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.