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

The great enemy, then (smile of complicity) is nothing other than the deficiency of imagination and desire: the lack of figurable representations that makes us settle for harmful, unhealthy drives. Here is a devil whose power Teresa knows too well—son semblable, son frère, perhaps.* [*A reference to the famous address to the reader in Les Feurs du Mal: “Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!”—Trans.] It tips one into comitial excitability, undermining the containing capacity of thoughts and images. It is futile to resist these imaginary fissures, these feeble, fearful, terrifying fantasies. My message is that it is possible to transform them: plunge yourself into the abundant figurations of my lovers’ spaces, read how by amassing them I come into possession of the Other in me, how I change and grow. For is it not foolishness (desatino) to believe we could ever enter Heaven without entering into ourselves first?⁷

(Pause.)

SYLVIA LECLERCQ, puffs, and resumes at speed. And though the building thus erected constitutes a shelter, it is steeped in the inconstancy of the baroque: its safety is but a fleeting spark, “centella de seguridad.”⁸ A bolt of lightning, a whirlwind, interior rapids: Teresa’s writing, reflective and caressing, surges along nonetheless with the speed of Love in Angelus Silesius: “Love is the quickest thing and of itself can fly / To topmost Heaven in but the twinkling of an eye.”⁹

Saint Teresa of Avila in Glory. Tapestry woven by the first Carmelites in Avignon (twelfth century). © Fine Arts Museum, Budapest.

And just as opposites coexist, when they are not actually interchangeable, in the works of Rubens, Guarino Guarini, Andrea Pozzo, or Tiepolo, so God and the Devil rub shoulders in the tornado traced by La Madre’s pen: why do we cry “‘The devil! The devil!’ when we can say ‘God! God!’and make the devil tremble,” she writes defiantly, and earlier, “His Majesty favor me so that I may understand,…and a fig for all the devils [una higa para todos los demonios].”¹⁰ Teresa has no compunction about firing obscene insults at the paternal superego of her more disapproving confessors! Against them, her love upholds her legitimate right, as the Lord’s Bride, identified with His Royal Majesty, not to fear anything or anyone: “I fear those who have such great fear of the devil more than I fear the devil himself, for he can’t do anything to me. Whereas these others, especially if they are confessors, cause severe disturbance: I have undergone some years of such great trial that I am amazed now at how I was able to suffer it. Blessed be the Lord who has so truly helped me!”¹¹ (Breathes out. Stares at the diamond.)

The Apotheosis of Saint Teresa (1722). Fresco by Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770).

Church of the Scalzi, Venice, Italy/De Agostini Picture Library/F. Ferruzzi/ Bridgeman Art Library.

Step by step the imagery of resistance to the erotic brazier gives way before the profusion of another imagery, orchestrating its success. The amorous subject triumphs over the soul unable to represent to itself the trials joining the lover to her Beloved; the castle-building narrative excludes from its halls disgraced souls who stray from the enchanted imaginary, like the prodigal son who once thought he could leave his father’s house and live off the husks of swine. A soul in love and proud of it, Teresa stakes out a double space (anxious voice): “outside this castle,” an alien exteriority inhabited by the kind of person who eats pig-swill, is contrasted with one’s “own house,” which has everything a person could need, and “especially, has a guest who will make him lord over all goods.”¹²

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Giuseppe Bazzani, oil on canvas (1745–1750). © Fine Arts Museum, Budapest.

Could the imprecision of the phrase manjar de puercos (pig feed) suggest that people who are incapable of inhabiting themselves and fully enjoying the riches of the imagination are eaters of pork? A diet that offends Jews and Marranos, not to say…the hidden interiority of my Teresa, always in search of some secret faith, some protected clandestinity. Like the faith of her ancestors, perhaps? Of course the prodigal son was uncritically welcomed back by his adoring father, and Teresa herself addressed her experience en lo muy muy interior to everyone, for universal dissemination.

(Silence. In the background we hear the voice of Dr. Thomas Leclercq, softly humming the “Deposuit.”)