There are friends who play to imagine which animal represents them.
Ana Garriga (Salamanca, 32 years old) and Carmen Urbita (Madrid, 32 years old) are clear about what name they would call themselves.
“I would be the Encarnación de la Paz”, announces Urbita, “Ana, sor Petronila de las Llagas”.
A strange conversation if it weren't for the fact that these two friends host a
podcast
about tricky nuns with mystical visions, lesbianism disguised as sisterhood between nuns, and soul-stirring magical powders cooked in the odd 16th-century monastery.
They baptized themselves "the Daughters of Felipe" one day when, when taking a photo while they were studying their doctorates in Providence (Rhode Island, USA), they saw themselves cadaverous, white and with dark circles under their eyes, and they could not imagine a better simile than with the descendants of Felipe II.
The reality is that they look like two conjoined twins separated at birth.
Daughters of lay and atheist parents — “very left-wing” — both decided at the age of nine, and without knowing each other, to be baptized for communion.
Later they coincided in the same institute, but did not mediate a word.
However, the two studied careers related to the history of literature and were equally fascinated by the writings of the baroque nuns.
They met in 2016, when they began their PhDs in the United States.
"And he was a crush," admits Garriga.
Similar to what he felt when he discovered Saint Teresa and the censored version of her book
The Path to Perfection.
She was hopelessly captivated by a quote: "Because the rulers of the world are all men, sons of Adam, and there is no woman's virtue that they suspect," Garriga recites from memory: "I said there: 'My God, what a holy queen Teresa".
Urbita was enchanted by a reading about the life of Juana de los Ángeles, a demon-possessed French nun: "And once you enter, you never leave."
In contrast to the official story, the Daughters of Felipe —which is the name of their
podcast—
take silenced characters and forgotten routines from the footnotes, and mix them with references to current culture such as
I am Georgina
or the enraged hymn of the feminist collective LasTesis.
Beyond finally explaining to their family and friends the baroque spell that surrounds them, they started the
podcast in
April 2020 out of pure therapeutic necessity.
Sometimes via Zoom, sometimes in the bathroom of Garriga's Rhode Island apartment as a recording sanctuary, and over time eaten by his PhDs.
They were disturbed by the academic solemnity, the corset in language, the timid disclosure of their juiciest findings, such as that carnal relationship between the Theatine nun Benedetta Carlini and Sister Bartolomea or the occasion when an elephant descended the stairs of El Escorial.
Carmen Urbita (left) and Ana Garriga, in the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, which Felipe II ordered to be built. Matías Uris
Although they touch on all kinds of gossip, from access to housing to fashion in the 16th and 17th centuries, their listeners want stories about nuns.
“That sudden fascination for recovering stories from female convent life is generational.
We approach it from affection: we read and talk about these women as if they were friends”, says Urbita.
For them, the Baroque is a period of crisis, misunderstanding and
bling bling
to solve it.
“When we talk about how we have been wandering the world as bilocates for many years, and we connect the bilocation of nuns with the current FOMO [fear of missing out], people feel alluded to”.
So far, no enemies have been made at the university or in the convents.
They have only received a small warning from the conservator of the Descalzas Reales monastery: "Please, do not call polychrome sculptures
reborns
(hyperrealistic dolls).