Teresa, my Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

TERESA. Since our first meeting in Medina in 1567—when you, Father, were still a young student in Salamanca—I recognized in you the spiritual authority we needed, by God’s grace. (Shifting her chair away from his.) I also realized straight away that your paternity would not be easy to deal with. You wanted to become a Carthusian, but I quickly made you see that you could be one, to perfection, with me. Do you remember what you replied? “I give you my word, on condition I don’t have to wait too long.”

JOHN OF THE CROSS, after a silence. “For, the farther the soul progresses in spirituality, the more it ceases from the operation of the faculties in particular acts, since it becomes more and more occupied in one act that is general and pure.”⁴ “The soul no longer enjoys that food of sense, as we have said; it needs not this but another food, which is more delicate, more interior, and partaking less of the nature of sense,”⁵ full of “peace and rest of interior quiet.” (He is motionless, eyes fixed not on her but on the glowing red space.)

TERESA. I expounded on these delicate matters long before you did, my little Seneca. Recall that by 1567 I had already written the book of my Life and The Way of Perfection. (No longer at death’s door, voice calm and authoritative.) It’s true that God accorded me the spiritual marriage in November 1572, and your arrival six months earlier did have something to do with it; still, I was already prepared, I had been ready ever since my re-conversion. I know you don’t dispute it, but I’d rather set the record straight once more before I die, seeing how absorbed you are by that flame…(Gazing at the brazier herself.) You didn’t write anything before my Interior Castle, and that’s a fact. (Shifting her chair back nearer to his.) The life of the spirit—which I taught you—arises from the most intimate part of the soul. It burns, and how! I am a connoisseur of fire, contrary to what you might expect from the voluble female you suspect me to be. Water is my element, I can’t help that, but it doesn’t prevent me from acceding to the soaring of the flame. You have often witnessed it yourself. For the spark that suddenly begins to blaze and shoots up like something extremely delicate to the higher plane that pleases the Lord is of the same nature as the fire that remains beneath. “It seems to be a flight, for I don’t know what else to compare it to.”⁶

JOHN OF THE CROSS. “Withdrawn from pleasure and contentment.”⁷ (Pause.) Nothing! Nothing! I would give up all I am for the sake of Christ! “Love is begotten in a heart that has no love.”⁸

TERESA, in a soft voice, eyes turned inward. Expiation, are you summoning me to expiation? I know…I’ve tried everything…it’ll never be enough.…But I insist on it right up to the final pages of the Castle: “What I conclude with, Sisters, is that we shouldn’t build castles in the air,” or towers without a foundation; and remember that there is no foundation during this short life other than to “offer the Lord interiorly and exteriorly the sacrifice we can.”¹⁰ What generations to come will retain of our experience as Carmelites is the acerbic taste of a noble atonement, isn’t that right, Father? Are you thinking, like me, of the Carmelites of Compiègne, in the Dialogues screenplay by Bernanos?

MOTHER MARIE. There is no horror but in crime, and in the sacrifice of innocent lives the horror is expunged, and the crime itself restored to the order of divine charity.…¹¹

JOHN OF THE CROSS. O sweet cautery!

The two friends hear the court pronounce the death sentence on sixteen Carmelites for holding counterrevolutionary meetings. Then they watch the nuns climb down from the tumbril at the foot of the guillotine in the place de la Révolution. Young Blanche de la Force advances calmly, her face shows no fear. Suddenly she breaks into song: “Deo Patri sit Gloria, et Filio, qui a mortuis surrexit, ac Paraclito, in saeculorum saecula.” Blanche becomes lost among the crowd, along with the rest of the sisters.

TERESA, after a silence. The feminist philosopher Edith Stein, who became Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, remembered them too, inevitably, as she offered herself up for God. “Come, we go for our people,” she told her sister Rosa, on August 2, 1942, as the Gestapo hustled them out of the Carmel of Echt, in Holland, where they had taken refuge.¹² She refused all privileges, unwilling to be an exception to her people’s fate or take advantage of having been baptized.…Like the Carmelites of Compiègne, she was thinking of you, Father, when she chose this self-sacrifice.…I’m sure of it…more of you than of me, anyway. There will be periods like that, in the history of men and women, when chastisement will be salutary. “With his stripes we are healed,” the prophet Isaiah said.¹³ The concentration of evil will be such that martyrs will be needed to testify that the relationship between Heaven and earth has broken down.…Had I lived then, and had they sewn a yellow star onto my sleeve, I would have behaved exactly like Sister Teresa Benedicta, don’t you think?…I hope I would have taken that decision, or done something similar like joining the Resistance or the maquis.…Not really the Carmelite style, I grant. But who knows? I’m asking you, as an expert in martyrdoms.…

(A large photograph of Edith Stein floats above the walls of Avila.)

TERESA, voice breaks, then steadies. Look at that smile.…The strength, the steadfastness that supported her along the road to Auschwitz.…She must have known she’d enlisted in the struggle between Christ and Antichrist. Why, on Palm Sunday 1939, she gave her prioress a note requesting to be given up as an offering. (Reads.) “Dear Mother, permit me to offer myself up to the sacred heart of Jesus as the expiatory victim for true peace, so that the reign of the Antichrist might collapse if possible without another world war, and a new order may be established. I would like to do it today, for we are at the eleventh hour. I know I am nothing, but Jesus wishes it, and He will surely call many others in these days.”¹⁴ All for the love of God, indeed…“the love that gives itself unstintingly,” as she wrote in a little biography of me, Love for Love’s Sake, while she was still only a postulant at the Carmel of Cologne, so you see…I could have written those words, couldn’t I?…I feel fulfilled, dear John, I can say this to you, at having been the inspiration for such a soul, who harbors divine grace within her so absolutely.…Do you think I’m committing the sin of pride, out of stupid vanity—that this is too much honra for the wretched creature that I am? (Sidelong glance at the photograph of Edith Stein as a young philosophy student, passing swiftly over the Avilan fortress.)

TERESA, in a melancholic and then assured voice. I think so too, you know I do, my sweet Seneca, I have often atoned, for far more than you can imagine, although it doesn’t stop me sensing the Guest inside of me, that’s just how it is.…Must one offer oneself up as a holocaust to appease the wrath of God, as Bernanos has the Carmelite prioress decide, during the Terror of 1794? Did the Lamb of God want Sister Teresa Benedicta to become another mystic Lamb, to be immolated by the Nazis, so that the profound joy and inner gaiety with which she submitted to His will at the blackest moment of that black night could burst back over the world to save even the most hardened sinner, and perhaps redeem the criminal himself? Do you know? She will write that “the mania for suffering caused by a perverse lust for pain differs completely from the desire to suffer in expiation,”¹⁵ and I believe her, of course. Although my path was a different one, and different also to yours, dear friend, for all your clear complicities. Sacrifice, suffering, obedience, and profound humility, of course…the fact of sin demands them.…But martyrdom?…Hombre como Cristo? What do you say? God loved me as something other than a Lamb, He loved me as a Bride and was content to demand works, works, and more works from me.…He bathed me and inflamed me and I wanted to enkindle you all with celestial fire…I wanted to become a perpetual spur to virtue…I mean, to love.…¹⁶ You can be Stein’s Science of the Cross, and I, the Hidden Spring.…¹⁷ Don’t pull that face.…All right, it’s not so simple! We are converging, though. Saint Teresa Benedicta will experience our reunion in herself.…We’ll come together in her, do you see? It diverts me to argue with you today, my good friend, just for the pleasure of getting closer to you, I know you understand.…In a nutshell, you’ll be most read in times of war, and I in times of peace…if such a thing exists.…(Moves her chair nearer, he doesn’t budge, doesn’t look at her.) In the Love of the Other, it does. (Tranquil face, pensive smile.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS, immobile in his love and as if absent, surrendered to his dark night. O delightful wound!

TERESA, shrinks back, straightens up and presses her head against the back of her chair. Here it comes again, that feeling I always had in your company, Father: dare I tell you aloud, by now? I am frightened by the spell you cast. How grateful I was to your paternity for founding the first discalced male monastery in Valladolid in 1568! But I know you felt snubbed when I wrote more about Prior Antonio de Jesús than about you, in relation to the foundation at Medina del Campo, and didn’t even mention you in connection with Granada. And yet you are everywhere in my pages: that wounded deer, for instance, slaking her thirst in the living waters;¹⁸ or that poor little butterfly so full of apprehension that everything alarms it and makes it take flight before the Lord has a chance to fortify it, enlarge it, and render it capable.¹⁹ It’s partly me, but very much you: you’ll be recognized in those figures one day. Excuse me for prophesying, I do it sometimes, I’m sorry, it’s embarrassing, you know how your Madre is.…But how can I refer to you but through secret analogies, when the sweet perfection of your suffering body often impressed upon my soul your own lovely pains and froze me with fright: you can understand my trepidation, can’t you, dear John? Oh, and those death’s-heads, those skulls in Pastrana! When all’s said and done it’s the Trinity that separates us, Father. I don’t feel it in quite the way you do, and your paternity doesn’t die of it the way I do.

JOHN OF THE CROSS. “I know that the stream proceeding from these two

TERESA. Look here, my brother! Although I am a woman and haven’t studied Latin, I try to comprehend the Mystery you describe so well. (Reads.) “I was reflecting today upon how, since they were so united, the Son alone could have taken human flesh…these are grandeurs which make the soul again desire to be free from this body that hinders their enjoyment.”²² That’s what you’re saying, too, yes or no?

JOHN OF THE CROSS. “In the beginning the Word

TERESA, fast. Father and Son, united in equality and excellence: I see that. The more love is one, the more infinite it is; I’m with you there, too. But what equality, what excellence? And how does this infinity become concretely plural among the Three Persons, and then in our souls? (Pause.) Oh, Father, please don’t scold me for splitting hairs; unworthy woman I am, and fleshly with it, I don’t want to make a mistake. As you know, I would go “to the ends of the earth as long as it were out of obedience.”²⁴

JOHN OF THE CROSS. “They were meant for the Son

TERESA, settling back into her chair, which will not levitate. Well said! Gospel truth! And yet it would seem that I took the opposite path to yours. One day, “I was given understanding of how the Father receives within our soul the most holy Body of Christ.”²⁶ Have you tried it, my great Seneca? (Thoughtfully.) Your vision is pure and intellectual, I know, you refrain from detailing ecstasies and raptures, you prefer only to explain the words, or rather your own stanzas, as befits a learned man. (Knowing smile.) You have no time for physical apprehensions and manifestations. (Pause.) Whereas me, I am a scruffy sparrow rather than a golden eagle.…I try to be inseparable from Jesus’s humanity, inside my flesh and its retinue of visions, revelations, words.…Your unsullied way is one of darkness, death, and desolation. A wholesale negation that peters out exhausted in a purified tranquility, a terrible, pitch-black peace. Like you I started off with pain, loss and separation. (Pause.) In my banishment as I moved toward the Spouse, ecstasy emptied me of myself. (Long pause.)

TERESA, in an anxious voice. Do you think, Father, that I allot too little space for the Holy Spirit? That I only mention it when a great scholar like yourself steers me back onto the straight and narrow? (Pause, short laugh.) Oh, but I said that in the Life…that’s the meaning of the dove…of course!²⁷

TERESA, fast. I can see you coming, with your pure-man’s objections to the base woman I am! That Christocentric Teresa, not theocentric enough—that’s what people will say, and I expect them to. Still, I often wrote and here repeat that when the Persons of the Trinity “take human flesh” in my soul, I felt a kind of obstacle to seeing three of them (parece me hacía algún impedimento ver tres Personas):²⁸ Not easy, for I am a creature, and a sinner.

TERESA. Quite quickly, however, the Lord filled me with His presence. “In emptying my soul of all that is creature and detaching myself for the love of God, the same Lord will fill it with Himself.”²⁹ (In a greedy voice.) That’s right, the Lord, Cristo como hombre, man and God, Son and Father, both inseparable and all of them deep inside me. But you’re the opposite, you only countenance the carnal figures of God—kisses, splendors, or what have you—to beseech them, to moan and groan over them, and then run away. Whereas I have our Guest dentro de mí. (Normal voice.) That’s the difference between us, my ideal father. For you, it gets cleansed in the fires of agreeable tortures, is that right? That’s what you feel?

JOHN OF THE CROSS. “Where have You hidden,

TERESA, pulling back again, not looking at John anymore. Hands crossed over her breast, like the blue-cloaked Virgin image bequeathed by her mother, La Madre looks inside herself. I’m not saying it’s not like that, but here again the Trinity is at stake, and my Trinity is as bodily, delectable and obliging as the Spouse when He does me the favor of lodging within.…If I tell you that Christ is inside of me, it goes without saying that only divinity penetrates there, but naturally, if I may put it that way.…The humanity alone of the Son could never enter into our souls, many learned fathers have told me so, and I agree. And yet since the Three Persons are united and inside us, I understand—and this is where our experiences differ, Father, with all due respect—I understand how this offering from the Son, the only Person to have become incarnate, is pleasing.³¹…Yes, pleasing to the Father who receives it. (Pause.) But inside my soul…deep inside my soul.…(Reading with her soul the text from the Testimonies as it scrolls past on the Virgin’s blue veil.)…Pleasing deep inside my soul.…Do you understand? This offering enables the Father Himself to enjoy, down here on earth, the pleasure of His Son. Both together. Deep inside me. The Father rejoices in His Son within my soul. I mean that the delights of the filial sacrifice are permitted to the Father and to the Son and to the Spirit, and that these three divine Persons are inside us.…(Pause.)

TERESA, exhaling deeply. Ah, dear Seneca, I’m sorry to repeat myself so often, but within us such great mysteries lie! At the moment of Communion, our interior is more than bodily when pleasure involves both body and soul. Does that make it any less spiritual? (Pause.) For me, the two go together. (Long silence, then slight smile.) No matter if the officiating priest is in sin: the reception of the jouissance of the Three Persons inside depends rather on the soul receiving the sacrament. If the sun doesn’t shine on a piece of pitch as it does on glass, the fault is not with the sun but with the pitch.³² (Imploring tone.) I myself have no hopes of conquering Heaven or avoiding Hell, I want to live here and now, lowly smear of pitch that I am, like a pane of glass penetrated by Christ made man, inseparable from the Holy Trinity. By my love, in the delightful friendship of His sacred humanity, spirit and body together, I try to achieve what you seek in your hopeless pursuit: “And He was gone.” It’s the living God, dwelling in my soul, who grants me the favor of such a powerful energy. “Esto no es como otras visiones, porque lleve fuerza con la fe.”³³

JOHN OF THE CROSS. I take what you are saying, Madre, but not completely. What you do in your relish is to gobble down sacred history until your mouth bleeds with it: look at the state you’re in! You’re dying, I realize that—but throughout your life this kind of symptom, or worse, has always waylaid you. I am well informed of it, and was even a witness on some occasions. (Pause.) Once you nearly choked on the Lord’s blood…or was the blood yours? (In a cold, level voice.) You seem blind to the difference, when it comes to union with Him as you engage in it. Is that what you’ve been trying to tell me, yet again? (John of the Cross lands his chair on the ground in front of Teresa, the better to fulfill his confessor’s vocation.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS. To make myself clear, tell me, are you capable of distinguishing between sensuality on the one hand and the taint of the sensual on the other? I’m asking you, Mother, and I’m not asking lightly. We both agree that nature takes pleasure in spiritual things. “Since both the spiritual and the sensory part of the soul receive gratification from that refreshment, each part experiences delight according to its own nature and properties. The spirit, the superior part of the soul, experiences renewal and satisfaction in God; and the sense, the lower part, feels sensory gratification and delight because it is ignorant of how to get anything else, and hence takes whatever is nearest, which is the impure sensory satisfaction. It may happen that while a soul is with God in deep spiritual prayer, it will conversely passively experience sensual rebellions, movements, and acts in the senses, not without its own great displeasure. This frequently happens at the time of Communion. Since the soul receives joy and gladness in this act of love—for the Lord grants the grace and gives himself for this reason—the sensory part also takes its share, as we said, according to its mode. Since, after all, these two parts form one suppositum, each one usually shares according to its mode in what the other receives. As the philosopher says: ‘Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.’³⁴ Because in the initial stages of the spiritual life, and even more advanced ones, the sensory part of the soul is imperfect, God’s spirit is frequently received in this sensory part with this same imperfection. Once the sensory part is reformed through the purgation of the dark night, it no longer has these infirmities. Then the spiritual part of the soul, rather than the sensory part, receives God’s spirit, and the soul thus receives everything according to the mode of the spirit.”³⁵

TERESA, eyes lowered, she continues to gaze inside her soul. The sensual also takes delight in spiritual things, Father, and I do not find that spirit and sense are so divorced from one another. Nor does merit consist only of gratification, it also means action, suffering, and love, all at once and together. “Look at my life: you will find no joy there other than that of Mount Thabor.” Of the Transfiguration. For incontinence of love is not dirty, Father; it is an excess that leads us down the true path, the path of suffering: I can’t forget that.³⁶ And I understood that you intended to reel me back toward your reason, your purity, when you offered me just half a wafer at Communion; you must remember that occasion, one which religious commentators will pick over avidly for ever and ever, amen.…(Short laugh.) You were already playing the psychoanalyst, my dear Seneca, trying to cure passion by means of frustration, weren’t you, go on! (Jovial laugh.) But surely the Discalced Rule I restored aims at the same result? I discovered it long before I met you, after all. (Vehemently.) And yet deep down in my soul I never thought it necessary to lay on the penance with a trowel, as your men do in Pastrana, and you too, in your own burning way.…The Rule, no more and no less: that seems enough to me. “The rule that heals all,” as a woman will write four centuries hence, without the least inkling of my existence.…³⁷

JOHN OF THE CROSS. I am a denying spirit, whereas you say yes to everything.

TERESA. To everything, but also to nothing, Father. (Eyes, head-on.) On that day I mentioned, even if you’d given me nothing but a crumb of Host, or none at all, I to whom the Lord had already given so much would have felt just as replenished by the mere fact of knowing He exists. (Eyes, looking upward.) Therefore the presence of His Majesty—even in a tiny speck of matter on my tongue—is more than sufficient to unite me to the Beloved, in a way you cannot imagine, Father, with all due respect. (Lips.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS. O guiding night! O night more lovely than the dawn! O night that has united the Lover with his beloved, transforming the beloved in her Lover.³⁸

TERESA, losing her temper. So tell me, Father. When you say: “transforming the beloved in her Lover,” you’re talking about your soul, of course, but don’t you also mean yourself, Brother John, here before me in flesh and blood? Yourself in the feminine? Or am I mistaken, being so lowly.…Yo que soy ruin.³⁹ (Lips.)

(Silence from John.)

TERESA, eyes head-on. Shall I have the impertinence to repeat, Father, that your mournful felicity frightens me? (Reading.) Of course, like Christ…you are suspended in the void…your heart racked by love and forever unsatisfied. How far I am, I the sinner, from that heart burning to obtain something or other…but loathing any food he sees!⁴⁰ I am the unworthy servant of your Lord, chosen by His Majesty to be filled with the divine essence.…

JOHN OF THE CROSS, edging his chair back a little, pinched face, then expressionless. “Not that which is most delectable, but that which is most unpleasing; not that which gives most pleasure, but rather that which gives least.”⁴¹ (John of the Cross begins to take flight, trying to escape La Madre’s appetites.)

TERESA. Your naked faith, my son, your desnuda fe is unsparing toward naked flesh.⁴² (Pause.) Here, I’ll offer you this insight, Father, the modest opinion of a woman. (Eyes upward, then down.) The only naked faith is that which transits through naked flesh, that’s what I’ve realized.…Only transits, mind you…Can you understand that, my little Seneca? (Broken voice.)…But what an incandescent transport in that baring of the flesh! (Flies off in her turn.)

TERESA, vehemently. Yes, my soul’s union with the Three Persons is a matrimonial one, dear Father—that is the divine mystery. Edith Stein says about human marriage in her Science of the Cross, listen: “Its actual reality has its highest reason for existence in that it can give expression to a divine mystery”—or perhaps it’s the other way around?⁴³ (Long silence.) For my part, I can’t see how that can be possible unless the soul is wedded to the sacred humanity of the Son of God. The Lord necessarily wants to make His presence felt: “Quiere dar a sentir esta presencia…para conocer que allí está Dios.”⁴⁴ And God the Father, along with the Holy Ghost, are necessarily present at the nuptials.…That is their place, and this union gives it to them, gives rise to them.…

TERESA. Won’t you answer, my little Seneca? Say, do you really hold the people of Israel to be the Bride? In the Song of Songs, of course. But the Bride of the Trinitary God? Of the Holy Spirit, I mean, as well as of the Father and the Son; of the Three Persons in their distinctness and yet substantial oneness? I can’t affirm this incontrovertibly when I listen to you…and yet it’s of the essence, for me. It’s a question of bodies, do you understand? Of course you do, forgive my choice of words, dear John.…In the long run people will realize, I know they will, that our religion—Christianity, of course, what else—that Christianity was founded on the loss of a body. Michel de Certeau will spell it out; he’ll be very fond of us both, believe it or not. The loss of Christ’s body, of course, but duplicated—are you listening—by the loss of the body of Israel.…It’s obvious, surely.…Well, the disappearance of both kinds of body, the Christic and the Jewish, was perhaps necessary: logically there had to be a detachment from both “nation” and “genealogy,” as they will be called, if the religion was to become universal and spiritual. In the Jewish tradition, you know, living bodies are always shifting and moving around.…Among us, the party of the Crucified One, it’s different, as I hardly need tell you: we start off depriving ourselves of the body and then, based on that absence, we keep trying to “form a body,” to incorporate ourselves. Don’t you think? You and me too, we make ourselves a body out of words, not in the same way as each other, but still. Add in the ecclesiastical body, the doctrinal corpus, all of that…delightful experiences, I grant you.…The Word becomes flesh and back again, a risky operation for the likes of us, and not given to all: you tend to overlook the flesh, and I the word.…Where was I? Oh yes, the Trinity. Well, there it is, the Bride can’t help but wed all three of them! And like the Sulamitess finds her Solomon, I find Him in the actual reality of marriage. “Draw me, we will run after thee.” That’s your sentiment too, Father. So let’s continue. Read with me what follows: “The king hath brought me into his chambers; we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine.”⁴⁵

TERESA, heavy sigh, before resuming, convinced and convincing. Heaven opens its gates to us in this life, that’s what I’m trying to say. Your business, the trato as you call it, is an affair of faith, that is, of knowledge. But it’s not because the contemplation I dwell in is an affair of the heart that the soul does not unite fully with God. (Short silence. Normal voice.) Then, in the surrender to God’s will, “the soul wants neither death nor life”: “Tiene tanta fuerza este rendimiento a ella, que la muerte ni la vida se quiere, si no es por poco tiempo cuando desea ver a Dios.”⁴⁶ (Beaming smile.) We concur on this point, my son, don’t we?

JOHN OF THE CROSS, clearing his throat, hesitating a moment, then speaking fast. There’s no longer any need to question God as in the olden days, under the Ancient Law. (Without looking at her, his eyes seem to be listening.) Listen to Christ: God has no more to reveal. The Word no longer speaks, and instead the Spirit of Truth makes itself understood. (Closes eyes.) Understanding…understanding…understanding.…(Gazing in rapture at the ceiling, with ramrod body.)

TERESA. In my own way I, too, manage to attain a measure of understanding…reaching the Spirit of truth itself…fire and splendor.…“Neither death nor life are objects of desire anymore,” do you hear me? And if my intercession could lead a single soul to love Him more, it would matter more to me than being in glory. “Y si pudiese ser parte que siquiera un alma le amase más y alabase por mi intercesión, que aunque fuese por poco tiempo, me parece importa más que estar en la gloria.”⁴⁷

ANA DE SAN BARTOLOMÉ, never having had much notion of time, now confuses one major crisis with another. After all, there have been so many. No, Mother, it’s the alguaciles trying to break down the door. But don’t worry, the sisters are reinforcing it with heavy joists. We’ll look after you!

TERESA, in an anxious voice. They’ll reproach me, I’m sure, for not mentioning him enough in my writings. His body was not at all attractive. Unlike his eyes. And his mind. It’s true Fr. Antonio de Jesús takes up more space in my Foundations, and God knows he was no genius, nor an hombre in the strong sense, well, I know my meaning. Brother John practically forced us to overlook him, such was his urge to self-annihilation.…(Pause.) He nearly caught us out that way.…I wouldn’t let him…I went all the way to our good Philip II, to rescue him from the mitigated lot…and succeeded, thanks be to God. (Pause.) There’s nobody like him for making me feel obscurely unworthy and infinitely guilty.…(Pathetic voice.) Under the steady gaze of his burning eyes, I stop being a crystal, I become once more that black pitch I’ve never ceased to be, as I know better than anyone, with or without the Lord’s voice, between ourselves. (The dying woman, appeased, has recovered the critical lucidity that is the hallmark of her writings. Casts circular glances around her.)

TERESITA, mothering her beloved aunt. Don’t beat yourself up so on your deathbed, Auntie: after all, the asceticism of John of the Cross was hardly yours, while you lived.…

TERESA, exhaling. Never fear, darling, I can look after myself, and even John got the sharp end of my tongue when he deserved it. I must say…(coughing) over and above the obliviousness to his person that he more or less deliberately instilled in us…(eyes looking right, pause) the great purifier aroused in me a dash of, what’s the word, impatience. (Eyes looking left, pause. She is no longer uttering a word, but knows her little niece can read her thoughts and only wishes to do her some good.) Oh, it was just a game between us, he wasn’t fooled…a piece of mock cruelty, don’t get me wrong.…(Circular glances, sighs.) Just for a laugh at his expense, and at mine too, of course. I’d found the sweet key to revenge, you see! (Looks at her fixedly for a while.) When in distress…and to shake up any who wallow in it just to show off…there’s nothing more effective than to be happy. (Pause.) And to laugh. Do you think that’s easy? (Pause.) But not everyone has the knack.…Try it and see. It’s enough to disarm the Inquisition itself. Even the “chief angel,” as I used to call him in my letters to Gratian, you know, the grand inquisitor…that’s right, Gaspar de Quiroga, bishop of Cuenca, archbishop of Toledo, well, even he came around to my reforms. As I was saying.…One of his nieces became a Carmelite.…But to bend such a model of perfection as dear Seneca, that’s a whole other matter.…It can be done.…Well, we’d better wait and see (Wry smile.). Death himself may get nothing for his pains, I’ll let you know from the Beyond once I have passed over.…(Stops smiling.). Does it seem to be taking a long time, little one? I think so too. How am I supposed to be afraid of the Reaper, as the wicked call him, when he is what I desire? One stage in my long desire for the Other…hardly anything…I’m nearly there.…(Deep sigh.)

TERESA, gaily. Wrong, my girl, it’s not the alguaciles but the commotion stirred up by the Vejamen, that some will call my Satirical Critique! (Smiling.) You know, that mock-colloquium, remember? That parody of a homage rendered to me by Julián de Ávila, Francisco de Salcedo, my brother Lorenzo, and John of the Cross himself, in the parlor at Saint Joseph’s, before a rapt audience of sisters.…(Broadening grin.) We’re going to have more fun before I take my final leave, come along, cheer up.…(Mock-serious expression.) Bishop Álvaro de Mendoza had requested them to send me their thoughts upon that edifying instruction I received from the Lord one day of grace in prayer: “Seek yourself in Me.” (Stops smiling.) The gentlemen’s muddled remarks were positively comic: it still tickles me to think of their precious colloquium and my own barbs in response! (Smiling again; the faithful nurses can’t hear the words, and can only imagine what’s passing through her mind.) Good Lord, I had no idea at the time—five years ago, it must be—that one’s dying agonies could also be a sort of satirical critique. Yes, indeed, a teasing yet gracious exchange with others very similar to my progress toward God, as you’d confirm, my daughters, would you not?…I’m much obliged. (Normal voice, fast.) Who mentioned Hell? Not I. Nor Heaven, of course, not even Purgatory, it’s nothing but a vejamen, believe me. (Coughing, tears.) Because I don’t know who I am, but I know that in seeking myself in the Other within me, I am a double self. I should add that those are Montaigne’s terms, the expression of a writer who is younger than me and not precisely on my side, as will soon be a matter of public record. “And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.”⁵¹ Yet that man is not so far from me, I assure you.…Will anyone have the insight to notice?…Too bad…I am double, I say, and uncertain, endlessly seeking myself; but not shy or distraught, and with good reason! Because the Me in which the Lord invites me to seek myself (“Seek yourself in Me”), the Lord’s Me, the Other Me, is nothing less than recollected deep inside of me, for God’s sake!

TERESA, waving her arms. So I loosed a volley of grapeshot in the direction of those fine, chin-stroking gentlemen, though leavened needless to say by my customary pinch of amused affection. (Wrinkled nose.) It was aimed at John of the Cross first and foremost, since the dear friar had contributed the longest commentary of all, as befits a highbrow scholar from Salamanca. (Lips.) What’s more he was addressing me, a poor unlettered woman, the way the Jesuits always do, with such haughty condescension…such.…Oh, you know. (Lips again.) Between strict paternalists and patronizing persecutors, no contest! I’ve never hesitated for a moment, do you hear me, girls? (Wavering voice.) A tenderly strict paternalist is indispensable, and will be needed for a long time to come, mark my words. (Does this please or frighten her? Looks up and straight ahead.)

TERESA, reading, fast. Why seek God as if we were dead, or when we are dead, my little Seneca? And why do you do no more than seek, unremittingly, wearing yourself out with it? While always claiming that there’s nothing more to question? Why, let’s rejoice, now that the Word has been revealed! The Sulamitess was good at bliss, even though she was always chasing after her elusive Spouse.…In the union I obtained by means of prayer, God’s grace bestowed on the soul means that the soul has found Him, once and for all. (Deep breath. Open palms stretched upward.) His actual presence actually inhabits me inside…since how long ago? As long as I’m alive I seek, but I seek inside me, because I’ve already found Him. I’ve said yes to the Other in me, and His Voice knows it. He is in me, I am Him, I am she who says yes. A woman called Molly Bloom will do likewise, more drolly. Did Joyce, a Catholic Irishman, think of me when he set that scene in the Spanish landscape of Gibraltar? (Pause. Stares at the flame. Closes eyes. Brief rest.)

TERESA, with a beaming smile, reading. “Yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”⁵² (Smiling more brightly still.) No, that’s not me, Father, it’s all right, just a vision that resembles me. I can see the future now…having got this far, why not.…Do you consider me excessively carnal? Others have done. A bishop even wrote to me about it, but which one? I haven’t a clue, I get them mixed up, all those dour, po-faced prelates. (Pause.) “God deliver me from people so spiritual that they want to turn everything into perfect contemplation, no matter what.”⁵³ I have always felt the greatest envy of you, I’ve told you so: le tengo una envidia grandísima.⁵⁴ Good father, good brother John, you should expect irreverence from me.…(Wrinkled nose.)…for I already spoke of you in my Dwelling Places.

TERESA. Yes, it’s not just deer and butterflies, you are present too.…(Reading.) That man I was speaking of, who was “so desirous of serving His Majesty at his own cost, without these great delights, and so anxious to suffer that he complained to our Lord because He bestowed the favours on him.” And had it lain in his power, that is, in your power, my little Seneca, had you been graced with the enjoyment of His favours, you would have declined them!⁵⁵ (Lips.) Goodness me! I wouldn’t! I am talking about the delights God gives us to taste in contemplation, not about the visions themselves—you’re entitled to despise those, and I myself am doubtful about them. But the contemplation that emerges out of suffering to overwhelm us with graces! Why deny ourselves the sweet fruits of spiritual marriage? I know, you’ve told me often enough, that the dark night for you is “deprivation of the soul’s taste or appetite for things”; “llamamos aquí noche a la privación del gusto en el apetito de todas las cosas.”⁵⁶ Nevertheless, dear John, to not expand is to shrink. And where love is true, it “cannot possibly be content with remaining always the same.”⁵⁷ (Pause.)

TERESA, startled and fearful. Shall I tell you? It was manifested to me, with “a knowledge admirable and clear” how the sacred Humanity of Christ “was taken into the bosom of the Father.”⁵⁸ Divinity…extraordinary glory.…(Trembling voice. Lips.)…And that’s not all. Since we are concerned with the Holy Trinity, do you think I’ve forgotten the Blessed Virgin, in other words, the woman I am? Not at all. Listen: “The Lord placed Himself in my arms as in the painting of the fifth agony.”⁵⁹ You see? And stop looking at me with those vacant eyes. Christ is held in the Father’s bosom, the Virgin’s arms, and mine.…Same thing.…Don’t worry, these are merely intellectual visions, the only sort you allow. But they’re so vivid that they resemble imaginative ones.…(Pause.)…I’m going too far, aren’t I? I’m being too greedy again? (Throws herself backward as if to picture John more clearly.)

When the body speaks, seeing images is unavoidable, dear John, but I do not really perceive them with the eyes of the body, in fact they are no more than intellectual visions.…In a way, yes, there’s such a thing as “sensation freed from the trammel of the senses.”⁶⁰ Those aren’t my words, they belong to Marcel Proust, do you know that writer? An expert in accursed races, men, women, and in-betweens, in hawthorn and rose windows and felt time.…Of course I can tell from here, I’m a visionary, don’t look at me like that, my great Seneca…you understand perfectly well.…“My imagination, which was my only means of enjoying beauty.”⁶¹…Those words could have been written by me, too bad, Marcel will do it for me. Better than anyone. And that’s why the imagination is “the organ that serves the eternal,” do you follow us, the two of us, that eternal young man and myself?…Deep down you agree with us, Father, but you concur in your own erudite, demanding way.…(Normal voice.) Does that make you feel better?…It’s true, I am very spiritual also. (Pause. Hint of a smile.)

TERESA. I’d have had to master mathematics in order to please you, and yet, I can’t help it, poor little me pleased His Majesty himself from time to time. I’m a pretentious woman and I repent of it. Not your style, I know. (Closes eyes and reopens them.) You see, Father, I don’t let go of you all the same, I love you more than you think, for look, even on my deathbed I am prolonging our so-called colloquium, the vejamen—remember? (Normal voice.) I cannot do otherwise, having this radiant Other at the core of me while you are constantly scurrying after it, poor little wounded deer, unhappy, racked priest whom I love with all my heart. (Long silence.) I understand, mind you: you’re nothing but a wretched man, which when all is said and done is even more frustrating than being a wretched woman. The truth is you’ll never be the Other’s Bride, whereas I am confident that I am. That’s how it is, get used to it. (Lips.) I enjoyed having that place, acquired since my prayer over the Song of Songs, and I’m not budging from it, hardened sinner that I am. But thank you kindly for having so clearly explained to me, in the course of your fraternal contribution to the vejamen, matters I hadn’t asked you about! (Teasing voice.) You disparage the understanding, and yet you wouldn’t stop commenting every sentence, interminably, where I, lowly creature, did nothing but feel.…Forgive me, Father, I don’t need convincing, as you know, that you alone are perfection. Me, I’m nothing but a trifler, I own. The Lord will judge; I’m on my way there now. (Listening expression.)

TERESA. You say that David assures us…of what? That the death of the just man is precious in God’s eyes.…Speak about yourself, Seneca my dear, I’m a mere woman, and a hard-hearted one at that.…Is it really in my power to tear the fabric of mortal life, as you put it so well? Perhaps.…But only in the Seventh Dwelling Places.…Run away, you say? No, I feel that I’m closing in on the jewel, la joya, within.

JOHN OF THE CROSS’S VOICE, with the face of an El Greco Christ. Solus soli.

TERESA, vehemently again. Quite so, I was about to say. “For it is not knowing much, but realizing and relishing things interiorly, that contents and satisfies the soul.”⁶² It may be that I am closer to these words of Loyola’s than you are, my friend. Ignatius does not refer to prayer, as we know, even if his spiritual graces are not so very different from your “substantial words of the soul,” are they?⁶³ And he is warier of the devil than I am, I agree. But.…(Broken voice, silence.) but when he has a vision of the Blessed Trinity “in the form of a lyre or harp,” amid uncontainable tears and sighs, and when.…⁶⁴ (Pause.) When Jesus appears to him in “white,” in His humanity as I see it, and again when He dazzles him like a sun…and leaves him nothing but the relish for the interior loquela, the uninterrupted voice.…(Her breathing and pulse accelerate.)…Well, I feel for it, it moves my soul, wounded with love, that seeks solitude with the help of the Holy Spirit.…⁶⁵

JOHN OF THE CROSS’S VOICE, still with his El Greco face. Solus soli. There is nothing nuptial in Ignatius Loyola!

TERESA, with a broad grin. Fortunately not! Man or woman, alone with the One and Only…what else do you think marriage is, my great Seneca!

TERESA, suddenly anxious. I smell burning, daughters, can you smell it? Is it me that’s on fire? That wouldn’t be surprising since His Majesty threatened me with Hell once before, but it was a stinking tube, a space without space where to be was impossible. A place that John of the Cross alone—who else—managed to survive and escape from. He must be a saint, that Seneca, as the hole where the mitigated friars locked him up was so infernal that it was a miracle he got out alive. A miracle, I tell you! (Still excitable.) Oh no, it’s not me that’s on fire! I do not consume myself, I can’t compete with John on that score, God bless him. It smells of charred paper; are they maybe burning my letters to the papal nuncio, the dreaded Nicolás Ormaneto? Or those I wrote to Pius V? To the Carmelite principal, Ángel de Salazar? To the nuns at the Convent of the Incarnation? How many thousands of letters and notes have I written…a collection not everyone regards as a treasure trove, naturally, plenty of people would sooner destroy it. How well I remember.…(Pause. Wide smile.) I who have a short memory.…(Smile wider still, with an edge of sarcasm.) It was the Dominican priest Diego de Yanguas, a reader of superior capacities, who when he heard that I had written down my meditations upon the Song of Songs commanded me to torch them on the spot, and of course I hastened to obey. (Pause. Hides face behind crossed hands.) What a silly I was…never suspecting what fearful dangers lurk inside that book for a woman.…(Uncovers face. Sighs, smiles.) But what’s this I see? (Worldly.) No, not you, my dear John! (Long pause. Stops smiling.)…So you’re playing the wafer trick on me again? Terminally, this time? I didn’t expect that, hats off, I’m impressed! I should have known it was too much to ask; you couldn’t fail to burn them. All my letters, up in smoke? Incredible. So driven to abolish yourself that you divest yourself of everything, even of me, especially of me.…We are so like and so unlike, aren’t we; day and night. Day is afraid of night. Night is indifferent to day.…And yet they are indissociable, one cannot be without the other.…

COMPANION. Look, Brother John, I have just found this taleguilla whose contents might interest you.

JOHN OF THE CROSS, absorbed in being perfect. Interest me?

COMPANION. I said “might.” This bag contains the letters of the late Mother Teresa of Avila, may she rest in peace.

JOHN OF THE CROSS, turning slowly but decisively to toss the bag into the fire. Burn them!

JOHN OF THE CROSS’S VOICE. “In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,

JOHN OF THE CROSS’S VOICE. “O living flame of love.”

BOSSUET. “It is an odd weakness of mankind, that while death surrounds us in its myriad forms, it is never present to our minds.” But since “we must only be lofty where St. Teresa is concerned,” bear in mind that Heaven above “has a plan to repair the house he has given us. When he destroys it and casts it down in order to make it anew, we must move out. Yet he himself offers us his palace, and within it, gives us rooms.” “And yet it was never so for this creature, Teresa, who dwelt on earth as though she were already in Heaven.”⁶⁹

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, occupying La Madre’s shadowy place stage right, speaking in a drained voice. Here’s a surprise Fénelon will appreciate, not to mention Madame de Guyon.…⁷⁰ I might have known the Eagle of Meaux would be here; he was never very keen on intimate, Quietist, or amalgamated-type scenes, but he made an exception for Teresa. Sylvia Leclercq “in the footsteps of Bossuet,” who’d have thought it? Ah, he’s no longer the bos suetus aratro, the “ox accustomed to the plough” of the Jesuit school.…The old theologian has aged as well, he’s got excema and gallstones and who knows what else.…But he will still go down fighting, weapons in hand, Saint-Simon tells us, and might have added: “like Teresa.”

BOSSUET, in a metallic, slightly breathless voice. “Our society is in heaven above,” nostra autem conversatio in coelis est.…And the hope of which the world speaks is but an agreeable illusion, somnium vigilantium.…If I don’t dare to affirm it, who will? I am a Cartesian, but not to the last ditch. Primo: Hope equals the “sleep of vigilance,” of course, except.…Except when hope comes from the Lord. In that circumstance its words are assured, and consequently the hope in Him is likewise assured, ergo it is certain.…Secondo: Contra spem in spem.…This is the anchor of our souls, something the true Christian does not possess, but is looking for. (Puts down the two tomes he was carrying and takes the Panegyrics proffered by Leclercq, riffles through while holding forth in a firm, steady voice.) And this “infinite munificence” was lavished on Teresa in life, while she yet inhabited her mortal coil.…Tertio: Such is indeed the grand spectacle to which the Church invites us.…

SYLVIA LECLERCQ. Nicely put, “munificence” and “grand spectacle” are appropriate. (Hand over mouth, she has finally been awed by the infallible rhetorician).

BOSSUET. “St. Teresa lives among angels, convinced that she is with her Spouse,” and thus fulfillment succeeds to yearning.…“A divine sickness,” undoubtedly, one whose power increases day by day? But there remains the “link, gentlemen, which is charity.…It elevates Teresa above the throng.…She speeds toward it, driven by ardent, impetuous desires…which prove unequal to severing the bonds of mortal flesh, against which she now declares a holy war.…For all true Christians should feel like travelers on a journey.” They must feel, yes, feel.…

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, hand over mouth again, disconcerted by her sudden admiration for the bishop. That’s right, go on.…

BOSSUET, imperturbably. Qui non gemit peregrinus, non gaudebit civis.…Saint Augustine had some splendid turns of phrase, madam. “He who does not lament the journey will not rejoice on reaching the city.” And Saint Teresa becomes “ever freer, more disengaged from perpetual agitation.” “The harder she finds it to cast off her body, the more detached from that body she becomes.”

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, admiringly. Is that in relation to John of the Cross? How unexpected, from you! Might you be an unjustly neglected author?

BOSSUET, ignoring the compliment, enthused by his panegyric. One can scarcely credit the way she built her monasteries, that girl.…

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, thoughtfully, almost inaudibly, hugging the Orations and the Instructions. Bossuet the Academician turns out to be a pragmatist with his own brand of mysticism, quite unlike his image. But he couldn’t have been any less, if he was to prevent a schism with Rome. Courted by the dauphin, the king, society ladies like Maintenon, Montespan, Sévigné; patron of men like La Bruyère, associating with the likes of Pascal, Molière, La Rochefoucauld, Leibniz.…Yet he still remembers his conversation with our Teresa. “That girl,” he calls her. Their conversation is in Heaven above, apparently, albeit that Heaven exists down here on earth, according to La Madre? Intermittently, but still. A weird space it is, Monseigneur. Go take a look.…(She tries to detain the Eagle of Meaux but he returns the Panegyrics to her and vanishes, holding a Cross, into the darkness stealing across the stage.)

The stage is empty. A huge diamond stands in place of La Madre’s body, shot through with rays of light and cascading waters that bathe the facets of cut stone and also circulate inside it. The fire that consumed Teresa’s letters to John of the Cross has left its red-gold color in the air. From time to time three shadows move through the permeable walls of the liquid jewel; one resembles the Teresa of the portrait attributed to Velázquez, another is Leibniz, and the third, Spinoza. There is also a mathematical formula, to wit:

TERESA’S VOICE. “A great gush of water could not reach us if it didn’t have a source somewhere; it is understood clearly that there is Someone in the interior depths who shoots these arrows and gives life to this life, and that there is a Sun in the interior of the soul from which a brilliant light proceeds and is sent to the faculties. The soul…does not move from that center nor is its peace lost.”⁷³ It’s true, the center exists and is at peace, and that’s why I can be so fluid…and vagabond, if I wish it.…(Subtle smile.) Who am I? “You who seeks yourself in Me,” or “Me who seeks myself in You?” Who speaks? Is Teresa I, You, or She? “We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment.”⁷⁴ (Eyes glance right, left, close.) “These interior matters are so obscure for our minds.…Whoever reads this must have patience, for I have to have it in order to write about what I don’t know. Indeed, sometimes I take up the paper like a simpleton, for I don’t know what to say.”⁷⁵ (Wrinkles nose.)

TERESA’S VOICE, coming from the immense diamond revolving on the stage. My castle is not an accumulation of images, it’s an imaginary discourse: ask Michel de Certeau if you don’t believe me! I am indeterminate, fluid, permeable, radiating light from my center: ask Mercedes Allendesalazar.…“I want to make one or more comparisons for you.”⁷⁶ “Turn your eyes toward the center, which is the room or royal chamber where the King stays, and think of how a palmetto has many leaves surrounding and covering the tasty part that can be eaten.…The sun that is in this royal chamber shines in all parts. It is very important for any soul that practices prayer, whether little or much, not to hold itself back and stay in one corner. Let it walk through these dwelling places which are up above, down below, and to the sides, since God has given it such great dignity. Don’t force it to stay a long time in one room alone. Oh, but if it is in the room of self-knowledge!⁷⁷ (Momentarily short of breath, coughing.) “God help me with what I have undertaken!…Let’s consider…two founts with two water troughs.…I am so fond of this element.…With one the water comes from far away through many aqueducts…with the other the source of the water is right there.…The water coming from the aqueducts is comparable, in my opinion, to the consolations drawn from meditation…thoughts…tiring the intellect.…With this other fount, the water comes from its own source which is God…with the greatest peace and quiet and sweetness in the very interior part of ourselves.…This water overflows through all the dwelling places and faculties until reaching the body. That is why I said that it begins in God and ends in ourselves.…The whole exterior man enjoys this spiritual delight and sweetness.”⁷⁸

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “Transumanar,” why, she talks like Dante:

TERESA’S VOICE. “The King is in His palace,” just as the soul is. The King, the soul, it-you-I? It’s all the same. Interchangeable, permutable, reversible. “In those other dwelling places there is much tumult and there are many poisonous creatures and the noise is heard”—all this being the drives, as Dr. Freud will tell us. And yet “no one enters that center dwelling place and makes the soul leave.…The passions are now conquered.” This is sublimation. “Our entire body may ache; but if the head is sound, the head will not ache just because the body aches.”⁸⁰ The mind and the word “must have amounted to much more than is apparent from [their] sound.”⁸¹ (Turns head leftward, with calm face.) It is not an imaginative vision, even if the soul, unable to express it in words, perceives it here by means of sight. And yet the sight is neither with the eyes of the body nor with those of the soul.…The three Persons of the Trinity are perceived in an intellectual, yes, intellectual vision, like a certainty of truth in the midst of fiery brightness, like a magnificent splendor coming straight to the mind.⁸² I am a point inhabited by infinity, the infinite contracted into a dot, a dot dilated to infinity. Infinitesimal Teresa: a curious phenomenon, don’t you think? (She opens her eyes again, unseeing eyes, as when she bent them on the portrait of Velázquez. La Madre is listening to herself.)

LEIBNIZ, in the voice of an anonymous man. “To me, infinities are not totalities and infinitely small values are not magnitudes. My metaphysics banishes them. I regard infinitesimal quantities as useful unities.” “My fundamental meditations turn on two things, namely, on unity and on infinity.” “Each monad is a living mirror, or a mirror endowed with an internal action, and that it represents the universe according to its point of view and is regulated as completely as is the universe itself.” “Everything is taken account of, even idle words…the just will be like suns…neither our senses nor our mind has ever tasted anything approaching the happiness that God prepares for those who love him.” “Imaginary numbers have the following admirable property, that in calculus they enclose nothing absurd or contradictory and yet by the nature of things they cannot be represented seu in concretis.”⁸³ The same goes for the infinitesimal: it is a fiction, and not a true difference. God is “the realm of possible realities.”

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “The infinity-point obeys the laws of transition and continuity: nothing is equivalent to anything else, and apparent coincidences really conceal an infinitely small distance. Thus the infinity-point does not form a structure but instead posits functions and relationships that proceed by approximation. A difference, never to be made good, persists between the number marked π and the set of terms able to express it:

LEIBNIZ, in the voice of an anonymous man. “Teresa of Avila had this fine thought, that the soul ought to conceive things as if there were only God and itself in the world.” How this limpid, fecund insight gives us to understand immortality! “This thought gives rise to an idea which is significant even in philosophy, and I have made good use of it in one of my hypotheses.”⁸⁵

TERESA’S VOICE. Might I be a soul, then, a woman co-present ad infinitum? Might I be an ancestor of infinitesimal calculus?⁸⁶ Little me?

SPINOZA, in the voice of the anonymous man. “God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love.”⁸⁷

TERESA’S VOICE. God loves Himself? Himself, myself, yourself? I are the Trinity. I was writing the sensual mathematics of sacred humanity!

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. “Paradise and its plenitude of grace, the Trinity in person, are unveiled in the Intellection of love. The more I love, the more I understand. The more I understand, the more pleasure I feel, and the more I love.” Not my words, but those of Philippe Sollers in his introduction to Dante’s Paradiso.⁸⁸

TERESA’S VOICE. “The image may be very helpful—to you especially—for since we women have no learning, all of this imagining is necessary that we may understand that within us lies something incomparably more precious than what we see outside ourselves.” (Coughs, trickle of blood.) You say women are hollow inside? You have no inkling of what a Guest we harbor!⁸⁹ You smile, I see: so who might this Guest be? The Father? The phallus? Animal lust? Hysterical excitability? All of the above, and of necessity sublime? Call it what you please, call it desire for the Other if you want to. Personally I’ll stick with Guest, for the moment.…“Nor is that happiness and delight experienced, as are earthly consolations, in the heart. I mean there is no similarity at the beginning, for afterward the delight fills everything; this water overflows through all the dwelling places and faculties until reaching the body. That is why I said it begins in God and ends in ourselves.”⁹⁰ Clear as day, is it not? Are you with me, my Seneca? (No reply.)

TERESA’S VOICE, meditatively. Some minds are orderly, and some are “so scattered they are like wild horses no one can stop.” I’m thinking of myself, of course…you guessed it.…Always restless and on the go…“and perhaps they were no more than two steps from the fount of living water, of which the Savior said to the Samaritan woman, ‘whoever drinks of it will never thirst.’ How right and true!”⁹¹ (Voice weakening, trembling of the arms, legs, head.) Between ourselves, I prefer Saint Augustine above other spiritual masters because he was once a sinner,⁹² a runaway horse. O rushing storm, euphoric tempest that “comes from regions other than those of which [the devil] can be lord”!⁹³ And how can we be sure? Why, because the soul derives benefits from it, by confronting the ringing Voice of His Majesty, or the superego if you prefer, the ideal Father who imparts the Law—that of both Testaments at once, needless to say. Poor butterfly-soul, “that went about so apprehensive that everything frightened it and made it fly.…The Lord has now fortified, enlarged, and made the soul capable.”⁹⁴ (Long silence. The crimson light turns violet.) The soul does not leave the wondrous company of His Majesty and never ventures out of its interior mansion, as a consequence of which it is somehow divided, like Martha and Mary Magdalene: perpetual calm and repose on the one hand, problems and worries on the other. (Exhales.) Although the degree of clarity is not the same, because the vision of the Divine Presence is rarely as vivid as it is on the occasion of its first manifestation, when God elects to grant His gift, “quiere Dios hacerle este regalo.”⁹⁵ (Breathing faster.) The light has changed color, it will accompany me to the very end of this final road. Its variations still illuminate, even today, the anguish I felt when I discovered that the movement of thought, or more precisely the imagination, was not the same thing as understanding.

TERESA’S VOICE, doubtful, quizzical. The understanding is one of the soul’s faculties, and is apt to be flighty. Flighty, yes, that’s the word, like a tortolito.…The understanding is like an inexperienced novice, or a smitten turtledove; it takes flight in so abstract a fashion that nothing embodies it. The imagination, for its part, cannot be confused with it, but takes from it the cue to soar up; since God alone can hold it fast, one is misled into thinking it detached from the body. “I have seen…that the faculties of my soul were occupied and recollected in God while my mind on the other hand was distracted. This distraction puzzled me.…The pain is felt when suspension does not accompany the prayer.…But it would be very bad if I were to abandon everything on account of this obstacle. And so it isn’t good for us to be disturbed by our thoughts, nor should we be concerned.…Let us be patient and endure them for the love of God since we are likewise subject to eating and sleeping without being able to avoid it, which is quite a trial.”⁹⁶ (Touches her arms, breast, stomach, then relaxes, exhausted.) Attached or detached? To the flesh or to the Lord? To each of them alternately and together? I love the imagination when it takes flight from the body, with the body, when it dives deep into our entrails and carries them away with it. I can feel it splitting from the senses, becoming purified in the Lord. And I prefer it to that other flighty thought, unsupported and disembodied—abstract thought. “Porque, como el entendimiento es una de las potencias del alma, hacíaseme recia cosa estar tan tortolito a veces, y lo ordinario vuela el pensamiento de presto, que sólo Dios puede atarle, cuando nos ata a Sí de manera que parece estamos en alguna manera desatados de este cuerpo. Yo veía, a mi parecer, las potencias del alma empleadas en Dios y estar recogidas con Él, y por otra parte el pensamiento alborotado: traíame tonta.”⁹⁷

TERESA’S VOICE, getting feebler, but firm, without trembling. Gratian maintains it’s a typical female fallacy to confuse imagination with the movement of thought. Ribera, by contrast, lets me develop my intuition about the existence of an imagination in which thought is fulfilled ad infinitum. One day Sylvia Leclercq will write that I am at the heart of the mystery of a sublimation that “journeys itself” between the instincts and the senses. But I say: a castle compartmented by transparent membranes, translucent walls, between the teeming of poisonous vermin below and the flashing of the central jewel. Between what seems to be me, and the God inside me. (Unseeing eyes, as in the Velázquez.) Ah, Sisters, only imagination can bring us close to that desire for the Other within, while at the same time releasing us from that hot brazier. I am leaving you now, so you’ll just have to read me. One final word before I depart. You mustn’t be afraid to play, to play with that thought in motion. Our worries and our fears don’t come from movement, but from a want of light. Inside us a whole world exists, and just as it’s not in our power to halt the movements of the heavens, swirling at prodigious speeds, neither can we stop our racing minds.⁹⁸

SYLVIA LECLERCQ’S VOICE. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, 1, verses seven to nine: “Because in drawing near to its desire / Our intellect ingulphs itself so far, / That after it the memory cannot go.”⁹⁹ Is Teresa the Spanish Dante, as Meister Eckhart was the German Dante?

TERESA’S VOICE, her face in the painting eclipses the polyhedron. Let’s play, Sisters! Play, my girls! To deliver yourselves unto the King and be delivered from Him, endlessly, for there is no stopping this game, this vejamen, these death throes.…Am I lucid? Let me elucidate. “My soul is completely taken up in its quiet, love, desires, and clear knowledge”;¹⁰⁰ “y claro conocimiento,” oh, yes. Listen: someone who doesn’t know how to set up the chessboard will be a bad player, and if he doesn’t know to check the opponent’s king, how will he ever checkmate it? You will frown to hear me talk of games again, because no games are allowed in this monastery. Look what kind of a Mother God gave you, skilled at such a vain pursuit!…But this game is allowed sometimes. And very soon it will be allowed more often, if we practice enough to checkmate this divine King! After that He’ll never be able to escape, and indeed He won’t want to. (Perceptibly relaxing, cheerful smile.)

TERESA’S VOICE, while Bernini’s Transverberation is refracted by the jewel. In chess, the queen has many advantages over the king, and is supported by all the other pieces. Well, there’s no queen like humility for forcing the divine King to surrender. Humility drew Him from heaven into the Virgin’s womb; and with it, by one hair, we will draw Him to our souls. (Beaming smile.) People say, “Here is a very contemplative soul,” and immediately expect him to possess all the virtues of a soul elevated to great contemplation. The person concerned aspires to this and more. But he is misguided from the outset, because he didn’t know how to set up the game. “He thought it was enough to know the pieces in order to checkmate the King. But that was impossible, for this King doesn’t give Himself but to those who give themselves entirely to Him.”¹⁰¹

(In a serene voice.) “La dama es la que más guerra le puede hacer en este juego, y todas las otras piezas ayudan. No hay dama que así le haga rendir como la humildad. Esta le trajo del cielo en las entrañas de la Virgen, y con ella le traeremos nosotras de un cabello a nuestras almas. Y creed que quien más tuviere, más le tendrá, y quien menos, menos. Porque no puedo yo entender cómo haya ni pueda haber humildad sin amor, ni amor sin humildad, ni es posible estar estas dos virtudes sin gran desasimiento de todo lo criado.”