Last Evenings On Earth

ANNE MOORE'S LIFE

Anne Moore's father served his country and the free world on a hospital ship in the Pacific from 1943 to 1945. His first daughter, Susan, was born while he was at sea off the Philippines, just before the end of World War II. Soon after, he returned to Chicago, where Anne was born in 1948. But Dr. Moore didn't like Chicago, so three years later, he and his family moved to Great Falls, Montana.

That is where Anne grew up. Her childhood was peaceful but it was also strange. In 1958, when she was ten years old, she glimpsed for the first time what she would later call the ashen (or the dirty) face of reality. Her sister had a boyfriend called Fred, who was fifteen. One Friday Fred came to the Moores' house and said that his parents had gone on a trip. Anne's mother said it wasn't right, he was just a boy, he shouldn't be left alone in the house like that. Anne's father reckoned that Fred was old enough to look after himself. That night Fred had dinner at the Moores' house, then sat on the porch chatting with Susan and Anne until ten. Before leaving he said good-bye to Mrs. Moore. Dr. Moore had already gone to bed.

The next day Fred took Susan and Anne for a drive around the park in his parents' car. According to what Anne told me, Fred's state of mind was noticeably different from the night before. He was preoccupied and hardly spoke, as if he and Susan had argued. For a while they just sat there in the car, in silence, Fred and Susan in the front and Anne in the back, then Fred proposed that they go to his house. Susan didn't answer. Fred started the car and drove to a poor neighborhood where Anne had never been; it was as if he was lost or, deep down, didn't really want to take them to his house, even though he was the one who had suggested it. Anne remembers that as they drove around Susan didn't look at Fred once; she spent the whole time looking out of the window, as if the houses and the streets slowly filing past were part of a never to be repeated show. And Fred, gazing fixedly straight ahead, didn't once look at Susan. Neither of them said a word or turned to look at the young girl in the backseat, although at one point, momentarily, she caught Fred's eye in the rearview mirror, staring at her, hard and bright.

When they finally arrived at Fred's house, neither Fred nor Susan made a move to get out. Even the way Fred parked the car on the street instead of in the garage was noncommittal, provisional, a deliberate pause. As if by parking like that, he was giving us and himself extra time to think, says Anne in hindsight.

After a while (Anne doesn't remember how long) Susan got out of the car, ordered her sister to do the same, took her by the hand, and they walked away without saying goodbye. When they were several yards away, Anne turned and saw the back of Fred's neck; he hadn't moved, he was still at the wheel, as if still driving, staring straight ahead, says Anne, although by then he may have closed or half-closed his eyes; he may have been looking down, or crying.

They walked back home and Susan refused to explain her behavior, in spite of Anne's questions. She wouldn't have been surprised to find Fred in their backyard that afternoon. It wasn't the first time he and her sister had fought, and they always made up soon afterward. But Fred didn't come around that Saturday, or on Sunday, and he wasn't in class on Monday, as Susan was later to confess. On Wednesday the police arrested Fred for drunken driving in a poor neighborhood of Great Falls. After questioning him, they went to his house and found the bodies of his parents: his mother's in the bathroom and his father's in the garage. His fathers body was partly wrapped in blankets and cardboard, as if Fred had been intending to dispose of it in the coming days.

As a result of this crime, Susan, who seemed at first to be coping remarkably well, had a nervous breakdown and was in therapy for several years with a series of psychologists. Anne, by contrast, was unaffected, although the incident, or the shadow it cast, would revisit her intermittently in later years. But at the time she didn't even dream about Fred, or if she did, she sensibly forgot the dreams as soon as she emerged from sleep.

At the age of seventeen, Anne went to college in San Francisco. Susan had gone there two years earlier, to study medicine at Berkeley, and was sharing an apartment with two other students in the southern part of Oakland, near San Leandro. Her letters home were rare. When Anne arrived she found her sister in a terrible state. Susan was not studying; she slept during the day, disappeared at night, and wouldn't come back until well into the next morning. Anne began a degree in English literature and took a course in Impressionist painting. She found an afternoon job at a Berkeley cafй. For a start she lived in the same room as her sister. In fact they could have gone on like that indefinitely. During the day, while Anne was at college, Susan was home sleeping, and at night she was hardly ever there, so they could make do with one bed. But after a month Anne moved to a place in Hackett Street, near the cafй where she was working, and stopped seeing her sister, although she would sometimes call her (it was always one of her housemates who answered the phone) to see how she was, pass on news about Great Falls, and find out if she needed anything. Susan was drunk the few times Anne got through to her. One morning they told her that Susan had moved out. For two weeks she searched all over Berkeley but couldn't find her. Finally one night she called her parents in Great Falls and it was her sister Susan who answered the phone. Anne couldn't believe it. She felt somehow cheated and betrayed. Susan had given up her studies for good and now she wanted to start over in a nice, quiet town, she said. If that's what you want to do, I'm sure that's best, said Anne, although in fact she felt her sister was a mess and throwing her life away.

Not long after this, Anne met Paul, a painter, the grandson of Russian-Jewish anarchists, and moved in with him. Paul had a little two-story house. His studio, full of large, permanently unfinished pictures, occupied the ground floor, and on the second floor there was a big space that served as bedroom, living room, and dining room plus a tiny kitchen and bathroom. Of course he wasn't the first man she had slept with. She had gone out with a classmate from the Impressionist painting course — he was the one who introduced her to Paul — and back in Great Falls she had had two boyfriends: a basketball player and a boy who worked in a bakery. For a while she thought she was in love with the boy from the bakery. His name was Raymond and the bakery belonged to his father. In fact, Raymond came from a long line of bakers, going back several generations. He was studying and working at the same time, but when he graduated he decided to become a full-time baker. He wasn't an outstanding student, according to Anne, but he wasn't bad either. And what she especially remembered about Raymond, in those years, was how proud he was of his trade, the family trade, in a place where people pride themselves on all sorts of things, but not, as a rule, on baking bread for a living.

Anne and Paul's relationship was unusual. Anne was seventeen going on eighteen and Paul was twenty-six. They had problems in bed from the start. In summer Paul was often impotent, in winter he was prone to premature ejaculation, and in spring and autumn he wasn't interested in sex. That's according to Anne; she also says that he was the most intelligent person she had ever met. Paul knew about everything: painting, art history, literature, music. Sometimes he was insufferable, but he could tell when it was coming on and knew to shut himself up in his studio and paint until he had stopped being insufferable and reverted to his normal self — charming, chatty, and loving — at which point he would stop painting and take Anne to the movies, or the theater, or one of the many talks and readings that were happening at Berkeley, as if to prepare people's minds for the decisive years to come. At first they lived off of Anne's cafй wages and a scholarship that Paul had. Then one day they decided to travel to Mexico and Anne quit her job.

They went to Tijuana, Hermosillo, Guaymas, Culiacбn, and Mazatlбn, where they rented a beach house. They went swimming every morning; in the afternoon Paul painted while Anne read, and at night they went to a North American bar, the only one in town, called The Frog, frequented by tourists and Californian students. They stayed there late into the night, drinking and talking to people they would normally have ignored. Outside The Frog they bought marijuana from a thin Mexican guy who always wore white and wasn't allowed into the bar. He waited for clients in his car, parked opposite, next to a dead tree.

The thin guy was called Rubйn, and sometimes he would exchange marijuana for cassettes, which he played straight away in the car. They soon made friends with him. One afternoon, while Paul was painting, Rubйn turned up at the beach house and Paul asked him to pose. From that day on, they never had to pay for their marijuana. But Rubйn would sometimes arrive in the morning and stay well into the night, which annoyed Anne, not just because she had to cook for an extra person, but also because, the way she saw it, the Mexican was intruding on the idyllic life they had planned to lead, just the two of them.

At first Rubйn talked only to Paul, as if he could tell that Anne resented his presence, but as the days went by they became friends. Rubйn spoke a little English and Paul and Anne practiced their rudimentary Spanish with him. One afternoon, while they were swimming, Anne felt Rubйn touching her legs under the water. Paul was on the beach, watching them. When Rubйn came up to the surface he looked her in the eyes and said he was in love with her. That day, as they later found out, someone drowned: a boy who used to go to The Frog; they had talked with him a couple times.

Shortly afterward they went back to San Francisco. It was a good time for Paul. He had a couple of exhibitions, sold some paintings, and his relationship with Anne was steadier than ever. At the end of the year they both traveled to Great Falls and spent Christmas with Anne's parents. Paul didn't like Anne's mother and father, but he got on well with Susan. One night Anne woke up alone in bed. She went looking for Paul and heard voices in the kitchen. When she went downstairs she found Paul and Susan talking about Fred. Paul was listening and asking questions, and Susan was telling him about the last day she had spent with Fred, driving around the poorest neighborhoods of Great Falls. She told the story over and over, from different points of view. Anne remembers that there was something oddly artificial about this conversation between her lover and her sister, as if they were assessing the plot of a film, not something that had happened in real life.

The following year Anne quit her studies and devoted herself to looking after Paul. She bought his canvases, stretchers, and paint; she cooked, washed, swept, mopped the floors, did the dishes, and generally tried to make their home a haven of peace and creativity. But their relationship was far from perfect. As a lover Paul kept getting worse. Sex with him did nothing for Anne and she began to wonder if she might be a lesbian. Around that time they met Linda and Marc. Linda sold drugs for a living, like Rubйn in Mazatlбn, and occasionally she wrote children's stories, which kept getting rejected by publishers. Marc was a poet, or at least that was what Linda said. At that stage he usually spent most of the day shut up in his apartment, listening to the radio or watching television. In the morning he would go out and buy three or four newspapers, and on rare occasions he went to the university, where he met up with old friends or attended the classes of some famous poet who was doing a stint as a visiting professor at Berkeley. But, according to Anne, the rest of the time, he stayed in his apartment, or in his room if Linda had visitors, listening to the radio, watching television, and waiting for the declaration of World War III.

It came as a surprise to Anne when Paul's career suddenly stalled. Everything happened too quickly. First he lost his scholarship, then the galleries in the Bay area stopped exhibiting his work, and in the end he gave up painting and started studying literature. In the afternoons, Paul and Anne would go to Linda and Marc's apartment and talk for hours about the Vietnam war and about travel. Although Paul and Marc were never really close, they could spend hours on end reading each other poems and drinking (around that time, Anne remembers, Paul began to write poems in the style of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth, whom they had once heard give a reading in Palo Alto). Anne's friendship with Linda, on the other hand, deepened imperceptibly but surely, although it seemed to lack a firm base. Anne liked Linda's self-assurance, her independence, her eclectic way of life, the way she flouted certain social conventions while respecting others.

When Linda got pregnant, her relationship with Marc came to a sudden end. She went to live in an apartment on Donaldson Street and kept working until a few days or maybe (Anne can't remember) a few hours before the birth. Marc stayed on in the old apartment and became even more reclusive. At first Paul went on visiting Marc but he soon realized they had nothing to say to each other, so he stopped. The two women, however, grew closer, and Anne would sometimes sleep over at her friend's apartment, mainly on the weekends, to help look after Linda's baby when she was busy with her clients.

A year after their first trip to Mexico, Paul and Anne went back to Mazatlбn. This time it was different. Paul wanted to rent the beach house, but it was taken, so they had to make do with a sort of bungalow three blocks away. As soon as they arrived in Mazatlбn, Anne fell sick. She had diarrhea and a fever and couldn't get out of bed for three days. The first day Paul stayed in the bungalow and looked after her, but then he started disappearing for hours and once he stayed out all night. Rubйn, however, came to see her. Anne realized that Paul had been out on the town with Rubйn and at first she hated the Mexican. But on the third night, when she was starting to feel a bit better, Rubйn turned up at the bungalow at two in the morning to inquire about the state of her health. They talked until five and then made love. Anne was still feeling weak. The door was ajar, and at one point she was sure that Paul was behind it, watching them, or looking through the window, but Rubйn was so tender and it went on so long that she forgot about everything else, she says.

When Paul appeared the next day, Anne told him what had happened. Paul said "Shit!" but didn't elaborate. For a couple of days he tried to write something in a notebook with a black cover that Anne was never allowed to read, but he soon gave up and applied himself to sleeping on the beach and drinking. Sometimes he went out with Rubйn as if nothing had happened; other nights he stayed at the bungalow and twice they tried to make love, with less than satisfactory results. She slept with Rubйn again. Once, at night, on the beach, and another time in the bedroom at the bungalow, while Paul was sleeping on the sofa next door. As the days went by, Anne noticed that Rubйn was becoming jealous of Paul. But this only happened when the three of them were together, or when Anne and Rubйn were alone, not when Paul and Rubйn went out at night to visit the Ma-zatlбn bars. They were like brothers then, Anne remembers.

When the day came to leave, Anne decided to stay in Mexico. Paul understood and said nothing. It was a sad good-bye. She and Rubйn helped Paul pack his bags and put them in the car and then they gave him presents: an old book of photos from Anne and a bottle of tequila from Rubйn. Paul didn't have any presents for them, but he gave Anne half the money he had left. When Paul was gone, Anne and Rubйn shut themselves in the bungalow and spent three days in a row making love. Anne's money soon ran out and Rubйn went back to selling drugs outside The Frog. Anne left the bungalow and went to live at Ruben's house in a suburb from which you couldn't see the ocean. The house belonged to Rubйns grandmother, who lived there with her eldest son, Ruben's uncle, an unmarried fisherman, about forty years old. Things soon took a turn for the worse. Ruben's grandmother didn't like the way Anne walked around the house half-naked. One afternoon, when Anne was in the bathroom, Ruben's uncle came in and propositioned her. He offered her money. Anne, of course, refused the offer, but not firmly enough (she didn't want to offend him, she remembers) and the next day Ruben's uncle offered her money again in return for her favors.

Without realizing what she was about to unleash, Anne told Rubйn. That night Rubйn took a knife from the kitchen and tried to kill his uncle. The shouting was loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood, Anne remembers, but strangely nobody seemed to hear. Luckily, Ruben's uncle, who was a stronger and more experienced fighter, soon disarmed him. But Rubйn wasn't about to give in, and threw a vase at his uncle's head. As bad luck would have it, just at that moment his grandmother was coming out of her room, wearing a very bright red nightgown, the likes of which Anne had never seen. Ruben's uncle dodged the vase and it struck his grandmother on the chest. The uncle gave Rubйn a beating, then took his mother to hospital. When they returned, the uncle and the grandmother marched straight into the room where Anne and Rubйn were sleeping and gave them two hours to get out of the house. Rubйn had bruises all over his body and could hardly move, but he was so scared of his uncle that before the two hours were up, they had packed all their gear into the car.

Rubйn had relatives in Guadalajara, so that's where they went. They ended up staying only four days. The first night they slept in Ruben's sister's house, which was small, stiflingly hot, and crowded. They shared a room with three small children and the next day Anne decided to find a hotel. They had no money, but Rubйn still had some marijuana and acid tablets he could sell, or so he thought. His first attempt was a failure. He didn't know Guadalajara well; he didn't know where to deal, and he came back to the hotel tired and empty-handed. That night they talked until very late and in a moment of frustration Rubйn asked Anne what they would do if they couldn't get money to pay for the hotel or buy gas for the car. Anne said (she was joking, of course) that she could sell her body. Rubйn didn't get the joke and slapped her. It was the first time a man had ever hit her. I'd rob a bank before I let you do that, he said, and threw himself on her. Anne remembers what followed as some of the weirdest sex of her life. It was as if the walls of the hotel room were made of meat. Raw meat and grilled meat, bits of both. And while they were fucking she looked at the walls and she could see things moving, scurrying over that irregular surface, like something from a John Carpenter horror movie, though I can't remember that actually happening in any of his films.

The next day Rubйn sold the drugs and they headed for Mexico City. They lived with Ruben's mother, in a suburb near La Villa, pretty close to where I was living at the time. If I'd seen you then, I would have fallen in love with you, I told Anne many years later. Who knows, said Anne. Then she added: If I'd been a teenage boy, I wouldn't have fallen in love with me.

For some time, two or three months, Anne thought she was in love with Rubйn and envisaged spending the rest of her life in Mexico. But one day she phoned her parents, asked them for money to buy an airplane ticket, said goodbye to Rubйn, and went back to San Francisco. She moved into Lindas apartment and found a job as a waitress. Sometimes when she came home from work, Linda was still up and they would talk until late. Some nights they talked about Paul and Marc. Paul was living on his own and had started painting again, though much less than before, and with no prospect of getting a gallery. According to Linda the problem with Paul's paintings was that they were very bad. Marc was living like a recluse in his apartment, listening to the radio and watching all the television news. He had hardly any friends left. Anne remembers that a few years later, Marc published a book of poems, which was something of a success in the Berkeley student community, and he gave readings and took part in some conferences. It seemed like the ideal moment for him to start a new relationship and share his life with someone, but after the initial buzz, Marc retreated to his apartment and she never heard anything more about him.

When a guy called Larry moved in with Linda, Anne rented a little apartment in Berkeley, near the cafй. Things seemed to be going well, but Anne knew they were about to fall apart. She could tell from her dreams, which were increasingly strange, from her state of mind, drifting toward melancholy, from her unpredictable mood swings. She went out with a couple of guys, but in both cases it was a disappointment. Sometimes she went to see Paul, but she soon stopped, because although the visits would begin well enough they almost always ended in tears, self-reproach and sadness, or in violent outbursts (Paul would tear up sketches, even destroy paintings). Sometimes she thought about Rubйn and laughed at how naive she had been. One day she met a guy called Charles and they became lovers.

Charles seemed to be the opposite of Paul, Anne remembers, although deep down they were very similar. He was black and had no source of income. He liked to talk and he knew how to listen. Sometimes they spent the whole night making love and talking. Charles liked to talk about his childhood and his adolescence, as if he sensed there was a secret there that he had overlooked. Anne, on the other hand, preferred to talk about what was happening to her at that precise moment in her life. She also liked to talk about her fears, the catastrophe looming ahead, lurking in some apparently normal day. In bed, Anne remembers, things were as unsatisfactory as ever. For a little while, maybe because of the novelty, it was pleasant, maybe even magical a couple of times, but then it went back to being like it always was. And that was when Anne made what, from a certain point of view at least, she regards as a monumental error. She told Charles what it was like for her in bed, with all the men she had slept with, including him. At first Charles didn't know what to say, but several days later he suggested that since she didn't feel anything, she might as well exploit her situation. It took Anne a few days to realize that Charles was talking about prostitution.

Maybe she accepted because at the time she was fond of him. Or because it seemed an exciting thing to try. Or because she thought it would bring on the catastrophe. Charles bought her a red dress and matching high heels, and he bought himself a gun, because, as he said to Anne, no one respects a pimp without a gun. Anne first saw the gun when they were driving from San Francisco to Berkeley and she opened the glove compartment to look for something, cigarettes maybe. She got a fright. Charles assured her there was no reason to be frightened; the gun was like an insurance policy, for her and for him. Then Charles showed her the hotel where she was to take the clients, drove around the neighborhood a couple of times and dropped her at the entrance to a bar where guys used to go looking for women. He went off, possibly to another bar, to hang out with his friends, although he told Anne he was going to be on the lookout the whole time.

Never in her life had she felt so ashamed, Anne remembers, as when she went in and sat down on a bar stool, knowing she was there to pick up her first client, knowing that everyone else in the bar could tell. She hated the red dress, the red shoes; she hated Charles's gun and the catastrophe that was always about to occur but never did. And yet she managed to collect herself, order a double martini and begin a conversation with the bartender. They talked about boredom. The bartender seemed to be an expert on the subject. Soon they were joined by a man of about fifty, who looked like her father, but shorter and fatter, whose name Anne has forgotten or maybe she never knew it; in any case I will call him Jack. Jack paid for Anne's drink and proposed they continue their conversation elsewhere. As Anne was about to get down from her stool, the bartender came over and said he had something important to tell her. Anne thought maybe it was another reflection on boredom, for her ears only. The bartender leaned across the bar and whispered in her ear, Don't you ever set foot in this bar again. When he had resumed his normal posture, he and Anne looked each other in the eye and Anne said, OK, and left. The man who looked like her father was waiting on the sidewalk. They got into his car and went to the hotel Charles had pointed out. For the duration of the short trip, Anne stared out at the streets as if she were a tourist. She vaguely hoped to catch a glimpse of Charles in a doorway or an alley, but there was no sign of him and she thought, I bet he's in some bar.

Anne's contact with the man who looked like her father was brief, though not devoid of tenderness, surprisingly for her. When he left, Anne took a taxi home. The next day she told Charles it was all over, she didn't want to see him again. Charles was very young, Anne remembers, and his fondest dream, apparently, was to have a whore, but he took it well, although he nearly burst into tears. Some time later, when Anne was working nights in another cafй in Berkeley, she saw him again. He was with friends and they laughed at her. This hurt Anne much more than all their fights. Charles was wearing cheap clothes, so perhaps he hadn't made his way in the world of prostitution, though Anne preferred not to think about that.

The following years, as Anne remembers them, were fairly restless. For a while she lived with some friends in a cabin near Lake Martis; she slept with Paul again; she took a course in creative writing at the university. Sometimes she would telephone her parents in Great Falls. Sometimes her parents would come to San Francisco and spend two or three days with her. Susan had married a pharmacist and was living in Seattle. Paul had become a computer salesman. Sometimes Anne asked why he didn't start painting again but Paul wouldn't answer that question. She traveled outside the United States. She went to Mexico a couple of times. With some friends, she drove a station wagon down to Guatemala, where she was held overnight by the police and one of her friends was beaten up. She went to Canada about five times to stay with a friend who wrote children's stories, like Linda, and had bought a house in the country near Vancouver to get away from it all. But she always came back to San Francisco and that was where she met Tony.

Tony was Korean, from South Korea, and he worked in a clothing factory where most of the employees were illegal aliens. He was friends with Paul, or Linda, or one of her workmates from the cafй at Berkeley, Anne can't remember; all she remembers is that it was love at first sight. Tony was very gentle and very sincere, the first truly sincere man Anne had ever met, so sincere that, the first time they went to the movies together (to see an Antonioni film), as they came out of the theater he confessed without the slightest embarrassment that he had found the film boring and that he was a virgin. When they slept together for the first time, however, Anne was surprised by Tony's sexual know-how; he was far better than any of her previous lovers.

Before long they got married. Anne had never really thought about marriage, but she did it so Tony could get a green card. Instead of getting married in California, they went all the way to Taiwan, where Tony had relatives, and held the wedding there. Then Tony went to Korea to see his family and Anne traveled to the Philippines to visit a friend from college who was married to a successful Filipino lawyer and had been living in Manila for two years. When they went back to the United States they settled down in Seattle (Tony had relatives there too) and with his savings, and Anne's, and money from his parents, Tony set up a fruit store.

Living with Tony, Anne remembers, was like living in a protective cocoon. Outside, storms raged every day, people lived in constant fear of a private earthquake, everyone was talking about collective catharsis, but she and Tony had found a refuge where they could be at peace. And we were, says Anne, though not for long.

A curious aside: Tony loved pornographic movies and he used to take Anne to watch them, something she would, of course, never have thought of doing on her own. She was shocked by the fact that in the films the men always ejaculated onto, rather than in, their partners: on their breasts, buttocks, or face. Going to those movies made her feel ashamed, unlike Tony, who couldn't see what there was to be ashamed of, given that the movies were legal. In the end she decided not to go with him, so Tony went on his own. Another aside: Tony was very hardworking; he worked harder (by far) than any of Anne's previous lovers. And another: Tony never got angry, never argued, as if he could see absolutely no point in trying to make someone else agree with him, as if, for him, everyone was lost, so how could one lost person presume to show another the way. Especially since the way, as well as being hidden from everyone, probably didn't even exist.

One day Anne's love for Tony ran out and she left Seattle. She went back to San Francisco, where she slept with Paul again and with other men. For a while she stayed in Linda's apartment. Tony was devastated. Night after night he called her, trying to find out why she had left him. Night after night Anne explained it to him: that was just the way things turn out, love comes to an end, maybe it hadn't even been love that had brought them together in the first place; she needed a change. For several months Tony kept calling her and asking what it was that had made her break off their marriage. One night, Anne remembers, one of Tony's sisters telephoned and begged her to give him a second chance. She told Anne she had called her parents in Great Falls and didn't know what else she could do. Anne was taken aback by this, yet it struck her as extraordinarily caring. In the end Tony's sister started crying, apologized for having phoned (it was after midnight) and hung up.

Tony traveled to San Francisco twice in the hope of convincing Anne to come back. They had countless phone conversations. In the end Tony seemed to accept the inevitable, but still he kept calling her. He liked talking about their trip to Taiwan, their marriage, the things they had seen; he asked Anne what it was like in the Philippines and he told her about South Korea. Sometimes he was sorry he hadn't gone to the Philippines with her and Anne had to remind him that she had wanted to go alone. When Anne asked about the fruit store, how the business was going, Tony replied in monosyllables and quickly changed the subject. One night Tony's sister phoned again. At first all Anne could hear was a murmur and she asked her to speak up. Tony's sister raised her voice, but only a little, and said that Tony had committed suicide that morning. Then, without a trace of bitterness in her voice, she asked if Anne would be attending the funeral. Anne said yes. But the next morning, instead of catching a plane to Seattle, she took one that landed a couple of hours later in Mexico City. Tony had died at the age of twenty-two.

During the days Anne spent in Mexico City, our paths might have crossed again; and again I might have fallen in love with her, although Anne doubts it. She remembers those days as unreal and dreamlike, yet in spite of everything she had time for sightseeing. She went to visit the city's museums and almost all of the pre-Columbian ruins still standing among the buildings and the traffic. She tried to find, Rubйn, but couldn't. After two months, she took a plane to Seattle and visited Tony's grave. She almost fainted in the cemetery.

The following years went by too quickly. There were too many men, too many jobs; there was too much of everything. One night, working in a cafй, she made friends with two brothers, Ralph and Bill. That night she went to bed with both of them, though while she was making love to Ralph, she looked into his brothers eyes, and when she made love to Bill, she shut her eyes but could still see his. The next night Bill came around, on his own this time. They slept together, but spent more time talking than making love. Bill was a construction worker and his outlook on life was brave and melancholic, more or less the same as Anne's. Both of them had one older sibling, both had been born in 1948 and they were even physically alike. Within a month they had decided to live together. Around that time Anne received a letter from Susan; she had gotten divorced and was in treatment for alcoholism. She said in her letter that once a week, sometimes more often, she went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and it was opening up a new world for her. Anne replied on the back of a tourist postcard of San Francisco, saying things she didn't really feel, but when she finished writing the card she thought of Bill and herself and felt that she had finally found something in life, her own private Alcoholics Anonymous, something solid, something she could hold on to, like a high branch she could swing from and balance on.

The only thing she didn't like about her relationship with Bill was his brother. Sometimes Ralph would turn up at midnight, completely drunk, and get Bill out of bed to talk about the strangest things. They talked about a town in North Dakota where they had been when they were teenagers. They talked about death and what comes after death: nothing according to Ralph, less than nothing according to Bill. They talked about how a man's life consists of learning, working, and dying. Sometimes, but less and less often, Anne participated in these conversations, and she had to admit she was impressed by Ralph's intelligence or his aptitude for finding the weak points in other people's arguments. But one night Ralph tried to sleep with her and from then on she kept her distance, until Ralph finally stopped coming around.

After living together for six months Anne and Bill moved to Seattle. Anne found a job in a company that distributed electrical appliances and Bill went to work on a thirty-story building that was under construction. For the first time, they had money to spare and Bill suggested they buy a house and settle down in Seattle for good, but Anne didn't feel ready, so for the time being they rented one floor of a big house occupied by three families, with a wonderful garden they all shared. In the garden, Anne remembers, there was an oak tree, a beech, and a creeper that covered the walls of the house.

Those were perhaps the calmest years of her life in the United States, says Anne, but one day she got sick and the doctors diagnosed a serious illness. She became irritable and couldn't stand Bill's conversation, or his friends, or even the sight of him coming home each day from the construction site in his work clothes. She couldn't stand her own job either, so one day she quit, put some clothes in a suitcase and went to the Seattle airport without a clear idea of where she was heading. She had thought about going home to Great Falls and talking to her father, asking his advice as a doctor, but by the time she got to the airport, it all seemed so pointless. She spent five hours sitting there thinking about her life and her illness, and both seemed empty, like a horror movie with a subtle twist, one of those films that doesn't seem scary at first, but by the end you're either screaming or shutting your eyes. She would have liked to cry, but couldn't. She turned around, went back to her house in Seattle and waited for Bill to come home. When he arrived, she told him everything that had happened that day and asked him what he thought. Bill said he really couldn't understand, but she could count on his support.

After a week, however, things started going wrong again. She and Bill got drunk, argued, made love, and drove around neighborhoods they didn't know, but which somehow seemed vaguely familiar to Anne. That night they came close to having an accident several times, Anne remembers. From then on it only got worse. A few months later Anne had an operation but the result was not conclusive. For the moment the illness was in remission, but Anne had to stay on medication and have frequent checkups. A relapse was possible and could have been fatal, according to Anne.

Not much else worthy of note happened during those months. Anne and Bill went to Great Falls for Christmas. Susan started drinking again. Linda kept selling drugs in San Francisco and her finances were sound although her love life was unstable. Paul bought a house and sold it shortly afterward. Sometimes, mainly at night, he and Anne would talk on the phone, like two strangers, coldly, without ever mentioning what, for Anne, were the really important things. One night, while they were making love, Bill suggested they have a child. Anne's reply was brief and calm, she simply said no, she was still too young, but inside she could feel herself starting to scream, or rather, she could feel, and see, the dividing line between not screaming and screaming. It was like opening your eyes in a cave bigger than the Earth, Anne remembers. It was around then that she had a relapse and the doctors decided to operate again. Her spirits fell, and Bill's too; they were like a pair of zombies some days. The only activity that gave Anne any pleasure was reading; she read anything she could get her hands on, mostly North American novels and essays, but also poetry and history. She couldn't sleep at night and would usually stay awake until six or seven in the morning. When she did sleep, it was on the sofa; she couldn't bear to get into bed with Bill. Not that she wanted to reject him, or found him repulsive, not at all— Anne even remembers going into the bedroom sometimes and staying there a while to watch him sleep — she just; couldn't feel calm lying beside him.

After the second operation Anne put her clothes and books in a pair of suitcases, and this time she did leave Seattle. First she went to San Francisco and then she took a plane to Europe.

When she arrived in Spain she had barely enough money to last two weeks. She spent three days in Madrid, then went to Barcelona, where one of Paul's friends lived. She had his address and phone number, but when she called there was no answer. She stayed in Barcelona for a week, phoning Paul's friend morning, afternoon, and night, going for long walks around the city, always on her own, or sitting on a bench in the Parque de la Ciudadela and reading. She slept in a hotel on the Ramblas and ate, irregularly, in cheap restaurants in the old part of the city. Little by little, her insomnia relented. One afternoon she tried to call Bill collect, but he wasn't there. Then she phoned her parents, who were out too. After leaving the long-distance office, she stopped at a telephone booth and called Paul's friend: no answer. It occurred to her that maybe she was dead, but she dismissed the thought immediately. Solitude is one thing, death is quite another. That night, Anne remembers, she tried to stay up late reading a book about the life of Willa Cather that Linda had given her before she left, but sleep overcame her.

The following day she phoned Paul collect and he was there. She told him what had happened with his friend in Barcelona but didn't mention her financial situation. Paul thought for a few seconds and then had an idea: she could try calling another friend, or at least an acquaintance of his, a woman who lived in Mallorca but also had a house near Girona. Gloria was her name; she had started studying music at the age of forty-something, and now she was playing with the Palma Symphony Orchestra, or something like that. You probably won't get her either, said Paul, or that is what Anne remembers anyway. Next she phoned Susan in Great Falls and asked her to send money to Barcelona. Susan promised she would do it that day. Her voice sounded strange, as if she had been asleep or was drunk. The second possibility worried Anne, because it might mean that Susan would forget to send the money.

That night she called Gloria twice from a telephone booth in the Ramblas. She reached her the second time and explained her situation in detail. They talked for fifteen minutes, and then Gloria said Anne could go and live in her house in Vilademuls, a village near Banyoles, where the famous lake is; no need to worry about money, she could pay later when she got a job. Anne asked how she would be able to get into the house, and Gloria said she would be sharing; the house with two other Americans, one of whom was bound to be there when she arrived. There was no warmth in Gloria's voice, Anne remembers, but no pretense either. She had a slight New England accent, although Anne knew straight away she wasn't from New England; it was an objective voice, like Lindas (though less nasal), the voice of a woman who walks alone (which sounds like something out of a Western, though very few women in Westerns walk alone; in any case that was the image that occurred to Anne).

So she spent two more days in Barcelona until Susan's money arrived, paid the bill at the hotel, and went to Vilademuls, a village with no more than fifty inhabitants in winter and two hundred and something in summer. As Gloria had assured her, one of the Americans was there at the house, waiting for her. He was called Dan and he taught English in Barcelona, but every weekend he went up to Vilademuls to work on his detective novels. The only time Anne left the village that winter was to see a doctor in Barcelona. Dan and sometimes Christine, the other American, would arrive on Friday night. Very occasionally they brought friends, Americans too for the most part, but as a rule they came to the house to be alone: Dan worked on his drafts and Christine wove at her loom. Anne spent the weekdays writing letters, reading (in Glorias room she found a large collection of books in English), cleaning or doing the minor repairs that the ancient house often required. When spring came Christine found her a job teaching in a language school in Girona, and for a start Anne shared an apartment with an English and an American woman; but then, since she had a steady income, she decided to rent a place of her own, although she still spent the weekends at Vilademuls.

Around that time Bill came to visit her. It was the first time he had been out of the States and he spent a month traveling around Europe. He didn't like it. Nor did he like the atmosphere at Vilademuls, Anne remembers, although Dan and Christine were straightforward people, and in fact Dan was quite similar to Bill: he had worked in construction for a while and had had similar experiences; he also liked to think of himself, without good reason, as a tough guy. But Bill didn't like Dan and Dan probably didn't like Bill either, although he took care not to let it show. According to Anne, seeing Bill again was beautiful and sad, though the words hardly begin to convey something deeper and indefinable. It was around then that I saw her for the first time. I was in a bar called La Arcada, on the Rambla de Girona. I saw Bill walk in and she came in after him. Bill was tall, his skin was tanned, and his hair was completely white. Anne was tall and slim, with high cheekbones and very straight brown hair. They sat at the bar and I could hardly take my eyes off them. I hadn't seen such a beautiful man and woman for a long time. They were so sure of themselves. So distant and disconcerting. I thought all the other people in the bar should have knelt down before them.

Shortly afterward I saw Bill again. He was walking down a street in Girona and this time, not surprisingly, he didn't seem quite so beautiful. In fact he seemed tired and flustered. A few days later, as I was coming down the hill from my house in La Pedrera, I saw Anne. She was coming the other way and for a few seconds we looked at each other. At that stage, Anne remembers, she had left the language school and was giving private English lessons and making a fair bit of money. Bill had left and she was living in the old part of Girona, opposite a bar called Freaks and a movie theater called the Opera.

From then on our paths began to cross quite often, as I remember. And although we didn't talk, we recognized each other. I guess at some point we started to say hello, as people do in smaller cities.

One morning I was in the Rambla chatting with Pep Colomer, an old painter who lives in Girona, when Anne stopped and talked to me for the first time. I can't remember what we said, maybe our names and where we came from. At the end of the conversation I invited her to dinner at my house that night. It was Christmastime, or nearly, and I made a pizza and bought a bottle of wine. We talked until very late. That was when Anne told me she'd been to Mexico several times. Overall, her adventures were very similar to mine. Anne thought this was because the lives or the youths of any two individuals would always be fundamentally alike, in spite of the obvious or even glaring difFerences. I preferred to think that somehow she and I had both explored the same map, fought the same doomed campaigns, received a common sentimental education. At five in th_e morning, or perhaps later, we went to bed and made love-Anne immediately became an important part of my life. After the first two weeks I realized that sex was a pretext; what really drew us together was friends hip. I got into the habit of going to her place at about eight at night, when she had finished her last lesson, and we wouLd talk until one or two in the morning. At some point, she would make sandwiches and we'd open a bottle of wine. We'd listen to some music or go down to Freaks to continue drinking and talking. A fair few of Girona's junkies used to gather outside that bar, and the local toughs were often to be seen cruising around, but Anne would reminisce about the toughs of San Francisco, who were seriously tough, and I would reminisce about the toughs of Mexico City, and we'd laugh and laugh, although now, to be honest, I can't remember what was so funny, perhaps just the fact that we were alive. At two in the morning we'd say good-bye and I would go back to my house in La Pedrera, up on the hill.

Once I went with her to the doctor, ac the Dexeus Clinic in Barcelona. By then I was going out wich another girl and she was going out with an architect from Girona, but I wasn't surprised (in fact I was flattered) when, as we entered the waiting room, she whispered, They'll probably think you're my husband. Once we went to Vlademuls together. Anne wanted me to meet Gloria, but Gloria didn't turn up that weekend. At Vilademuls, however, I discovered something that up until then I had only suspected: Anne could be different; she could be another person. It was a terrible weekend. Anne drank nonstop. Dan would occasionally emerge from his room and promptly disappear again (he was writing) and I had to endure the presence of one of Christine's or Dan's ex-students, a brainless Catalan girl from Barcelona or Girona, the sort who's more American than the Americans.

The following year Anne traveled to the States. She was going to Great Falls to see her parents and her sister, then on to Seattle to see Bill. I got a postcard from New York, and another from Montana, but nothing from Seattle. Later on I got a letter from San Francisco in which she told me that her time with Bill had been a disaster. I imagined her writing the letter in Lindas apartment, or Paul's, drinking and maybe crying, although Anne rarely cried.

When she came back from the States she brought some packages with her. One afternoon she showed me: they were the diaries she had kept from shortly after her arrival in San Francisco up until her first meeting with Bill and Ralph. Thirty-four notebooks in all, just under a hundred pages each, each page covered with small, hurried writing, with quotations, drawings, and plans scattered throughout (plans of what? I asked her the first time I saw them: dream houses, imaginary cities or suburbs, the paths a woman's life should follow, though hers had not).

The diaries were kept in a box in the living room. I began to browse through them, in Anne's presence, and gradually my visits fell into a new and very peculiar pattern: I would arrive and sit down in the living room; Anne would put on some music or start drinking, while I resumed my perusal of her diaries. We hardly talked, except when I asked her about something I didn't understand, turns of phrase or words I didn't know. It was sometimes painful, plunging into that writing in the presence of the author (sometimes I wanted to throw the notebook aside and go and hug her), but mostly it was stimulating, although I couldn't say exactly what was being stimulated. It was like a fever rising imperceptibly. It made you want to scream or shut your eyes, but Anne's handwriting had the power to sew your lips shut and prop your eyes open with matchsticks, so you had no choice but to go on reading.

One of the early notebooks was entirely devoted to Susan, and the words "horror" and "sisterly love" give only the vaguest idea of its content. Two notebooks had been written after Tony's suicide; in these Anne reflected and discoursed on youth, love, death, the dimly recollected landscapes of Taiwan and the Philippines (where she had gone without Tony), the streets and movie theaters of Seattle, and perfect evenings in Mexico. One notebook covered the early days of her relationship with Bill but I couldn't bring myself to read it. My verdict was predictably uninspired: You should publish them, I said, and then I think I shrugged my shoulders.

At the time Anne had become preoccupied by her age, time slipping away, the few years left before she turned forty. At first I thought this was just a kind of coquetry (how could a woman like Anne Moore be worried about turning forty?) but soon I realized that her fear was real. Her parents came once, but I wasn't in Girona and when I got back Anne and her parents had gone off to travel in Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

Not long after this Anne and the architect parted on the best of terms, and she started going out with one of her former students, a technician who worked for a company that imported machinery. He was a quiet sort of guy, and short, too short for Anne; the difference was not only physical but also, to put it preciously, metaphysical, though I didn't tell her that — I felt it would have been rude. I think at this stage Anne was thirty-eight and the technician was forty, and that was the main thing he had going for him: being older than her. One day I moved away from Girona, and when I came back Anne was no longer living in the apartment opposite the Opera cinema. I wasn't particularly worried; she had my new address, but I didn't hear from her for a long time.

During the months when I didn't see her, Anne went traveling in Europe and Africa, had a car accident, left the technician from the machinery-importing firm, saw Paul and Linda who came to visit, started sleeping with an Algerian, developed a skin condition on her hands and arms caused by nervous tension, and read several books by Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers.

One day she finally turned up at my house. I was on the patio, pulling up weeds when suddenly I heard steps, turned around and there was Anne.

That afternoon we made love to hide the sheer joy of seeing each other again. Some days later I went to see her in Girona. She had moved to the new part of town, and was living in a tiny attic room. She told me that her neighbor was an old Russian man, a guy called Alexei, the sweetest, most polite person she had ever met. Her hair was cut very short and she had done nothing to disguise the grey. I asked her what had happened to her beautiful hair. I looked like an old hippie, she said.

She was about to go to the States. This time the Algerian was going with her and I think they had problems getting him a visa at the consulate in Barcelona. So it's serious with him, I said. She didn't reply. She said that at the consulate they thought he wanted to go and live in the States for good. And doesn't he? I asked. No, he doesn't, she said.

I don't know where the rest of the time went. I can't remember what we said to each other, the stories we told, nothing important, anyway. Then I left and I never saw her again. A while later I got a letter from her, written in Spanish, from Great Falls. She told me that her sister Susan had killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates. Her parents and her sister's partner, a carpenter from Missoula, were devastated and simply couldn't understand why. I prefer not to say anything, she wrote, there's no point adding to the pain, or adding our own little mysteries to it. As if the pain itself were not enough of a mystery, as if the pain were not the (mysterious) answer to all mysteries. Shortly before leaving Spain, she added (having finished with the topic of Susan's death), Bill had called her several times.

According to Anne, Bill would call her at all hours of the day and night, and he almost always ended up insulting her. They almost always ended up insulting each other. The last few times, Bill had threatened to come to Girona and kill her. The funny thing, she said, was that she was saving him the trip, although she had hardly any friends left to visit in Seattle. She didn't mention the Algerian, but he must have been there with her, or so I preferred to assume, for my own peace of mind.

After that I had no more news of her.

Several months went by. I moved. I went to live by the sea in a village that has acquired a legendary aura since Juan Marsй wrote about it in the seventies. I was too busy working and dealing with my own problems to do anything about Anne Moore. I think I even got married.

Finally, one day I caught a train, returned to grey Girona, and climbed up to Anne's litde attic room. As I had anticipated, a stranger opened the door. Of course she knew nothing about the previous tenant. Before turning to go I asked if there was a Russian gentleman living in the building, an elderly man, and the stranger said yes, and told me which door to knock at on the second floor.

A very old man came to the door, walking with great difficulty and the aid of a spectacular oak stick, which looked a bit like it had been designed for ceremonial occasions or combat. He remembered Anne Moore. In fact he remembered almost all of the twentieth century, but that, he admitted, was beside the point. I explained that I hadn't heard from her in a long time and had come to see if he had any news. Not much news, he said, just a few letters from America, a great country where I would have liked to stay longer. He took the opportunity to tell me briefly about the years he had spent in New York and about his adventures as a croupier in Atlantic City. Then he remembered the letters, made me a cup of tea and went off to look for them. Finally he appeared with three postcards. All from America, he said. I don't know exactly when I realized he was completely mad. It seemed logical, all things considered. It seemed appropriate, so I sat back and waited for the ending.

The Russian handed me the three cards over the steaming tea. They were arranged in order of arrival and written in English. The first was from New York. I recognized Anne's handwriting. She said the usual things and at the end she told him to take care of himself and to eat every day. She said she was thinking of him, with love. There was a photo of Fifth Avenue on the other side. The second postcard was from Seattle. A view of the port from the air. It was much briefer than the first, and harder to understand. There was something about exile and crime. The third postcard was from Berkeley: a quiet street in bohemian Berkeley, read the caption. I'm seeing my old friends and making new ones, said Anne's clear handwriting. And it ended like the first card, advising dear Alexei to look after himself and eat every day, if only a little.

Sadly, curiously, I looked at the Russian. He looked back at me kindly. Have you been following her advice? I asked. Of course, he replied, I always follow a lady's advice.