Teresa, My Love

by Julia Kristeva

  In contrast to the moralistic repression advocated by conventional religious instruction, the spiritual guidance of the illuminated Alphabet produces an effect of sustained, impassioned excitement that devastates the young nun, much like the first charged moments along the psychoanalytic journey. Lacking the interpretations of a therapist, not yet ready to trust in her own self-analytical lucidity, supervised by a string of confessors, Teresa settles into her crisis with Osuna’s encouragement and blessing. She surrenders unreservedly to the amorous delights suggested by the Franciscan: “It seemed to me…that by having books and the opportunity for solitude there could have been no danger capable of drawing me away from so much good.”7

  But for the time being, after your stay in Castellanos and three months in Becedas with a healer who just made matters worse, these spiritual joys were helpless to check the advance of the mysterious illness that kept you bedridden for three years. The heart trouble you complained of since the start of your novitiate grew more acute: “Sometimes it seemed that sharp teeth were biting into me, so much so that it was feared I had rabies.”8

  No, not rabies but extreme disgust afflicted you. You couldn’t swallow anything but liquids. Anorexic, burning with fever, this “inner fire,” as you called it—condensing into a single interiority both organic spasms and anguished thoughts—was so violent that it inflamed your nerves, clenched your body, stabbed it with unendurable pain day and night, while a deep and unshakable sadness also chilled it through and through. Perhaps you were tubercular?

  “Pain of the nerves is unbearable, as doctors affirm, and since my nerves were all shrunken, certainly it was a bitter torment. How many merits could I have gained, were it not for my own fault! [y como todos se encogían, cierto—si yo no lo hubiera por mi culpa perdido—era recio tormento.]”9—as you recall years later in The Book of Her Life, with that scientific-poetic knack for rhythmic concision.

  Did Alonso, the loving father, on seeing Teresa brought back to him by the nuns, detect an element of play-acting in her plight? An exaggerated hankering to join the divine Spouse? Doctor Charcot would have called this “hysteria.”10 Be that as it may, the father wouldn’t let her go to Confession, as she often liked to do. Too often.

  “I will not let her have her way!” declares Alonso de Cepeda.

  “Oh, the excessive love of flesh and blood!” responds the nun. (But to what love does she refer? Hers? Or His?) “How you have harmed me!”

  That same night, Teresa “mounted” an almighty paroxysm that made her pass out.

  Day of the Assumption, 1539. Your hands and feet are twisting in pain, there is no respite in Hell. Is it that you long too much for death? You lie in a coma for four days.

  At this time they gave me the sacrament of the anointing of the sick, and from hour to hour and moment to moment they thought I was going to die; they did nothing but recite the Creed to me, as if I were able to understand them. At times they were so certain I was dead that afterward I even found the wax on my eyes.11

  Like most psychiatrists, not to say psychoanalysts, Charcot steered well clear of female saints, hastily dismissing them as “undeniable hysterics.” He didn’t leave any considered opinion with regard to your case.12 However, we do have the diagnosis emitted by a Spaniard, Esteban García-Albea, who defines Teresa as an “illustrious epileptic.”13 More recently, in 2000, the French epileptologist Dr. Pierre Vercelletto contended that the saint’s later raptures amounted to “ecstatic crises” typical of “temporal epilepsy.”14 My colleague Jérôme Tristan has nudged me in that direction already, as readers will remember.

  The temporal lobe is a hugely complex node, I realize: it’s the seat of sensorial, gustatory, and olfactory functions and is also involved in mnesic processes. Neuronal discharge can induce fleeting psychomotor phenomena in that area, experienced by subjects as “auras,” almost invariably painful or unpleasant. Epileptic discharges can become generalized to trigger a convulsive crisis resulting in coma, like Teresa’s four-day period of unconsciousness in August 1539.

  The scientific term aura—applied to Teresa’s raptures—simply means “breath,” in an acceptation coined by Galen during the second century with regard to a patient who perceived “an impression of cold steam.” We are forever obliged to Dr. Vercelletto for having pointed out, in his discussion of the precise value of the term aura in epileptology, that motor crises (characterized by clonic shaking, diverse paralyses of limbs or jaws, and speech difficulties—all of which Teresa reports) are linked to neuropsychological gains “specific to each person”: in Teresa’s case, her sensory, intellectual, even metaphysical peculiarities, and of course her tendency to hypergraphy! Few people are as peculiar as Teresa, Vercelletto agrees. He cautions that while her saintliness can never be reduced to her temporal lobe, this factor should not be ignored. So, which is it, epilepsy or mystical marriage?

  Other neurologists or psychiatrists would make short work of spotting in the young novice the specific symptoms of a hypersensitive predisposition, prone to regressions and exaltations, with a tendency to alexithymia. And what might that be? Don’t act baffled, google it! The term denotes the incapacity of certain subjects to express emotion verbally, entailing consequences such as nausea, anorexia, and occasional instances of atypical epilepsy. All the same, while science knows more and more about this kind of brain dysfunction, as Dr. Vercelletto confirms, it is still uncertain of how a subject utilizes it in order to be free of it.

  They can but think you are dead, Teresa, all except for your father, who refuses to bury you right away. He finally gives in. Your body has been laid out, the sisters have dripped funerary candle wax on your eyelids. The grave has been dug. Your younger brother Lorenzo watches over you during that last night, dozes off, the candle scorches the coverlet…you wake up.

  Let’s hear Teresa herself on the subject. In the light of her account I can confirm Dr. Vercelletto’s diagnosis without hesitation: I am familiar with these symptoms, I’ve seen them before.

  Such were these four days I spent in this paroxysm…my tongue, bitten to pieces; my throat unable to let even water pass down—from not having swallowed anything and from the great weakness that oppressed me; everything seeming to be disjointed; the greatest confusion in my head; all shrivelled and drawn together in a ball. The result of the torments of those four days was that I was unable to stir, not an arm or a foot, neither hand nor head, unable to move as though I were dead; only one finger on my right hand it seems I was able to move. Since there was no way of touching me, because I was so bruised that I couldn’t endure it, they moved me about in a sheet, one of the nuns at one end and another at the other.…the lack of appetite was very great.…

  I was very conformed to the will of God, and I would have remained so even had He left me in this condition forever. It seems to me that all my longing to be cured was that I might remain alone in prayer as was my custom, for in the infirmary the suitable means for this was lacking. I went to confession very often.…For if this patience had not come from the hand of His Majesty, it seemed it would have been impossible to suffer so much with so great contentment.15

  Don Alonso is forced to face the facts at last and to grant his daughter’s stubborn wish to attend Confession. The ensuing Communion is accompanied by copious tears. Though “the pains that remained were unsupportable,” what a relief! And it is so frightening to see “how apparently the Lord raised me from the dead, that I am almost trembling within myself.”16

  Almost trembling, and almost amused, Teresa, as you describe this hysterical coma thirty years after the event. It would happen again. Maybe you were secretly giggling about it under don Alonso’s nose, he wasn’t the kind to notice, but then again…Distraught, contrite, he determined to follow his brother Pedro’s example by becoming a monk. This is what you were waiting for: the relationship had come full circle! You hastened to foist upon your father the famous “good books” he had been the first to recommend—the books to which not he,
however, but Uncle Pedro had introduced you with genuine passion, and which you had already explored more deeply than either man. Naturally you insisted on The Third Spiritual Alphabet: “Since I loved my father so much, I desired for him the good I felt I got out of the practice of prayer.”17

  A great good indeed! Father and daughter, praying as one, “in the manner of Osuna.” But…but you dissembled, you kept other pleasures from his knowledge: after returning to the convent in late August 1539 and spending three years virtually bedridden, you rejoined convent life around Easter 1542, crawled through the refectory on all fours, entertained plenty of visitors as a result, and led a dissipated life, at least in your own view; you were not to tell him any of this. And since he appeared to believe in your purity, whereas you were busy “deceiving people,”18 getting away with sensual worldliness and the cultivation of “friendships and attachments that the devil arranges in monasteries,”19 you agonized even more deliciously over it all! In his Vida del buscón Pablo, Quevedo has great fun with the ruses people invented for the courtship of nuns, in defiance of grilles and cloisters.20 Ah, the galán de monjas or nuns’ beau, what a menace! Is he prowling nearby, perhaps? You do say that the freedoms of some sisters led them to pass messages “through holes in the walls, or at night.”21

  A sharp sense of the indignity of such behavior made you desist from prayer altogether, and you told don Alonso of this, though omitting to explain in what way you had offended him and God at once. Your father did not condemn you, however. He believed your excuses of illness and infirmity, your symptoms worried him, and his candid acquiescence highlighted the affection between you: “My father because of his esteem and love for me believed everything I said; in fact he pitied me.”22 The piquant trials of father–daughter “negotiations” were reaching their pitch when, typically, the father suddenly caved in—I’ve seen it all before!

  You entered him, he entered you. It was entirely for his benefit that you performed all that body-theater, my playful Teresa, confirming the hypothesis of a friend of mine who maintains that the hysteric’s symptoms are directed at his or her spectator, whoever it may be. Another friend holds, on the contrary, that the hysteric prefers to bodily deliver himself or herself exclusively to the beloved. Don Alonso stood at the junction of both possibilities. He was more available to you than his brother Pedro, who merely fulfilled the ferryman’s role (in my view; but what a ferryman!), and he was prepared to follow his daughter on the road to a perfection that would bring him nearer to—who? His wife, Beatriz? Or his brother, Pedro? Nearer to both, no doubt, thanks to the conquered nearness of his daughter.

  You succeeded; you persuaded your father Alonso to pray as you did, in Osuna’s style, as recommended by your Uncle Pedro. Full circle, I repeat. The daughter would teach the father to pray, in other words to love, as though she were her father’s father. Such was your first triumph over…men.

  And also, I might add, your first triumph over the Inquisition—the institution that humiliated your grandfather Juan Sánchez, came close to prosecuting Pedro and Alonso, and was soon to take an interest in your own case. For the moment, you rejoice at having got your father to pray: the Marrano’s descendant is by way of becoming a mystic, a much more enviable destiny than that of cristiano viejo. A most remarkable success, in fact. He has at last been “integrated,” in today’s parlance, who knows whether on the edges or in depth, for both are possible once mysticism is accepted as an interiority external to, or exteriority internal to, true faith.

  In fact, big brother Rodrigo, whom you coaxed into running away with you to court decapitation by the Moors (your first bid for sainthood!), was really just a twin, a double of yourself…and a provisional substitute for Alonso, perhaps? You father was, after all, now and forever, the first man conquered and in need of conquering, giving rise to evident “paternal” replicas in the form of that improbable string of confessors and other counselors whom you resorted to every step of the way. Early on in the book of your Life, you give the game away: “I was the most loved of my father.”23 In return you would draw your father with you, back to the prayers in which Uncle Pedro and Osuna the alumbrado taught you to search for love. To put it more precisely, thanks to Osuna, whom you discovered thanks to Pedro, you can share the pleasure with don Alonso. Your father and you, you and your father, separately and together, snuggle into that bed where it is right and possible, asleep against the Other’s breast, to quench the eternal thirst to suckle that plagues human beings at night or after matins. Let time come to a halt: you are convinced your father belongs to you and you to him, the die is cast, and the man (Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda) is dead, transformed into a (religious) father.

  Am I taking things too far? Not at all. It makes sense that at the very moment you relate your victory over him, you also mention the death of this man, the first man you ever wanted: “In losing him I was losing every good and joy, and he was everything to me.”24 Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda passed away in December 1543, a full eight years after you entered the Convent of the Incarnation. Eight years of upheaval and trouble to mark the start of your monastic career, eight years during which you were constantly feeling and fighting a passionate attraction to men, to that man. And yet, when remembering him in your memoir in 1560, you announce his death just after reporting his alignment with you on the religious plane. Why such haste to erase his presence? Why this anticipation of his decease? Why exclude papá from the passionate ordeals that shook your interior castle during those years, diagnosed by Dr. Vercelletto as a string of “temporal seizures” accompanied by the perception of “auras”?

  You give us the answer yourself, with the breathtaking intellectual honesty that forbids you to equivocate: porque le quería mucho, because I loved him dearly. This admission escapes at the end of a passage on how you had to force yourself to keep your feelings, particularly those toward your father, in check. Your resolve to cut loose from worldly vanities entailed—among other sacrifices?—making the effort to appear insensible in his presence: “I had great determination not to show him my grief and until he would die to act as though I were well. When I saw him coming to the end of his life, it seemed my soul was being wrenched from me, for I loved him dearly.”25

  Can you see what I’m getting at? I suspect you, Teresa, of keeping quiet about the guilty attraction you felt for don Alonso despite—or because of—his Marrano fiscal lawsuit, his way of getting your mother pregnant ten times over until she expired at age thirty-three, his delusions of grandeur, his impossible integration, and the nonchalance with which he cultivated a hidalgo’s lifestyle without the necessary assets, leading him to fritter away your grandfather’s fortune until there wasn’t even enough for a dowry. All the same, if the paternal cause of your hysterical conflicts remained in the shadows, you had plenty to say about some other sources of extreme emotion that seem to have pitched you repeatedly into a coma.

  I want to pause on just two of them, which mesh so thoroughly with the father’s sway over your early steps on the path to perfection that the spiritual battles against the devil you credit yourself for in those days appear in an indisputably erotic light.

  First, the woman with the open abdomen, to whom you became so attached. The sight of her at the convent sends you outside yourself. Then—as if to escape her ill-being, or perhaps, again, to indirectly cause it—that unhappy sinner you found so appealing, the Becedas parish priest, succeeded with the same ambiguous purpose by a “person,” an assiduous visitor to the nunnery, whose company you became “extremely fond of.” What dangerous places they were, those Golden Age Spanish convents! You had excellent reasons for wanting to reform them, Teresa, my love!

  She hasn’t left her cell for three days. Each morning she is racked by vomiting fits, which make her unable to ingest anything until past midday. Her limbs contract, she cannot move, she is confined to her bed by absolute exhaustion.

  “I am down to my bones,” Teresa sighs to the nursing sister, who looks in on her
several times a day.

  She refrains from mentioning what gladness can be had from such affliction, how glad she actually feels…In the evening, before darkness falls, Osuna’s disciple makes herself throw up with the help of a goose feather, failing which she will feel considerably sicker the next day. At midnight her heart sets to thudding again, her arms and legs are twisted by waves of rheumatism, her fever soars.

  What tortures her most, since the onset of this immobilizing condition, is not being able to keep watch by the bedside of the nun with the open belly. The poor woman’s calvary is always on her mind, Teresa can see her, right here in her cell, though not of course with the eyes of the body. And yet she feels her bodily, she vomits her, loves her. The wretched sister’s intestines are obstructed and have burst through the skin, a veritable sieve, and anything she eats now oozes through those holes. Like dribbling mouths all over the surface, stinking anuses puncturing her flesh. The other nuns, aghast, have retreated from the abject spectacle. Teresa alone is determined to sit by the deathbed. Too bad if her bones are wrenched by convulsions; she drags herself as best she can into the cancer-sufferer’s cell, and there she stays.

  “You’re very brave, sister,” gasps a Carmelite on a whirlwind visit, holding her nose and making for the door.

  “I envy her patience in dying,” Teresa replies dreamily, outside herself.

  Instead of holding her nose, she begs God to grant her equal patience and send her all the afflictions He pleases. Sure enough the Lord fulfills her wish, and blesses her with the vomiting attacks she knows so well, the retching she provokes when the need arises. He sends her bone ache, exhaustion, new bouts of fainting, and an ever more infirm heart. Does He do it to torment or to ravish her?