The year was 1529: Teresa’s time had finally come. It was time for her to lie and rest next to her beloved Gutierre, gone from her side these last 26 years. It was time, she thought hopefully, for her rebirth in the celestial kingdom. But first, Teresa she would be buried inside the church that she had built with money she had inherited from Gutierre.      Getting his money had not been easy; for Teresa had not been barren: She had given birth to several sons, who like all men, expected to receive an inheritance from their father that they have not earned. I did not earn it either, Teresa thought, But against all odds, she had won Gutierre’s considerable fortune in a bitter court battle 26  years earlier. It had been a long wait; she was ready to join Gutierre. In the movie version of her life, we would Teresa’s illuminated face, a sign of God’s favor. Against the odds? God do not throw dice. Teresa had come from a position of power and privilege: Her father had been an admiral in the Catholic Kings’s navy; Gutierre had been the royal treasurer and the mayor of Toledo, an important city where Christians, Jews and Muslims had once lived in relative peace as the rest of Europe wallowed in the Dark Ages. A place of relative harmony in a violent world dominated by increasing nationalism.

      Neither King Arthur nor any of his knights spent any time in what is now Spain. And in Arthurian tales, there is a sea of fatherless boys, struggling to survive childhood, to joust, feast, and go on quests. to father their own fatherless children with women who are not their wives. Oddly, there are no girls, and there are very few older women at Camelot. Yet somehow, there are lots of young, pretty women, who are either treacherous femmes fatales, or mindless pretty faces that cause men to go to war against all reason…and their friends as well as their enemies. One wonders if Teresa had read the ground-breaking Castilian novel, Amadís de Gaula, which would be foundational to French literature. Had she read the works of Julian (Gillian) of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizane or Marie de France, the ground-breaking women writers who preceded her who, like her, have lost since been forgotten by misogynous male academics?

     Teresa had been born a motherless girl in 1460, 32 years before the founding the nation-state called Spain and the Luso-Hispanic invasion of the Americas. The only mother, and the only father, Teresa would ever know would be her paternal grandmother and namesake Teresa. Neither had been named after the more famous Saint Teresa of Ávila, the future saint had not been born yet. And Teresa’s childhood home? A convent outside the city of Valladolid, far from her father. Life in the convent was austere, to be sure, however love was always present, the love that only a grandmother of a motherless girl.

     Teresa thought back to that day 26 years ago when her beloved Gutierre have left her. It must have been God’s will: Her father had made one excellent contribution to her life after her birth when he selected Gutierre as her husband, of that there was no doubt: Gutierre had been a wonderful husband. He was, by all accounts, a faithful, thoughtful, intelligent man, a rare species in the late 15th century. And Toledo was an important place in positive as well as negative ways. It had been a hotbed of religious violence against Jews, who lived in Iberia since Roman times (according to Jewish tradition, “Toledo” mean “wanderer” in Hebrew); Toledo’s Jewish community had thrived during the Moorish occupation. Yet strangely and quite unexpectedly, miraculously really, after the city fell to the Catholic forces in 1085, its large Moorish and Jewish libraries were not destroyed by the fanatics who would later launch the Inquisition. Instead, many books were translated into Castilian by Toledo’s Jewish and Muslim scholars, who continued to live the area until the expulsion in 1492. Without their written works, much knowledge and understanding of the past would have been lost forever.

     “What are you thinking?” a voice asked Teresa.

     “Did I do enough?”

     “You did a lot. You built the Holy Sacrament Order. The convents. Your work among the poor, the vagabonds, the orphans, prostitutes, and unmarried women in search of decent husbands…men like Gutierre.”

      “I was an orphan, never knowing my mother or my father. But I was blessed with such a wonderful grandmother and husband, I certainly wanted other women to have the same. Love is a blessing.”

     “You were a volunteer battlefield nurse in 1492, when there really were no nurses.”

     “But did I do enough?”

     “You used to hire beggars to do trivial tasks so that you would have an excuse to give them money with which to buy food. You gave them a roof under which they could sleep, if only for a short time.”

     “But did I do enough?”

     “You founded schools for poor children, and you built a hospital for people who could not pay.”

     “But did I do enough?”

     “And before you, Teresa, hygiene in hospitals was unknown in Spain.”

     “But there are still so many poor, and so many orphans, and so many vagabonds, and so many women in need of husbands, and there is still so many people who need medical attention, and there are so many people who live in squalor, who do not know cleanliness, and who, even if they did, do not have clean water with which to bathe. Did I do enough?”

     “The poor will always be with us, our Lord told us this.”

     “Did He mean we can never do enough?”

     “You have done all that you possibly could have done. Now you must go and rest, to be with Gutierre and with our Lord, Teresa.”

     “Who are you?”

     “Adiós.”

 

POSTSCRIPT: One need not believe in God or the saints to admire people who were or sadly still are ahead of their time. Christine de Pizane, e.g., constructed The City of Ladies with her pen in hopes of promoting gender equality. Then, Teresa Enríquez built an brick-and-mortar “City of God” that served anyone in need, and which continues to function into the 19th century.  I hope to visit Teresa and her "City of God": http://www.colegiatadetorrijos.com/; the people of Torrijos have recently reclaimed some of the delapidated buildings from the rats, time and indifference. And entirely fortuitously, after I wrote this story, I began to read Introducción a Teresa de Jesus by Cristina Morales, a fictional autobiography of the future Saint Teresa of Avila, one of the most influential writers, male or female, of 16th century Spain. Now, it is Teresa Enríquez de Torrijos time to be recognized.