Wholly taken up by her visions and foundations, Teresa would never have dreamed that more than four centuries after her death, people would be scrutinizing her portrait and trying to find her in the pages she saw fit to write about her life. No doubt it gratified her to imagine the Discalced Carmelites, as an institution, continuing down the centuries—for fulfilled though she was by that Other residing within, she was not immune to vanity. But from there to fancying that women who might doubt the existence of the divine Spouse, or deny it outright, could one day be fascinated by her far from cloistered life, crisscrossing Spain on a donkey to the outrage of the Inquisition, which nonetheless hesitated to burn her at the stake—never! Not a chance. For Teresa’s imaginings—entirely real to her, unseen by her eyes but felt with all her heart, which is to say her body, despite the fear of being a victim of holy madness—were indifferent to passing time, let alone therefore to modern times, and certainly wouldn’t care what we might think.
I say “we,” because I am not the only one puzzling over the portrait painted by Giovanni Narducci, alias Juan de la Miseria. Beyond Carmelite or pilgrim circles, where Teresian relics are prized as part of popular tours (run by Catholic business interests like memory trails, the Mysteries of Faith package), her writings have attracted a range of contemporary “sisters” as diverse and improbable as I am: Marcelle Auclair, Rosa Rossi, Dominique de Courcelles, Mercedes Allendesalazar, Alison Weber, Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Mary Frohlich…These unlikely exegetes came as a surprise to me. Teresa infuses them, infuses us, with her taste for the union with the Other in oneself. All of a sudden these modern women, perfectly at ease in the epoch of the Pill and raunchy sex, began to haunt the waters, paths, and castles of the Spanish nun. They became theologians, interpreters, or writers in order to follow the thread of her raptures, comas, and foundations. Men, too, men like Michel de Certeau, Denis Vasse, Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Américo Castro, Antonio Márquez, Joseph Pérez, and others, as lacking in circumspection as their female counterparts, have trodden the labyrinth of our philosophical sorority.3
It is my turn to travel through Teresa country, in the variegated company of these passionate loners who are not always acquainted with one another, don’t necessarily get along, may or may not know one another’s books, and have nothing in common but the writings of Teresa of Jesus. Could the saint’s texts provide a key to the enigma that is faith, the last stronghold of secrecy in our see-through, mediatized globalization, where everything is instantaneously divulged?
I bathe in the liquid imaginary of La Madre. I drink it in, filtered by the tastes and notions of the “specialists” on her, I glimpse it through the tracery of their interpretive ruminations. I build my own castle out of their dwelling places, I cultivate my dreaming garden in order to bring you a Teresa alive in us, coming alive again in you.
Buried at Alba de Tormes beneath a heap of soil, lime, and stones after her death on October 4, 1582 (or October 15, due to the switch to the Gregorian calendar that year), Teresa’s body was later exhumed in secret at the request of Jerome Gratian, who wanted very much to look at it. Her garments were moldy, but her flesh was intact. The body was taken to Avila and examined by Fr. Diego de Yepes, prior of the Hieronymites of Madrid, alongside legal advisers Laguana, of the Council of State, and Francisco Contreras, of the chancellery of Granada; both men had been dispatched from Madrid. Also present were two physicians, a handful of notables, and the bishop of Avila. Each witness concurred that the body was incorrupt. According to the medical report, “It was impossible that this be a natural occurrence, rather than truly miraculous…for, after three years, never having been opened or embalmed, so whole was it that nothing thereof was missing, and an admirable fragrance wafted from it.”4
With apologies to the pilgrims, I should say that I much prefer the vision of Teresa’s living body always traveling toward us to that of her uncorrupted corpse. I seek that body in her books—of which she herself only edited one, The Way of Perfection, helped by the archbishop of Evora, Teutonio de Braganza; it was published in 1583, a year after her death. I visualize that other incorruptible body through the commentaries of her recent interpreters; I appropriate it, dream it up, and restore it back it to you.
First of all, she was a wanderer. The apostolic nuncio Felipe Sega, hostile to her work as a foundress of monasteries, accused her of being a “restless vagabond, rebellious and headstrong, who invented twisted doctrines she called devotions and gave herself license to teach, which the apostle Paul had forbidden to women.” A woman, restless and wandering, that’s what you are, Teresa, and it’s a compliment in my eyes. But where does a life begin? And how many beginnings make up a lifetime?
The novel of Teresa of Jesus, suffering and sovereign, was slowly plotted in the destiny of Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada; but it was crystallized in a crucial event of 1533. I picture a young girl of around eighteen, pretty, elegantly dressed, enchanting—no portrait exists, but there are many testimonies to that effect, and she herself often mentions her good looks. Many pages written in a painstakingly pungent Castilian for the benefit of her confessors, thirty years after the fact, retrace this youthful period. Indeed, Teresa only completed the first draft of The Book of Her Life in June 1562, when she was forty-seven.
The young lady had just spent a year and a half at the Augustinian school of Our Lady of Grace, where her father, don Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, had sent her in hopes of safeguarding the honor of his bright, too-bright child. Her mother Beatriz had been dead for some years and her elder half-sister, María de Cepeda, was now married, after playing chaperone to the little one as best she could. Don Alonso, that loving, too-loving father, knew just how cute and seductive she was, better than anyone—except perhaps her cousin Pedro, one of the three sons of don Francisco Álvarez de Cepeda. Or perhaps Vasco, or Francisco, or Diego, one of Elvira de Cepeda and Hernando Mejía’s boys? A plotline takes shape. We don’t know the name of the elect, but Teresa was said to be dangerously in love.
In love, maybe, though without a dowry. The young beauty hesitated to take the plunge: “I also feared marriage.”5 Was she reluctant to share the fate of the countless women who passed away, sad and young, their bodies wrecked by an unbroken string of childbirths—her own mother’s fate? Teresa liked to have fun. She read novels about knights and ladies, like her mother, and adored masked balls, parties, flirting, and conversation. Her favorite interlocutors were the servant women, bent on improving this spotless soul with salacious stories, and her cousin Elvira, reputed to be vain and an airhead.
“I must warn you, Father, that Teresa is receiving instruction in wickedness from the servants. I can’t prevent it, she’s obstinate and won’t listen to sense.” María’s accusation only upsets the widower more, for he already suspects it.
“But what if I were to get engaged?” Teresa cautiously brings up the mirage of marriage, family honor oblige. María weighs in crossly:
“Don’t even think about it! I mean, you don’t seem to be thinking about it.”
“We are proud but of modest condition, increasingly modest, understand me, child.” Teresa frowns. Don Alonso cannot get his favorite daughter to see that a father has the right to expect strict decorum and total obedience from a young girl of such a condition.
Teresa shuts herself away with her secrets.
It’s the same old story: fathers have always relied far too much on convents or marriage to calm their daughters’ lusts. Don Alonso had no idea how easily love notes passed through the walls of the Augustinian school, via keyholes, furtive meetings in the parlor, the mediation of the airhead cousin…
The girl was on fire, and concealment being the rule, her young body soon fell sick. Palpitations, depression, continual weeping. Oh, to be free like Cousin Pedro, to sport velvet doublets slashed with gold, and buoyant ruffs, to twirl one’s cape and sword…Let him take her in his arms, let him be her and she be him, let them waft together from ball to ball, or sail away to the antipodes. They coul
d follow Rodrigo and his New World dreams, Rodrigo her favorite brother, two years older and born on the same day, whom she overtook in maturity long ago. Wasn’t she cleverer, quicker, more intrepid than other little girls her age? The whole Cepeda-Ahumada clan agreed on that. The things they got up to together! Hardly surprising, when she stuck like a shadow to her likeness, her double, and he, although a boy, followed her lead in the peculiar games that so dismayed their parents.
One day, while reading the Lives of the Saints together, Teresa informs her brother that she aspires to be a martyr, like Saint Catherine or Saint Ursula.
“Or Saint Andrew or Saint Sebastian,” says Rodrigo.
“For the love of God!” cries Teresa, in imitation of her mother, the godly doña Beatriz.
It was after the sack of Rhodes by the Turks—an event that had all Christendom quaking, Spain above all. But not these two children, who resolved to go and get their heads chopped off in the land of the Moors, across the Strait of Gibraltar, where menacing foreigners lived who were completely unlike the Spaniards. They set off—for the love of God!—and were caught up with on the Adaja bridge, still inside the city walls. Phew.
“It was her idea!” Rodrigo opts for shameful betrayal, rather than undergo the father’s anger and the mother’s sorrow.
Teresa did not hold this against him: her masculine double had at last admitted that she was the brains and the heart of their partnership. Closer now than ever, the runaway pair turned into a pair of writers: their amazed family was very soon presented with a chivalric novel, The Knight of Avila, by Teresa de Ahumada and Rodrigo de Cepeda. In this osmosis between brother and sister, might the virtuous knight be a foreshadowing of that “virile soul of a monk” that some detected in Saint Teresa? In any case, here began her writer’s path.
But boys have a future ahead of them. If adolescence is excruciating for girls, it’s largely because it brings home to them that they don’t have such a future. This is not easy to stomach, especially for one who like Teresa has grown up among male siblings: coming after Fernando and Rodrigo into the world, she was followed by Juan, Lorenzo, Antonio, Pedro, Jerónimo, and Agustín, before the advent of another girl, Juana. How she longed to be a man, to set sail for the Americas like Fernando, the eldest, or like Rodrigo himself, who enlisted in Pedro de Mendoza’s expedition! All her brothers, except for Juan, became conquistadors. In reality, Teresa had no need to be jealous. She could make people laugh, she could beat them at chess, and she produced superlative embroidery—the last was less unusual, being an Avilan specialty. The family, bewitched, would celebrate the child’s witty sallies while fearing for her, given the impetuousness of her nature. “Our little charmer makes the most of herself, tastefully to be sure, but she overdoes it a bit: what a passion for baths and perfumes and jewels…”
Were you quite sure, Teresa, of what you later claimed: that you enjoyed yourself wherever you went, and that the least rag looked like a queen’s raiment on you? No doubt you were, since you sought out “pastimes” and “pleasant conversation,” indeed you were “strikingly shrewd when it came to mischief,” as you later wrote, with stern self-reproof. There’s nothing wrong with being at once the knife and the wound, and I guess this made you feel better. Your half-sister María’s marriage to Martín Guzmán de Barrientos was an opportunity to engage in “vanities” for the full three months of the event. How embarrassing! How shameful! All this “could not be achieved so secretly as to prevent me from suffering much loss of reputation.”6 Checked by your confessors, you said no more about it, Teresa, my love, but not because you, a connoisseur of mortification, were loath to flagellate yourself. Marcelle Auclair thinks your discretion was due, not to the wickedness of the alleged frivolities, but to their innocence. That’s plausible. I would also point out, though, that the honor of the Church forbade you to be more candid:
Since my confessors commanded me and gave me plenty of leeway to write about the favors and the kind of prayer the Lord has granted me, I wish they would also have allowed me to tell very clearly and minutely about my great sins and wretched life. This would be a consolation. But they didn’t want me to. In fact I was very much restricted in those matters. And so I ask, for the love of God, whoever reads this account to bear in mind that my life has been so wretched…7
Don Alonso knew that his favorite daughter was a magnet for the young and not so young people revolving around her—women and men both, needless to say. All the more reason to protect her, but how? Mysterious Teresa.
Her father did not know, however, that she had already come to terms with a fatal, irrevocable reality: the transitory nature of human love. “Para siempre, forever,” she and Rodrigo had sworn it: and now he was getting ready to start on his man’s life, away from her. Away from that role as her double, which he played so well under her direction—menial parts, it must be said, as an extra in the runaway scene and then as quill-carrier, all to his sister’s advantage. The word “forever” does not exist, there is no forever between men and women, neither with Rodrigo nor with Cousin Pedro. Nor between don Alonso and doña Beatriz, who died of love, poor thing, her belly swelling up again and again, her children being the death of her until she really did depart to the Beyond, and forever. So does “forever” apply solely to separation and death and Nothingness? Her mother was only saved by leaving them all behind, bequeathing nothing to Teresa but a passion for courtly novels and a holy picture of the Virgin in a bright blue cloak. Mothers are cruel. So are the men who drop you, who never love you enough, who’ve always got somebody else to love.
My father was fond of reading good books, and thus he also had books in Spanish for his children to read. These good books together with the care my mother took to have us pray and be devoted to our Lady and some of the saints began to awaken me when, I think, six or seven years old, to the practice of virtue.…
My father was a man very charitable with the poor and compassionate toward the sick, and even toward servants. So great was his compassion that nobody was ever able to convince him to accept slaves…
My mother also had many virtues. And she suffered such sickness during her life. She was extremely modest. Although very beautiful, she never gave occasion to anyone to think she paid any attention to her beauty. For at the time of her death at the age of thirty-three, her clothes were already those of a much older person. She was gentle and very intelligent. Great were the trials she suffered during her life. Her death was a truly Christian one.
We were in all three sisters and nine brothers. All resembled their parents in being virtuous, through the goodness of God, with the exception of myself—although I was the most loved of my father. And it seemed he was right—before I began to offend God. For I am ashamed when I recall the good inclinations the Lord gave me and how poorly I knew how to profit by them.8
Doña Beatriz de Ahumada was don Alonso’s second wife. The first, Catalina del Peso y Henao, who succumbed to the plague, was proud to be an Old Christian with connections to the Dávila family, a prestigious line of Castilian nobles whose coat of arms displayed thirteen golden bezants. Beatriz was Catalina’s cousin thrice removed; she was barely fifteen when she wed this widower of thirty. By the time Teresa arrived, she had already borne two sons and was taking care of her two stepchildren, María de Cepeda and Juan Vásquez. Seven more children were still to come. Exhausted by so many childbeds, the fine and delicate Beatriz commended her soul to Almighty God at the age of thirty-three: a Christlike sacrifice in female mode.
Nuns who complain of the monastic life “do not recognize the great favor God has granted them in…freeing them from being subject to a man.” You wrote this much later, Teresa, my love. Unfair, carried away, too much in love with Mother? With Simone de Beauvoir, the revolt of the “second sex” ought to acknowledge a precursor in you, who continued angrily: “a man who is often the death of them and who could also be, God forbid, the death of their souls.”9 An angel passes: it is the soul of Beatriz de Ahumada.
You were thirteen and a half when your mother died, and the only woman of the line accompanying your father, except for your half-sister María, the firstborn of the previous union. Surrounded by servants but responsible for the youngest children, you were probably tempted to become the center of this domestic circle, now that the mistress of the household was no longer around and the master was doubly appreciative of his daughter’s looks and brains. But was it possible? Not when one has imbibed, at the departed mother’s knee, so many tales of knights and martyrs. Doña Beatriz thus managed to instill in her eldest daughter the sense of another world, not in so many words, of course, simply by reading novels—as if there was no difference between such love stories and the lives of the saints, which her husband preferred. There is an elsewhere, my girl, innocent of childbirth and domestic drudgery, and that’s where salvation surely lies, beyond this earthly plane, beyond my bleeding maternal body, beyond bodies, beyond everything…
Teresa absorbed the message in her own way. Not only was she as beguiled by these knightly and saintly adventures as by the feminine charms of her aristocratic progenitor, but she had also developed a taste for freedom in the company of boys to whom she never felt inferior. After all, she’d reigned supreme over the Ahumada siblings.
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