The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  XII

  THE REFORMER AND Foundress had no illusions at all on the subject of women in general or of nuns in particular. Her opinion of women’s intellectual endowments was low. She was no feminist. Women, she says, need no more than what their intelligence is capable of. Their constitutions are weak, and the love of self that reigns in them is very subtle. They are poor weak women, inhabiting little dovecotes. Their wits are dull; their foibles astonish even her at times; she knows by experience what women are when a number get together, and may God deliver us from it! She is “amused at your Reverence declaring that you could see her character at a glance,” and assures him that women are not so easy to understand; he may hear their confessions for many a year and be astonished at the end to find how little he really knows about them. As for nuns, she knows that they do not shed their feminine weaknesses on taking the habit, and since it is with nuns that she is principally concerned, her scathing remarks occur passim throughout her writings. She has learned to mistrust them and their experiences; nor can you trust what they say, for if they want to do a thing they will find a thousand reasons for it. (No se crea de monjas!) It is not advisable to impose regulations in too much detail, since some sisters never come to an end of their scruples; thus, will Father Gracian please ordain that stockings may either be of coarse linen thread or worsted, and leave given to wear them; wimples, also, may be of linen instead of the prescribed hempen cloth. He might also abolish Father Pedro Hernandez’ act forbidding the nuns to eat eggs or bread for their collation, as she does not want additions to the law of the Church which will make nuns over-scrupulous and harm them; at the same time, she takes the opportunity of reminding Father Gracian, in a broad hint, that Father Hernandez never made new regulations without telling her and discussing them with her first. Father Gracian and Father Mariano must be very wary indeed. Father Gracian is to attend to what she says, and to believe that she understands women’s whims better than he does. Nuns tell tales against one another, and even against their Prioress: this propensity must be checked. There is more quiet and concord where nuns are few. Severity is strongly needed, and although there may be an outcry for a few days most of the nuns will be silent if they see that others are punished, for most women are naturally timid. With tiresomeness or discontent she has of course no patience. She knows what a discontented nun is, and dreads her more than a host of devils. She would like to know what Sister Francisco means by the great strength she says God gives her, as she does not explain it. How tiresome this is! Sister San Francisco gives way to tears before the other nuns and they see her continually writing. That which she writes is to be taken away and sent to Teresa. As for a nun who has apparently gone out of her mind, perhaps she would leave off screaming if she were to be slapped, and in any case it would do her no harm. Some nuns have a mania for doing penances with neither moderation nor discretion; this lasts two days, and then the Devil makes them fancy that penance makes them ill. They fancy that their head aches, and absent themselves from choir one day because it aches, the next day because it has ached, and three more lest it should ache again. Anything in the nature of showing off also enraged her; excessive mortifications and demonstrations of piety impressed her so little that it is difficult to credit the legend that she once entered the refectory on all-fours, led on a rope by a sister, or loaded her back with the panniers of a beast of burden. Grotesquely suitable though the picture is to sixteenth-century Spain, it accords not at all with the personality of Teresa. It is clear that she would stand no nonsense, and in a fit of exasperation she writes to one of her Prioresses that had two troublesome nuns been near her, Teresa, they would not have undergone so many extraordinary experiences. Yet she did, oddly enough, believe that many more graces were given to women than to men, and at times she could relapse into a charming and maternal tenderness, when she could remark that her nuns were so delighted (with a change of house) that they seemed “just like little lizards coming out into the sun in summer time.”

  The maxims she wrote out for the guidance of her nuns are, as might be expected, full of common sense. Naturally, many of them are concerned with spiritual matters, but Teresa was not the woman to neglect precepts of human wisdom and social behaviour. When you are with many people, say little. Never be importunate, especially about things of little moment. Never excuse yourself except when it is most probable that you are in the right. Never affirm anything unless you are sure that it is true. Consider how quickly people change, and how little one can trust them; yet, listen to ill of no one and speak ill of no one save yourself, and think not of the faults of others but of their virtues and of your own faults. Fall in with the mood of the person to whom you are speaking; be happy with those who are happy and sad with those who are sad. Never do anything which you could not do in the sight of all.

  It was this humanity which made her beloved as well as feared. In cold weather—and it can be bitterly cold at Avila or Toledo—her daughters would try to give her their own coverings for extra warmth. Sometimes, when they saw that she was tired, they would sing her to sleep. On other, more cheerful evenings, they would follow her to her cell and importune her to return to them for their entertainment. “Is your Reverence not coming to us?” and she answered laughingly, “Do you wish it, daughter? well, let us go together.” Sometimes she played the tambourine and danced with them—an unexpected picture. There can be no doubt at all that Teresa was an exceptionally charming woman who inspired deep affection, which was sometimes sudden but always lasting; and that apart from her qualities of saintliness, apart even from the liveliness of her mind and the fascination of her conversation, the magnet which drew this response was her own warm humanity. It was all very well for her to preach a fine detachment from worldly affections: she did not, she could not, live up to her own precepts in the least. She fussed and worried unendingly over her brothers, their children, their marriages, their property, their law-suits, and, of course, their souls. But her anxieties were by no means confined to their souls. Her nephew Francisco is to marry Doña Orofrisia de Mendoza y de Castilla; she is related to the dukes of Albuquerque and Infantazgo, also to the marquises de las Navas and de Velada; no one in Spain comes of better blood; it is a highly satisfactory marriage (incidentally the bride is beautiful and very sensible), but what about the money due to Francisco from Peru? His brother must see about it immediately, or Francisco will not be able to maintain his rank. Then there were her friends, both secular and religious; an astonishing number. Reading her letters, or her own history of her Foundations, she seems to be perpetually picking up new people and attaching them to herself. How she found time for them all, with the innumerable things she had to do, remains a wonder; she founded seventeen convents in less than twenty years, contending with the most complicated difficulties, settling and directing every detail; she was concerned in the foundation of a number of monasteries for friars as well; she undertook those long, fatiguing, and often dangerous journeys all over Spain; she wrote a quantity of books; she suffered from the interruption of constant illness; yet the letters continue to pour out in a torrent, intimate, affectionate, upbraiding, practical, dashing from subject to subject, breathless, (“Alas, I ought to write with both hands in order not to omit one subject for another”); she hopes she will manage to write a short letter this time, but she never does; they flow on and on, in a large hand on single open sheets, folded and sealed afterwards with one of her two seals, the monogram J.H.S. or a skull, (but as she did not like the skull, her brother must send the other one, “for I cannot endure this death’s head”); the spelling is phonetic, punctuation totally disregarded save for an occasional upright line in place of a full-stop, so that the whole letter reads as a single sentence and the recipient sometimes had to use his own discretion in interpreting what the saint really meant. “I never revise my letters,” she writes; “if any letters in the words are missing, fill them in. One sees at once what the words are meant for and it would be loss of time to correct the
m.” She is particular about her pens: her nephew must send her some well-cut ones, for she has changed pens so many times during the course of the letter that the handwriting will look worse than usual but “much to my disgust and trouble” there are none to be got in Toledo. Sometimes she employs a secretary, whose task must have been as alarming as it was inspiring, for Teresa much disliked not writing to her friends herself and also we may suppose that her mind worked quite as rapidly in dictation as in transcribing by her own hand. One is not surprised to hear that one of these secretaries “stands in great need of prayer,” or that another one, in understandable haste, learns to write by a miracle, after being told to copy one of Teresa’s letters.

  Her correspondents do not have an easy time either, and one surmises that the arrival of the courier bearing one of her enormous missives produced an anxious as well as a pleasurable flutter. For one thing, the letter must be answered, and answered quickly, in detail, and legibly. Whatever Teresa’s own handwriting might be like she insisted that any report should be “clearly written so that I am not obliged to copy it out.” Exaggerations, also, are intolerable; the writer may think that her rhodomontades are not falsehoods, but such a style is far from perfect; let her write frankly, and amend her style, and not spin out her letters, and then Teresa will be satisfied with her. But what really arouses her wrath is to get no reply at all. Has Fray Antonio taken a vow not to answer her letters? She will not write to him again, for it seems that she might as well talk to a deaf-mute. As for Father Gracian, “Oh, God help me, what a provoking character you have! I declare I must be very virtuous to write to you, and the worst of it is that you are infecting the Licentiate Padilla, for, like you, he neither writes nor sends me any news of himself. God forgive you both! When I consider the difficulties you have left me in and how forgetful you are of everything, I do not know what to think except ‘Cursed is the man that puts his trust in man.’” Surely somewhat unusual language for a nun to use to her confessor. And it is not only the dilatoriness of her correspondents which brings them a scolding. The long-suffering Father Gracian is constantly getting into trouble. He is informed that his letter would have been capital had he left Latin quotations alone. Then she is very much annoyed that he should have gone away into Andalusia, leaving her at Burgos. Fray Mariano too, she cannot understand why he has not sent a reply by the carter, nor can she understand what he is doing in Madrid and why he is not staying with the Mitigated friars. He is not to argue with the Archbishop; and he is to speak with restraint when he has to complain of anyone, for she fears he is careless, being so extremely frank. The Father Provincial of the Company of Jesus receives an answer couched in terms of such indignation that he is obliged to beg her to read his letter again, when her feelings have subsided; then she may take it in a kindlier way. Her reply shows, however, that she was not in the least mollified. Her Prioresses fare no better. Mother Mary of St. Joseph is informed that Teresa would have considered it a piece of good fortune if she could have managed to pass through Seville in order to scold her to her heart’s content. The Prioress at Valladolid is reminded that she is “a very insignificant person in yourself.” The Prioress at Granada receives a letter (it occupies eight pages of print) of such violent castigation that it almost produces a sense of vicarious guilt in the modern reader. Nor was her severity inadvertent, or the result of dashing off her epistles at top speed with an overheated pen, for more than once she remarks quite complacently that she has written “terrible things” and wonders whether her correspondent will ever speak to her again. No wonder that a harassed Corregidor was driven finally into saying, “Let it be done at once. In spite of ourselves, we are all obliged to do whatever she wants.”

  The tone she sometimes adopts towards the All-Highest is startlingly similar, for, like all people of strong personality, her accent is always unmistakable; her utterances always in her own authentic voice. In this she resembled, say, Dr. Johnson or the Duke of Wellington. Is she indeed addressing God, or some recalcitrant friar? Hear her speak. Charged by our Lord with a message to deliver to a certain person, a type of mission she particularly disliked, she retorted, “Why dost Thou give me this trouble? Canst Thou not speak directly to that person?” On another occasion she was heard on a river-bank informing God that the reason He had so few friends was that He treated them so badly, a theory which seemed fixed in her mind, for she writes also to Father Gracian saying that although “God treats His friends terribly, He does them no wrong for He served His Son in the same way.”

  But when she chose to be affectionate, how gracious she could be! At those times she must surely have been forgiven all the lashes of the whip she could coil round the wincing body of her victims. Of her deliberate compliments it was said that she always put a grain of pepper into them, but when no compliment was intended, and nothing but her warm heart overflowed, there was no pepper, no sting, nothing but the spontaneity of love like the caressing sun. There was something truly maternal and protective about Teresa in her personal relationships. No detail concerning her friends was too small to arouse her interest and concern. She is extremely worried to hear that Father Gracian has fallen off his mule; she does not know what sort of a mount it is, nor why he thinks it necessary to travel ten leagues a day, which on a pack-saddle is enough to kill him; but in any case she thinks he ought to be strapped on to prevent his tumbles. God grant his fall has not injured him! And has it occurred to him to wear more clothes now that the weather is cold? Five years later she is still worrying about his mount; she is afraid the little mule is not suited to him, though, indeed, she is not so frightened of his falling off the little mule as off a larger animal which might unseat him. Still, she thinks it would be well for him to buy a good one. She sends him a bezoar stone to wear round his neck, as an antidote against poison. When he leaves her at Palencia she sends a letter after him, asking if he does not see how short a time her happiness has lasted; she had hoped to undertake her next journey in his company, but “O my Father! thank God for having given you such charming manners that no one else seems to fill your place.” She can tease him too, but gently: “Whenever I recall your words I am amused at the solemn manner in which you declared that I must not judge my superior. O my Father, how little need there was for you to swear, even like a saint much less like a muleteer.…” Father Gracian was perhaps her favourite,—early in their acquaintance she had written that he was perfect in her eyes,—but others had their share of her attention. She is extremely sorry that Father Mariano is so delicate; Father Gracian must see to it that he eats well, and must on no account allow him to go to Rome until he is stronger. Don Francisco de Salcedo must not repeat so often that he is growing old, for it cuts her to the heart. Mother Mary of St. Joseph, the one who escaped a verbal scolding, receives sudden messages which must have provided a more than adequate compensation: “I cannot tell you why I love you so much.… I assure you that if you love me dearly, I love you in return and like to hear you tell me so. How natural it is to us to wish for a return!” How natural indeed; but the exclamation comes somewhat unexpectedly from one whom we have been taught to regard as an austere and other-worldly visionary. This same visionary is concerned about Mother Mary’s clothing; how foolish she is to wear a woollen tunic in summer! She will please take it off directly she receives this letter. Nor can the saint rise superior to a rather childish greediness. She hopes that Father Gracian will not forget to send her her Easter cake,—the equivalent of our Easter egg, it was made of eggs baked in dough. As for the butter that a friend has sent her, it tasted very nice, and she will accept it on condition that she may be given some more when it is particularly fine. The quinces which came with the butter were delicious too. She hears that the aloja (a kind of metheglin, or spiced mead) is very good at Valladolid, but fears she will not get any. And there are constant references to sweets, sardines, partridges, radishes, lettuces, apples, orange-flower water; all gifts which had a special value in the eyes of one who had renounced
her birthright of good-living in exchange for the utmost poverty, and whose diet moreover was frequently insufficient. Teresa had been born with a liking for agreeable things, and although her vow forbade them she was far too human ever to turn herself into a sour and disapproving ascetic. Works of art appealed to her; she is “delighted with the charming things sent for the Administrator”; the small goblet is the daintiest she ever saw, and she can see no harm in his drinking from such a graceful little tankard, although his habit is of serge. Conversely, she aptly remarks that a patio at Seville looks as though it were built of iced sugar; those who have seen some patios in Seville will know how true the description is. In spite of her appreciation, however, she was sometimes a little casual; she does not know why the two emerald rings and the large A gnus Dei cannot be found; she cannot remember where she put them, nor whether they were ever handed to her at all.…