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

“Mind you, the cloistered woman—your Teresa was a woman, riiight — can easily accept her subordination to one or several bossy mother superiors, just to tickle her latent homosexuality, not half as unconscious as one might think. Next thing you know, the path of these handmaids of the ideal Phallus is paved with pleasures that are out of this world. In fact, once they run out of excitement they jettison the Word itself, which likely panics them by becoming flesh, and these halo-hunters take refuge in the Void: pure love, cult of silence, take or leave a whiff of Buddhism. Did you see yesterday’s Monde? Apparently more and more monks and nuns are raring to drop Our Father who art in Heaven and even the Name of the Father, and move to India instead. Faith is getting with the decentralization program at long last. All roads lead to India, you’re behind the times, sweetheart!”

The new Marianne is unrecognizable: energetic, outspoken, confident, briskly efficient. Shall I get her to have lunch with Bruno? That would be a scream. She’s given up the cigs and scruffy jeans; today she’s modeling a shimmery silk ensemble. I don’t take her up. My smile can only be read as agreement.

“Still, I think you’re doing the right thing, getting stuck into your saint like that. So I changed my mind. Can I? You’re too kind. Because what I said about vocations, enclosures, and co doesn’t just apply to a handful of visionaries. That lot, who survive by stopping time, only succeed in aggravating the soul distress we find in milder form — let’s be thankful for small mercies — in our own everyday hysterics, do you see? Actually, I don’t understand why the PPS insists on saying hysteria is on the wane and that most cases count as borderline. First of all, it’s not true; second of all, they’re not mutually exclusive. Take what I just said about the disgusted hysteric, male or female, hiding from the primal scene, and apply it to a Marie or a Chloe, model wives and mothers who wipe their brats’ noses and get depressed at the office and dream of a higher love, or even better — it’s forbidden to forbid — a romance with Patrick Bruel or Brad Pitt or some TV anchor, yeah? When it comes to the eternal call of infinite love, the possibilities are infinite…QED! You’re so right to devote yourself as you do. I applaud you from the bottom of my heart.”

She blows me a kiss, sashays away, leaves me.

Marianne is triumphant, and I applaud with her. Just one damper on my side: Is there any hope of Marie or Chloe setting down their soul distress on paper and “elucidating it through narrative,” as my learned colleagues would say? Our patients, Marianne’s and mine, are probably too image-soaked to indulge in that kind of old-fangled pursuit. As for those who surrender to the sexual night of hackneyed autofiction, that’s part of the program: no comparison with my exigent Carmelite.

Fortunately, Paul, who really does love me, arrives to rescue us from certainties and hypotheses that lead nowhere, as I’m prepared to admit. He’s holding an open book, it’s my copy of Diderot, he’s reading as he walks in and doesn’t stop. He’s letting me know he wants to share in what I’m reading. He must have picked it up off my desk, my door is always open; he often borrows books of mine and as often returns them, with the utmost tact. After a sidelong, hostile glance at the departing Dr. Marianne Baruch, who was surely “bothering Sylvia,” as he unceremoniously calls me, he starts reading out loud from The Nun.

I am overwhelmed by tiredness, I am surrounded by terror, and rest escapes me. I have just reread at leisure these memoires that I wrote in haste, and I have realized that, though it was utterly unintentional, I had in each line shown myself to be as unhappy as I really was, but also much nicer than I really am. Could it be that we believe men to be less sensitive to the depiction of our suffering than to the image of our charms, and do we hope that it is much easier to seduce them than it is to touch their hearts? I do not know them well enough and I have not studied myself enough to know the answer. But if the Marquis, who is credited with being a man of exquisite taste, were to persuade himself that I am appealing not to his charity but to his lust, what would he think of me? This thought worries me. In fact he would be quite wrong to attribute to me personally an impulse that is characteristic of all women. I am a woman, perhaps a little flirtatious for all I know. But it is natural and unaffected.³⁶

Paul lifts his head and looks at me.

“Have you any idea what she means?”

I don’t respond, that’s my role.

“A natural, unaffected woman? What’s that?”

Silence from me again.

“‘A woman dominated by hysteria experiences something infernal or divine.’ What do you make of that, Sylvia? Shall I go on? ‘Saint Teresa has said of devils, How luckless they are! They do not love.’”³⁷ Paul carries on reading out his latest discoveries in the Pléiade edition of Diderot.