Maia's Into The Moonlight

SINTRA MYSTERY RESOLVED - A CONVERSATION WITH ANNA THULIN

Soon after returning from the north, I received a surprising message from Anna Thulin, who I talked about in a previous entry. She thanked me for my note – left at the hospital the day before she was to be discharged – and invited me for tea.

Ms. Thulin greeted me at the door of her lovely home. She is very pretty and young looking. Proper. Lithe as a dancer.

She took me to a room bathed in sunlight, big windows giving onto a garden. I gasped, recognizing a painting of mine on the wall. Anna smiled and told me she loves the painting, and had always wanted to meet me. What a rare and wonderful coincidence for me!

As we sipped tea and ate little hot almond pastries, Anna Thulin talked. I will try to transmit here, in an impressionistic way, the gist of what she told me.

“I have been like a fish that lives in the sunless depths of the ocean….

“I married a year after arriving in Portugal. I was very young. I was staying with a Swedish couple, friends of my parents, and attending art classes. One day I was invited to a party where I met Vasco. I was blown away by his charm and seduced by his extravagant love of life. I was in over my head.

“I guess we go on playing various roles until we find our own….

“I seemed concocted to fulfill Vasco’s fantasies, like an exotic pet one likes to show off to one’s friends. At first I loved it, to be treated like a valuable collector’s item, but with the passing of years I was more and more dissatisfied. I became filled with frustrated artistic visions, daydreams, restlessness, chain-smoking….

“My husband’s schemes and pace were getting wilder, his demands on me more and more difficult. It frightens me to admit I was frightened.


“I suppose I could just have walked away, but it was not so easy. Everything was his, the travel agency, the houses, the cars, all in his name. I was naïve and he was a lawyer.

“My dissatisfaction with myself was the hardest. I have artistic talents, but if they are not expressed and acknowledged they don’t exist.

“And I was being tossed aside like a fading mistress. I felt there was no way out for me.

“I had to do it, get out of my life -- get out of life as I’ve known it for almost 20 years -- and I felt an unfamiliar kind of courage. I started collecting sleeping pills.

“I went to Hotel Central, a place I know well from work. All our clients stay there. I knew the hotel’s routines well. The rest you know. As it took place in a hotel, it became public. Vasco has a total terror of publicity, he has to control everything. Then he was exposed by his wife’s attempted suicide splattered across the paper. You picked it up. Others did too. The police are all over him because of the note I left behind in the room. I am being invited daily for interviews with TV and papers. He is giving me all I want, divorce, this house, in exchange for my silence.

“You know, the world is beginning all over again for me, and I intend to savor the exciting days ahead. I am going to design fabric. It has been my passion since my art school days in Sweden. I came here to learn how to paint azulejos, Portuguese tiles, and now I am starting again.

“Living means change and growth. Sometimes one has to take risks.”