The long
read
‘You are
living with a difficult person who is waiting to die’: my harrowing time as
Patricia Highsmith’s assistant
I worked for
the author of The Talented Mr Ripley in her final months. She was so mean and
secretive, I imagined she wanted to kill me
By Elena
Gosalvez Blanco
Thu 10 Jul
2025 05.01 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/10/my-harrowing-time-as-patricia-highsmith-assistant
Ifirst read
Patricia Highsmith’s novels in the autumn of 1994. I was 20 and living in a
room in her house in Tegna, Switzerland, that was plastered with bookshelves
full of her first editions, organised in chronological order. Pat was 73 and
knew she was about to die; she had been, it was rumoured, 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 fantasised 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
modelling since I was 17. 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. 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.
Dani
mentioned that he was distracted by a work problem. He was looking for an
English speaker with a European driving licence 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 any more; 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 in Europe and the US.” 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 theatre 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.
As he served
the new wine to the group, Dani told me very quietly he was talking about
Patricia Highsmith. I did not react. “How many of her books have you read?” he
asked. “None,” I answered. He laughed loudly, and Anna, who had been listening
from the other side of the table, said she was sure that I had at least watched
Hitchcock’s film Strangers on a Train, which was based on one of Highsmith’s
novels. I did remember having liked it on TV.
Later, after
a few more bottles were emptied, Dani told me he would ask Pat if she might
consider me. But given how young I was, he said, I was not to get my hopes up.
Within a
week, Pat agreed to interview me. I took the train from Zurich through a heavy
summer storm. On the way, I finished reading my first Highsmith novel, The
Tremor of Forgery (1969). The man who had been taking care of her came to pick
me up at the train station in Locarno, a Swiss town on the northern tip of Lake
Maggiore, not far from her house. He looked old to me, not too tall, with
glasses. He greeted me as if it were he, not I, who had finally arrived home
after a long trip. We ran into a cafe, and over a quick cup of coffee, he told
me about his months with Pat. He talked about her irritability, how difficult
it could be to deal with her temper, and her health issues. He spoke about his
reasons for moving into a monastery and his hope of finding peace. Our
conversation scared me a bit; he seemed to be in the midst of an existential
crisis, and he disclosed far too much to me, a 20-year-old stranger.
“Pat is an
amazing writer,” he said. “So imaginative. But she does not like people. You
will feel you are bothering her, but don’t think it is something you did. She
is like that.”
I found his
description of Highsmith perplexing. How can someone so isolated write so well
about human nature, I thought. I could see, touch and almost smell the
characters in the novel I had just finished. I felt as if I were still with
Howard Ingham – the main character – in Tunisia, questioning the absurdity of
our moral codes, rather than having coffee with a future monk on an unpleasant,
rainy summer day.
The future
monk seemed on the verge of tears as we got into an old Volkswagen Polo to
drive to her house. Tegna is only three miles from Locarno, but those 10
minutes felt long. It had stopped raining, but it did not feel like August. He
dropped me off at the door, yelled “Good luck!” without getting out of the car,
and quickly backed down the driveway. I straightened my wet, wrinkled dark-blue
dress.
The house in
front of me was a one-floor brutalist structure made of large bricks. It looked
like the letter U. Highsmith had designed it in the late 1980s with the help of
an architect from Zurich. It was her dream house (as in, she had literally
dreamed it), similar to one she describes in Strangers on a Train. In the book,
though, the shape is a Y. I liked how the house’s hard lines contrasted with
the beautiful valley, and that, by European standards, it was quite far away
from other houses. The concrete blocks, which had once been white, looked
dusty. The garden was full of bushes and leaves. The effect was uncanny.
Highsmith
opened the door before I rang the bell, as if she had been waiting behind the
curtains. She was shorter than me, very thin, petite. Wearing a sweater and
oversized jeans, her greasy grey fringe partially hiding her face, she looked
unfriendly. She shook my hand in silence, then said: “Thank you for coming.” I
closed the door and followed her into the house. Without turning around, she
offered beer or tea; I asked for water. She looked fragile, but she moved
quickly. She told me to sit on a large white sofa covered with colourful
cushions and blankets, then disappeared into what I guessed was the kitchen.
It was a
cosy living room. I stared at the bookshelves around me. An orange cat crossed
the room, ignoring me. On the coffee table, I spotted a European magazine
opened to a feature on the 100 best living writers. Pat was right below Gabriel
García Márquez. She finally returned with my water, moving as stealthily as the
cat had.
She sat down
in a chair across from me and asked: “Do you like Hemingway?”
She looked
me in the eyes for the first time. I drank some of my tepid tap water. I knew
the question was important. But I did not know anything about Pat or her life
history. I did not know her tastes, or her relationship with other 20th-century
North American writers. I did not even know she had lived in New York and
Paris. I had read only that one book by her, just before on the train. I set my
glass on the table, knowing I was running out of time, like in a gameshow, and
I decided it was a heads-or-tails choice. I could not guess the right answer, I
reasoned, so I might as well tell the truth. “No,” I answered, as if putting my
last chip down on the roulette table.
“I HATE
Hemingway!” she screamed.
She stood up
and walked to the door to show me out. Is that the entire interview, I
wondered, following her. I had a thousand questions about the job, the daily
tasks, the car, the salary, the conditions. But I didn’t dare open my mouth.
She thanked me again for coming and told me she would call Dani as soon as
possible to convey her decision. She shook my hand, then quickly slammed the
door behind me.
The
Volkswagen reappeared as I walked down the driveway. To get in, I had to pick
up a large pile of mail on the seat that had not been there 15 minutes earlier.
The future monk told me he had known the interview would be short, but not that
short. “Maybe she did not like me?” I asked.
“The next
train to Zurich leaves very soon, so I have to rush you back to Locarno,” he
said, ignoring my question. He looked worried; I thought he was wondering if
Pat would ever find someone to replace him, and if he would be capable of
leaving her alone without feeling guilty. I did not say anything. I stared at
the 40 or so envelopes I was holding, all different sizes and with various
coloured stamps on them. Most were simply addressed “Patricia Highsmith,
Switzerland.”
On the long
train ride back to Zurich, I dreamed about orange cats, the Tunisian heat and
the U-shaped house swallowing the pensive assistant I’d met. I was sure I would
never again see the mystery-novel author who received mail that didn’t even
include an address. And I knew it would take a while to get over the intensity
of our brief encounter.
A few days
later, though, as I was about to leave for the airport to return to Madrid to
start university, Dani called me at my boyfriend’s house. “Pat wants to know
when you can start,” he said. “This is a miracle!” He sounded relieved.
I said I
could be in Tegna by late October. My boyfriend was going to be doing his
military service in Switzerland, so he could visit me or we could meet
somewhere on his days off. Dani told me to call him once my travel plans were
confirmed, and thanked me over and over.
“Just thank
the fact that I don’t like Hemingway,” I said. Dani laughed and said that he
and Anna would come visit once I was installed.
As promised,
I made it back to Tegna a couple of months later, after flying to Zurich then
taking four trains. The red one-car train that chugged from Locarno to Tegna
seemed like a toy in a set made just for me. The arrangements had all been made
so fast that I did not have time to understand what I was getting into. I came
wearing my long coat, heeled boots and black hat, ready for a literary
adventure.
Inside Pat’s
house, a woman who had been helping around the home waited, impatient to leave.
She and the cleaning lady would now come as little as possible. Pat showed me
to my room. It was big and had a queen-size bed. She pointed to the bookshelves
with all her first editions “in order”. That’s when I told her I had read only
The Tremor of Forgery and had loved it. She said that in her opinion it was by
far her best novel, so from now on her books would just disappoint me. This
turned out not to be true: Edith’s Diary soon became my new favourite. But I
understand why Pat, a queer person who never felt accepted by society (and who
had a hard time accepting her own queer self), preferred The Tremor, a book
about the need to question the moral codes we are handed, to all her other
work.
The shelves
in my room also held autographed books by, and biographies of, her friends,
like Graham Greene (the ones from Truman Capote were out in the living room),
as well as many volumes about Marlene Dietrich, with whom she was obsessed.
Pat’s personal and literary notebooks were stowed in closets and shelves right
outside my room. She told me she had written almost every day for over 50
years.
My room was
freezing. It had large French doors leading out on to a courtyard, on the other
side of which was Pat’s room. Her curtains were open, so I could see the single
bed and writing desk in her messy bedroom. This voyeuristic setup also, of
course, allowed her to see me and my room. She left me to unpack. I had no idea
what was expected of me other than my presence. I came back into the living
room, but she was in her room, typing. When she finally emerged from her room
for dinner that first night, I followed her into the kitchen. She boiled water
in a pot and added a bouillon cube. She asked me if I wanted supper, and I
nodded, so she added another cube. That was dinner. She served herself a large
mug of dark beer from a box she kept in the pantry and announced that the next
day, she would teach me how to go to the supermarket.
I read
Strangers on a Train later that night, lying in bed. I could see, across the
courtyard, Pat moving around in the dark of her room with a torch. I did not
understand why she was using a torch when the electricity worked just fine. It
was unnerving, but I was too absorbed by the novel to question her strangeness.
The next
day, I became the driver of the Volkswagen. I was a new and terrible driver,
but Pat was very enthusiastic about my driving, probably because I went so
slowly, which she said used less petrol. We went to the supermarket and bought
soup cubes, beer boxes and food for the cat, which, Pat said, ate raw cow offal
that the butcher was kind enough to reserve for her. She told me I would go
shopping by myself once a week to pick up these things. We also got cheap
bologna, white sandwich bread and six small apples. She introduced me to the
butcher, who kept repeating “Charlotte” (the name of Pat’s cat) with a funny
Italian accent. Pat paid with cash and brought used plastic bags to avoid
paying for new ones. I was trying to remember everything and did not realise I
was going to starve unless I bought my own beer for calories.
I soon
discovered that a neighbour stopped by every few days with minestrone soup or
chicken stew, which she made at her home, since Pat did not allow her to cook
in the house. Each evening, we would “dine” together at seven o’clock. We
served ourselves in the kitchen and then, since the dining table was covered
with unopened mail and other clutter, we unearthed a couple of place mats from
beneath the junk and sat down. The room was dimly lit at all times, and Pat
barely tasted those meals – her bowl was usually empty or had only a little
broth. But she always brought a litre of beer to the table.
I would eat
slowly, trying to match her lack of appetite, and ask many questions that she
enjoyed answering. She never offered me any beer and seemed surprised that I
did not bring my own. She told me the doctors had forbidden her from taking her
favourite poison (whisky), but I found a bottle of scotch hidden in the
kitchen, and it kept getting emptier, even though she told me it was just for
visitors (who never came). She’d had to quit smoking and was not supposed to
drink at all because of her health. (Whatever was wrong with her seemed to be a
secret, but Anna had implied it was cancer.) She was clearly used to drinking
as much as her characters do; they sometimes comment that their liquor servings
are “smallish”.
At dinner a
few days later, I asked if she had a computer, and she told me she still wrote
all her work, and all her letters, on the same typewriter she had used to write
Strangers on a Train at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New
York. Hitchcock’s decision to adapt that novel into a 1951 film had changed
Pat’s life. She had been making ends meet by writing comic books and taking
other low-paying gigs, such as an editorial assistantship. When Hitchcock
bought the rights to her novel anonymously – in order to pay less – Pat got
$7,500. But more important than the money was the fact that, once the film was
made, she became known, making it easier for her to meet people, get more
writing jobs and publish books. This was why Pat kept using that typewriter,
even though she had others, all of which looked prehistoric to me.
“Superstition, I suppose,” she concluded.
Pat did not
talk much. She did tell me that although Hitchcock’s adaptation had “destroyed”
her novel, she was forever grateful to him. In Strangers on a Train, she
explained, the perfect crime is successful; both antiheroes win. But at the
time, Hollywood had a morality code – the Hays Code – which meant that evil
could not go unpunished, and so Hitchcock had a screenwriter come up with a new
ending. She did not blame him for this. She seemed to be proud that Hitchcock
liked her novel the way she had written it.
Early the
next morning, Charlotte woke me up meowing, as she would every morning. During
the day, she slept somewhere or went hunting, but she always roused me at dawn.
Pat had shown me how to slice the cow lungs we got from the butcher who kept
saying “Charlo-TTe”. And now, every morning, Charlotte circled my legs, pushing
impatiently as I prepared her breakfast. When I cut the lungs with the kitchen
scissors, the alveoli would explode, popping like bubble wrap. It was an
unsettling, disgusting sensation.
After, as I
washed my hands with detergent, I would hear Pat’s radio crackle on. She
listened to the BBC for an hour every morning before getting up. Some days, I
could not hear the radio until a bit later, and I would fear that she had died.
I dreaded the thought of having to find her dead. (One morning towards the end
of my stay, Pat did not turn on the radio at all, and I spent hours listening
for movement behind the closed door.)
As Charlotte
ate her breakfast, I would make myself a black tea. Dressed and ready to go in
case Pat needed anything, I would read until I heard her come out of her room.
Most days, she went briefly to the bathroom and then to the kitchen and then
returned to her room, after which the typing would start. At that point, she
was writing only letters, I believe. Sometimes she came to find me so she could
share her plans, or ask me to get the mail because she was waiting for
something or had something to send.
On days when
it was clear she was not going to need me, I would volunteer to go to the post
office, just so I could walk around Tegna and have a coffee at the tiny town
bar. The post office always had mail for Pat, but the postal workers were not
friendly. My guess is they had heard Pat was a lesbian with no family, so must
have assumed that I, the young woman living with her, had to be some sort of
well-paid lover. And to be fair, I did not look like a nurse. I understood why
Pat had stopped going there long ago and did not allow those judgy postal
workers near her house.
My walks
allowed me to get fresh air, look at the mountains and take a break from the
oppressive indoors. The house was depressing because Pat did not consider
herself to be among the living. She explained that the magazine I saw during my
interview had invited the 100 best authors alive to a celebratory event in
Paris. “I obviously declined,” she told me. And I understood that she thought
she was among the 100 best but did not consider herself to be really alive.
Dani and
Anna called us on Sundays. At one point, Dani explained that Pat had to go over
the galleys of her novel Small g: A Summer Idyll, and I had to fax him her
corrections. She had finished the novel a few months back, but she made
significant last-minute edits. Every day, Pat made me fax the same page several
times as she made changes. She was a perfectionist and studied each page for
hours. She called Small g, which is about Zurich’s gay scene, her last novel,
so my guess is she wanted it to be a great one. I did not get to read it until
several months after she died. I was impressed by how much she knew about the
city’s gay community and by her realistic portrayal of the Aids epidemic.
Pat did not
let me use her phone to call my boyfriend. Whenever he called, she told him I
was not there. I did not dare confront her, even though I was counting on him
visiting, even staying over occasionally. One day, I worked up the courage to
ask her, and she told me that he could not enter her house or garden; if I met
him at the town bar, I could not be gone for more than an hour, in case she
needed me. My boyfriend and I decided he should not come, since I couldn’t even
get away to meet him in Locarno. We just wrote letters. The same went for my
friends and parents. A letter from Spain took 10 days to reach its destination,
but she was clear that I could not occupy her phone line. When someone did call
me, she would pick up the phone in her room, loudly clear her throat and
announce she needed the phone for an urgent call, which she then never made.
I did not
question her rules or the assertiveness with which she refused to let me out of
her world or anyone in, insistent that nobody could interrupt her routine or
distract us from her bitter wait. I was weak and submissive, because of a lack
of experience and because of the constant fear that something might happen to
her while she was on my watch. I obsessed over not bothering her, and shortened
my walks around town, tortured by my sense of responsibility, worried that Pat
was unwell and alone, or needed me to fax the same page yet another time. So I
adapted to her ways, becoming just as isolated, always home with her or near
her, accompanied by only her novels, waiting for something to happen. I was
mesmerised by the perfect crimes she had created in her books, and given how
angry at life she seemed, I wondered if she had ever tried to kill someone
herself.
The only
regular intrusion of the outside world into our claustrophobic existence was
the Sunday phone call from Dani and Anna. Dani would talk to Pat for a bit, and
then Anna would talk to me for 10 minutes. Anna could hear in my voice that I
was not doing well, so she and Dani came to visit, as promised. They gave
little notice of their plans, and afterwards Pat complained for days about
having had to host them. They arrived late – “So rude,” she kept saying – and
brought a gorgeous bouquet of two dozen tea roses. Pat told me to put them in a
vase, whispering about how they had probably spent more than 500 francs on
something that we would have to watch die. Dani was used to Pat’s insults and
understood that aggression was her way of relating, so he just moved on to
talking shop about Small g.
Dani got
along with her, maybe because he could be just as impatient and abrasive. He
had overseen her world rights for years. She respected him. Pat was on bad
terms with all her previous editors. While they talked in the living room, Anna
took me to my room, worried about the dark shadows under my eyes and my weight
loss. “We knew this would not be easy,” she told me.
“I am fine,
Anna,” I answered, trying to smile.
“You are
living with a difficult person who is waiting to die, and you remind her of
everything she can no longer have,” Anna consoled me.
Pat could
not say no to Dani, so she allowed them to take me out to the only restaurant
in town, where I ate a real dinner, including wine and zabaglione, a fluffy
gift of hedonism and freedom that became my favourite dessert. They reminded me
there was life out there, people to talk to, good food, laughter, air. I
confessed that not being able to call anyone or have visits was hard, but I had
got used to it. I told them I understood that old Pat had her ways but was not
trying to hurt me.
I said the
hardest rule to follow was her mandate that I keep the lights off at night
because she thought electricity too expensive. That’s why she used a flashlight
and gave me one to use, too. I had got used to fearing her flashlight
reflecting across the patio, but I dreaded total darkness because of what that
could mean. I found it puzzling that the most basic expenses worried someone
who had so much money. She yelled at me if I turned on a light by accident or
used too much water, too many stock cubes, too many paper napkins, too much
fuel for her car. She gave me very little money for groceries and petrol, and I
told them that she had not paid me and that I was starting to feel as if I
preferred not to be paid. Her pathological obsession with saving money shocked
me.
I also told
Dani and Anna that I had been reading the first editions on Pat’s shelves in
chronological order, during the day and by torch at night. I was in awe of her
characters, human antiheroes, complicated souls. I was well into the Ripley
saga by then and joked that maybe she would achieve the perfect crime by
killing me even if she could not steal my identity. Later, as we were saying
goodbye, Anna said something I didn’t expect: “It is obvious. Pat is just in
love with you.”
I did not
know it then, but Pat had written many years ago, in her diary, that there are
no sexually satisfied killers. She wrote that around the time she was creating
Ripley. It was obvious from the Ripley series that frustrated desire was the
catalyst for crime in Pat’s world, and Anna telling me that Pat was upset and
short with me because she might love me made me even more afraid. Like Ripley,
Pat could be charming but also dark, possessive, irrational and impatient.
When I got
back home from dinner, Pat was watching TV. She was upset that I had been gone
for almost three hours and had missed half of the weekly BBC true-crime special
we watched together. She told me that the show had given her ideas for her
work, so she found it inspiring. I hated true crime.
We watched
the rest of the show together in silence. I could not stop thinking about what
Anna had said to me.
Once or
twice a week, I drove Pat to Locarno’s hospital for her treatments. They took a
long time. As I waited, I read my philosophy homework because I did not want
her to see me reading her books in public; she was uncomfortable with being
recognised.
I did not
know what kind of transfusions she got at the hospital (the fact that she had
lung cancer did not become public until after her death), but they always made
her feel better afterwards. Certainly, her mood lifted, though never for very
long. She was private and worried about what others would say of her. Much
later, I read that when she was young she had felt guilty about her gayness and
so had hidden it, dating men and even trying psychoanalysis so she could marry
a man, a fellow writer who was her good friend. All that negativity and
frustration Pat radiated seemed to come from a deep guilt about being who she
was. After her diaries became public, some articles noted that she had moments
when she was able to accept being a lesbian and was unbothered by her
significant drinking problem, but the Pat I knew had reverted to her shame.
I left her
in early December to return home to take my exams. I had reminded her of my
departure date for weeks. She did not make other arrangements for someone to
look after her, just asked me to stay. I explained that I could not miss my
finals, and that my family expected me for Christmas in Spain, but she ignored
me. She pretended she could write our lives as if we were in one of her novels.
On our last
night together, she avoided talking to me or even looking at me. When I put my
bags by the door the next morning, I expected a hug, as if I were the
granddaughter she never had; instead, she offered me her hand for the third and
last time. Her eyes were wet. I asked her to sign a German edition of a book
about her that Dani had given me. She simply wrote her name without a
dedication or personal note. She was angry. I was abandoning her, she finally
said, just like “others” had done. She handed me an envelope with the weeks’
worth of salary she owed me, then went to her room. I had to close the door
behind me and walk to the tiny red train that took me to Locarno. I never saw
her again.
On the
train, I dreamed that I never made it home. When my parents called Anna, she
called Pat, who said I had left the house to catch the morning train after she
autographed my book and wished me the best. Soon, the police were telling my
parents that I hadn’t made my flight and they couldn’t find me. I woke from the
dream exhausted as my train was pulling into Zurich. I wiped the fog off the
window with my hand to look at the city. Boring normal life felt so good, and I
could not wait to be home, to get home alive.
After
Christmas, I spoke with Dani, who told me that Pat’s health had deteriorated
after I left, and she had been admitted to the hospital in Locarno. I do not
think she ever returned home. She died there at the beginning of February. Part
of me was guilty and ashamed to realise this, but I was glad I had not been
there for her worst days. Dani invited me to her funeral, which took place in
March on my 21st birthday, but I declined.
It took me
decades to digest my time with Pat. I did not want to think or talk about it.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that Pat had not been in love with me, and
had not, of course, been trying to kill me, but I do think she loved and hated
the fantasy of being me: young, positive, loved, hopeful, straight, healthy,
maybe even happy.
In late
2022, I returned to Tegna to visit the house where I had lived with Pat for
those few weeks. She had told me that, after her death, it would be made into a
museum dedicated to her life and work. That did not happen. Instead, the house
is surrounded by the weekend homes that popped up around it, and today a family
lives there with a lot of useless stuff everywhere. From the manicured garden,
I saw that the foyer that led to my old bedroom was now filled with toys. And a
swimming pool had been installed in the courtyard that formed the U, where Pat
and I used to look across into each other’s rooms. I felt happy that she did
not live to see this. We will miss the good things that happen after we die,
but we will be spared some major disappointments. The house Pat dreamed up did
not have a pool.
This is an
edited version of a piece that appeared in The Yale Review
