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

TERESA. And yet your mother was virtuous and devoutly Christian, like mine! (Long pause. A joyful expression gradually forms.) Aren’t human beings strange! You’d think the Creator had not made us all of a piece, but out of mismatched scraps. As a result we all have several faces. You in particular, my child, it’s a veritable curse.…Unless it’s a stroke of luck, a kind of grace or freedom, do you follow? One of the most enviable of God’s gifts, the ability to travel through our innermost spaces in a kind of pilgrimage.…

(Beatriz goes back to poring over the twisted threads of her misfortune, not listening to La Madre. Teresa, carried away by storytelling, is not listening either. She has already written this drama, she contents herself with gleaning a word here and an image there. Hopeless, toxic female contiguity.…)

TERESA. Ah, so your father passed away? (The movie allows itself some melancholic frames.) You never told me about that…and your brothers died as well? The Holy Virgin had to take you under her wing to ensure that when you were around twelve, you stumbled on a book about Saint Anne and developed a great devotion to the saintly hermits of Mount Carmel. (Joyful expression returns, more intensely.) Like me, you chose virginity. Clearly the best choice of a bad bunch. Fatherless and miserable, harried by your poor mother, who couldn’t help taking it out on you, you barricaded yourself behind your hymen. (Thin smile, fading.)

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS. I wanted to die a martyr, like Saint Agnes. Father and Mother beat me almost to death, then they tried to choke me.…I was confined to bed for three months, unable to move.…I wanted desperately to lose myself.

TERESA. Lose yourself, child? (Leans back to inspect her.) Thanks to the love of Christ, you were saved! To suffer like Him is pure glory. Once you felt affinity with the martyrs and the Passion, your family’s harassment was transmuted into a token of love, wasn’t it? (Long pause.)

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS. There was only one way out for me: to become a nun.

(Teresa seems to be suffocating again, she gasps for air to the alarm of Teresita and Ana. She thinks of the other Beatriz: Beatriz de Óñez.)

TERESA. Beaten children, abandoned children, it’s all the same: that’s what you are, my darlings. (The sequence of images is overtaken by darkness.) Primed to take shelter in the bosom of the tortured Father whom I call our Lord. (Turns to face us.) My sisters, you are, and I along with you, we are the paler twins of the Lord on Calvary. The Lord who allowed Himself to be tortured, abused to death if you like, in order that we might merge with Him, fuse our flesh with His, and thus and only thus be saved along with Him. (Sudden vehemence.) You see, little one, you can escape from a degraded or violent mother, flee a falsely respectable and profoundly distressed family, but you can never, ever, get away from Him. We poor mistreated creatures — and what creature is not? — could only be saved by a Father as cruelly flogged as we were, who loves us and saves Himself, and thereby saves us too. (Voice cracks.)

(The Chávez girl will never hear the catechism lesson La Madre recites to herself in order to make sense of her life and death. Beatriz is still hung up on her own adolescent yearnings.)

BEATRIZ DE LA MADRE DE DIOS, in a perverse whine. I couldn’t find a good father confessor anywhere, Mother.

TERESA. That’s the way it goes, perfectly natural, my child. (Smiles.) But you are a shocking little flirt, let me tell you plainly.…As plainly as I allow that your mother was a wicked bully, in her way. (Knowing smile.) No need to blush! I can tell your cheeks are on fire, even with my eyes closed. (Turns her back, settles on side with face to wall.) I’ve known you long enough.…(Breathes out.)