Teresa thinks back to her mother, to all those mothers who die in childbirth: What else can a woman succumb to but her womb, the womb that’s been impaired since adolescence, smelly and bleeding, a cancer in gestation for generations? If Teresa is a woman like her mother Beatriz, she will die like her, too, of her belly. Or like the cancerous nun, herself somehow a victim of that fertilized, fertilizable putrefaction, that sickening space every woman carries around inside. But how will you escape their fate except by being, precisely, sick; rejecting that matrix that inhabits you, that tumor, that pernicious motherhood, that mother, that mortality?
Teresa’s condition worsens by the hour. The nuns have deserted the cancer patient to crowd around Teresa’s pallet.
“She’s gone!” wails the nursing sister.
A false alarm. Teresa sits up, but how tired she is!
Don Alonso, not yet initiated by his daughter into the art of prayer, decides to send her to Becedas, a village famed throughout Castile for its healer, whose attentions no ailment could withstand. The stay in Castellanos hasn’t helped, and he can think of no other way to save his favorite child. Meekly obedient for once, the young novice sets off, accompanied by her half-sister María and the affectionate, loyal Juana, to endure three months of violent purges and other outlandish remedies at the hands of the curandera. Never mind, she’s deep in Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet, the book her uncle gave her; searching for union with the Spouse, regardless.
Now, this prayer of quiet might last only the space of a Hail Mary, but from the lofty summit of her twenty-three years, when body and soul attain the state of grace, the young woman feels she has “the world at her feet.” It seems to her that the yearning for perfect love is all that can lift her above the pestiliential stuff of human flesh; the stinking cloaca of the cancer-ridden nun, the puffy, flaccid, rotten female body.
Bones, bones alone have the dignity of hardness. Teresa enjoys the sensation of a hardening soul, it’s just that the body doesn’t follow suit. Or not yet. Her body is always going soft, and only stiffens as a preamble to collapsing senseless. The Lord has granted women one hardness, the hardness of bones. And even then, women can only appreciate them if they’re thin, as a result of fasting, perhaps. One can’t really feel that except through pain. Or by throwing up, which is simply a way of provoking pain in the deepest part of one. A way of emptying the belly, wringing it out, annulling it.
At Becedas church, a young priest catches Teresa’s eye. Mental prayer is voiceless; it stokes the desire for love, but keeps it encysted inside. Teresa’s body wants to be heard, it wants to empty its love-need into the ears of a man, a man of faith, of good faith: a man of God. Let voice break free of sickly flesh and climb to the heights of perfect love! How else to escape from her aching guts, as though tied by her own hand to those of the dying nun, which the healer was helpless to pacify? On the contrary, these viscera threaten to drag her into the female hell, into death. Teresa is overpowered by a sudden certainty: in order to escape the vicious circle of doomed womanhood, she must absolutely take this young priest as her confessor. It is a shining imperative.
“Of excellent intelligence and social status…learned, although not greatly so,”26 the cleric in question is defenseless against the onslaught and soon falls for his penitent. Teresa, immersed in her quest for God as a bulwark against “noxious forms of recreation” (as she called them bitterly in 1560), against “mischiefs” and “frivolous pleasures” and her own palpitating body, talks to him of nothing but the Other. Her candid inebriation naturally fires him up still more, as she can’t but notice, later explaining shrewdly: “I believe that all men must be more friendly toward women who they see are inclined toward virtue. And this is the means whereby women ought to gain more of what they are seeking from men…”27
The protagonists of their amorous skirmish swap roles along the way. When he begins to have feelings, he confesses them to the young woman, who finds his bashfulness increasingly seductive. Until the day this nameless man, this anonymous protagonist, makes a clean breast of his predicament: “I’ve maintained illicit relations with a woman for the last seven years, and yet I continue to say Mass.”
Teresa pounces on the opportunity to get even closer to the unfortunate sinner. After all, remaining true to an errant friend is a virtue. Excitement mounts to fever pitch: the misdeed arouses as much desire as compassion, and the existence of a rival peps up the love potion with an acid tang of Mother, that first competitor for the father’s love.
“What’s he like, how does he live?” Thoroughly tantalized by the young priest, Teresa is becoming nosy; she grills the servants.
“Who’d have thought it, Sister!” Conchita the housekeeper, full of false prudery, does not hold out for long. “That woman has him in her clutches thanks to some charms she’s put in a little copper amulet. The poor possessed creature wears the trinket around his neck, for love, and no one has been able to get it off him.”
Teresa needs no more encouragement to turn herself into a Good Samaritan for her confessor, who is clearly under the devil’s thumb:
I used to speak with him very often about God. This must have profited him, although I rather believe that it prompted him to love me greatly. [Note that our therapist is not unaware of the deep springs of her spiritual magic: a matter of “love” and “pleasure.”] For in order to please me, he finally gave me the little idol, which I then threw in a river. Once he got rid of this, he began—like someone awakening from a deep sleep—to recall everything he had done during those years.…Finally, he stopped seeing this woman entirely…Exactly one year from the first day I met him, he died.28
Here is one love affair whose terminal denouement would seem to affect only one of the partners, the hapless priest! We would be wrong to think so, because Teresa is not immune to these conflictive passions herself. Her seizures and ailments return with a vengeance, punctuated by further dangerous liaisons.
The Carmelite’s body now turns into a veritable battlefield. Her impetuous desires clash constantly with her equally violent brakes on them. She wants to belong to a man…brother Rodrigo, cousin Pedro, don Alonso, don Pedro, a visitor here, a cleric there…she wants to yield to the tenderness of María de Briceño or Juana Suárez. Nothing doing, her defenses are unbreachable, everything—such as it is—will be resisted, honor will be preserved! That’s don Alonso’s first priority, isn’t it, as well as the wish of doña Beatriz, still being beamed down from the Beyond…Carnal pleasure debases us, sex is dirty, like any other vital impulse: we must punish our lips, our skin, our loins, we must pull back ever deeper into the soul, cleansed to God’s satisfaction by edifying texts. There, in that innermost self, reconciled with the Other, all is order and purity, luxury, calm, and chastity.* [*A variation on Baudelaire’s lines in “L’Invitation au voyage”: Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté.—Trans.] Teresa tries her best to lock herself into it, sobbing, sickened. But powerful as the prohibition may be, loudly as the voice of honor growls from above, and scrupulously as the vigilant conscience complies with the diktats of propriety, still the smothered drive sends its waves coursing through every fiber of her unhappy being. Hence another seizure, and another, in full view of both the sisters and the Lord.
The spasm grips her like the messenger of some secret, shameful pleasure, vibrating under the burning spear of a horseman, a double, an extraterrestrial, an angel, a Master. It starts with a helpless shuddering, the wringing of every muscle. It ends with a coma—a melancholy rerun of that osmosis with the lifeless mother’s lifeless womb. Teresa doesn’t want to get over her mother, she doesn’t think about her at all, not any more, for mother inhabits her smarting skin, her rigid body, her frozen blood, even the quivering chassis of her bones. The only corpse is hers, Teresa’s—the daughter who will never be a fertile woman, anything but that.
Given “the nothingness of all things,” there’s nobody to love and one is neutralized: there’s no sen
se, no sensation. But the refusal of life still constitutes a vital protest, combating refusal itself with an explosion of destructiveness. Impeded desire mutates into an electric discharge—vomiting, stiffening, paralysis, disconnection, annihilation of the flesh and the spirit. Thus provoked, Nothingness is a resistance, the only possible resistance to the death of desire, itself desired. Or rather to the death of desire imposed, and consented to, in the name of the point of honor, which purports to lead you to the name of God.
You know your way around that point of honor so well, Teresa, my love, that you always push it a step further, eager to make it stricter and more demanding! Not content with blaming it for all your ills—epilepsies, comas, pathologies, desires and counterdesires, all umbilically linked to that merciless point of honor—you up the ante, you want more, and more! Combating the superego, that frenzied ideal, with an excess of perfection, at last you will enjoy those conflicts, always the same, which it will command for you throughout your life; they will grow milder with time and age, less a matter of honor and more simply pleasant. As the years go by you break in your Commander bit by bit, you put yourself in His place, you understand Him and He understands you better all the time. His tyranny begins to soften, to feel increasingly familiar and salutary. You will be reassured by an Other who is not stern and judgmental, but kind and fair; an Other who loves you, His cherished spouse, who prays and writes for Him alone…But we have not got there yet. Just now the point of honor is making you ill, my Teresa of anguish and pain.
The Lord comes to the soul if we make the effort and strive to give up our rights in many matters.29
God deliver us from persons who are concerned about honor while trying to serve Him. Consider it an evil gain, and, as I said, honor is itself lost by desiring it, especially in matters of rank. For there is no toxin in the world that kills perfection as do these things.30
In one of those portraits you like to sketch of “certain souls,” you are highly critical of “one lady” whose great defect is the fuss she makes over points of honor behind a façade of humble piety. Knowing how censorious you are of your own frailties on that score, I wonder whether the lady with the neurosis about honor might not have something in common with the author of the below lines, who is perhaps taking a swipe at herself:
I shall tell you about one lady in particular, for it is not long ago that I spoke with her in a special way. She was very fond of receiving Communion frequently…[and] experienced devotion in her prayer…She had never married, nor was she now at an age in which she could…it seemed to me that [all these virtues] were effects of a very advanced soul and of deep prayer.…
After getting to know her I began to understand that all was peaceful as long as her self-interest was not affected.…I learned that although she would suffer all the things that were said against her, she would not tolerate anything said against her reputation even in some tiny point concerning her honor or the esteem she thought was her due. She was so overcome by this misery, so eager to know everything that was said against these and so fond of her comfort that I was amazed how such a person could spend even an hour alone.31
With matchless aplomb, aren’t you caricaturing here your own “hysterical narcissism,” to borrow dear old Jérôme Tristan’s pet term? It’s a failing you confess to throughout your writings: the “excessive pains about cleanliness” you took when young,32 the hunger for gossip and society (“This [frivolous] relative was the one I liked to associate with”), the concern with “the honor of the world,”33 and the “calculation” that leads some to seek out honor, not realizing that if it exists at all it is granted by others, and besides, “honor is itself lost by desiring it.”
Another anonymous suitor, identified only as “a person” who visited the monastery, “distracted” her more than anybody before him, and offered a friendship of which she was, while it lasted, “extremely fond.”34 Might the mystery companion have been Francisco de Guzmán, the eligible eldest son of a wealthy, aristocratic Castilian family? Her enjoyment feeling incompatible, once again, with the exigencies of honor, Teresa derived as much pain from this friendship as fun, despite certain associates “with great importunity assuring me that it was not wrong to see such a person.” That’s all very well, but how was such a perfectionist to cope with compromise?
At this point, Teresa, you experienced—for the first time?—a kind of seeing that is not owed to bodily eyes but to those of the soul, as you recalled twenty-six years later. Caught between fright and pleasure—halfway between your excitement in the person’s presence and your shame at infringing the paternal and religious interdict—the young woman that you were abruptly “saw.” With scientific exactitude, the writer of 1562–1565 details the nature of this vision and describes the two forms it took: the semblance of Christ and a toad.
With great severity, Christ appeared before me, making me understand what He regretted about the friendship. I saw Him with the eyes of my soul more clearly than I could have with the eyes of my body. And this vision left such an impression on me that, though more than twenty-six years have gone by, it seems to me it is still present. I was left very frightened and disturbed, and didn’t want to see that person any more.35
But then you doubted what you had seen, Teresa, for you were a rational woman, even if tempted by “noxious recreations.” “It did me much harm not to know that it was possible to see in other ways than with the bodily eyes.” Had it been an illusion, a chimera conjured up by the devil? “Although the feeling always remained with me that it was from God and not a fancy,” you hesitated: “I did not dare speak about this with anyone.”
Truth to tell, your early “visions” were not exclusively of the Holy Countenance. A coarser brand of “character” also featured: the toad, for example.
Once at another time, when with this same person, we saw coming toward us—and others who were there also saw it—something that looked like a large toad, moving much more quickly than toads usually do. In that part where it came from I cannot understand how there could have been a nasty little creature like that in the middle of the day, nor had there ever been one there before. The effect it had on me, it seems to me, was not without mystery; and neither did I ever forget this. Oh, the greatness of God! With how much care and pity You were warning me in every way, and how little it benefited me!36
Note that the writer does not attribute the toad to a vision; she says merely that “we saw” it, “we” being the couple she formed with her visitor and the others who were there. But she has the integrity to point out that no specimen of that size had ever been sighted before and that this abject apparition was without doubt a warning from God. The toad as the obverse, the other face in some sense, of Christ’s forbidding countenance as He appeared to her earlier?
Heads or tails: divine wrath and foul toad, prohibition and sex. The first visions related to us by Teresa crystallize at the intersection of her desire for the masculine body and her shame at falling short of the inevitable “point of honor.” She will have to banish guilt and secure her right to pleasure within a new construction, of which she will be the author if not altogether the inventor, since admittedly its inspiration lies in the Gospels.
Logically, necessarily, Teresa attempted to detach herself from these sinful attractions by becoming a devotee of the chaste adoptive father of her Beloved, Saint Joseph. The first discalced convent she founded, in Avila, was named for Saint Joseph and was followed by several more with the same patron.
I took for my advocate and lord the glorious Saint Joseph and earnestly recommended myself to him.…For since bearing the title of father, being the Lord’s tutor [subtext: this father is not a progenitor], Joseph could give the Child command.…I don’t know how one can think of the Queen of Angels and about all she went through with the Infant Jesus without giving thanks to Saint Joseph for the good assistance he then provided them both with.…He being who he is brought it about that I could rise and walk and not be crippled.37
The cult of Saint Joseph pervades the first pages of the Life, which tell how the novice effects a rapprochement with her own father via religion, a development parallel to the process whereby her erotic temptations and reactive health crises gradually give way before the emergent vision of an optimal father figure, at once sublimated (in Saint Joseph) and sensuous (in prayer as prescribed by Osuna). At that stage of the journey, her spiritual road will be to accept that a Father exists who neither judges nor desires her but is pleased to “adopt” her as she is, in all her love-starved, dolorous interiority—so much so that He acquiesces to her womanly passion for Him, thus releasing her from infatuation with attractive “persons” and from the concomitant dread of toads. This road will be a long one, and its stages will often need to be retraveled. Just now, however, battered by the physical and erotic storm, she hasn’t yet found the path, and her “visions” will be the occasion of hellish ordeals for some time to come.
How long had death been making its slow way in you, Teresa? Since your father’s lawsuit, with its diffuse threat of obliteration, the inevitable Marrano sacrifice? You met and desired death as a child, before trying to run away to be beheaded by the Moors; your encounter was more intimate when it came to the loss of your mother, Beatriz. After that you resolved to die to the world, by cloistering yourself in the Convent of the Incarnation. Your father’s death in 1543, a passing prepared by his induction into prayer, sounded the final knell.
Teresa, My Love Page 21