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

La Madre lies motionless for a long while. Exhausted by her efforts, glad to have been accompanied by His Voice one last time, is she still thinking, feeling, or living at all? There’s no way of telling, because Teresa has completely merged with her interior castle. There she holds open the doors of possible and impossible dwelling places.

She wants to let go into meaningless words, to speak in tongues…Delirium is her Pentecost, and she pulls herself together.…This transit toward His Majesty is going to be interminable.

LA MADRE, regaining her breath and her senses. They say the “babbling talk” of lovers does not say anything about the events of the world. (Knowing smile.) I expect they’re right, because they are philosophers, whereas I am just a woman, and a wretched one at that. Certainly, lovers’ babble has nothing to tell, not about worldly events.⁴⁷ (Another shrewd smile.) But my own babblings, inflamed to the point of madness by the fire that carried me to Pablo, made me tell everything I knew about…about what? (Stops smiling.) About my wanting to do what is in me…me, outside myself…outside the world within the world.…(Opens eyes, seeking to rest them upon an absent interlocutor. Sylvia Leclercq hides, unseen, behind a column.)

HIS VOICE. What are you talking about now, you stubborn creature?

LA MADRE, reading. “Oh, Lord, how we Christians fail to know you!”⁴⁸ To do what is in me, “do what lies within your power,”⁴⁹ that’s what living is. (Pleading voice.) That is the reconciliation of Martha with Mary Magdalene. Does it surprise you that a contemplative like me should identify with Martha? (Pause.) Because Martha is not a contemplative in the way of the Magdalene, that’s official. You know better than I do, Majesty, that contemplative women are not immune to the call of the flesh. (Pause. Reading.) If Martha had been like them, who would have prepared food for His Majesty? Who would have served Him? Who would have eaten at table with Him? Contemplation makes one forgetful of self and of all things, and progress is fast.⁵⁰ Others such as Martha, however, are led by God into the active life. (Still reading, gravely.) The Lord, fostering them little by little, gives them determination and strength.…⁵¹

TERESA, palms joined in prayer. By straying with my Eliseus, while also listening to the Voice of the Lord — Oh God, would that I heard it more often! — I was attempting to reunite Mary Magdalene and Martha. (Pause.) It seemed to me that, since the Lord is corporeal and likewise His Voice, the Creator was surely to be sought in His creature.…⁵²(Quavering voice.) To be precise, I knew this to be true, but thanks to my folly with Eliseus I experienced it body and soul, in this world, by trying to accomplish the work of a Martha reconciled with Mary. (Lifts hands and holds them open before face.) A contemplative soul is left floating in the air, as they say; it seems it has no support no matter how much it may think it is full of God. (Normal voice.) Well then, the humanity of Christ’s body provides that support.…Ah, but that humanity attracts the desires, in other words the fires of the Spirit, which weaker souls are daunted by.…(Pause.) And such souls are quick to conceive fears…flee from the pleasures…and reject that extreme sweetness…which I so often could not tear myself away from, no more than could Saint Francis, Saint Bernard, or Saint Catherine of Siena.⁵³ (Expression of happiness.) Most of the others prefer to ascend or be elevated, and that is doubtless excellent for the souls most advanced in spirituality, but it is not continual. (Happy expression fades.) Pardon me these comparisons, Majesty, I often have trouble being humble, in spite of my best efforts. And yet I fear that others are far more deficient in humility than I am, if they’re not content with so fine an object as the humanity of Christ. And, of course, “a woman in this state of prayer is distressed by the natural hindrance there is to her entering the world.”⁵⁴…She is distressed, I am distressed, do You hear?…

(His Voice remains silent. Here Teresa believes she can hear it smiling at her.)