Just a few notes confirm the astonishing timeliness of Teresa of Cepedaits incredible modernity: these days filming has just finished and the editing of Teresathe biopic about the saint starring Blanca Portillo and directed by Paula Ortiz, which will be released next year, based on tongue in piecesby Juan Mayorga. In addition, the work in which he is inspired is still alive on stage, since the playwright’s production is performed in Oviedo during the week of the Princess of Asturias Awards, there has been another “magnificent” production of Ignatius Garcia in Portugal in a monastery, it is being performed right now in Mexico, at the National Theater, “and they have just announced the publication of the Japanese translation,” explains Mayorga.
deep, contradictory
It is also necessary to remember other films such as Teresa (2003), directed by Raphael Gordonwith Elizabeth Ordaz Y Assumpta SernaY Teresa. Body of Christ (2007), by Ray Loriga, with Paz Vega in the role of the saint; The war according to Santa Teresathat Maria Folguera took to the stage in 2013; that just a few months ago the publishing house La Uña Rota published Minimum speedby Paco Bezerra, which brings together the playwright’s eleven works, including his monologue on Santa Teresa (I die because I don’t die), and that Editorial Password has just rescued The verb became sex. Teresa of Jesus (1931), by Ramón J. Sender, with a prologue by Cristina Morales, in which the writer vindicates the saint as a feminist and punk.
In the case of the filmmaker Paula Ortiz, her interest in Teresa was born at the university: “I was studying Golden Age Literature at the time, and I read Teresa from a very naïve and poetic approach, perhaps very little imbued with her historical-political dimension and religious; in reality, it was a purely poetic approach. However, as I delved into her life and her work, what surprised me the most was reading a woman capable of expressing experiences of extraordinary intensity, but also endowed with a capacity for action and feminine self-inquiry in a field such as spirituality that is absolutely deep, intense, contradictory, stirring… The most amazing finding is probably her word, totally contradictory, tense, fine, intelligent, brilliant… Yes you think about it, it is an impossible pen. Her sentences are profound, beautiful… They are so wide that they don’t fit anywhere. It puts words to internal landscapes that I would not know how to express, and gives shape to very strong intimate experiences, from elusive areas of human experience such as spirituality, in my case from non-belief, giving you a very strong knowledge of yourself. She names you inside.”
A woman against the current
From Teresa also to Juan Mayorga the word dazzled him. Yes, she was impressed by “his determination, his strength – the strength of a very fragile body – and his intelligence, but above all his word. Teresa is one of the greatest writers of our language”. Perhaps for this reason, the author of tongue in pieces (2011) says that every day, “in my life”, phrases from the saint accompany her. “Yes, I consider Teresa to be an exemplary person – which does not mean that I am going to imitate her path, since I do not share the creed that led her. I know that I will never reach the intensity of her writing or have the courage of her, but I should demand both of me ”. And maybe for that too, Mayorga he has not stopped rewriting his workto the point that one of his favorite phrases only appears in the latest version: “The sentence no one can cross it out.”
Dazzled by Teresa, Mayorga assures that her courage, her ability to love and her word make her an amazing being, “in this and in any time, and she continues to seduce us because she was a woman against the tide in her time and she is in ours. Because she will always be untimely, she will always be current. She will always be a subversive.”
Clara Sanchis in the work ‘The tongue in pieces’
The case of Paco Bezerra and his monologue I die because I don’t die is very different: it was commissioned by the Fundación V Centenario del Nacimiento de Santa Teresa de Jesús, but the negotiations did not come to an end and, from then on, the text began to go through a thousand vicissitudes that led to its forced departure from the programming of the Canal Theaters. “As far as I am concerned, I am convinced that, with all this, Teresa is trying to tell us something,” highlights Bezerra, who points out that what surprised him most about the character as he studied his life and work was the way in which, starting with the beatification process, “they began to manipulate their message. The Teresa of five hundred years ago has nothing to do with the one they have sold us. The military kidnapped, after her death, Eva Peron, and the men of the Church to Teresa. It is the revenge of the males towards the women who had more power than them. Since they couldn’t tame them in life, they did so once they were dead.”
subversive and dangerous
The playwright confesses that Teresa “has taught me to survive in the worst possible scenario: the life that has touched me”. Also that in her monologue there is “the best I have achieved” because from 2014, when she started writing it, until 2022, “when I published it, I have had time to think about it a lot. There are chapters that I did not include because it was too long. Anyway, one day, I put out an extended version with all the deleted scenes. I dont know”.
As for the secret of its modernity, Bezerra stresses above all “its disobedience. Teresa was subversive and very dangerous. What she tells you, when you read her, is that you are a coward. That is why, although she was the daughter of the XVI today continues to teach us the true meaning of the word freedom”.
Cristina Morales expresses herself along the same lines, assuring that calling Teresa de Jesús a feminist “is an understatement, because She is a woman to claim from anarchist and radical feminism”. Now, when seven years have passed since Profanity appeared in Lumen, the writer from Granada recalls that in her case it was a commission “for four pesos” to celebrate Teresa’s fifth centenary, and that the editor, Silvia Querininot only imposed the title (“over time, in Anagrama, I was able to change it and transform it into Last evenings with Teresa de Jesus”), but asked him to recreate a supposed personal diary written by Teresa in 1562, while writing his book of life, “which was actually also commissioned by her confessor father, who tried to control her thoughts and intentions while she tried to save herself from the Inquisition. I had a lot of fun that curling the curl of the orders ”.
Cover of ‘The verb became sex’, by Ramón J. Sender
Jokes and curls aside, the truth is that when investigating her figure, Cristina Morales discovered an “amazing” woman for whom she has been “on the verge of conversion many times. As a result of the book I have had a lot of relationship with Carmel, especially with the masculine Carmel, less closed than the feminine, and I have understood that in a time like the contemporary, religiosity so free and sui generis of Teresa, so heterodox, makes it at least striking for a world as iconoclastic as the current one. She was a proscribed woman, denounced, censoredits book of life it could not be published during his lifetime, but he did not renounce the faith, because he preferred to say what he wanted without renouncing either the Church or his faith. Today he continues to question us. She was a woman who questioned everything, who was satisfied with nothing, and who found her salvation in her writing, always alone, always free”.
I was born for you
Also in 2015 appeared I was born for you (Ariel), by Espido Freire, who highlights Teresa of Ávila’s attempts during her youth to “fit in, to become mediocre, to be understood and to be forgiven for a personality that entered into genius. Unlike other figures who were quick to receive admiration and whose surroundings enhanced her difference, Teresa made her way much to the chagrin of others…even herself.” Freire confesses that when he reread the work of the mystique, in 2013-2014, “he was going through a fairly serious depression, in which both Teresa de Jesús and Seneca either Montaigne they served as intellectual guides while I recovered. Suddenly, his mental illness took on an importance that he hadn’t given it before. in a completely different way, his search for happiness, joy and a sense of life was also mine”.
As for the secret of its actuality, what he continues to tell us, he highlights both its complexity and its contradictions, “together with a balance between spirituality and practicality.” Of course, he points out, today he continues to teach us “that what we see is not enough, and that what we do not do to pursue what we want, nobody will.”
‘I was born for you’, by Espido Freire
Juan Manuel de Prada, author of the diamond castle (Planeta, 2015), is another of those seduced by the saint due to his quixotic component, “always in struggle with the spirit of her time, always ready to impose her ideal on a reality that rejects it”. Also for being “a mystic and, at the same time, a woman of action, always from the mint to the mecca, founding convents and swallowing the dust of the roads. She is very impressed that the same woman who had achieved an intimacy with God of supreme delicacy had at the same time to be dealing with muleteers, or convincing her gentlemen to sponsor her foundations. This contrast seems to me expressive of a polyhedral soul”. That is why he has always felt challenged by her: “It helped me a lot to downgrade my literary work, which had always pursued the ghost of formal perfection; Santa Teresa’s neat slovenliness is a lesson to any pretentious writer. And he keeps teaching me! His amazing confidence in God, which was also confidence in one’s own possibilities, when he is at peace with God. That ‘nothing disturbs you, nothing frightens you’ has an amazing validity, especially in this world of gods who believe they can do everything by themselves”.
For his part, Fernando Delgado, who won the Azorín award in 2015 for her eyes on me (Planeta), describes its protagonist, Santa Teresa, as an exciting character, “not only in the aspect that is told in my book, but in general. She is an extraordinary character, in the midst of the corruption and absolute depravity that existed in the ecclesial world and also in the civil world of the Spanish 16th century. She was an impeccable woman, fighter and faithful to her principles”.
a walking enthusiast
The same enthusiasm shows Jesús Sánchez Adalid, author of And suddenly Theresa (Ediciones B, 2014), when describing “the absolute unity in the essential or vital of Santa Teresa. In addition to the power of the imaginative, always palpable, in Teresa everything is authentic, complete. In her work, she is completely herself, without losing for an instant her fidelity to her vital enterprise, which is an enthusiastic walk towards God, expressed in symbols, metaphors, and all the marvelous game of sensory adjectives. Teresa’s style is hers and very hers, dominated by the grace of a character that she never sheds”. Teresa de Cepeda, she insists, “she is one of those exceptional beings in humanity. His is an attractive human personality, alert, graceful; and at the same time, free, enterprising and magnanimous. And she is still alive, teaching us authenticity…”
At the end of the day, as Olvido García Valdés points out, author of Teresa of Jesus (Omega, 2001), the saint ends up becoming, for today’s women, “someone with whom you talk without realizing it. I really like how he analyzes things, especially in times of difficulty.” Hence, it continues to give us “energy, that energy that we perceive intensely when reading and that makes it alive, quarrelsome, depressed and immediately excited, thoughtful, vulnerable, and of unwavering resistance. She is a born communicator, she makes us feel that changing the world is possible, even though we think –and she herself thinks so– that it is not”.