Teresa, My Love Read online

  Not rationalistic, not skeptical, not isolated, not even “balanced,” and yet drawing on knowldge as much as on unknowing, Teresa’s Self is a twofold knowing from the start, born in the Other’s love and for the Other* [*“Le Moi de Thérèse est d’emblée co-naissant dans l’amour de l’Autre et pour l’Autre.” The author makes a pun on connaissant, knowing, and co-naissant, co-being born.—Trans.], ceaselessly inscribing itself in the spiral of call and response from I to you, between you and me. After the dialogical Socrates, before the doubting Montaigne and the cogitating Descartes, this woman had the idea—a biblical idea? baroque? psychoanalytical?—to invent a self-knowledge that can only be realized on condition of an inherent duplication: “you in me” and “me in you.” Her castle is interior inasmuch as it is infiltrated by the exterior Other, irreducible and yet included, body and soul; sensible and signifiable. This double knowing is a long way, too, from Rimbaud’s “illumination” (“I is another”)29 and more an intuition of something close to Freudian transference: a clarified passion for seeking a self that is grounded in the bond with another, inevitably poignant and definitively jubilant. Does Teresa posit this “third kind of knowledge” in muffled resonance with Spinoza the Marrano?30 Maybe, but from there to celebrating her as a scholar in theology was quite a step—one finally taken in 1970, in the aftermath of Vatican Council II, almost five centuries after she was born. Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena were proclaimed by Pope Paul VI the first women “Doctors of the Universal Church.”

  On hearing me enthuse about the droll letters Teresa sent to her confessors (those secret or semiavowed loves, who no matter how erudite she often chided for their lack of what she called “experience”) my friend Dr. Baruch teases me: “Our Freudian Sylvia, lapsing into Catholicism, eh?”

  Not a bit. Or no more so than Leibniz, whose company is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, the great rationalist who aspired to overcome the rifts within Christianity took La Madre seriously in his Discourse on Metaphysics, describing her as “a person of noble mind whose sanctity is greatly revered [and who] used to say that the soul must often think as if there were only God and it in the world. Now nothing makes immortality more completely comprehensible.”31 In a letter to André Morell, he is explicit about his debt to her: “And as for St. Teresa, you are right to esteem her works. One day I found in them this fine thought: that the soul ought to conceive things as if there were only God and itself in the world. This thought gives rise to an idea which is significant even in philosophy, and I have made good use of it in one of my hypotheses.”32

  Teresa’s soul incorporating its God, consubstantial with the Other: might this be the only possible immortality? Enough, surely, to mark down the Carmelite saint, the inspirer of Bernini, as the precursor of the infinite monad and Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus!

  Did I mention my former partner? I finally erased him altogether, it’s true. It’s all so long ago. We were fifteen in May 1968, we manned the barricades on rue Claude-Bernard, discovered sex and drugs at the Odéon, experimented with the whole gamut of erotic fantasy and power games. His name? Can’t remember, not a clue. Honestly. My friends, the few I still have from those days, are the same: they say “your ex,” “her ex.” My ex left no trace of himself in me, good or bad, which might seem strange for a psychologist, or perhaps it just shows how thoroughly I was psychoanalyzed. He claimed to like women and hate children; he made love like—and with—anybody else, but preferred me for sleeping with. When we were together he’d cross the road to avoid greeting an acquaintance, male or female. Was he ashamed of me? Ashamed of himself? Given that everything was or ought to be transparent, this hole-and-corner stuff made no sense to me, I couldn’t see why we had to play at secret lovers. So I asked him, I nagged him about it, and he’d fly into a temper and disappear for days. We carried on that way for ten years or so, I wanted to be up to date, but I was just a masochist. One day he didn’t come back. One of our friends, mine that is, I never met his, got some news via a mutual contact. “Seems your ex opened a holiday club in Thailand, can’t you just picture it! Did you know? I always thought he was in computing.” I could picture it alright, but I hadn’t believed in anything for quite a while. I’d been depressed. A spell in the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital, a lengthy analysis, the Duras book, the psychology degree, I did whatever it took to delete the whole thing. You can hiss as much as you like, the fact is that I came out unscathed, smooth as a pebble.

  Love, the tritest business of our whole lives, as my mother used to say in evocation of her favorite authoress—Colette or Sagan?—love had ditched me for good. Free of it at last, I find life nicely open and varied, full of surprises. My patients offer unexpected gifts, my dear colleague Baruch buoys me up with her businesslike approval, and occasional affinities with the male of the species afford me occasional pleasures of the kind known as physical. With 9/11 and the rise of Islamic terrorism, I realized that religion is the only world—besides those of Paul and Élise—that can still rouse me to passion. For better and for worse.

  It’s late, I’m in my apartment on Place d’Italie gazing out at the city lights. My father always loved this great window; the view would relax him after a strenuous day. I’m getting supper ready and listening to the news: from one folly to the next, Sky News, CNN, on goes the world.

  The phone rings. It’s Zone Books.

  Bruno doesn’t call very often, and why should he: sales of my Duras book were modest, except abroad. “There’s a Duras cult in the States, what do you expect, all those depressed women sucked in by feminism…Sorry, did I upset you?” Of course not: I wouldn’t kick up a fuss with my publisher. All he’s asked after that is to meet for a drink every two or three years, in case there’s something to be got out of the dingbat psychology circles I now move in, and which include Zone customers. Invariably he draws a blank: I’m not the mole he’s after. Let’s do it again soon? I’ll call you. That would be lovely…

  Meanwhile, Zone switched niches. Seeing as everybody else was writing and publishing fiction, Zonabend slashed the literary list to the bone and went into contemporary nonfiction. “Essays are such a catch-all, ever since Montaigne and Rousseau, you know, essays have been great sellers.” But without spurning his old flames.

  “The time has come for you to take up your pen once more, my dear! I need you, yes I do, I’m serious, surely you realize you’re cutting-edge? Come now, I’ve always known you had flair. Value crisis! Apocalypse now! The new sicknesses of the soul! How to become a suicide bomber so as not to go crazy when you’re crazy already! You are at the total front line of all that, my dear Sylvia, and plus you’ve got the inside story, with those fruitcakes of yours! You hold the key to the enigma, on the deep-down intimate level, I mean.”

  Bruno is trying to flatter me: he dreams of a White Apocalypse Mark 2. I’m thrown, I’m not on the same wavelength as when he published me.

  “Do you hear what I’m saying? Today’s Anne-Marie Stretters, Lol V. Steins, what are they doing? In France they’re singing on shows like Star Academy, or making a fortune as high-end escorts, like the one who tripped up Daniel Stern, what was her name? Anyway. So, think about it: suppose those same rather sordid heroines are Muslims, what choices do they have, between the Pill and the chador? Suicide bombers in the making. I’m rushing the transitions, ok, but here’s your theme: apocalypse, feminine case. What say you?”

  “You mean the Hiroshima of love would only get more devastating?” I’m alluding to the subtitle of my book, which Zonabend has evidently forgotten. “And I’m supposed to be the expert in the field?” I say, feigning jokiness.

  “The Hiroshima of love, excellent!” Bruno can already see me on TV, guesting on the Guillaume Durand show, or, why think small, on prime time with Patrick Poivre d’Arvor.

  “I don’t know, but I do think there can be religious women in love. I happen to be reading one now who talks about nothing else.” Teresa, by default, again.

  “Really?
Well, why not…Let’s see. Not Diderot’s nun, she’s been done. A fundamentalist? A mystic?”

  “A writer.”

  “Not another writer! Ok, do me a synopsis.” My publisher goes quiet all of a sudden. He doesn’t seem very excited about my saint. “Religion is always a mystery for you psychologists as well, isn’t it? So that’s it…I’ll trust you. I want it. I’ll send the contract. And get your skates on.”

  Bruno’s such a bore. I don’t feel like ticking boxes. I am steeped in Teresa, her faith and madness speak to me, and the faith I never had may not be so far distant. As for madness, well…A bonfire under my white apocalypse?

  Hail Teresa, borderless woman, physical hysterical erotic epileptic, made word, made flesh, who unravels inside and outside herself, tides of images without pictures, tumults of words, cascades of florescence, a thousand tongues listening out for whom for what, listening to time etched in stone, eardrum larynx cry out write out, night and brightness, too much body yet disembodied, beyond matter, empty gaping matrix throbbing for the Beloved ever-present and yet never there, but there’s presence and presence, His in her, hers in Him, sensed felt buried, sensation without perception, dart or glass, pierced or transparent, that is the question, transverberated instead, and again inundated, La Madre being the most virile of monks,33 most canny of the herders of souls, a veritable twin of Christ, she is He, He is she, the Truth is me, or Him in the deepest part of me, me Teresa, a successful paranoiac, God is myself and what of it, what’s the matter? A free-for-all, who can beat that? Certainly not Schreber, not even Freud, awfully serious chap from Vienna, gloomy rather, a woman finds it easier to talk about these things, what things, well, her of course, her beside herself, obviously, in the throes of dread and delight, little butterfly expiring with indelible joy because Jesus has become it or rather her, butterfly-Jesus, woman-Jesus, I know someone who though she’s not a poet composes poems without trying, novels that are poems with an extra something, extra movements, I wonder whether it is really I, Teresa, speaking, the path that is pain, the Nothingness of everything, that everything which is nothing, do what is in you to do, but gaily, be cheerful, my daughters, for twenty years I vomited every morning, now it’s in the evenings and it’s harder to bring up, I have to provoke it with a feather or some such thing, like a baby a baby girl if you prefer latched on to the Other’s teat, mystic or is it spiritual marriage, young John of the Cross34 says there’s a difference, I don’t really see it, more like two sides of a coin, or like the Song of Songs, as always as ever she sings off-key but she writes true and carries on founding her convents, her girls, her Church, her own gestation, her game, a game of chess, games are allowed, oh yes, even in a cloister, especially in a cloister, God loves us to be playful, believe me, girls, Jesus loved women, what are the Doctors so scared of in us, yes, checkmate to God too, oh yes, Teresa or Molly Bloom, I am numb at last, I flow into the water of the garden, flow on by, all we do is feel pleasure, souls that love can see all the way into atoms, that’s right, for yes is all there is to souls like mine, mine sees as far as the infinite atoms that are atoms of love, the philosophers don’t have a clue, they become scholars, they recoil from your sensations, the best of them are mathematicians, tamers of infinity, and yet it’s as simple as that, oh yes, metaphors mutating into metamorphoses, or possibly the other way around, oh yes, Teresa, my sister, invisible, ecstatic, eccentric, beside yourself in you, beside myself in me, yes, Teresa, my love, yes.

  Chapter 2

  MYSTICAL SEDUCTION

  Besides obeying it is my intention to attract souls [entice souls: engolosinar las almas] to so high a blessing.

  Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life

  Transforming the beloved in her Lover.

  Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul

  It’s Christmas. People are buying trees, foie gras, oysters, gifts. Some will go to midnight Mass, millions are already clogging the freeways, apparently London is paralyzed by the weather (shame that the one destination that could tempt me is off limits due to global warming); there’s been a deadly pile-up in Gironde, three young people carjacked by a drunk in the 13th arrondissement, two dead, one critically injured. I’m staying put. The MPH ladies are of one mind for the vacation: they are trooping off for some thalassotherapy in Ouarzazate. For some unfathomable reason Morocco at Xmas is a magnet for the political class (“Of a right-wing bent,” my friend Dr. Marianne Baruch points out) and for women of a certain age.

  Marianne is going as well, not looking forward to it much—but the alternative is “Not been there, not done that,” already the favorite expression of this Prozac-popping chronic depressive and proud of it. Ouarzazate wins: “Cheaper than Biarritz or Quiberon, and sure to be sunny, you know?” I do.

  “So I guess Mme Leclercq will be staying put, as is her wont?” Our psychiatrist’s intent sympathy is trained on me. I must be looking even more oblivious than is my wont; Marianne is fishing for a smile.

  “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

  “I’m not the kind who says, ‘it’s nothing, just a woman drowning.’”

  She doesn’t miss a trick, that one. When Dr. Baruch wants to please me, she fires off one of those Exocets I myself taught her to use, in this case a line from La Fontaine. We are supposed to chortle together. Not me so much, because I don’t agree with her in the slightest. For the moment Teresa is my entertainment, she’s a great deal more engaging than anything else, including thalassotherapy, and since my one vice is curiosity I’m currently devouring all I can get hold of that has to do with my saint in particular and mystics in general. I feel well within my rights to fire back: “I’m not drowning, darling, I’m allowing myself to be seduced!”

  But I’ve underestimated her again.

  “Not Bruno, is it?” she says, with a censorious sniff.

  Well I never! Has she overheard a phone call, or gone into my e-mails? Unlikely, it’s not her style. Did she spot that old exhibition catalog of works by the Beguines, which Zonabend found in an antique bookshop and gave to me the other day?1 “For company on your journey toward Teresa. Love, Bruno.” That surplus word “love” did not escape my notice. But Marianne can’t have seen the catalog or its inscription; I keep it at home, where I consult it religiously.

  Got it: Bruno had Freud’s complete works delivered to me at the MPH address. The standard edition in English, twenty-four volumes accompanied by an “affectionate” note. A generous if somewhat ostentatious gift, and a peculiar one, because not only do I read English poorly, the MPH is also growing increasingly cognitivist, in line with the rest of our globalized planet, and disdainful of psychoanalysis. Zonabend decided to defy the international trend, he claimed, simply to “please me.”

  Point noted. I got the message, and couldn’t help feeling a consequent twinge. My colleagues rapidly forgot about the anachronistic offering, except, as I now realize, for Dr. Baruch. In love and therefore jealous, my friend saw the whole thing in a flash, well before I woke up to the pickle I was in with my funny old publisher. Who has, sure enough, become rather more than that in recent days.

  “Oh, stop fantasizing!” I stand up, to cut the conversation short. “Happy Christmas, happy hydrotherapy, happy New Year! Send me a card I might get before Easter!” I give her a warm, close hug, but I can sense that she’s not fooled.

  Did I really seduce Bruno with my talk of saints? Or does mystical seduction itself make straight for its human target, publishers included, without need of assistance from me? Having lost, as the reader will recall, my faith in human relationships, I am inclined to favor the second hypothesis. Be that as it may, Bruno is a changed man since I mentioned Teresa to him. The Beguines catalog, the complete Freud; my middle-aged publisher is getting adventurous.

  For he did not stop at “love” and efforts “to please me” with gifts of books. We were at the dinner-date stage. I accepted the invitation, just to see what he was after. Never in our long and intermittent history had I thought
of him in any but a professional capacity, but pieces of his story started coming back to me as I sat opposite him, nursing my drink, in the Café Marly overlooking the sculpture courtyard at the Louvre. The erstwhile handsome rogue and shameless philanderer had been kicked out by his wife—what, five years ago?—because she couldn’t stand any more of his Monster Baby scenes. To the surprise of tout-Paris, that microcosm of media-savvy glitterati, his wife went and married a great but obscure biologist at the INSERM medical research institute, without either celebrity status or private income—not much of a playboy either, at best a boat in the marina of La Rochelle, thanks to which I numbered him among my summer acquaintances. As expected, the diffident scientist had found safe haven in the arms of Stéphanie formerly Zonabend, henceforth Coblence. He has found happiness, actually, if the beaming face of their little girl, nearly three, is anything to go by. She skips along the strand at the Île de Ré under the frankly spiteful glances of the readers—mostly women—who feign an interest in the output of Zone Books.