The Talented Ms. Highsmith
I worked for the novelist in her final months. I thought she wanted to kill me.
Patricia Highsmith pictured at her home in Tegna, Switzerland, in 1985. Dino Fracchia / Alamy Stock
I first read Patricia Highsmith’s novels in the fall of 1994. I was twenty and living in a room in her house in Tegna, Switzerland, that was plastered with bookshelves full of her first editions, organized in chronological order. Pat was seventy-four and knew she was about to die; she had been, it was rumored, diagnosed with cancer or some other terminal disease. I was trapped in her world with her, trembling. She had weeks left to live and had spent so much time writing about how to get away with murder. I fantasized that she might try to kill me. The story of how I ended up in that house begins a few months earlier, in Zurich, with me on a blue tram, on my way to dinner at the house of Anna and Daniel Keel, a couple I’d grown friendly with. Anna was a brilliant painter for whom I had been modeling since I was seventeen. Her studio smelled like oil paint, instant coffee, and the brine in which floated the mozzarella balls that she ate while working. She was a genius. In the foreword to one of her catalogs, she explained that although she felt guilty about spending “so much time in the company of two lemons” (the subjects of her still lifes) when there were so many big problems in the world, she had concluded that being able to see beauty was also essential. She taught me, in the years I knew her, a great deal about fighting my fears and following my passions. Anna’s husband, Daniel—or Dani, as we called him—was a book editor and the founder and owner of Diogenes Verlag, a Zurich-based publishing house that was (and still is) a major publisher of European fiction. He was brutally honest but had kind eyes and piles of books that he used as furniture.
Anna and Dani hosted what they called “interesting dinners” at their house, inviting random combinations of people they found fascinating. The night I arrived, all the doors were opened so the fresh air from their tree-filled garden could fill the dining room. Dinner was served on an oval wooden table covered with platters of pasta and cantaloupe and delicious prosciutto, along with many different bottles of French and Italian wines. The conversation switched from English to Swiss German (which I didn’t understand), and I stared at the original Picasso print on the wall: a naked woman with a man peering between her legs. Dani noticed my gaze and explained that their Sicilian cook hated the “drawing”: nobody wanted to see a woman at the gynecologist.
He talked about her irritability, how difficult it could be to deal with her temper, and her health issues.
Then Dani mentioned that he was distracted by a work problem. He was looking for an English speaker with a European driver’s license to take care of one of his authors in Ticino, the Swiss Italian part of Switzerland. “I am desperate,” he whispered. “This is for someone important; I can’t really advertise the position.” The divorced man who had been doing the job for some months, Dani told me, had just called to say he was not going to do it anymore; he had decided to become a monk.
Dani got up to open yet another bottle of Chianti. Without thinking it through, I volunteered for the job. “I speak English,” I said, in English. “And I am licensed to drive both in Europe and the U.S.” As Dani knew, I was about to go back to Spain to start my junior year of college, so he shook his head. But I insisted, explaining that all I needed to do was go to class for a month to meet the professors and collect the philosophy books assigned; after I had done that, I could help until my exams in December. (Attendance was not mandatory at my university.) My grandfather had been a theater impresario and patron of the arts, and growing up, I had heard many stories about him helping all sorts of artists. When I eventually got to meet them, they seemed incredibly grateful for all my grandfather had done for them. So helping a writer in need seemed like the thing to do.
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