The breast of Beatriz de Ahumada is forgotten, as swiftly glimpsed as it was dispelled by the grace of the Host into the sweet taste of Christ’s masculine body. Masculine, yes, but not as other men’s bodies are, for the Son of God’s is cavernous, like a woman’s: passionately wounded, punctured, tortured, and yet resilient, eternal, immortal. Male and female both? Superhuman, resurrected.
If she could gobble every one of those wafers, destined for the eager mouths of the nuns queuing behind her, she would. But she doesn’t go that far, she aspires only to receive the very largest crumb of divine Body and admits as much to her confessor. The amiable priest always saves the largest, roundest one for her. It’s their little secret, it brings them together, although in reality Teresa only communes with the Other. What harm can there be in wanting the biggest part, insatiable as she is for Jesus? It’s merely a sign of how greatly her devotion surpasses that of the other nuns. The man of God indulges her.
Only John of the Cross, much later, manifests any objection to the arrangement. In September 1572, Teresa invites her “little Seneca” to become resident confessor at the Convent of the Incarnation. Obsessed with asceticism and self-punishment, when this perfect Father tires of punishing himself he takes it out on Teresa. He shares her zeal for the reform of the order, and yet one day, when at the communion rail he sees those sensuous lips approach, radiant with expectation, instead of rooting out the largest Host—as is customary for this insatiable female—he proffers the first he finds. Then pauses, draws back his hand, breaks the wafer in two, and places a meager half on Teresa’s tongue, keeping the other half for the nun behind.
What’s come over him? There’s no shortage of wafers, is there? John is obviously bent on reprimanding her hedonism, but the rebuke backfires: since Jesus is wholly present in each particle of what exists, how much more must He inhabit the smallest scrap of Host! This is logic enough for Teresa, in whom reason will always be greedier than taste buds. She won’t give John the satisfaction of seeing her chastised, let alone allow him to deprive her of pleasure in the tiniest flake of wafer as though it were the largest. So long as she is replenishing herself with the body of the fatherly, motherly Jesus, nothing—within the bounds of discipline and obedience—can spoil her enjoyment.
And in the privacy of her soul the Lord appears, holding out His right hand pierced by a nail: “Don’t fear, daughter, for no one will be a party to separating you from Me.” How could it be otherwise, since she has just swallowed Him! And what’s the puny nail John has tried to drive into her soul, by denying her the best Host, compared to the nail in Jesus’s palm? Nothing. No deprivation can ever hurt the Carmelite, for every hurt brings her closer to the One who endured agonies beyond imagination! Every time she takes Communion—and Teresa loves that sacrament, as her father don Alonso had noticed—the Host reconciles her with the ideal Father while allaying her disgust at the maternal-feminine taint.
The teat and its milky streams are henceforth fused with the steely tip of the nail and with the thorn of absence, disgust has mutated into ceaseless hunger, and frustrated voracity into hunger for imagination. Teresa accepts her half of the wafer as yet another token of her osmosis with His double Majesty, father and mother in one. Actually, John of the Cross has given her the opportunity to celebrate her nuptials with Jesus in fine style. The union of the lover with the Beloved is the more unbreakable for being marked by a gash, a thwarting, a lack. John knows this, of course! He cannot fail to read his friend’s feelings. With humility, more than ever filled with the Other, La Madre moves imperturbably away, leaving the great spiritual poet to reflect upon sensual Teresa’s response to the lash of his rigor. It’s not the first time their paths have crossed and diverged, nor will it be the last.
Meanwhile His Majesty soon confirms His approval of the beloved daughter, in these words: “Behold this nail: it is a sign that you will be My bride from today on.”14
Part 4
Extreme Letters, Extremes of Being
The devil cannot give this experience, because there is so much interior joy in the very intimate part of the soul and so much peace; and all the happiness stirs the soul to the praises of God.…St. Francis must have felt this impulse…those who at one time listened to [Friar Pedro de Alcántara] thought he was crazy. Oh, what blessed madness, Sisters!
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle
After all, the patron saint of hysterics, St. Theresa, was a woman of genius with great practical capacity.
Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria
Chapter 11
BOMBS AND RAMPARTS
It is foolish [es desatino] to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves, coming to know ourselves…
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle
July 7, 2005. Castile is baking hot. Cracked earth, stony gullies, parched shimmer of yellow air; a lunar landscape under a sun of fire. Here water is a saint’s dream, a figure of speech. Madrid lies behind us; we’re heading to Avila in a bright-red rental KA from Hertz. I twiddle the dial for the midday news, they’re talking about bombs in London: explosions in subway tunnels near Aldgate, King’s Cross, Edgware Road, and on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square. Aldgate is also one of the stations for the area where the 2012 Olympic Village will be built. Is that significant? We speculate about the number of devices, of casualties, of missing people…The Madrid bombings were just over a year ago. Thirteen bombs, ten of which exploded in three minutes in four suburban trains coming from Alcalá de Henares toward Atocha station. There were ninety-one fatalities at a scene of twisted, gutted carriages littered with the dead and injured; Aznar’s party lost the elections and the Spanish troops were pulled from Iraq. Like every tragedy that feeds the global media machine, there is little sign of it today; only in the sorrowing hearts of the victims’ loved ones. One almost expects Al Qaida cells in Madrid. But in London! What was Scotland Yard doing? Where was James Bond? Where was Tony Blair?
“We were braced for it. It wasn’t a question of if but of when.” My Mexican pal Juan preempts the BBC and other globish media platitudes. Juan lives in London, and knows all there is to know about Spain’s Golden Age. Here, his voluble campiness irks the local studs: gas station attendants, waiters, and vendors look daggers at him, and we always get served last. I pretend not to notice.
“The Piccadilly line must be hell. The tunnel’s really narrow, you know, it nearly touches the sides of the train. Like hurtling at high speed through the eye of a needle, and in rush hour! To think I was on it the day before yesterday.” Andrew’s blood drains from his skin whenever something happens. He looks like a snowman in a heat wave.
I’ve lost all sense of time with him. How long is it since we met? “Young writer from New York,” that’s how he introduced himself at the Kristeva class we both attended at Columbia. Cocktails, dinners at the Top of the Sixes, the Nirvana, the Soho—all of them gone now. Memories, memories.…But the sexual attraction persists. Andrew is the only American I know without a jot of religious sensibility. His Methodist parents hammered him so hard with the Bible that his Oedipus obliged him to make a “clean break,” as he says wryly. His ruthless retaliation is becoming more ironical with age. He’s raw and sensitive the way I like them, while being outwardly cool, sexy, and witty. Just the ticket for an occasional flutter; each of us is irrevocably alone, but every time we meet it’s like we’d never been apart.
“Our pilgrimage to your Teresa,” as dear Andrew teasingly calls it, becomes shadowed by current events. The radio keeps updating the material damage and the number of fatalities, it’s unimaginable…Other countries are shaking off their torpor. Spain’s wounds are still fresh. France gloats: of course, Paris is smarting from the failure to bag the 2012 Games. And then there are the various “European opinions” conveyed by the referendums rejecting the Lisbon Treaty. We tried to forget that “they” were still around, but “they” reminded us, and how. Who are “they,” anyway?
“A bunch of fanatics, what else? The world’s full of ’em. One was even spotted in Avila!” Andrew’s jocularity falls flat. Juan and I don’t respond, and Andrew segues sideways: “I’ve always preferred Lazarillo de Tormes to weddings with God, and at this rate history’s bearing me out.”
On the road and around the table, alone and with friends, the erotic thrust and parry between him and me takes the form of scholastic disputes. The sex of angels, Bush and Chirac, Nietzsche and Heidegger, French politicians Villepin and Sarko, Le Monde versus Le Nouvel Observateur, the tele-evangelism phenomenon, the refurbishment of MoMA, the Hispanization of the Big Apple, the relative merits of Philip Roth and Philippe Sollers—nothing escapes us, and everything makes us laugh. Before we end up in bed, we never know how the sparring will pan out. We’re even in terms of weapons, but poles apart in style. I’m notoriously dogged and consistent. Whereas Andrew, who changes his mind as often as his shirt, will suddenly start defending an idea he trashed five minutes ago, just for the novelistic fun of trying a different character. I don’t sulk or cry foul, it could wreck the game. I catch the ball in the air, run to the net, smash! Or sometimes it’s the other way around, I’m not saying that never happens. On this occasion, I let the whole thing go.
Juan is hunched over his cell phone: none of his posh friends who work in the City around Aldgate can be reached. The radio says the phone signals have been jammed to prevent the terrorists from detonating a new wave of attacks. We’re scared.
“What of? Come on, there’s no use being scared!” Andrew’s blood has flowed back, now he’s red in the face with temper. At least the London bombings will have had the effect of concentrating my on-off partner’s mind on the faith wars. So far, the Teresian landscapes we’ve seen have only impressed him with their storks! “You wait and see, soon all will be revealed: Islamic suicide bombers,” he continues in a mocking drawl. “James Bond don’t know it yet, but when he finds out, he’ll be awful scared of scaring the populace. Dear me, bombers in our bosom! All those chaps flooding in from North Africa, Pakistan, the Philippines! Or even better, homegrown, from some run-down inner city, smart enough to become engineers or teachers, Her Majesty’s socially mobile subjects.…Remember 2001, how surprised we were at the high educational levels of the pilots, mostly Saudi, who crashed into the Twin Towers? And how that didn’t stop them identifying with the losers of globalization and turning themselves into human bombs? I say! Even the most phlegmatic Brit might ask himself a few questions. One point to me! And what about the G8, keeping awfully quiet back there; just as mad for God, and unlikely to change the opponent’s way of thinking, if you see what I mean. Because there’s a hair in the soup of the rich, and that’s religion. The rich are pretty keen on religion, the fuse of the human bomb! Can you see them deconstructing it?” (Besides the Kristeva course, Andrew has attended rather too many Derrida seminars for my taste.) “Another point to me! Nope, few takers for that job.”
Even an occasional lover is loath to admit that his partner has had the same insights as him, not to say before him! The jagged peaks of the Guadarrama are bristling with wind turbines in the distance, like a hi-tech version of the windmills Don Quixote mistook for giants. I kick the ball into touch.
“The suicide bombers are the windmills, you mean, and the politicians are our Quixotes? So we’re waging war on an unfindable enemy, attacking effects instead of causes, and hitting back with futile militaristic campaigns, like the Man of the Mancha charging forth on his Rocinante, instead of undertaking the necessary social reforms? We’d do better to change the wind than sit in judgment on the windmills. If the wind keeps blowing from that direction, it’ll drive all the world’s windmills insane, it really will.”
Juan and Andrew have stopped listening. Good old Sylvia, talking through her hat again. They turn up the radio. In fact I’m getting closer to Teresa, I never left her. Her wind, her sun, her peerless energy of Love with a capital L, which draws her irresistibly to the divine Spouse—did she construct or deconstruct them? In La Madre as in the Islamists, it’s their faith, the “hair in the soup,” the fuse that interests me, pace Andrew. That exaltation that makes a person ill with love, ill unto death.
“Forty-nine dead, 700 wounded, 350 still in hospital, of whom 22 are in a critical condition…” It’s enough to have the radio on: the same figures ride the airwaves in every language.
“And that’s just the beginning! Over to you, G8!” Andrew’s sarcasm is not funny anymore.
Ocher and gray, streaked with red, the ramparts of Avila rise before us like a brusque eruption of the arid land we are traveling, piously nestled in the heart of the Sierra de Gredos, ice-cold in winter and windblown in summer. Many peoples once settled this hilltop, but now all that remains of them are the stones and bricks packed into the two and a half kilometers of the majestic perimeter wall, twelve meters high and three meters thick, with nine gates, four disused posterns, and eighty-eight massive semicircular towers. The fortification raised between 1090 and 1093 by Count Raymond of Burgundy, don Raimundo, at the express command of Alfonso VI, recycled the rubble of earlier Roman walls that had been demolished and rebuilt by Muslims and Christians in a string of legendary clashes that foreshadowed the Crusades.
Our little red KA is unfazed. It speeds from gate to gate, whips through the steep and winding streets like a lizard, and is soon parked in front of the Parador. Strange how that dragon of a wall has taken over our bodies, pushing us in and out without our hardly being aware of it, like a constant swinging: Teresa’s birthplace is a vertigo. Getting as close as possible—my saint’s manuscripts themselves can’t be touched, sequestered under glass in the worthy museums of the Guía Teresiana—I come across pre-Roman altar stones, carved with geometric designs and the shapes of plants and fish; dressed stones; Latin inscriptions; funerary stelae adorned with primitive reliefs of human heads. Although the piling of histories one on top of the other added up to a citadel dreamily reflected in the Adaja River as if in a tale of knights and ladies, this Romanesque edifice looks brand-new to my eyes, like a flimsy set built to accommodate one of those “duties of memory” our contemporaries go in for. The Avilans are so proud of their fortress that they fix every damaged stone at once and repair the least crack as soon as it appears. The blinding Castilian sun makes the ramparts look as artificial as a pasteboard backdrop for son et lumière shows on summer nights. We remember the London bombings; we’ll observe a minute of silence later on.
As soon as you step inside the walls, you realize that the fortified space of the saint’s home city is the model for her moradas or Dwelling Places, misleadingly named The Interior Castle, as she described them late in life, in 1577, at the request of her friend and confessor Jerome Gratian. The moradas could not have been conceived without the Hekhalot and Avila: a haphazard agglomeration of little houses, plazas, and barrios, partitioned off from one another and yet open and permeable. By the monumental grace of those eighty-eight towers that bulge and snake rhythmically around the holy of holies, the moradas or “abodes” of Avila communicate with one another just as they do with the mountains, fields, and sky.1 Avila “expands in its smallness” as an effect of those walls, wrote Miguel de Unamuno.2 No, Avila is in no sense “small,” because all of its boundaries are membranes. Instead of enclosing and compacting it, that great concertina of a wall inflates and transcends it. Here, every indoors is halfway to being outdoors; Avila streams with greatness.
Of the family home and little garden, the place where Teresa is said to have been born, nothing remains to feed the nostalgia of her fans. Located on the plaza de La Santa, between the home of the Avilan notable Blasco Núñez Vela and that of her uncle Francisco Álvarez de Cepeda, whose sons were her first heartthrobs, it was once a stolid block of granite adorned with the Ahumada crest. In 1630 the Discalced Carmelites purchased the abandoned property, whose direct heirs had emigrated to the New World, and six years later an ostentatious church in the worst baroque taste was
erected on the site.
I think about the inventory drawn up by don Alonso on the death of his first wife, Catalina del Peso y Henao, a victim of the plague in 1507. This document shows Teresa’s Papá in a different light than do her own sketches. We find a conscientious hidalgo who in 1512 rode off to fight in Navarre under the king of Aragon, ruler of Castile on behalf of his daughter, Juana. But did Alonso’s breastplate hide the soul of a collector? The list of tackle for mules and horses includes harnesses, saddles, girth-straps, stirrups, curb chains, halters, and bells. Mule blankets were “red, with dark green diamonds” or “white and red,” and there were “several Rouen coats in red and yellow” for the horses. Alonso rejoices in the enumeration of luxuries and seems to have had a fetishistic love of swanky textiles. He mentions a “crinkled doublet made of fustian from Milan, with aiguillettes,” another of “purple damask,” and another of “crimson silk.” He is no less precise about the wardrobe of his late wife: a “scarlet gown trimmed in black velvet,” a “skirt of zeïtouni—moiré satin from China—slashed with yellow taffeta, lined in red.” These treasures were set off by splendid jewelry: a pair of gold chains that encircled the neck four times, six chiseled gold bracelets, earrings of pink and yellow gold, and a crucifix inlaid with precious gems.
By the time Teresa came along, this sumptuous lifestyle was already, or nearly, over; she recalled her mother only ever wearing black. The modern setting for the cult of Teresa contains no hint of her father’s pampered tastes, any more than it suggests the raptures and tortures consigned in her writings. Inside the church, a plaster Teresa swoons for all eternity against a blinding gold background. Awed pilgrims shuffle past a display of relics, the sight of which makes me feel quite ill. There’s a finger from her right hand, a staff she used on her travels, her rosary, and—more endearing—the soles of her sandals. A medley that is supposed to authenticate the handful of letters kept in a jar, which have no need of such a reliquary.
Teresa, My Love Page 24
