“You wanted to see it, and here it is!” crows Andrew. This time I’m inclined to agree: the tacky mummification of La Madre marks the high point of Catholicism and the beginning of its decline. Scenting my tacit accord, Andrew launches into a rant. “Examples abound everywhere, obviously, but your Teresa takes the cake, and I think you know it! This religion is a model for all the personality-cult peddlers who dreamed of absolute Truth incarnate on earth: whether fighting it or inspired by it, it’s all the same, they dream of it. Royalists, Bonapartists, communists, Maoists, fascists, Nazis, fundamentalists, bin- Ladenists, evangelists, creationists, the lot. Every despot sees a pope in the mirror, I can assure you! The Sun King, the Führer, the Little Father, the Duce—and, right here on this dry plateau, General Franco, the grand sponsor of national tourism with specialism in holy sites, who never went anywhere without the left hand of your roommate packed snugly in his pocket, you told me so yourself. And further allow me to point out that it was your precious Counter-Reformation that sowed the seed of the interactive spectacle, thought by cretins to be a modern invention. Look around, this is where Disneyland got started—for the entertainment of the humanoids aka ‘children of all ages’ who’ve overrun the planet! Just look at the kitsch: here’s where the Spectacle finally vanquished the Spirit. And from then on, the way was open to mass hypnosis in front of the TV. That’s what you, Sylvia, have got to wake up to here, if you can open your eyes at all. How could Catholicism ever offer the antidote to the poison it pioneered so brilliantly itself? Because that’s what you want us to believe, isn’t it! But how could it?” His blue eyes stare at me with lover-like fixity; I’d rather interpret it that way than suspect he’s making fun.
“Take it easy, will you? You should follow my example and read more about it,” I tell him with mock severity.
“Later.” He pulls me close and we kiss in a less than saintly manner. I’ve got over Bruno, though my American writer is quite mean enough to bring up the subject sooner or later. Teresa herself was a saint in a very special sense.
Juan brings us back down to earth.
“The bombers were from the suburbs of Leeds. Seemingly well-integrated Brits, who had had some further education in madrassas in Pakistan. Blair must be so proud of his multicultural model!” As a former Maoist Juan has no time for Blairism, and is glued to the radio whenever the political juncture looks insoluble. What times we live in!
“Thank goodness for the storks.” I’m unreservedly on Andrew’s side in this; he films them obsessively. Another artsy video is all we’ll get out of this trip, no use whatever for my research, I should have known!
I prefer to go alone to visit the convent and church of Our Lady of Grace, outside the city walls to the southwest, where don Alonso sent his daughter to school after her mother died. It’s my favorite Teresian site, and it doesn’t even show up in the guidebook; a handful of Avilans come to Mass here as if seeking the safety of a swallow’s nest hooked to the eaves of the hillside. The sisters’ gliding forms can barely be distinguished through the grilles. Those elderly bodies, cloistered and unseen, emit a musical twittering like eternal adolescents, head over heels about everything and nothing.
Beyond the ramparts to the north, near the Ajates district where stonecutters, weavers, and market gardeners once lived, the Monastery of the Incarnation has become a special station for Saint Teresa’s pilgrims. A clutch of dignified storks nests above the ancient door, and the clatter of their beaks, like wooden sticks knocking together, imparts an inhuman tension to the triumph of the bells. Did these migrants ever come in Teresa’s day? She only seemed to notice the doves, she even called her convents “dovecotes.” Was this to compare them to cages, crowded confinements, prisons? Not necessarily; Teresa says that she felt “very happy and at ease” in her parents’ house. Oddly enough, all that remains of the family hacienda on the wide Morana plain, near Avila, is the dovecote.
There’s not a dove or pigeon to be seen at the Incarnation, any more than inside the fortified town; only solemn storks. They look like black-and-white Carmelites mounted on red stilts, clacking gutturally about their raptures. The rosebushes in the neat courtyard never knew Teresa. Nettles used to grow there, and she would make bunches of them into stinging whips, believing that only the soul must enjoy bliss. Gazing out at the ramparts, she dreamed of water in this courtyard—cool water to refresh her mortified inner garden.
The building where Teresa spent thirty years of her life is spare and simple in a rustic way that induces meditation, and must have attracted many souls that were, like hers, disappointed by the world’s stupidity. The cloister was built, it was said, on ground that once contained a Jewish ossuary. This was not the only fateful sign: the monastery chapel was inaugurated on the same day as Teresa was baptized, April 4, 1515.
In a reconstructed cell we are shown an austere cot, with a wooden pillow. Unlike many other religious houses, the Incarnation lacked wealthy patrons, and so the garden was surrounded by plain clay walls, and the rooms and tiny cells were whitewashed. A flimsy roof of abutting tiles covered the choir. Repairs, extensions, or modest improvements would drag on for years, and the nuns sometimes had to be housed elsewhere for works to continue. In winter, snowflakes would fall on their breviaries; in summer, they hid from the heat behind closed shutters, in a dark, damp purgatory where you could hardly see to read your holy book. Faith was invigorated by these trials. The call to matins came two hours before sunrise; lauds and prime were sung before first Mass, vespers in midafternoon, and compline at evening, before retiring. Terce, sext, and none were also chanted at their due hour, so that each occupation was part and parcel of worship. Holiness, cleanliness, decency: these humble premises sought to be worthy of Carmelite purity and to reflect it. Teresa, supremely mindful of cleanliness in both the literal and the figurative sense, made sure of it by setting exacting standards, before and after her appointment as prioress in October 1571.
A rough cherrywood bench, seemingly the work of a country carpenter, serves as the Communion table in the lower choir. Two grilles rise above it, like those in the parlor, from behind which the nuns can follow Mass. That narrow doorway to the left, generally used by cleaners and suppliers, is the one Teresa was forced to pass through when she returned to her former convent to take up her duties as prioress. Since the community’s susceptibilities forbade the reformer to use the main entrance, she had no choice but to take this lowly, humiliating alternative. Yet I want to think that she didn’t particularly resent it; on the contrary, she took every slight as a sign of being “chosen.”
A fifteenth-century painting hangs at the entrance to the choir in the lower cloister, a naïf work from an early Beguine establishment. I decide I like it. The Virgin is shown sheltering Carmelite monks and nuns under her cloak—a subject that was very powerfully treated, too, by Piero della Francesca.3 This Madre, protecting and dominating her sisters and confessors on the wall of the Incarnation in Avila, bearing the Infant Jesus in her heart and recalling a winged angel in her regal cloak, its tips outspread by two cherubs—is she only Mary? Or is she already Teresa, following her way of perfection from prayer to prayer toward a serenity fit for a queen?
Silence was the rule in the chapel, the choir, the refectory, and the dormitory. Compared to the majestic, frugal austerity that enveloped this tension-ridden little world during the Golden Age, the kitchens look cheerful and cozy, with ceilings that graze the tops of our heads. Copper pans hang next to musical instruments: the community of 190 women must have had great giggles and gossips behind the double bars of the parlors or between prayers.
Juan smacks his lips at the sight of the pots and pans.
“Oh, look! Everything they needed to rustle up a wicked salpicón!” Andrew chuckles, and I join in with slurping noises. Juan riffs on, inspired by the kitchen.
Since giving himself the title of Doctor of Low Food, our Golden Age specialist has got the bit between his teeth.4 Historians, it seems, recently discov
ered that before you can have any notion of what people thought, you’ve got to know what they ate. Sancho Panza, for instance, was partial to salpicón de vaca—cow’s meat salad—garnished with onions and seasoned with pepper, pimentos, or crushed peppercorns, and sometimes vinaigrette, with boiled calves’ feet on the side. Juan pauses, beaming, intent on making our mouths water. I demur: “That might be all very well for Sancho, and maybe the Don, but Teresa…”
This gets him going again, as if trying to block out the shock of Al Qaida with tantalizing evocations of food.
“Well, the ingredients varied according to class. Mutton cost more than beef, and a lot more than cow. Basically it’s easy, you chop it, salt it, and boil to a bit of a mush. Like what they call a ‘melting pot.’ So picture a conventful of nuns, what do they get up to after feeding their souls? They prepare a delicious salpicón, that’s what. A chunk of hock bacon and some chopped onion goes in with the boiled cow, then you add pepper, salt, vinegar, and some raw onion rings on top: delicious! With extra spices sprinkled on, it was a popular baroque delicacy very like the French saupiquet. Same root, yes. Saumure, saucisson, German sauerbraten, English sausage, sauce…From sau or sal-, salami, salmagundi, salmi, and so on. It’s all in the salpicado, isn’t it, the sprinkling. Which being a function of the weather and the mood of the cook, these ones here must have piled it on, in their low-ceilinged hole, either freezing or baking to death!”
What does he know? Between the fruits of the earth sustaining Teresa and the unappetizing stew described in the Quixote, I’m not hungry. I wander away. To each his drug, to each his taste wars…Juan isn’t done with it, though. He combs all the restaurants in Avila in search of salpicón. The waiters shrug pityingly: local cuisine means cured ham and sangría, you can whistle for the low food of the Golden Age. Even in Avila, globish rules!
But Juan does score one hit. Avilan bakers have not forgotten the delectable sweets the sisters used to make, and you can still buy yemas de Santa Teresa, a rich confection involving twelve egg yolks, 175 grams of sugar, fourteen spoonfuls of water, a stick of cinnamon, and the zest of a lemon.
The cloister Rule had been relaxed, as everyone knows, and one result was that it became easier to get permission from the mother superior for extramural leave. Since money was tight, an absent nun allowed significant savings to be made; at any rate, this was the argument used to justify the laxity the future foundress would condemn before reinstating the rigors of the Primitive Rule. Meanwhile Teresa herself took several, sometimes lengthy, breaks outside the convent (six months in Toledo staying with Luisa de la Cerda, three years in the home of Guiomar de Ulloa). Inside, it’s no exaggeration to say that the nuns were cloistered or locked away behind those finely wrought bars. Their dovecote was indeed a cage, allowing little squares of light and air to filter through the ingenious grilles behind which a Carmelite could see without being seen, leaving the visitor clinging to the sound of her voice. For extra security there was always a third, a chaperone nun who presided over parlor conversations. But, like every rule on earth, the Rule only existed to be circumvented, and the sisters at the Incarnation were good at circumventing it: the young Teresa couldn’t help but notice, as we’ve seen.
The Incarnation was not known to be particularly forbidding, then, and word soon got around town that a most agreeable Carmelite could be encountered there. The parlor became the site of maximum temptation, and also, now and then, of the most decisive liberation.
It was here that Teresa held her long confabulations with John of the Cross, whose “miraculous” chair, miraculously preserved, is a big draw for tourists: they picture it hovering in the air as it is said to have done one day when the two friends and reformers talked themselves into a state of ecstasy over the mystery of the Trinity. It was here, too, that the noble and influential lady Guiomar de Ulloa announced the arrival in Avila of the great Franciscan contemplative, Pedro de Alcántara. Doña Guiomar obtained leave for Teresa to spend a week at her house so that the saintly friar (one of whose self-imposed mortifications was never to lay eyes on a woman) might vouchsafe, by his righteous authority, that Teresa’s visions really did come from God. Many other visitors came here to meet her, some of them well-known, like Francisco de Borja5—who urged her to persevere in silent prayer despite the doubts of her current confessor—or certain princesses well placed at Court. And let us not forget the attentions of the “person” in whose company she saw the toad…
We continue our exploration of the old convent. This tidy museum and its piously exhibited relics mean little unless they send a modern visitor back to the writings. Well, do they? Not if Juan and Andrew are anything to go by, but it doesn’t bother me; let them be instructed, entertained, or bored by what they call my “fetish saints.” Everyone sees what they can or want to understand. Perhaps it was necessary to institute this baroque cult in order to protect La Madre’s works from creeping oblivion, and gold-sprayed mummification is, I’m sure, effective for enriching the faith of many weary pilgrims from Portugal or Valencia who follow in the footsteps of the saint inside their buses, on the trail of values that elude them. And yet it’s the living Teresa, alive though my reading of her books, that I am trying to conjure back—into this space between its stark walls, amid the murmurous bustle of mothers trying to keep their kids from stampeding, and even into the flight of those impertinent storks, not content with flapping slowly over these haunted halls but seemingly settled in the saint’s very lap.
“Those two-tone clickety guys were the only Carmelites around, in the end,” says Andrew, true to type. “No, I take that back: they were the only living creatures of any kind! Because those pilgrims of yours, frankly…Sacred space is fast turning into a desert, isn’t it?”
I don’t say anything. What space? Jokers, admirers, visitors, pilgrims, storks—Teresa tears us all away from our spaces, from space itself, to deposit us in time.
Teresa’s greatest “torment” as a novice was not undergone in that aseptic cell reconstructed around a few of her belongings. I can’t help smiling at her travails, but not callously. Let’s see. The young woman was mystified by the “special love” she felt for anyone who preached “well and with spirit,” but “without striving for the love myself, so I didn’t know where it came from.” At all events the pretty young recruit “eagerly” listened to every sermon, even when “the preaching was not good.” “When it was good, the sermon was for me a very special recreation.” A guilty one, she means. Why so? Perhaps because this pleasure was prompted by a human, an all too human, factor—the personal charms of God’s representative rather than the quality of his message. My poor, supplicant Teresa, ever torn between duty and pleasure, you won’t miss out on a single one of the “torments” so familiar to neurotics! “On the one hand I found great comfort in sermons, while on the other I was tormented…I begged the Lord to help me.”6
Teresa felt restless, inadequate, unsure of her vocation.
I didn’t understand that all is of little benefit if we do not take away completely the trust we have in ourselves and place it in God.
I wanted to live (for I well understood that I was not living but was struggling with a shadow of death), but I had no one to give me life, and I was unable to catch hold of it.7
Can this weary soul, impatient to be re-converted, ever find the extremity which will be her road? The great event takes place at last, after eighteen years spent “in this battle and conflict between friendship with God and friendship with the world,”8 one Lenten day in 1554.
Chapter 12
“CRISTO COMO HOMBRE”
Let Him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth.…I confess that the passage has many meanings. But the soul that is enkindled with a love that makes it mad [que la desatina] desires nothing else than to say those words.…God help me! Why are we surprised? [¿Qué nos espanta?] Isn’t the deed more admirable?
Teresa of Avila, Meditations on the Song of Songs
One day entering the oratory
I saw a statue [una imagen] they had borrowed for a certain feast to be celebrated in the house. It represented the much wounded Christ and was very devotional, so that beholding it I was utterly distressed in seeing Him that way, for it well represented what He suffered for us. I felt so keenly aware of how poorly I thanked Him for those wounds that, it seems to me, my heart broke. Beseeching Him to strengthen me once and for all that I might not offend Him, I threw myself down before Him with the greatest outpouring of tears.1
This was not yet a vision; it was a carved image, a work representing the Beloved—“In this very place, Juan! You see, Andrew?”—which the approaching feast day caused to be placed in the oratory of the Incarnation, where it caught the nun’s eye. The sight of Jesus moves her, distresses her utterly [toda me turbó de verle tal]. What perturbs her so? His “wounds” and His weals, of course, His sweat and His grief. Teresa interiorizes this bleeding, hurting, body of a man: “Since I could not reflect discursively with the intellect, I strove to represent Christ within me [procuraba representar a Cristo dentro de mí]…it seemed to me that being alone and afflicted, as a person in need, He had to accept me.”2
It was not enough for Teresa to identify with a man in pain, underwriting her own feminine anguish. “I could only think about Christ as He was as man (Yo sólo podía pensar en Cristo como hombre).”3 She must bring him literally inside, and the man of the statue—far less tortured, incidentally, than a Christ by Matthias Grünewald—now dwells in the Carmelite’s entrails.4 But the God-man is also all around her, and His presence contains her “so that I could in no way doubt He was within me or I totally immersed in Him” [yo toda engolfada en Él]5.
Teresa, My Love Page 25