As far back as she could remember, Teresa’s playmates had been boys, and she had been the domineering one. Look at how she dragged her darling Rodrigo, the best of them all, to be decapitated in the land of the Antichrist: no one ever tired of that story. She herself sounded tickled to recall it in her autobiography, years after the event. At the time, though, love unto death and a saintly end were in deadly earnest: cross my heart and hope to die.
She loved her mother, of course she did, and she prayed feelingly to the Holy Virgin, doña Beatriz’s beloved patroness, and kept the picture of her in a blue veil, with those large white hands crossed over her breast, until the day she died. But was the Virgin really a woman? Or was she a creature unique to her sex, as someone had suggested? In any case, the mischievous tomboy was not keen to be mothered. She preferred playing chess, she had no desire to spend her own life gestating, and one may wonder if she ever needed a mother at all, such was her individuality and independence.
“What a handsome girl she is, and prouder than a boy!” The neighbors either admire or deplore her for it.
A young woman afraid of woman’s destiny as exemplified by her own mother: it’s a rare phenomenon, but not unique. The fear is stifled, opaque, inescapable. Even the queens of the Golden Age were little more than wombs in the service of a monarchy and its political ends. From the birth of Philip II in 1527 to that of Charles II in 1661, the queens of Spain produced thirty-four heirs, infantes and infantas—not counting miscarriages. That’s to say one child every four years, seventeen of whom (exactly half) did not live to see their tenth birthday! Some queens died in labor, as did countless women who were not queens and did not play chess: it was their destiny. In 1532, girls had little choice in the matter. Since 1525, however, the alumbradas or “illuminated” women had been advocating celibacy, a state far superior to the indignity and enclosure of marriage, against which any freedom-loving spirit chafes. Women who were unwilling to be just another link in a dynastic chain, or who had no dowry, or whom no one wanted, did what the Ahumada girl did: they entered a nunnery. Their bodies sick with desire, often without a religious vocation, they took the veil. What else could they do?10
Now, if Teresa preferred the company of boys, it was also to turn their heads with the scent of her skin through layers of silk and velvet while she fantasized, just like those haughty males, of being a knight or a sailor or a conquistador across the sea: a combination which her cousin Pedro found alluring and alarming at once. I shouldn’t be surprised if Pedro shrank from her, maybe attracted to a different, more submissive girl, or maybe heading for the El Dorado that galvanized the whole of Spain at its apogee, a place known as Peru. That’s right, the boys will be peruleros, and the girls, well, they won’t be anything. “Too bad,” the schoolgirl said to herself, but her heart started racing, and the tears gushed all over again…
She likes this torrent, she drowns in tears, it’s so lovely to cry, as well as shameful! “Too bad,” don Alonso’s best girl doesn’t see herself wasting to death in one confinement after another. “Always bedded, always pregnant, always birthing,” was how Louis XV’s queen described herself. Teresa will be as worthy as any son, free and independent. Impossible for a woman, of course, but the family honor will be saved. Father is always so preoccupied with that: honor must be saved! She will do as her father asks, but in make-believe, that’s all that’s expected of a girl. All that’s expected of mothers, women, families. She’s one of them and she adores them, mothers, women, families. How else could she feel? It would be a long time before Teresa admitted to herself that the paradise of women, sisters, and mothers is also a kind of hell.
In the evening of her life, well past sixty and busy writing the Foundations, Teresa projects herself into a rather strange sister, Beatriz de la Madre de Dios. Now known as La Madre herself, she evinces a curious closeness to her subject when relating the story of this other Beatriz. A victim or a monster? It’s hard to tell. She was illiterate, and her mother used to beat her. She was variously accused of poisoning her aunt and seducing her confessor Garciálvarez, whom she saw alone, or even Father Gratian, that special friend of Teresa’s…She fancied herself on the road to sainthood, and reported visions and spiritual favors aplenty. Manipulated by another sister, Isabel de San Jerónimo, who was both crazy and in league with the calced Carmelites, who had it in for the reforming nun, Sister Beatriz accused Teresa—to the Inquisition—of maintaining sinful relations with the same Fr. Gratian and bearing several children by him, whom she slyly dispatched to the New World…What a scandal! But Beatriz retracted her story, Seville simmered down, and the Inquisition did not even open a file on the case.
Does Teresa’s concern for this abused and abusive child suggest an emotional affinity with a possible rival for Gratian’s affections? Or does it cast light, for the nosy posterity that we are, on just how hard it was to be a young girl or a young woman caught up in the vortex of desires and horrors that made up the world of other people, and how even harder this was in the ruthless ambit of female desires? A terrifying mother has a vile daughter. Which is the murderess, and which the manipulator? Who are these passages of the Foundations about—Beatriz de la Madre de Dios, Beatriz de Ahumada, or Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada herself? The “novel” left to us by Teresa of Avila muses on the crossed destinies of love unto death. How can one not be involved? And how does one cope?
On the whole Teresa preferred the company of women: she liked being under their spell, before imposing her sovereignty. Frivolous Cousin Elvira, for instance, the one execrated by don Alonso and his solemn daughter María—how sensual she seemed, how free, how different from the misery-guts who slunk about in corners, sniveling! Teresa also fell for the charms of María de Briceño, mistress of the young seculars at Our Lady of Grace, who had a way of talking about holy books and one’s own person that made a girl blush with pleasure. Briceño was living proof that not all women gave up their lives to a man, as Teresa’s mother had done, sacrificing herself for husband and children in the name of honor. There were women who became such admirable people in their own right that they deserved and received the love of the Lord Himself. Teresa’s dearest friend, Juana Suárez, had herself entered the Convent of the Incarnation, under the mitigated Carmelite rule, to follow that marvelous destiny alongside 180 other women—seculars, widows, undowried girls, as well as some genuine nuns who sounded rather jolly, by Juana’s account.
Teresa was at a crossroads. Her young body was not appeased, but who could satisfy it? Her brother Rodrigo, her cousin Pedro, her best friend Juana? All possible and all forbidden. Everything ends, everyone leaves; the nothingness of all things, all things are nothing. Except Teresa wasn’t as strong, yet, as María de Briceño or Juana Suárez; she wasn’t ready to embrace the veil as a vocation. Not ready at all.
Her mother’s devotion she found compelling, but her martyrdom was frightening. The dourness of her father’s faith held her back: what a bind, that “point of honor” he kept on about, when Teresa only longed for excitement and adventures sweeping her up, up and away, into the Beyond! She cried out for love with every fiber of her being, she lacked for love. She would sponge herself carefully all over several times a day, dab her skin with perfume and scented oils, making herself pure and desirable—ready for anything, yet always in the anticipation of failure. And still that aching heart, still those floods of tears. Was she depressed or elated? She could not tell, and neither could the sisters at Our Lady of Grace. Teresa fell seriously ill. Best to send the Ahumada girl back to her father: too fragile…
Already disappointed and yet offered up, Teresa obtained her father’s permission to convalesce at her sister’s in Castellanos, where María had settled after her glittering marriage. On the way she stopped off at Hortigosa, to visit her uncle Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda, the third of her father’s four brothers. Indisposition did not prevent her from wearing her red skirt with black braiding, black velvet bodice, and black lace shawl—an attire immortalized
two centuries later by Bizet’s sultry Carmen. On some level she was aware that don Pedro, though still in mourning for his wife, responded to her youthful beauty. For her part she enjoyed his company, like a more lenient version of her father.
“So you’re not well, I hear?” inquires don Pedro, his eyes crinkling in a smile.
“Surrounded by dry rosemary bushes, and nobody to lean on,” Teresa says nervously, alluding to her disappointments.
“Of fair Don Juan the king that ruled us, / Of those high heirs of Aragon, / What are the tidings? / Of him, whose courtly graces schooled us, / Whom song and wisdom smiled upon, / Where the abidings?”11 Don Pedro is being kind or mocking, it’s not clear which. He is said to be an Erasmist, something of an Illuminato. What could he mean? He’s awfully well-read…
“Pardon, Uncle?” She feels on the verge of tears, again.
“Jorge Manrique.” Don Pedro fetches the book from a library shelf; bibliophilic treasures outnumber worldly luxuries in this country manor. “Do you know him?”
Teresa likes to arouse desire, and yet the moment she senses the man’s interest she retreats, introspectively, feeling guilty and soiled. Pedro de Cepeda notices this, and goes no further.
“Are you uncertain about marriage?” He realizes he must talk to this niece as an uncle, almost a father. It had not been a good idea to upset her with the verses of this old-school but very famous poet, who had enthused the whole of Spain.
“I’m not ready for the monastic life either, Uncle. My remorse at my mistakes is so great, the doors of Heaven are closed to me for ever.”
“Mistakes, child?”
“My father suspects me, he can’t be sure, of course, but it’s true that I dissemble my desires…and I am incapable of understanding God, I am too hard-hearted. I am not like a woman in that way.”
“You dissemble, do you? You feel remorse…Is this a young lady speaking, or do I hear somebody speaking through you? You sound just like your father.”
He feels caught out, and doesn’t know how to pursue the conversation. Smart and pretty though she is, Teresa is clearly in a bad way. God alone could rescue a soul like that, a young woman like that. For this fresh-faced niece, scarcely more than a child, is undoubtedly a woman. Or is it precisely because of her febrile womanliness that…No, too confusing.
“Don’t cry, my dear, we’re all in need of consolation. I am myself, indeed I am, and without dissembling. I need…I need you to read…Here, read to me from Saint Jerome.”
He puts Manrique back and pulls the Epistles from the opposite shelf, before stretching himself out to listen.
And what happens then for Teresa? She feels violently assaulted. “For without my desiring it, [God] forced me to overcome my repugnance,” she wrote thirty years later.12 She sits down by her uncle and fastens her dark gaze on the page.
Why Saint Jerome? Why was she reading, here in Hortigosa, the letters of the “learned ascetic” and first Christian translator of the Bible into Latin? Born in the sixth century on the border between Dalmatia and Pannonia, preoccupied with hebraica veritas, Jerome was the “author” of the Vulgate Bible, which replaced the Septuagint translation attributed in legend to the work of seventy-two rabbis. An accomplished rhetorician, he had studied in Rome, learned Greek in Constantinople and Antioch, and regarded himself as a disciple of Cicero. He had crossed polemical swords with Origen and disputed more amicably with Saint Augustine. What was his appeal for Teresa’s uncle? Was it down to the Bible itself, which was only permitted to be read by the ecclesiastical elite (and whose mere presence in certain homes was evidence to the Inquisition of heresy or covert Judaism)?
It could also be because the future Saint Jerome had thrown himself into the solitary study of Hebrew in Chalcis, Syria, and spent years translating the Old and New Testaments in Bethlehem, where a Jew visited him at night “like Nicodemus,” he said, had visited Christ. Pedro Sánchez de Cepeda, who was of converso stock, was very likely moved by the indefatigable Christian’s return to the source. He would have known that a number of Marranos had been eager to join the Order of Saint Jerome, because this brotherhood’s lenient rule allowed them to practice the Old Religion with impunity. Although their eventual condemnation on charges of “Judaization” had discredited the order, this would not have prevented Pedro from reading Jerome’s Epistles or having them read to him. Far from it. Nor would it stop him, a few years later, from becoming a Hieronymite himself.
Then again, perhaps he wanted his tormented niece to read from this saint because Jerome had spent his youth enjoying the baths, circuses, and theaters of voluptuous Rome, and not a few reprehensible relationships, before he became an ascetic. Early on, at the wealthy home of the patrician Marcella, he became involved with a set of highborn ladies and gained the affections of a widow named Paula, along with those of her daughters, notably Eustochium—all recent converts to the Christian faith.
The great Hebrew scholar had also championed the superiority of virginity over marriage so rigidly as to be accused of Manichaeism; the most hostile antagonists found him guilty of “perversion and sin.” His faithful Roman noblewomen came to join him in Bethlehem. All of them knew Greek and several applied themselves to Hebrew. Paula and Eustochium were later canonized. Why shouldn’t Teresa follow a similar path?
Pedro’s eyes are closed, but he is not asleep. He is trying to conjure up the monastery founded by Jerome in Bethlehem, with its great hall leading to the grotto where Jesus was born. Here Jerome translated, at a furious rate, the language of Teresa’s paternal forebears into Latin. He was ultimately buried in another grotto nearby, opposite the tomb of his friend Paula, where Eustochium would soon join them.
“Here, read me the letter to Eustochium, if you please, Teresa.”
“That epistle opens with Psalm 45, shall I begin, Uncle? ‘Hear, O daughter, and consider, and incline your ear; forget also your own people and your father’s house, and the king shall desire your beauty.’” Teresa’s throat tightens, she stifles a sob, and pauses for a moment before resuming her reading. “I have left the home of my childhood; I have forgotten my father, I am born anew in Christ. What reward do I receive for this?”13
Don Pedro watches her intently, his body trembling all over at the sound of her young voice. He leads a secluded life; for some time now, books in Castilian and the joys of the mind are all he has had. Saint Jerome’s letters would soon lead him, without transition, he thought, to become a friar.
He kept Teresa by his side for a few days more, soothed by her voice and by her hands as they turned the pages, talking to her about the vanity of the world.
The more Teresa read, the more she felt like throwing up. The more nausea she felt, the more interest she feigned: it was a point of honor. She had been torn in two. One part of her body dreamed of valiant knights and conquistadors like Rodrigo, and was mounted behind them, or being buffeted by wind and spray on the high seas. The other espoused the words of a father whose one concern was to save his soul and his children’s; then Teresa scolded herself for her vanity, her frivolous temperament, and her womanly senses, which she hated to death, all on behalf of that judgmental father. There was only one way out, it seemed: “to leave the home of her childhood.”
On the third day of her stay with her uncle, Teresa calmed down. She’d found that with him she could move between her conflicted states, casting off the divided self that sickened her and made her cry. It might even be possible to splice the two sides back together. Until she came to Hortigosa, Teresa had always seen the monastic option as a bastion against her low desires, while her intelligence discerned in this need for protection a sort of groveling, which put her to shame. But things were different with Uncle Pedro.
In the first place, he knew all about the vanity of the world, far more than other men she had encountered in the course of her young life. So much so that he had led her to forcibly overcome herself, as a protection against worldliness and against him, too—but in such a way as
to introduce her to the pleasures of forcing herself. Uncle Pedro made her aware of passion and the inanity of passion at the same time; she discovered the allness and nothingness of the temptations that beset her at the nearness of Rodrigo, Cousin Pedro, Cousin Elvira, or her inseparable best friend Juana…And he had done more than this. As she daily steeled herself to read, for his sake, from the edifying book which made her sick with the boredom of subjection to his whim, she found to her surprise that she was glad. Glad to please him, glad to encounter Saint Jerome and his psalms…
Ah, that vigilant eye lodged deep in her young mind, which never ceased to observe, to judge, to comprehend what she was feeling in body and soul! She was beginning to get the measure of this night watchman inside, who never left her, who tormented and yet enhanced her! Was she really so glad to please Uncle Pedro? Or was she simply reveling in her own capacity to analyze what was happening on either side of this epistle by Saint Jerome: she, reading in the armchair; he, pretending to be half asleep on the couch? And between them this kingdom, Audi filia…
Her nausea gone, Teresa felt ready in heart and body to push this willingness to please to extremes. There was no virtue in this dissection, though, she knew that too; nothing but an utter lack of discretion, boundless ambition, the sin of omnipotence.
The more she was intoxicated by her spiraling thoughts, the more the girl felt that her uncle was inducting her into a universe in which guilty passions and debating with those passions were not mutually exclusive, but simultaneous: a delectable surfeit, a world in itself, salvation perhaps. Teresa wasn’t thinking about Jesus yet. She was simply afraid of her senses, while clinging to the sensuousness that Uncle Pedro allowed to the things of the mind. Blessed be voluptuous spirituality!
Teresa, My Love Page 17