust; the time of its racing extends into space, reversible dwelling places hatch and stack up ad infinitum, evidently.

It’s clear from inside the plural and delectably amorous intimacy of my moradas that “the devil never gives delightful pain like this.” Oh, I know Satan is capable of affording us tidbits and pleasures that can seem spiritual, but it is beyond his power to join great suffering with quiet and gladness of the soul; the devil does not unite, his work is always a scattering. Likewise “the pains he causes are never…delightful or peaceful but disturbing and contentious,” whereas the “delightful tempest comes from a region other than those regions of which he can be lord.”²² Thus Teresian interiority effects a masterly transformation of Saint Augustine’s regio dissimilitudinis, created by original sin, for which the Protestants were developing such an appetite. No doubt about it, the muy muy interior is nothing less than Heaven down here on earth.

But then, if the questing soul is certain of its reciprocated love for the Other, what pains it? What greater good does it want? Another discovery, as baroque as the last, comes to resolve this dilemma in your writing, my blissful Teresa. As with the inconstancy of the Divine Archer who, like the Spouse of the Sulamitess, comes and goes in His nevertheless absolute goodness, and whose wounding “reaches to the soul’s very depths” before He “draws out the arrow,” the pain, like the soul, “is never permanent.” It’s as though a spark leaping out from “the brazier that is my God” so struck the soul that “the flaming fire was felt by it,” but “not enough to set the soul on fire,” so leaving it with elusive pain; the “spark merely by touching the soul produces that effect [al tocar hace aquella operación].” An arousal the more exciting for being unsatisfied, a pleasure forever unconsummated, the “delightful pain” remains nameless, fluid, without identity. It is “pain” and “not pain,” and this uncertainty — baroque in itself — means that it is fluctuating, “not continuous,” mutable and tantalizing to the end. “Sometimes it lasts a long while, at other times it goes away quickly”; the soul in search of loving interiority is not master of itself, it always depends on the Other…although the Other is within it, like a blinding flare. The insatiable seeker, never quite ablaze, begs for more, for as soon as the spark makes contact it goes out, and the desire for pain — or is it pleasure? No term seems right for this erratic, multiple state (porque este dolor sabroso — y no es dolor — no está en un ser) — once more stokes up “that loving pain [He] causes.”²³

Frigidity? Masochism? Voluntary servitude compensated by a runaway imagination? Good old Jérôme Tristan, beating us over the head with his diagnostics, my mercurial Teresa. He’s right, no doubt, but it’s more than that. If that were all, it’d be the devil’s work. On the contrary, in your penetration-appropriation of the good Being by itself, this operation “is something so manifest that it can in no way be fancied. I mean, one cannot think it is imagined, when it is not.”²⁴ The test of the imagination by the senses emerges as the ultimate proof of the truth of the experience, unmistakably stamped with the Other’s trademark, not that of the devil. Kinetic, sensitive, bittersweet, the endlessly relaunched imagination (“again!”) with its exorbitant intensity and rosary of metaphors, creates the geometry of an authorized serenity, authorized because shared with the ideal of the Self, the ideal Father. Touching, sparks, braziers, extinctions, pains…and again…and again…and again! “Lack,” “frigidity,” “masochism,” you say? All that is nothing but trials sent by the devil, fit to be reversed into an infinite winging toward the space packed with obstacles overcome, toward the capacity for love proper to the Beloved incorporated in me. Toward the Other who is Love, inaccessible and yet so present that He can be possessed to the infinity that He is, an infinity I too am becoming.

If the devil is no more than a puny, death-dealing imagination — a “melancholic” one, Sisters, I should have warned you — the only way to defeat him is via the baroque kaleidoscope of a psychic space erected against the nonplace of Hell, but also against the headlong rush to the uninhabited outside, from which the soul should remain apart. Only when the plastic mobility of this interiority is in place (or rather, in motion) and unhealthy impotence is transmuted into fresh ramifications, an eternal nativity, will the world itself be available for conquests without end and interminable re-foundations. Tutti a cavallo, yes, on condition of retaining the malleable castle of the soul, laminated into degrees of love.

As Teresa travels Spain on donkey-back and in carriages, and the writer’s pen establishes her home base in a polyvalent space, the vagabond desires instigated by the devil and stirring in the soul “some passion, as happens when we suffer over worldly things [things of the age: cosas del siglo]”²⁵ give way to another, more dominant movement. Instead of taking one’s worldly hankerings for “something great,” resulting in “serious harm” to health,²⁶ and instead of condemning them, what matters is to put them to work. Should they become excessive, these impulses must be “fooled.” What else can we do, faced by the wiles of the malevolent genie inside us intent on preventing us from entering the interior space where the soul moves in the certainty of meeting its Other? Watch out, illusion and error are recognizable because they do harm; logically, harm cannot be anything but illusion and error in the good Being and the castle I am building to its scale!

Tears themselves are only beneficial for watering the desiccated soul when they come from God; then they will be “a great help in producing fruit. The less attention we pay to them the more there are”;²⁷ but in tears, too, “there can be deception.”²⁸

Fragmented and restless, forever tempted by the devil, the soul (again this third party, probingly observed as it endlessly unfurls within her) is not hopelessly in thrall to demonic falsehoods all the same. However infinite the way of perfection, union lies at the end of it — that is, at the “center,” right here, in the labyrinth of dwelling places. The writer already senses a premonitory excitement, “feelings of jubilation and a strange prayer,” an “impulse of happiness” comparable to those experienced by Saint Francis and Pedro de Alcántara, carried away by “blessed madness.”²⁹ What could this be?

By a further twist of alert lucidity, Teresa analyzes the phenomenon as a “deep union of the faculties”; an osmosis of the intellect, memory, and will into the good Being of the Lover/Beloved. A flexible osmosis, though, since the Lord “leaves [the faculties] free that they might enjoy this joy — and the same goes for the senses — without understanding what it is.”³⁰

And so you arrive, Teresa, with full freedom to enjoy, at the faceted jewel of your writing, which condenses your union with the Beloved and your freedom vis-à-vis Him into a cascade of metaphors-metamorphoses. Clinging proximity mixed with flighty expansiveness, brief touches, darting escapes. Centripetal and centrifugal, your jouissance is a nameless exile, a fascinating and yet appalling estrangement. What? How? Our souls cannot know. But it’s a disturbing ignorance all the same, reviving the memory of another escapade, equally both real and symbolic, which was supposed to take you and brother Rodrigo to the land of the Moors with a view to getting beheaded, thus winning martyrdom and sainthood.

In a burst of writing that soars high over the “somersaults” of the devils, you depict a soul, your soul, rushing toward the dangerous, bewitching strangeness that is so hard to express (it might sound “like gibberish” or Arabic, algarabía). It recollects itself, but without losing the élan of its euphoric activity (que aquí va todo su movimiento). At the very heart of this compacted, stony intimacy — diamond or castle — the soul is driven to making expansive proclamations.

“What I’m saying seems like gibberish, but certainly the experience takes place in this way, for the joy is so excessive the soul wouldn’t want to enjoy it alone but wants to tell everyone about it so that they might help this soul praise our Lord. All its activity is directed to this praise.”³¹

The journey, interior or through the outside world, is here a synonym of serenity, as prodigal sons and daughters reconcile to a world made safe at last. Revolts have been shelved, self-denials forgotten, frustrations transcended. To want to “put to work” and even pacify one’s irksome desires by the grace of loving oneself in the Other is perhaps madness, as Teresa is aware; but a blessed madness. And surely preferable to grim truth, belligerent folly, or deceptive, gloomy nihilism.

Today, as I am reading you and speaking to you, your “activity” is being widely publicized, everyone is being “told about it.” You are being rediscovered. Everybody has his or her Teresa. Tutti a cavallo. You seem to be intriguing the world all over again, beginning with me, Sylvia Leclercq, to speak only of my own headlong race.

1574. En route to Segovia, you are escorted by just four stalwarts: John of the Cross, Julián de Ávila, Isabel de Jesús (whose fine voice you discovered in Salamanca), and a layman, Antonio Gaytán: a widower whose enthusiasm for your work led him to entrust his home and daughters to a governess while he goes on the road with you. You assign to him the daunting task of spiriting fourteen nuns out of the Pastrana convent, where your fearsome friend Ana de Mendoza de la Cerda, princess of Eboli, is holding sway. Donning the habit after her husband’s death, this pretentious woman seems obsessed with aping you. The noble lady climbed into a “cloistered” carriage and took herself off to Pastrana, where she lives secluded under the name Ana de la Madre de Dios. Eaten up by envy, she has lost all proportion: everybody is to obey her, never mind the constitutions, and especially yours. The Rule is what she says it is!

Out of kindness to the unfortunate nuns left at the mercies of this capricious aristocrat — or maybe out of a desire to get even with one of your bugbears, the epitome of “artificial displays” of lordship and authority — you arrange for the fourteen sisters to be kidnapped by Julián de Ávila and Antonio Gaytán. You ought to be ashamed, Teresa, you female pícaro, you pícara of faith! After that you go ahead and make a foundation without an order from the bishop, merely with his verbal approval.

The princess turned Ana de la Madre de Dios lets you get away with it, busy preparing an exquisite revenge of her own. Have you forgotten how in 1569, when you were founding Pastrana, you gave in to her pleas and lent her the copy of the book of your Life that had just been authorized by some saintly men? Eboli left the manuscript lying around, and the servants took a peep at it. People began jeering at your visions, comparing your ecstasies to the impostures of Magdalena de la Cruz, who’d pretended to be a holy woman as well — some heretic she was! They burned her at the stake for faking, and serve her right! One-eyed Eboli has got you now. You snatched her girls, she’ll denounce you to the Inquisition!

Without the slightest inkling of these schemes, you buy a house in Segovia and move in the fourteen nuns you acquired in a less than Catholic way, perhaps, but too bad, here goes another foundation:

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John, your “little Seneca,” is lost in rapture in front of a Cross he perceives floating against the lime-washed wall of the cloister. You are writing your Meditations on the Song of Songs. The sisters all worship you, without the least discretion. It’s too good to last. Squalls and storms are about to catch up with you again.

Your confessor, Fr. Yanguas, quotes Saint Paul’s words commanding women to keep quiet in church, as a way of telling you that women should know their place; he is no fan of the alumbrados toward whom he feels you incline. The Inquisition begins to rummage through your past and scrutinize everything you ever wrote. Father Domingo Báñez is the only one with the finesse and the forcefulness to defend you — but not before making alterations here and there, and prefacing your works with a beautifully wrought screed of scholarly approval.

On the way to Avila, you can’t help stopping off at the grotto where Saint Dominic used to pray. Prostrating yourself for a long time before the saint’s apparition, you will not depart until he promises to stay by your side in your work of foundation. You are in sore need of him — but of Saint Dominic, or of Domingo Báñez?

You write: “I saw a great tempest of trials and that just as the children of Israel were persecuted by the Egyptians, so we would be persecuted; but that God would bring us through dry-shod, and our enemies would be swallowed up by the waves.”³²

The Egyptians are not through with you yet, Teresa. And you, the “child of Israel,” will help whip up the tempest.

1575. Springtime at Beas de Segura, at the border of Castile and Andalusia. In the warm climate of the slopes of the Sierra Morena, almond and orange and pomegranate trees are covered in blossom. Two highborn ladies, the Godínez sisters, have donated a house worth six thousand ducats and invited La Madre to make a foundation there. The eldest, Catalina, handsome and wealthy, always refused to get married; to spite her parents, who wouldn’t hear of her going into religion, she ruined her complexion in the sun, a proper Donkey Skin. Miserable and ill, finally released by the death of her parents, she summons Teresa: the only salvation for the two orphans is a discalced convent. Saint Joseph of the Saviour at Beas thus saw the light of day on February 24, 1575. But it’s not because Beas will be a breeding-ground for saints that it stands out in Teresa’s story; it’s because this is where she meets “the man of her life.”

Such a corny cliché is not unwarranted at this point in the holy gallop. In her own words:

In 1575, during the month of April, while I was at the foundation in Beas, it happened that the Master Friar Jerome Gratian of the Mother of God came there. I had gone to confession to him at times, but I hadn’t held him in the place I had other confessors, by letting myself be completely guided by him. One day while I was eating, without any interior recollection, my soul began to be suspended and recollected in such a way that I thought some rapture was trying to come upon me; and a vision appeared with the usual quickness, like a flash of lightning.

It seemed to me our Lord Jesus Christ was next to me in the form in which He usually appears, and at His right side stood Master Gratian himself, and I at His left. The Lord took our right hands and joined them and told me He desired that I take this master to represent Him as long as I live, and that we both agree to everything because it was thus fitting.³³

Teresa hesitates only for a second. Recalling her affection for other confessors, she feels guilty, attempts to rein back her desires — putting up a momentary “strong resistance,” she tells us. But twice more the Voice of the Other encourages her: there can be no mistake, her orders are “for the rest of my life, to follow Father Gratian’s opinion in everything.”³⁴

Thunderbolt of love, amour fou, spirit made flesh. A young man of thirty, the son of a secretary of Charles V, the apostolic visitator for Andalusia, finally slakes the desire of this sixty-year-old woman. He is a son to her, obviously, but this Mother who could have been his mother is also his daughter, since he is her father confessor. Flesh and spirit at one, Teresa revels in a different ecstasy, of a kind she had never known at prayer. It resembles the paradox of the Virgin Mother as seen by Dante: “Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,…The limit fixed of the eternal counsel” in the Paradise!³⁵ Is this Paradise on earth, perhaps? Here is the last missing link in the chain that resorbs the immemorial incest prohibition in Teresa’s experience: the daughter of her father, who became the heavenly Father’s Bride, has now become a mother in love with her son who is at the same time her father. The fantasy of incest, purified by the theological canon, has now become embodied in earthly affects, bonds that are as real as can be.

The new water in which the ecstatic Carmelite will bathe flows precisely from this transport, in which the little girl merges with the mother. Joys of symbolic motherhood, folded into a child’s imagination; joys of infant innocence, conjugated with the omnipotence of masterly maturity. More than hysterical excitability, it is female paranoia that Mary satisfies and appeases when, from being a mother, she moves to being the daughter of her son/father, and only thus a fiancée and a wife, in the suspended time of the eternal design. Teresa does the same. She has never been so sure of herself, so triumphal in the passion of her faith: nor has she ever been as fragile, more exposed to the trials of reality, more attentive to the violent thirst of desire,³⁶ than to the Voices of His Majesty. But the latter is bound to smile upon these new transports with a young father-brother-son-husband; there are no worries on that score.

Loving and being loved by Gratian reassures, stabilizes, and makes her feel secure, far more than did the protection of the sound and prudent Domingo Báñez. But this new connection also makes her more vulnerable than ever as she hunts for new, efficacious “fatherhoods,” both spiritual (angling for the support of the great Dominican writer Luis de Granada, she writes him a markedly humble letter on the advice of their mutual friend Teutonio de Braganza) and institutional (she doesn’t shrink from appealing to Philip II for help when her darling Eliseus — one of Gratian’s many code names — gets into trouble).

Your passion for Jerome Gratian, infantile and pragmatic at once, cannot be compared — although some have done so — to the vaporous swoons of Madame Guyon’s “pure love” for Fénelon. The more in love you are with your cherished son-father — at last, an hombre of flesh and blood by your side, a physical replica of the Lord, would you have settled for less? — the more realistic, militant, astute, and active you become, a businesswoman all over. Besides, for all that you may be the “daughter” of your son-father-partner, you are the boss in this couple, my headstrong Teresa, from the start, and increasingly as you pursue those business affairs at your usual furious pace:

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a caval

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

I try to keep up with that pace, I pant and struggle, unlike you. I count with you the foundations you continue to make until your last breath, always against the backdrop of your love for Gratian, naturally, as he “replaces” the Lord: “Y díjome que éste quería tomase en su lugar mientras viviese”! Isn’t that something? Have you thought about what such a replacement could possibly mean? No? Is it that you don’t do much thinking anymore, carried away by your passion for that man? Of course not, that’s not it at all. Actually the intoxication doesn’t last long, you soon perceive the limits of the man and of the thing, but you cling to the game, believing without completely believing in it; we’ll take a closer look at this later, you and me. For the moment let me ride with you, come on, everyone to horse:

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So your Eliseus wants you to found a house in Seville? Seville it is! In fact, by this move the apostolic visitator Jerome Gratian of the Mother of God was disobeying — again! — the general prior of the Carmelite order, Juan Bautista Rubeo. A tricky predicament that soon proved untenable when Gratian found himself trapped between the pincers of Philip II’s wish to accelerate the Teresian reform and the obduracy of the order, reluctant to be reformed. You use your Pablo-Eliseus-Paul and he uses you, bestowing little pet names like Laurencia or Angela…All in the cause of reform, as we have said, but one can’t dig in the spurs without incensing the laggards and drawing persecution down. The next five years will be a perfect tempest of trials and thunderbolts.

Seville is a long way from Avila, and Andalusia is a sly country; it scares you. The local churchmen don’t even respect the authority of the general, Fr. Rubeo: they actually condemned a disciple of Juan de Ávila to burn at the stake! No matter, you are at the height of your fusion with Gratian, you pledge him your “total obedience” for “as long as you live,” and you hurtle on, keener than ever.

Father Ambrosio Mariano lends a hand, but he gets ahead of himself: he persuades you that Archbishop Cristóbal de Rojas has given his permission, when he has done no such thing. Worse, Mariano thinks nothing of leaving you all by yourself in Seville in a frightful situation: comprehensive hostility to discalcement and not a cent in donations! Those giddy Sevilleans only care about having fun. It’s a port city, where whores count more than nuns, but this trite pleasantry doesn’t make you laugh. The things you learn, on the road! The calced community are outraged, your program is seen as meddling, as “interference”! But you get your way: on May 29, 1575, a convent for discalced nuns is founded in Seville, once more under the patronage of Saint Joseph.

How happy it makes you! New novices, charming Andalusian girls, join up. They intrigue you, too: the confirmed Madre fundadora starts to explore a new country, the landscape of the female soul. The text of the Foundations begins to sound as though the chronicle of your works were also, or chiefly, the novel of these sorely tested and often castigated lives. Take the chapter on Beatriz de Chávez, aka Beatriz de la Madre de Dios, the spiritual daughter of your dear Eliseus. What a handful, that girl! You try to understand her, in writing. We’ll come back to it at the end of our ride.

One thing has never been plainer than it is here, in Seville: the world threatens to gag you, Teresa, my love, it may end up by burning you alive. What do you expect when you move from pure ecstasy to the work of founding, when you aspire to found pure ecstasy in the world, against the world, but with the world? Tensions between the women are rising, too; nothing new about that, but it’s getting more dangerous. Your own niece, María Bautista, feels licensed to disobey you and speak ill of you, she even finds fault with Gratian. She receives a wrathful letter from you, dated August 28, 1575;³⁷ but will this tongue-lashing suffice to bring her to heel?

It gets worse. Copies of the Life are circulating, the princess of Eboli has filed a complaint against you, and the book is submitted to the court of the Inquisition; even Fr. Báñez is growing peevish. And María Bautista makes a point of seeing the influential Dominican every day — emphatically not for your or Gratian’s benefit.

But Domingo Báñez is an honest man in the end, thanks be to God. He rescues your book in exchange for a modicum of censorship, emendations which of course you accept. It’s better than being burned. You’ve won, but be prudent!

Another piece of good news: your brother Lorenzo is back from Peru with a fortune, money that will help reflate the beggarly convent in Seville. He will be “consigned” for his pains, since your enemies are alert, they will do anything to sabotage you; it’s lucky they didn’t put La Madre’s brother behind bars! This pitiful imbroglio does not stop you giving him a good telling-off. It is ridiculous, nay, unacceptable, to call oneself “don” on grounds of one’s fiefdoms in Indian country! Now that you are sure of yourself and of him, there’s no need to be flattering him with titles. You can dress him down as he deserves, beginning with the matter of honra, the good old family vice. Well, you had bones to pick with the new and fervently discalced brother, and you like being the only captain on board; family take note: you’ll make foundations as you see fit!

This claim to autonomy doesn’t stop you requisitioning Lorenzo’s nine-year-old daughter, Teresita, for the convent. Gratian is against it; but she won’t take vows just yet, of course, you only want her for “her education.” And also to spread a little merriment in halls that often lack it, truth to tell. You established asceticism for it to be sublimated in joy, Teresa, you established joy to be elucidated by asceticism; Teresita will be your great weapon in this debate, because the little one is an “imp” and highly “entertaining.” People should know that Teresa de Jesús’s holy houses are not disdained by merry little imps, quite the contrary.

Meanwhile the persecutions continue, and it’s your job to face up to them, to think of everything, to tie down everything that can be, and when the storms blow too hard, simply to hang on. Gratian helps out, but not always, and not really. You already know how impulsive he is, always too harsh or too lenient, clumsy with some people and ingratiating with others: “Difficulties rain down on him like hail.”

Now for the latest dirty trick: Gratian is packed off to a monastery of the Observation. How appalling, he must be rescued, I’ll write letters, pull every string I can…Right, it’s over, he’s back. But in early 1575, the general chapter of the order at Plasencia resolves to dismantle the convents Gratian founded in Andalusia without permission from Fr. Rubeo. And again it falls to Teresa to intervene. She writes to the general of the order, Rubeo, pleading for his continued support.

December 1575. An anonymous Carmelite nun denounces Teresa to the Inquisition. “And nonsense also was what she said of us, that we tied the hands and feet of the nuns and flogged them — would to God all the accusations had been of that sort.”³⁸

But it’s the last straw for Provincial Ángel de Salazar. Finally out of patience, he commands Teresa to repair to a convent in Castile: “[He] said that I was an apostate and excommunicated.” It seems the bell is tolling for Teresa’s enterprise.

Searches, interrogations; are you about to be arrested, Madre? A vehicle belonging to the Inquisition is stationed before the door of your convent in Seville. But only a deposition is required, which you will send to the Jesuit Rodrigo Álvarez, the acknowledged expert in matters of delusion and error.

But you, skillful Teresa, not only bewitch your world with the grace of a writing that thrills us today, four centuries after the tempest; you also carry out a veritable plan of military encirclement! First, you present a long list of ecclesiastics prepared to testify to your good faith: Fr. Araoz, the Jesuit commissary; Fr. Francisco de Borja, the former duke of Gandía; and numerous others. Then comes the epistolary race, the gallop of letters:

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a caval

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

Humbly you confess your penchant for mental prayer in the wake of Pedro de Alcántara and Juan de Ávila, well aware that that’s your major transgression in the eyes of the authorities. You swiftly move on to reference the many illustrious scholars who helped you protect yourself from this unconscionable error, Dominicans this time, necessarily; chief among them the councilor of the Holy Office at Valladolid, the ubiquitous Domingo Báñez.

But don’t expect to get out of trouble so easily. The investigation has only just begun. You are summoned again — to justify your ecstasies! Kindly provide a new deposition!

You’re enjoying this gallop of writing, after the race of the roads. Here’s how you sum up that phase of the adventure in a missive to María Bautista, on February 19, 1576: “Jesus be with you, daughter. I wanted to be in a more restful state when writing to you. For all that I have just read and written amazes me in that I was able to do it, and so I’ve decided to be brief. Please God I can be.”³⁹

Of course, it pleases Him to fulfill your every wish. His Majesty is hand in glove with you, His Voice speaks through your lips, as you don’t fail to remind us. And you’re capable of convincing anyone who takes the time to listen. Indeed, the wind is momentarily turning to your advantage. How could even the wind resist your galloping?

A new house is purchased, the recalcitrant Franciscans eventually come around, they didn’t want you in the neighborhood, poor things, and now they do.

Teresa is triumphant. She leaves Seville, where María de San José takes over as prioress. Before departing she sits for Fr. Mariano’s painter friend, Giovanni Narducci, now Juan de la Miseria. Writing to Mariano on May 9, 1576, she sounds elated, hopping gaily from one topic to the next, as if the Sevillean ordeal had been nothing but fun and games, a period of ebullient agitation:

The house is such that the sisters never cease thanking God. May He be blessed for everything.…This is not the time to be making visitations, for [the friars] are very agitated.…Oh, the lies they circulate down here! It’s enough to make you faint.…Nonetheless I fear these things from Rome, for I remember the past, even though I do not think they will be to our harm but to our advantage.…We are receiving many compliments and the neighbors are jubilant. I would like to see our discalced affairs brought to a conclusion, for after all the Lord won’t put up with those other friars much longer; so many misfortunes will have to have an ending.⁴⁰

Prior to departure, after kneeling before the archbishop to be blessed, Teresa cannot believe her eyes and ears when the same archbishop, don Cristóbal de Rojas, the source of so many vexations, kneels in turn before her and asks for her blessing. It is June 3, 1576.

1576–1577. Enjoying the mild climate of Toledo, housed in a pleasant cell, you receive from Lorenzo the manuscript of the Foundations you had left at Saint Joseph’s and continue composing your text. The updates concern Gratian, the calced and the discalced, your idea of creating a special province of the Carmelite order with Gratian as the provincial, a project you already mooted in your letter to Philip II. Separately you draw out the political lessons of past experience, from the Incarnation to Seville. Firstly, it is important to consolidate the temporal sphere by a “government” that is temperate and yet clearly hierarchical, in order to advance the spiritual good: “It seems an inappropriate thing to begin with temporal matters. Yet I think that these are most important for the promotion of the spiritual good.”⁴¹

Respect for hierarchy is essential from your point of view as foundress, especially among women who are duty-bound to acknowledge their chief, that is, yourself:

I don’t believe there is anything in the world that harms a visitator as much as does being unfeared and allowing subjects to deal with him as an equal. This is true especially in the case of women. Once they know the visitator is so soft that he will pass over their faults and change his mind so as not to sadden them, he will have great difficulty in governing them.⁴²

Is that because obedience is harder for a woman? For a woman like you?

“I confess, first of all, my imperfect obedience at the outset of this writing. Even though I desire the virtue of obedience more than anything else, beginning this work has been the greatest mortification for me, and I have felt a strong repugnance toward doing so.”⁴³

Be this as it may, the works are multiplying. You maintain a prolific correspondence (200 letters up to 1580), dispense advice of all sorts, circulate The Way of Perfection and keep an eye on its reception. In 1577 you begin The Interior Castle—a metapsychology avant la lettre, the quintessence of your journey toward the Spouse and ultimate nuptials with Him. Nothing is left to chance, and all these works are created while managing in hands-on fashion the establishment and staff of twelve nunneries, without neglecting the affairs of the male counterparts founded in accordance with your new-old Rule.

You have the gift of asserting your authority without dispelling good cheer, your own or that of others. Witness that sparkling vejamen, also from 1577—a response known as the Satirical Critique, mixing faux pedantry with schoolboy humor, to a solemn colloquium held in your absence in the parlor at Saint Joseph’s in Avila. You had requested Julián de Ávila, Francisco de Salcedo, John of the Cross, and your brother Lorenzo de Cepeda to reflect on those words the Lord once spoke to you, “Seek yourself in Me.” Once the bishop who was also present had arranged for the various speeches to be sent to you in Toledo, you replied with the jovial irony of one who had just escaped the clutches of the Holy Office: “I ask God to give me the grace not to say anything that might merit being denounced to the Inquisition.”⁴⁴ And you then proceeded to mercilessly tease each of your friends for their contributions; we shall reread these remarks once you have passed away.

I have a notion that the months from July 1576 to December 1577 constitute the most luminous period of your later life. You are given over to writing, elucidating, and transmitting. You don’t have much longer to live, but for the present, time has ripened: you experience it fully, soberly, and laughingly.

The papal nuncio who championed your reforms, Nicolás Ormaneto, has died. You leave for Saint Joseph in Avila; could it turn out to be a definitive “prison”? Your fevered race repudiates such a thought. Let’s wait and see.

The new nuncio, Felipe Sega, bishop of Piacenza, loathes the discalced movement and brands you a “vagabond and a rebel.” Accusations rain down once more on Gratian, relating to his licentious ways with women. That’s the situation, and nothing’s going to change: Gratian needs your protection more than you need his presence or his affection. Another letter to His Royal Majesty is called for. You write and sign it on December 13, 1577.

All is not well at the Incarnation, either. On the order of Gerónimo Tostado, vicar-general of the Carmelites in Spain, the calced provincial Juan Gutiérrez de la Magdalena arrives to preside over the election for prioress. He threatens to excommunicate anyone who votes for you.

Such is the frayed atmosphere in which you continue exploring the Dwelling Places of The Interior Castle, that masterpiece of introspective analysis. Yet the work is completed on November 29, 1577, in less than six months. However did you do it, Teresa?

“Hosts of demons have joined against the discalced friars and nuns,” you complain to your friend Gaspar de Salazar on December 7.⁴⁵ Matters reach such a pass that John of the Cross and a close associate, Germán de San Matías, are taken captive by Gutiérrez. Where to turn, when the general of the order and the nuncio are both ranged against you? To your pen, Madre!

For the fourth time you write to Philip II, outlining the conflict between the two rules and pleading on behalf of John of the Cross, for “this one friar who is so great a servant of God is so weak from all he has suffered that I fear for his life. I beg Your Majesty for the love of our Lord to issue orders for them to set him free at once and that these poor discalced friars not be subjected to so much suffering by the friars of the cloth.”⁴⁶

Absorbed in founding, in writing, in Gratian, have you not rather neglected your “little Seneca”? Is he too ascetic for you, too saintly in his inhuman self-mortification, too inaccessible in his elliptical purity? Are you feeling guilty, Teresa? It’s time to make amends! Between you and me, John deserves salvation more than Gratian. But you’ll save both of them, my future Saint Teresa.

Christmas Eve, 1577. Teresa falls down the stairs and breaks her arm. The traveler is getting old. Her morale is as solid as ever, but her bones are getting brittle.

Don Teutonio de Braganza, appointed to the archbishopric of Evora in Portugal, who was a Jesuit from 1549 to 1554 and knew Loyola in Rome, asks you to make a foundation in his city. Alas, it’s impossible. Your reforms are under threat in Spain, and there’s still many a road to be galloped down in your native country; it’s no time to be going abroad. But can his lordship do something for Gratian, perhaps, and for John of the Cross? The latter “is considered a saint by everyone…In my opinion, he is a gem.”⁴⁷

Her arm in a sling, the aging Teresa can still write. A deluge of diplomacy, of piety, of courage and craftiness will come to drench everyone who has the honor of knowing her, closely or from afar.

But where is John being kept? Rumor has it that Germán, his companion in misfortune, is coughing up blood, and that John has been sent away, but where, where? Doña Guiomar, a saintly lady and unswervingly loyal, can’t stop crying. Is Gratian really doing everything in his power to have John released? You feel that the apostolic visitator, the much-cherished Eliseus-Paul-Pablo, has hardly noticed John’s absence: Might people be put off by that odd brand of sanctity that aspires above all to self-annulment? “I am shocked by the imprisonment of Fray John of the Cross and the slow pace of all our negotiations.”⁴⁸

That’s the problem, Gratian is too slow. Whereas sanctity is speed, and John is the swiftest of us all, the most condensed; and in consequence the most unfindable, the one who escapes us, is always already beyond us.

I tell you I am certain that if some influential person were to ask the nuncio to have Fray John set free, he would at once give orders that he be returned to his house. It would be enough to tell the nuncio about this father and how he is kept in prison unjustly. I don’t know what is happening that no one ever remembers this saint. If Mariano were to speak to the Princess of Eboli, she would intercede with the nuncio.⁴⁹

Precisely because he is like lightning, gentle John didn’t need help from anybody in the end. He’s escaped on his own from the prison of the order, in Toledo, where he had languished for nine months in a dungeon so cramped that even he could not stand up in it, body and soul compacted in that Nothingness that stands him in lieu of sanctity. He’s taken refuge with the Discalced Carmelites. Will he be safe from persecution there? Teresa is vigilant, leaves on a trip, keeps watch again, goes off on a tangent, follows her own path.…

Even the Society of Jesus becomes infected by the climate of suspicion, and the friars are divided; repression smites Teresa’s Jesuit allies. Baltasar Álvarez, who defended Teresa at the time of her first raptures, is charged with “wasting his time among women and chiefly Carmelites,” instead of following Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises to the letter. He will be sanctioned.⁵⁰ Gaspar de Salazar, another Jesuit who wants to join the discalced friars, becomes the target of malign insinuations relating to Teresa. In a curt letter to Fr. Juan Suárez, the Jesuit principal, in February 1578, La Madre goes bravely out on a limb to defend her right to “friendship,” however misunderstood:

I will never deny the great friendship that exists between Padre Salazar and me or the favor he shows me. Yet I am certain that in what he has done for me he has been moved more by the service it renders our Lord and our Blessed Mother than by any friendship. Truly, I think it has even happened that as much as two years went by without a letter passing between us. If the friendship is an old one, it is because in the past I was in greater need of help, for this order only had two discalced Fathers. At that time I would have had a greater motive for wanting him to transfer than I do now. Thanks be to God we have more than two hundred, I think, and among them not a few who are especially suited for our poor manner of life. I have never thought that the hand of God would be more sparing toward his Mother’s order than to the other orders.⁵¹

March 15, 1578. The Inquisition arrests Juan Calvo de Padilla, who had often lent a hand in the management of Teresa’s convents and whom she had recommended to King Philip in 1573.

Events continue to accelerate, in contradictory ways.

The nuncio issues a brief to strip Gratian of all his powers.

On August 14, Roque de la Huerta, one of Philip’s right-hand men, announces that on the ninth the king promulgated a counter-brief: Gratian retains his functions as a visitator.

It is vital not to take sides between pope and king, you know that better than anyone, my careful Teresa; it’s all about wriggling through…with rectitude; above all one should not bristle, act “foolishly,” or indulge in gloomy “prophesying,” like dear Gratian is prone to do. In love, but not blindly, La Madre is frank with her Eliseus in a letter written at the end of August 1578.⁵² To any purpose, one wonders?

The worries don’t let up. The discalced convent at Almodóvar holds its second general chapter: La Madre is furious, what a moment to choose, it’s crazy! In Gratian’s absence, old Antonio de Jesús is elected. John of the Cross is sent, or should we say banished, to El Calvario, near Beas. The discalced communities are placed under the baton of communities of the cloth; Gratian’s punishment requires him to retire to Alcalá. There’s a rumor that he plans to defect to another order, in disgust. Will he abandon Teresa? To cap it all, the calced friars march into Saint Joseph’s accompanied by policemen and lawyers to oversee the handover.

The situation in Seville is even worse. The provincial appointed by the nuncio Felipe Sega starts defamatory proceedings against Gratian, while the prioress María de San José is replaced by Beatriz de Chávez, who spreads all sorts of slander against the discalced nuns and is completely under the thumb of Diego de Cárdenas, the provincial of the cloth in Andalusia.

Has the galloping switched sides? The adversaries are the ones charging forward now: Teresa’s clan is badly weakened, and it’s all it can do to resist. But she does not give up, just adapts her ammunition. Ever carriers of His Majesty’s Voice, her letters increasingly do the work, in place of mules and stagecoaches.

January 31, 1579. A trustworthy friend, the octogenarian Hernando de Pantoja, asks Teresa to vouch for the moral propriety of her nuns and to deny all those stories of extravagant mortifications at Seville. Can it be true that they hang sisters from the ceiling to flog them? Outraged, the fundadora hastens to reject all such lies and accompanies her indignant response with an open letter to the “Discalced Carmelite nuns, Seville” designed to share this defense of her order’s holy, wholesome lifestyle with the community concerned.⁵³

Either Teresa’s epistolary battle was beginning to bear fruit, or the king’s reformist zeal was exerting its irresistible effect on the course of events. Personally I feel sure that what weighed heaviest in the balance of history was your graphic pressure, my single-minded Teresa. Philip II appointed the Dominican Pedro Fernández, a veteran of the discalced cause, as a counselor to the papal nuncio. Gratian and María de San José were rehabilitated. And yet Teresa never regained her trust in this eccentric woman, María; was it a question of female rivalries, stirred up by the slippery Gratian? We shall keep an eye on that. Teresa sent a new friend of hers, the Genoese banker Nicolo Doria, to call on the prioress in Seville and get her to acknowledge her mistakes. An educator and a politician underlay the businesswoman and the mystic. Could it all be one and the same person?

1580–1581. High time to be back on the road, after two years’ immobility. Her traveling companion is Ana de San Bartolomé, acting as both nurse and secretary. First they visit Valladolid, then Malagón, where the convent projected since 1568 can at last be made reality in a new, harmonious, simple space. After that, a new foundation at Villanueva de la Jara. On the way back, they stop, with Gratian, in that fateful Toledo where the cardinal archbishop, don Gaspar de Quiroga (painted by El Greco as the grand inquisitor general), grants Teresa permission to take back The Book of Her Life, something forbidden until now. The “Great Angel,” as he is dubbed, addresses the Mother in these terms:

I am glad to make your acquaintance. I have long desired to do so. You have in me a friend who is ready to help you in your undertakings. Some years ago, one of your books was submitted to the Inquisition; the material was most rigorously examined. I myself read it from beginning to end. You expound very solid arguments there, of great profit to readers. You may have it collected whenever you wish; you may do as you like with it; I hereby grant permission. Pray for me.⁵⁴

Eight years later he will make no objection to returning the manuscript to Ana de Jesús and Luis de León when they decide to have it printed. What a victory! Is the Inquisition to be forgotten at last?

Teresa makes more foundations, at Palencia in 1580 and Soria in 1581. And then excellent news arrives: the nuncio Felipe Sega himself is calling for the separation of calced and discalced orders, something La Madre had demanded in vain. They’re off again:

E E E E G E C

E E E E G E C

C G G G G G G C G G G G G

C G G G G G

E E E E G E C

E E E E G E C

Letters, interventions, contacts, tactful mediations, amours, and adversities…La Madre, the daughter of her Eliseus, prepares her friend Gratian to be elected principal of the discalced order. And that’s what happens on March 3, 1581.

Teresa of Jesus is weary, but glad to be back home as the prioress of Saint Joseph’s. The road is mostly behind her, and many deceased loved ones are waiting for her on high: her sister María passed away in 1562, her brother Lorenzo and her friend Francisco de Salcedo both died in 1580. Gratian is usually away, that’s how it is, although she can’t get used to it. As for the rest of her family, Juana and the children, unfortunate brother Pedro, the nephews, they’re all the same as ever — always needy, like every family, always the victims of money and honra.

There are issues in Valladolid with young Casilda de Padilla: Is she being manipulated by the local Jesuits, hostile to the discalced nuns? That’s what Teresa thinks, but it can’t be helped. We are not about to change our attitude to the Society, when “most of the nuns who come here do so through them.”⁵⁵

And John of the Cross is pestering for a foundation in Granada! No, Madrid and Burgos. Is she worn out at last? Her legs may be faltering, but not her love of new acquaintances. Gratian being somewhere else as usual, Teresa falls back on Pedro Castro de Nero, a friend of Gratian’s from Alcalá days, whose “intelligence, charm, and manner of speech please me very much.” She makes a point of informing Gratian of this appreciation on October 26, 1581;⁵⁶ she wants her fickle Pablo to know that his Laurencia is still alive, more than he imagines, even without him.

Teresa is sixty-six years old. Regarding this pleasure in Pedro, “I don’t know whether that may be due to the fact that he is so close to you,” you say coyly; “If I didn’t have a confessor and it seemed all right to you, I would go to him.” Later the young understudy for Eliseus is privileged to read your book, after the duchess of Alba sends over a copy, and “he never stops talking about the benefit he derived from [it].”⁵⁷

In December she goes to Burgos. The midwinter jaunt will drag on for twenty-four days, complete with accidents, snowstorms, the wagon capsizing in the river with eight Carmelites inside, and La Madre in the grip of fever. Sometimes she feels paralyzed, sometimes racked by shivering, her tongue seized up in her mouth, spitting blood, unable to swallow anything but fluids…Teresa is plainly exhausted, the body can’t keep up with the exalted soul, and yet somehow it does.

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a caval

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

Catalina de Toloso, with two daughters already in the Carmel, proposes a new convent at her home. The archbishop of Burgos, don Cristóbal Vela, agrees to the idea. But humiliation lies in store again, Teresa girl, you didn’t expect that, did you, at the end of your life?

You were intensely excited by the honor of meeting this great man: he reminded you of childhood, and you hoped he would recognize, respect, and esteem you. After all, he was the nephew of Francisco Vela de Núñez, that revered neighbor of your father who was godfather to little Teresa de Ahumada, how long ago now…sixty-seven years already? But it was not to be. The great don Cristóbal only wants to “negotiate” with you, what did you think? He never suggested that you should go ahead and found, or not yet, and maybe never. We’re simply “negotiating.” Do you grasp the distinction?

Twenty-four days’ arduous trek, only to be snubbed! Such rudeness and disdain! Toward a lady your age! You dig your heels in, true to type. The wrangling stretches on for three months. Gratian does nothing but complicate things: he’s either euphoric or depressed, never the cool-headed realist you need for such discussions.

It’s now or never for unsheathing your invincible weapon, your blade of eloquence alloyed with humility. As the sadism of the quasi-kin archbishop hits home, you counter with the diplomacy of mortification:

“My poor daughters are so desirous of obtaining the authorization of your Lordship, they are flagellating their bodies as we speak,” you murmur, heartrendingly.

Don Cristóbal Vela remains unmoved.

“At this very instant, they’re offering up to God their use of the scourge.” Your voice grows soft, Teresa, you abandon yourself, your calm gaze rises to the Beyond: as a masochist, you know the drill!

“Let them, it won’t change my mind.” Don Cristóbal knows from experience that there’s no limit to masochism, it leaves him cold…

His retort stings worse than a slap in the face. It’s the baptized goddaughter in you that is humiliated, it’s your converted lineage he scorns, it’s your inspired foundations that are being trampled underfoot…You know it, and you take it. In the name of His Majesty within. It’s not over yet.

The Burgos Jesuits are being uncooperative, too: they take every opportunity to disavow you. For example, said gentlemen will only accept a convent set up in a duly purchased house. Fine, but where? You’ll have to work it out. The race is on again.

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a caval

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

You manage to remove Gratian from the scene. You won’t give up on your goal. So His Lordship wants nothing to do with you? So there are no premises in which to lodge your religious house? You get hold of two small rooms in the hospital, and you go to work there. Here’s a new experience even for a practised woman like you, how amusing! Caring for the sick and crippled, you who had so little time for people with one eye or otherwise infirm! It’s never too late to learn, when one is in dialogue with the Voice of His Majesty.

At last you find the perfect house. On April 18, 1582, the inaugural Mass is said in the presence of the archbishop. The whole of the royal town of Burgos is delighted, it could not be otherwise. Don Cristóbal de Vela is more delighted than anyone, naturally. And even the Jesuits are amicably on board.

A new stage begins at Valladolid. The convent is getting harder and harder to run, what with all those complicated women, sadly submissive when not experts at intrigue and scandal. Casilda leaves to become a Franciscan; Beatriz de Ovalle, Juana’s daughter, is lambasted for her relationship with a married man of means; and the prioress herself, María Bautista, is definitely lacking in charity. There are headaches at Salamanca, too, involving the prioress Ana de la Encarnación. And at Alba de Tormes with Teresa de Layz, that estimable donor who seems unable, since she became prioress, to stop bothering the nuns. The exception proving the rule, you are getting along well with Soria’s prioress, Catalina de Cristo. She may be illiterate, which alienates Gratian, but what a nice person she is!

Women are hard to govern, but never boring. And letter-writing is such a splendid invention: swift as a horse, more to the point than an arrow! Teresa loves it, there are always letters to write, as much when business is ticking over as when it isn’t; the founding sequence follows the same beat in any case.

E E E E G E C

E E E E G E C

C G G G G G G C G G G G G

C G G G G G

E E E E G E C

E E E E G E C.

Leaning on her stick, Teresa goes to Mass and never fails to deal with the problems: reasoning with the overly authoritarian Teresa de Layz, arguing with the rector of Salamanca who has come to complain about Ana de la Encarnación.…

And all the grandees who want to see her! Today it’s the young duchess of Alba, who is soon to give birth; the house of Alba needs Teresa as it did long ago, that memorable Christmas night of 1561. Father Antonio de Jesús, who has taken over from Gratian as the provincial of Castile, tells her to go there at once.

The month is September 1582. Chilly goodbyes at Valladolid. The weary old lady sets off with Antonio de Jesús and Ana de San Bartolomé. Her last letter to Gratian is dated September 1: disappointed, embittered, resigned, she tells the absent one that “your servant and subject” will be in Avila at the end of the month, “with God’s favor.” “Oh, mi padre, how oppressed I have felt these days.”⁵⁸ An appeal to her darling Eliseus? The anguish of never seeing him again? The premonition of the end?

Jolting along the rutted roads, Teresa grows hungry and enfeebled, her pulse abruptly slows. A faint: they fear she is gone, but she straightens up. At the town gates, a messenger delivers good tidings: the duchess has been delivered of a healthy child. “No more need for the saint, then, thanks be to God!” mutters the dying woman. Dying or not, she can still crack a joke.

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a cavallo a caval

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

tut-ti tut-ti a cavallo

She receives a glacial welcome at the Convent of Alba de Tormes. The new prioress, María Bautista, doesn’t even come out to say hello, and La Madre is left alone in her room like a nobody who’s just passing through. She is in a desperate condition. While Gratian dallies in Andalusia, Teresa wastes away in her cell, stiff-tongued, vomiting blood. Catalina de la Concepción, Catarina Bautista, and Ana de San Bartolomé take care of her in her last days. Teresita is there, too.

At dawn on October 4, 1582 (October 15 by Pope Gregory’s calendar), the feast of Saint Francis, Teresa departs to join her Beloved.

Finis the melody of war and love.

It is said that when Antonio de Jesús asked her whether she wanted to be buried in Alba or in Avila, Teresa replied: “Do I possess anything that is mine? Will they not give me a patch of land here?”

The new prioress of Alba and the conversa Teresa de Layz, with the help of Antonio de Jesús, make haste to bury the precious body of the future saint beneath a pile of earth, quicklime, and stones. What a treasure for the convent! “In the final accounting, Lord, I am a daughter of the Church,” she repeated while receiving the Last Sacrament. To convince herself? Or to persuade her friends and foes?