Ana

Ana, also known as La Estrella de Sevilla, is a celebrated flamenco dancer whose appearance in Frank’s life joins an immediate physical presence to a mystery that reaches across centuries. The novel eventually identifies her with the woman in Goya’s La maja desnuda and La maja vestida; after her death, that recognition makes her earlier claim that she will meet the living again somewhere else resonate as more than a cryptic prediction.

Identity and Introduction

Ana enters Frank’s account as a woman he feels he has seen before but cannot place. In Seville, a man identifies her as one of the city’s most famous flamenco dancers. The information gives Frank a possible explanation for his recognition: he has visited tablaos in Madrid, where a dancer might have fixed herself in his memory. Yet he doubts that a brief performance could account for the strength and particularity of the image he carries of her. Flamenco offers a lead, not a solution.

On Taveuni, Frank encounters Ana and José bathing naked in a natural pool at the Bouma River. The path runs directly past the waterfall, leaving him unable to continue without revealing himself; he turns away rather than watch them. Before he does, he notices a large mole on Ana’s abdomen. This bodily detail becomes part of his later recollection of her and of the momentary glimpse that helps him understand why her face seems familiar. The scene also places the couple in an image Frank associates with Adam and Eve: for the moment they remain naked and happy, before the expulsion from the garden that his biblical comparison anticipates.

A Life with José

Ana and José share a life shaped by private conversation, recurring journeys, and stories they have made together. At the Plaza de España in Seville, Ana reveals that the two of them have often walked there on Sundays and invented a small story for each Spanish province. When travelling, they try to recall the stories in the correct order or invent new ones. The paired mosaics become prompts for their shared imaginative practice: as they move from province to province, they tell Frank and Vera a brief tale, legend, or anecdote for each.

This disclosure retrospectively explains the couple’s murmured exchanges, which Frank had been unable to understand during their earlier encounters. On Taveuni, José sometimes stopped Ana from answering particular questions; in Seville, he simply gives a shrug that signals those restrictions no longer apply. Frank had unknowingly served as interpreter and mediator between them, while failing to understand what their conversations contained. The stories at the Plaza de España are not merely a pastime but a glimpse of a shared world built through repetition, memory, and invention.

Their companionship is also evident in José’s response to Ana’s pronouncement about death. At a gathering in the tropics, she first looks into the night, then straightens and speaks with authority. She says that a reality exists beyond this one, that she will not be dead when she dies, and that everyone will believe her dead even though she will soon meet them again elsewhere. The game and conversation around the table end abruptly; the atmosphere turns sinister, and the narrator notices José shed a tear. His reaction makes her declaration intimate as well as metaphysical: the prospect of her death is already present in the couple’s shared scene.

Death and Recognition

Frank learns that Ana has died while standing before El jardín de las delicias. José’s remark that it takes billions of years to create a human being and only seconds to die is enough to make Frank understand what has happened. The realization gathers earlier details into a single, devastating sequence: Ana’s sudden indisposition at breakfast, her later departure from a Salamanca café in an agitated declaration that she wanted to return to Seville, and José’s arrival with a pale, exhausted face.

José then leads Frank to Goya’s collection. When they stand before La maja desnuda and La maja vestida, Frank nearly faints, and José grips his left arm. Frank recognizes Ana in the painted woman, appearing both clothed and nude. The paintings supply the answer to the question that had followed him from their first meeting: he had seen Ana before, not in a film or dream, but in Goya’s images at the Prado.

The recognition also clarifies why the resemblance had eluded him. At the Bouma waterfall, Frank had glimpsed Ana naked and thought that only her face was familiar. Ana was notably slimmer than the figure in Goya’s painting, so the difference in body shape had obstructed his identification. When he first saw her in a red dress, his two impressions—that he knew her and that something did not fit—coexisted without resolution. In the museum, José’s gesture and the two paintings bring those impressions together. Ana’s death is thus revealed at the same moment that her identity acquires an impossible historical dimension.

Grief, Memory, and the Promise of Return

Ana’s presence remains attached to the novel’s account of loss, but the evidence distinguishes her story from the bereavements of Frank, Vera, and John Spooke. In the closing account of his grief for Sheila, Spooke says he continues to speak aloud in response to the words he expects her to say. Her habitual expressions, their shared memories, and even the request that he shuffle her solitaire cards keep her presence active in his daily life. He recalls that he once resented her eccentric devotion to solitaire and caught her cheating to make a game come out in her favour; after her death, he misses precisely what had irritated him. The changed meaning of those habits shows how remembrance preserves a relationship without erasing the fact of death.

Frank’s retrospective reflections likewise keep the dead within a continuing family history. In Salamanca, he and Vera speak at length about Sonia, hear anecdotes one parent had not known, and recognize that only they can give their daughter’s memories a living sphere of influence. Their shared grief does not restore Sonia, but it gives them a way to remain connected as her parents. Elsewhere, the narrator of the closing account imagines that the manuscript and Frank’s letter to Vera might remain sealed in a time capsule for a thousand years, when the story of Ana María Maya may seem like a saga from the distant past. Against that long view, Ana’s promise of a reality beyond death is both the most intimate and the most extraordinary possibility the narrative leaves open.

Narrative Significance

Ana is at once a dancer encountered in the present and the apparent source of an image preserved by art. The delayed recognition turns the reader’s attention back to earlier scenes: the brief glimpse at Bouma, the unidentified familiarity of her face, her refusal to dance flamenco, and the bodily interruption at breakfast. These details first seem to belong to separate questions—where Frank has seen her, what has happened to her health, and why she speaks so confidently about death. The paintings make them converge without resolving the larger uncertainty of how Ana can correspond to Goya’s Maja.

Her declaration at the tropical gathering also changes the meaning of the later news. José’s tear and Ana’s sudden collapse make her words sound like an anticipation of death, while her insistence that she will not truly be dead prevents the confirmation from functioning as a simple ending. The novel does not establish what happens to her after death. Instead, it leaves the reader between the material evidence of her death, the historical impossibility suggested by the paintings, and the promise that the dead may be met again elsewhere. Her mystery is not an answer that closes Frank’s search but the point at which recognition opens onto a question the story refuses to settle.