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

No, women never stop telling stories.…And this is another, stranded on its sandbank, jumbling times and places, high on love, children, and disappointment. Teresa isn’t listening, she knows it all in advance, always did. What she had to do was swim on by, let the rest sink, wash herself down, escape.

TERESA. A happy marriage, then. Like my marriage to my Spouse? (Broad grin.)

TERESA DE LAYZ. Not all that happy, Madre, in that it was barren.

(At these words the foundress falls back into her blue chill of agony. The visitor continues prattling about the desire for children, hijos, posterity, generación, and the many devotions and prayers she offered up, all in vain. Teresa thinks nothing. Nothing but the cold that sends icy fingers through the entrails that once were enflamed by the spear of transfixion.)

TERESA DE LAYZ. “Do not desire children, for you will be condemned,” I was told by Saint Andrew, a powerful patron of these causes. And then I seemed to see a patio, Mother, and beyond it green meadows as far as the horizon, dotted with white flowers. Like your gardens, Mother, irrigated by the four waters, fragrant and in bloom. Saint Andrew appeared to me again, saying: “These are children other than those you desire.” At that I understood that our Lord willed me to found a monastery. (In a metallic, conquering voice.) I no longer wanted to have children.

(Teresa remains silent for a long time. Why must this other Teresa rekindle such hoary griefs, incommunicable, forgotten, overcome and buried long ago?)

TERESA. I never wrote about what is now burning the tip of my tongue, and will remain as pure, unformulated thought.…(Fervid reminiscence.) Your story finds an echo in me. Two Teresas, de Cepeda and de Layz, two barren wives who begat religious houses instead of offspring.…(Pause.) You and your faithful husband eventually created Our Lady of the Annunciation at Alba de Tormes, a fine convent, and I’m proud of it. (Pause.) Sincerely proud. (Weeps. Another long, heavy silence.) And now, they tell me that the good donor that you were torments those great souls? (With sudden violence.) “I fear an unsatisfied nun more than many devils!” There!

Teresa de Layz feels the fear of sterility come over her again. If a mother upbraids her daughter, if she deserts her, is it not because the mother is herself unhappy, numbly inadequate, afflicted by some inexpiable infirmity? A dried-up fig, in short.

(The dying woman pushes herself up on her elbows in the white bed with its freshly changed sheets.)

TERESA. Ah, dear lady, one cannot serve God in disquiet. All this is infantile, mere attachment to self. How different it is wherever the Spirit truly reigns! (Turns the page.)

Teresa of Avila can be cruel, all right — just enough to restore order. Up to her last breath, and, if God wills it, piercing her foremost alter egos to the quick.

Father Antonio de Jesús shows Teresa de Layz the door.

TERESA, to Ana de San Bartolomé. Tell me, child, are we still in Alba de Tormes, on the duchess of Alba’s estates? (In a childish tone of regressive nostalgia.) Ah, the duchess! She delivered me for a time, like the exit from Egypt, she nurtured me.…It was her, doña María Enríquez de Toledo, wasn’t it? Or am I out of my mind? I see her now.…(Tries to rise onto elbows, falls back.)

(Doña María Enríquez de Toledo, the duchess of Alba, walks past holding a trout.)