Italy Impressions #6 The Bombshell Edition
Of Santa Teresa and Sophia Loren. "She was smaller than I’d imagined, dwarfed practically, by the black and red marble columns, the ornate stone canopy over her, the panels with their Rorschach blots"
Hello from Paris!
Mondays are the more classic newsletters that actually offer news. Thursdays are Italy Impressions as long as they still inspire me, then who knows?
Enjoy!
Of Santa Teresa and Sophia Loren
There, in a side chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria, she was smaller than I’d imagined, dwarfed practically, by the black and red marble columns, the ornate stone canopy over her, the panels with their Rorschach splotches. Off to each side, like at a theater, there were opera boxes holding life-sized marble effigies of the donors footing Bernini’s bill. They watched the scene, gestured, smirked, whispered as the androgynous angel prepared his arrow to stab the Spanish nun whose lips were already parted with desire, toes curling in orgasmic rapture, the featured act in a religious cabaret put on for the titillation of rich and powerful men.
I was distracted by the other man pointing at her, a tour guide, loudly whispering to his group. He should have just spoken normally. His hiss was far more distracting than a shout. His clients arranged their faces in dutiful appreciation, eyes sliding sideways, fanning themselves with sheets of paper, guidebooks. Some wandered off.
I had to readjust my expectations. I’d first seen her projected monumentally on a wall in a high school Spanish class where she was the focus, Santa Teresa, and her relationship to God, not the donor Cardinal Cornaro and his family watching the show. While my teacher talked about how she was one of the few women who hadn’t disappeared from Spanish history, had a huge impact, in fact, on the entire Catholic world of the Holy Roman Empire, I stared at her face and wondered what it would be like to be a nun, living apart from the world, and have the absolute joy of God answering when you prayed.
Born in 1515 in Ávila, Spain, she herself was fascinated by the lives of the saints, and ran away at age seven with her brother seeking martyrdom against the Moors who had succeeded the Visigoths, who conquered the Romans who nonetheless continued to dominate the landscape with their aqueducts and art, legal codes and increasingly codified Christian religion. Her uncle caught them before they could get very far in the quest which was largely moot. The Catholic Kings, Isabel and Fernando, had already largely defeated the Moors, their last gasp marked by the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in 1492, the same year, they expelled Jews from the peninsula, and sent off Cristobal Colón to find a shortcut to the profitable spice trade.
Back then, I didn’t recognize the parted lips and curled toes as belonging to any porn star faking orgasm. Filtered through the story of Santa Teresa’s life, I saw the longing, the transcendence. I yearned, too, not so much for adventures, or martyrdom, but to escape, disappear from my life into God. It wasn’t very Southern Baptist of me. Even speaking in tongues in the 1970’s and 80’s would have been considered a little much. But at least I knew I wasn’t alone.
Standing there, in Rome, I wondered how she would have portrayed herself. Sure, she had her ecstasies, and wrote extensively about them, including this passage from her autobiography which inspired Bernini.
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.
But she was also a formidable theologian and writer, reading widely in the literature available to her, digesting it, and transforming her experience into texts that continue to resonate today. She was an administrator, too, with impressive logistics chops, founding dozens of convents before her work was interrupted by attacks from rival Carmelites, who unleashed the Inquisition on her, and got her confined to one of her own convents, until King Philip II of Spain got involved. Which means she wasn’t just some ditzy woman off having visions, but a force in her own right, who probably spent a lot of time at a desk in front of a manuscript or writing letters, correcting ledgers. But who’d want to have a sculpture of that? Not Cardinal Cornaro. Not Bernini, marking her canonization forty years after her death with a statue of her orgasmic bliss, the parted lips of Sophia Loren.
I imagined replacing her with the unsmiling efficiency of the young cashier at the nearby grocery store who, ringing up my yoghurt and oatmeal the night before, had pegged me as a tourist, and while polite, didn’t look me in the eyes until I apologized in broken Italian for forgetting to weigh the bananas. The basic courtesy apparently set me apart, and won me a glance, a little life in her eyes, grace, though not a smile, not yet.
That’s it for this time.
Ciao,
xoxo Kelly