The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  For the moment the higher side of her nature was unrevealed. Nothing was apparent except the exterior charm of a loving and loveable girl, lively, intelligent, sociable and enterprising, with the additional advantage of being good-looking and making the most of it. “I began to make much of dress, to wish to please others by my appearance. I took pains with my hands and hair, used perfumes and all vanities within my reach, and they were many, for I was very much given to them.” She had evidently not taken to heart the words of St. Jerome about “those who paint their cheeks with rouge and their eyelids with antimony; whose plastered faces, too white for human beings, look like idols, and if in a moment of forgetfulness they shed a tear it makes a furrow where it rolls down the painted cheek; they who load their heads with other people’s hair and enamel a lost youth upon the wrinkles of age.” Nevertheless, Teresa’s vanity had its good side. Her fastidiousness, and a real mania for cleanliness in every respect, come as a slight surprise considering the century in which she lived; it was a subject on which she was later perpetually bothering her Prioresses and even her friends. Although in accordance with her vow of poverty as a nun she wore nothing but an old patched habit, she was always very particular that all her garments should be clean; and so noticeable was this idiosyncracy that her contemporary biographer remarks, unconsciously throwing a light on his own times, “her coifs and tunics never smelt of sweat or any other unpleasant smell, like those of other people.” One is reminded of St. Christina the Astonishing who, like Teresa, paid no attention to the appearance of her habit which consisted of no more than rags held together by twigs, but who so much disliked the smell of human bodies that she thought nothing of climbing trees, flinging herself into mill-races, or crawling into ovens to escape the offending odour, and during her own requiem Mass flew from her coffin up to the roof, away from the congregation, and perched there on the rafters until the priest made her come down again.

  For the outward semblance of Teresa there exists a detailed description compiled by a Jesuit friar who had known her personally and furthermore in his anxiety to get his facts right had consulted many people intimately acquainted with her. From a preconception, and misconception, we might imagine her to be tall, forbidding; aquiline, even haggard; bony, even cadaverous; impressive, but uncomely; momentous, but unapproachable. Not at all. She was somewhat plump (abultada, or bulky), with a white skin and a good deal of colour; curly black hair; thick reddish eyebrows, almost straight; round black eyes, somewhat prominent (papujados, or swollen), very vivacious and laughing, so that when she laughed, everybody laughed, yet they could be very grave when she wanted to express gravity. Her nose was straight with a rounded and slightly drooping tip, the nostrils small and arched; her mouth neither small nor large, with a thin straight upper lip but the lower lip thick and rather drooping; good teeth; a broad, short neck, rather thick in front. Three little moles added to the piquancy of her face: one halfway down her nose, one between her nose and her mouth, and one just beneath her mouth. Her hands were pretty and small (muy lindas aunque pequeñas); her feet were small too, and after death were seen to be transparent as mother-of-pearl; a gentleman had once caught sight of them and complimented Teresa, who without a blush replied, “Have a good look, caballero, for this is the last time you will see them.” It is clear from all this that she was what we should call a typically Spanish woman. We may add, that judging by her full-length portrait, and also by the probability indicated by her nationality, she was short and somewhat stocky of build. How did she dress as a girl? at least one of her dresses has been described by an old nun who remembered it: it was orange, trimmed with black velvet braid.

  It is evident that her natural vanity never wholly deserted her, for when in later years Fray Juan de la Miseria painted her portrait she said “May God forgive you, Fray Juan! what I have had to suffer at your hands, and after all to paint me ugly and blear-eyed!” (fea y legañosa).

  Teresa, later in life, naturally held the most orthodox views about the position of women, views which in any case would have proceeded from her profession, but which also reflect the attitude of her age and nation: a married woman, she says, dare not speak of her most serious maladies and poignant trials lest she annoy her husband; if he is sad, she too must appear unhappy; if he is merry, although she may be feeling far from cheerful she must appear light-hearted also; and from an unlawful attachment may God deliver us! It is a perfect hell, never to be mentioned; we must never remember that it exists, nor even hear it named either in jest or earnest. But Teresa at fourteen was unregenerate. She would be cautious, certainly, for she greatly feared disgrace and her own nature would prevent her from failing in the honour of the world, but within those limits she would enjoy life; and, she adds, “I was very adroit in doing anything that was wrong.” The picture she draws is extremely vivid: a band of young cousins, boys, all round about her own age, some a little older, who were always with her and had a great affection for her. It was she who kept the conversation alive in everything that gave them pleasure, their loves and their follies; and it is indicated that her sister Maria, a quiet and sober young woman, much older than herself, stood quite outside this gay circle with no influence upon Teresa. The influence came, instead, from one of the cousins, a girl whom Teresa’s mother had so greatly mistrusted that she had taken great pains to keep her away; but, owing to the kinship and the many reasons for her coming, she could not actually be forbidden the house. Don Alonso and Maria, equally distressed by this friendship, were likewise handicapped, and Teresa continued to enjoy the gossip, the recital of affairs and vanities, and, clearly, profited by the part of go-between that this unclean and parasitical tempter was willing to play. The servants, too, she found “ready enough for all evil.” This is where it becomes difficult to determine what Teresa really did. It is clear that she blames herself bitterly for something; she uses strong words, “mortal sin,” “blinded by passion;” and insists that the fear of God had utterly departed from her though the fear of dishonour remained, a torment in all she did. However scrupulous her conscience in retrospect, this is scarcely the language she would have used, even allowing for the excessive rigour of the Spanish code, even allowing for the degree of sanctity she had attained by the time she wrote this account, in referring to some boy-and-girl cousinly flirtation or to a temporary relish for the salacious conversation of older girls. Whatever her apologists may say, for three months something very dark was taking place in Teresa’s life; something so dark according to her views that she never brought herself to be explicit on paper. It concerns the girl cousin and “another who was given to the same kind of pastimes” (otra que tenia la misma manera de pasatiempos). It is to be noted that this “other,” so ambiguous in English, appears in the feminine in the Spanish original; and, since few things are more distasteful than veiled hints, it may also be outspokenly noted that in her own country the name of Teresa has been associated with that of Sappho. The authority (Vicente de la Fuente) who records this suspicion attaching to her reputation adds rather superfluously that no closer comparison with the lascivious, obscene, and unbridled loves of Sappho should be drawn than between the honeycombs of the bee and the wasp. Nobody in their senses or with any knowledge of this most misunderstood aspect of natural psychology would dream of comparing the organised orgies of Lesbos with the rudimentary experimental dabblings of adolescent girls, sciolists whose tentative essays may wither with maturity. The point is in any case perhaps not of very much interest, except in so far as every point concerning so complex a character and so truly extraordinary a make-up is of interest as possibly throwing a little extra light on subsequent behaviour. Above all, it is not introduced here in any spirit of scandalous disrespect to a wise woman and a great saint. But it may well supply the clue to this mysterious and tormented chapter in her autobiography, taken in conjunction with a further remark, to the effect that she had never constrained any man to like her, the Lord keeping her from it, but that had He abandoned her she m
ight well have done wrong in this, as she did in other things. In yet another passage she states that she was afraid of marriage.

  Her account is both confused and confusing. After bringing these vague but forcible accusations against herself, and saying that when she thought nobody would ever know she ventured upon many things neither honourable nor pleasing to God, she ends up by saying that, the occasion of sin being present and danger at hand, she exposed it all to her father and brothers. Yet, again, she says that so deep was her dissembling and so excessive her father’s love for her, that he never would believe her to be so wicked as she was, and she never fell into disgrace with him. Must this be taken to mean that she had not after all been entirely open with him? or that he had discountenanced a confession in which he feared to believe? Whatever the explanation, Don Alonso took the practical step of putting her into a convent. Here, once more, she contradicts herself, for, after saying that she had told all to her father and brothers, she states that her relegation to the convent was done with the utmost concealment of the true reason, known only to herself and one of her kindred. Teresa’s memory was always bad; she was constantly apologising for it, and also for the fact that she never had time to read over what she had written, but such apologies are scarcely valid in this instance where the contradiction occurs within a few lines of the document. The whole passage, even under the most honest examination, must remain a mystery.

  V

  TERESA AT THIS stage had no desire whatsoever for the religious life. As a sixteenth-century Spaniard and a Catholic she could not fail to venerate God, with a corresponding dread of the Devil and a very vivid mental picture of Hell, but it cannot be emphasised too strongly that she was no vocational nun. Her seven-year-old fancy for martyrdom had originated in a search for adventure and a hankering after the fulfilment of promises, not clearly understood, but advertised as being held in reserve in heaven. Her sixteen-year-old entry into the Augustinian convent of Santa Maria de Gracia was imposed upon her from the outside, not by her own insistence or volition. Hers is a very strange case. One is tempted to say that she not only became the inmate of a cloister by convention, but became a saint by accident. True, it might be an accident ordained by God, a mysterious and fortuitous choice of instrument; for certainly neither in her early years nor in her visible nature did any indication exist of a tendency towards so high a calling. The very thought of becoming a nun filled her with repugnance. She says so quite frankly and with her usual energy. “I was most hostile to being a nun,” (estaba enemigisma de ser monja). Yet not only did she become a nun, but also, after the lapse of many years spent in monastic obscurity and seclusion, one of the most energetic reformers with new foundations of the Unmitigated Rule to her credit all over Spain.

  Meanwhile she was not even a postulant, but merely a pupil, and, after the first week, not unhappy. She much enjoyed the conversation of the young nun in charge of the secular children, and the evil cousinly influence began to be rooted out. By the end of her eighteen months’ stay in that convent she was beginning to consider the possibility of embracing the monastic life, though determined it should not be at Santa Maria de Gracia, if at all, but in the Carmelite convent of the Encarnacion where a great friend of hers was already professed. But although these good thoughts came to her from time to time, they very soon left her again and she could not persuade herself to any decision.

  It may seem strange, considering her aversion, that she should have entertained the thought for more than a moment, but, given her objection to marriage, there was really no other alternative. Beside this factor, which she does not mention—it was perhaps too obvious to her mind—there was another factor which she mentions strongly. It was fear. She describes her motive with absolute candour, taking no pains to disguise the remarkable lack of enthusiasm with which she gradually decided on the step. She began, she says, to be afraid that if she were to die she would go to Hell; and although she still could not bend her will to be a nun, she resolved to force herself into it, little by little, because she saw that the religious state was safest (mas siguro) and best. The abandonment of self to love, the love of Christ, the anguished adoration of the suffering Saviour, the ecstasy of surrender to the heavenly Bridegroom, such as we find in Thérèse of Lisieux, is far more intelligible even to those who somewhat cynically attribute it to a psychological, neuropathic cause from which sex, however innocently and unawaredly, is not absent. No such explanation can be advanced in the case of Teresa of Avila. There is even one curious phrase embedded in her autobiography in which she refers to her “hatred of our Lord, which I made so public.” Even allowing for her habitual exaggeration in self-accusation, this is going far indeed. So it was “more influenced by servile fear than by love” that for three months she argued with herself, persuading herself that the trials of living as a nun could not be greater than those of Purgatory, whereas she, personally, had well deserved to be in Hell. It would not be much, she argued, to spend the rest of her life as though she were in Purgatory and then go straight to Heaven, which was what she desired. The words scarcely make sense to our ears, nor is it easy to understand a terror so extreme that she preferred to do violence to all her own inclinations and to sacrifice a life which offered many attractions, sooner than run the risk of meeting that remote but, to her, very concrete fate. It is, indeed, impossible to understand it at all, unless we can succeed in shaping our mind to the very contours of Teresa’s own, and in grasping not only with our minds but with our emotions the appalling reality of her conceptions. It is all the more difficult, given our knowledge of Teresa as an active, practical woman; an organiser and administrator full of determination and decision, to whom no detail was too small, no enterprise too intimidating; a woman shrewd and, in her dealings with the world, of great firmness and no illusions. Even in her attitude towards her own extraordinary experiences she gives reiterated proof of the utmost caution, dreading delusion no less than she dreaded Satan himself, dreading exaggeration, endeavouring to conceal her sudden trances from others, unwilling, resentful, yet all the time convinced of the terrible truth.

  The exact nature of her visions must remain unexplained, though she herself went to the most scrupulous pains to explain it. They would come upon her at the most unexpected and inconvenient moments, when she was busy with other things and had no intention either of being rapt away into Heaven or bodily shaken by the possession of satanic power. They would come upon her when her mind was quite otherwise occupied, and were physically shattering in their effects. They embarrassed her exceedingly, so great was her fear that those who happened to be with her should perceive something to be the matter and should find out what it really was. Often she went away to hide herself from view; and sometimes she would not even dare to ask for holy water when devils were present although she knew it to be the sovereign remedy. As her niece wrote of her, she did all she could to conceal her ascetic practices and never indulged in outward signs of sanctity or in false modesty; outwardly, indeed, she was so natural and so courteous that no one who looked at her would think there was anything of the saint about her at all. This shrinking, this desire for secrecy and privacy, is far removed from the exhibitionism of the hysteric determined to be interesting at any cost.