My Confessor
He was in love with someone else, but he couldn’t have her, and so he chose me. He lived with me for seven years and I had asked for nothing. Not even marriage. When you love a holy man, you know that God is in his heart, and you take what you are given. He was a cleric before he was a man, and a man before he was my beloved.
His name was Pedro Fernandez, and I had known him all my life. I knew how he looked when he was sleeping, how he took on blame when he was angry with himself for his failures, how he cried when he spoke to God in the late afternoon, begging for forgiveness. I had gone to him when my husband died. I needed faith and he was kind-hearted and took my hands in his, and perhaps that was when it started.
He had me move into his family’s house. He said I was in need. I would help as I could. I swept the courtyard when leaves fell. I made tea and lit the fire. He told no one that at night, long after twilight, when the moon rose and all his prayers had been said, when the supper dishes had been washed and put away, he came to my room. He always knocked first, and now I think it was his way of showing God that I was the one who chose to allow him to enter my room. I was the one who yearned for him. I always confessed to him before he took me to bed. My family were conversos, and I knew the old Hebrew prayers, my mother had taught them to me in the cellar of our house, but I was a Christian to my confessor as I was to the rest of the world.
If Pedro worried that my red hair meant I had evil within me, he didn’t say so. Instead, he cut a lock of my hair and carried it with him always. If that wasn’t love, what was? Or so I thought at the time. I didn’t know that he punished himself for all he did with me. He beat himself with olive branches; he got down on his knees and ground his hands into the stones. I see now that he told himself I was a witch, that was the way he could believe that I was the one with power. But what sort of power was that? I was only a young woman, not much more than a girl, and I would do whatever he asked.
The other woman was a nun called Teresa who’d had a long and terrible illness when he became her confessor. People suspected her of speaking with angels and devils; they said she thought too highly of herself, even though she always vowed she could never be enough for God. When Pedro was with her, they spoke of many things. I know because I followed him and overheard their conversations. Was I proud of myself for seeing what I shouldn’t, for trailing after him and observing how closely together they sat in the garden, how she nodded when he spoke, how he looked at her transfixed? I wasn’t and yet I stayed. I saw more and more and still I could not see enough. Pedro was charmed by everything about her, and she warned him that although his affection for her was not bad or immoral, it was too great and therefore would come to no good. She told him not to love her so much, the opposite of what I wanted. In my imagination he had kissed her, but I think she would not have met with him if he had. God was watching her, and she knew it. All the same, I could see the strong love he had for her, and, if I am not mistaken, she had the same for him. When he left her, he wept openly in the shade of an olive tree, he cursed himself, he refused to eat. I knew what it meant. I didn’t give a damn about her, for I understood he had forsaken me.
Why had he fallen in love with her? I asked myself that a thousand times. I spoke to God myself, but he never answered me. The nun was older than I, but truthfully, she was still beautiful, all the more striking because she tried to make herself plain. That was when I realized he had fallen in love with her goodness and with her purity; he was in love with her spirit. Some people called her delusional, for she was austere in her practices and had visions. She claimed that the Lord commanded her. I will not have you hold conversation with men, but with angels. Yet the man I knew was always at her door.
I discovered that Teresa had been born in March, that unreliable month of grass and snow, in the town of Ávila in the year 1515. Her father was a cloth merchant, and his family had been Jews, but he had been punished and humiliated by the Inquisitors and had left that faith behind. Teresa was said to be the most pious and the most wondrous, even as a child, not just in her countenance, but in thought and deed, willing to be tortured and set apart for the sake of her savoir. Competing against someone like that is like fighting with an angel, you will be blinded by light and brought low by darkness, and that is what happened to me. I turned to the left-handed side. I went down the cobbled streets and found the witch’s house. Every woman knows where it is. You can find it if you try.
“What you’re asking is for me to help you go against a man of God,” the witch said when I explained my needs. She came from a background of Jewish and Spanish magic, but what was holy was holy and she gave prayers to all beliefs and faiths.
I was in a state, and hardly listened to her. My beloved was a spiritual man, who had been seized with rapture when he prayed, but now I saw a different sort of rapture in his eyes. I gave the witch the one thing of any value that I had, my mother’s ring with a turquoise stone, and in return the witch gave me a copper idol. Inside there were charms that would help me possess him, an amethyst, apple seeds, almonds, a love token in the shape of a small key. That night I asked if he would wear the chain holding the idol and the charms around his neck. He thought it foolish, but I begged and as soon as he lifted the chain over his head, the love magic worked. He wanted me again. He wanted me even in the daylight hours and everyone could hear us. By now his family knew, and so did others. There were other confessors who would no longer admit him into their rooms.
“What have you done to me?” he cried. He had to blame me, I understood, otherwise he could not have lived with himself. All the same, I told him exactly what I had done. I had come to his house, washed his dishes and his floors, done all he wished, given him a charm, wanting to be with him even when he had loved another.
Consumed by his sins, he told the nun about his terrible moral state, and now she had sympathy. I saw that she denied herself love. I saw something inside her that was beautiful and tragic, a dove that would never fly, caged forever. She put her arms around him, showing him she had forgiven him, but I could tell from her expression she might be trying to please God, and in matters such as that, you can never do enough.
I was watching on the day she asked him for the charm. “It is used to bewitch,” she said. “Give it to me and you’ll have no worries.”
To please her he did so, and when he left, I stayed. I was more interested in Teresa now and in what she would do. I wondered if she would slip the necklace around her own throat, just to know what real love felt like if you gave into it, if you didn’t think about sins and confessions. She thanked the Lord for protecting her from evil. Even though I had been so wretched I have never fallen into anything of this sort, nor have I ever tried to do evil, even if I could have, I would never have desired to force anyone to love me.
She went walking, and when she reached the river, she threw the idol into the shallows. I was on the next bridge over, and I watched it sink into the murky waters. It disappeared before my eyes. Love was like that, you could throw it away if you wished to, you could say it was worthless and it should never have been. I later heard that she said that once she’d gotten rid of the charm, Pedro began—like someone awakening from a deep sleep—to recall everything he’d done over those years and he was filled with shame. He had me leave his house not long after. I was no longer allowed to call him by his name, and he burned the token of my hair to ashes, and I could see that Teresa was right, I was nothing to him now. I heard that his reputation had changed. He had grieved over his sinful state, and he now abhorred me. He told everyone his sins, listing them, for he had them memorized, and he celebrated the feast of the Immaculate Conception with great solemnity, thanking God for returning him
to the light.
I tried not to think about these things, and I didn’t, until one year after the date when he had first met Teresa, Pedro died. I thought that was an unusual anniversary, and I mourned him in my way. I decided to search out the nun. I heard her speak about him to the women who followed her. I sat in the back of the chapel. She said that when she saw a mortal sin, she did what she could to avoid it, and that seeing this very human tendency in herself had helped God to love her more. She said men must be friendly toward women who they see are inclined to virtue and that her friend and confessor had been on the path to salvation.
Sometimes intentions are good, but the deeds that are done are evil. Sometimes the light falls upon you after it’s too late. I thought about love, and how it could be so very different to different people. I walked alone and found myself at the river, at the very spot where she had thrown the idol away. I saw Teresa there, walking through the reeds, not caring that her garment had become soaked. The idol was there waiting for her, exactly where she’d thrown it.
She walked out of the water and came to me as if she knew me, as if I wasn’t the only one who had followed somebody.
“Who do you think I was saving?” she asked.
She held out the idol to me and at that moment, I understood everything that he had seen in her. I saw her spirit shining all around me. I took up the love charm and held it in my hands and wished that the world was different than it was. I wasn’t surprised that she was there for me. If love lasted forever, what could we expect? Of course, we would both be at the same place, at the same time. I kept the charm as a reminder of all that had happened and all that could be. Even if I threw it in the river, I would still be carrying it with me, whether I wore the chain around my neck or not, and each time I saw her after that, each time I sat in the rear of the room where she spoke to the women who adored her, I knew that she would be wearing it too.
Afterword
This story was based in part on the following passage of The Collected Works of Saint Teresa of Avila, Vol. One, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D.
The passage in part:
When I began then to confess with this cleric… His affection for me was not bad; but since it was too great, it came to no good… This was no small matter, because for about seven years he had been living in a dangerous state on account of his affection and dealings with a woman…. For the unfortunate woman had put some charms in a little copper idol she asked him to wear around his neck out of love for her…. For in order to please me, he finally gave me the little idol, which I then threw in a river. Once he got rid of this, he began—like someone awaking from a deep sleep—to recall everything he had done during those years. Exactly one year from the first day I met him, he died. He was very devoted to the service of God, for I never thought that the great affection he bore me was wrong, although it could have been more pure.
Thank you to Stephanie Paulsell.
