Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

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

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

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

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

  I DREAM, THEREFORE I AM

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

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

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

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

  “In your dreams, Paul! Quit dreaming!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I sip my tea. I’m waiting.

  “I’m going to Spain!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Marianne doesn’t let my silence last.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What!”

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

  “No harm done. See you in two weeks!”

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

  Part 3

  The Wanderer

  It is very important for any soul that practices prayer…not to hold itself back and stay in one corner. Let it walk through those dwelling places which are up above, down below, and to the sides, since God has given it such great dignity. Don’t force it to stay a long time in one room alone. Oh, but if it is in the room of self-knowledge!

  Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

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

  Chapter 8

  EVERYTHING SO CONSTRAINED ME

  This true Lover [verdadero Amador] never leaves it.…it should avoid going about to strange houses…to avoid going astray like the prodigal son and eating the husks of swine [comiendo manjar de puercos].

  Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

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

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

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