Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. Amy Tan

They have the same long dark hair, wide-set gray eyes, and a mole on the right cheek. Even the dresses would be identical if the whore’s were not dirty and hers were not clean. When she looks down at her dress, she sees for the first time a black oily spot, then another and another. She instantly feels cold, so brittle with cold her spine might snap. The beggar woman does not exist, she tells herself. It is worse. She is the malevolent twin of her imagination who has been waiting to be recognized. Anna tries to calculate how many years have passed since she began these repetitious journeys to her lover’s bed. How many mornings did she rise and leave the narrow cot with him still dozing? It must be thousands. Her skin must be worn thin from so many rubbings. She is afraid to look. Over the years, she refused to let questions about him enter into her mind. Yet she still felt tormented by small doubts: that he did not love her as much. Or that he did not even exist. The first time she had that thought, she immediately turned around on the road and rushed back to the village. On her way there, she noticed that the road had grown longer and steeper. When she reached his home, she peered through the window and saw him sleeping as usual. She was tempted to rap the window and see his delight that she had returned so soon. But then, as usual, she thought it was best to not interrupt his dreams of desire for her. She simply returned home.

      But now, since meeting the wretch on the road, she cannot stop the worries. Does he still desire her? Is his desire the same as what he had for the harlot? Was that why the woman gave her a pitying look? What a brainless fool she has been. She should have banged on the window and broken the pane, then reached in and shaken him to make him speak. Does he, too, believe desire for her is life’s meaning? Who else has he desired? What does he do besides satisfy himself with her body? Her malevolent twin is delighted she has doubts. His incomprehensible groans and grunts were not promises of love, she tells Anna. They were lusty profanity in a foreign language. You saw him only between the hours of dusk and dawn. You had eyes for only what lay at the end of the road and not what surrounds you. Anna looks around her. The woman is not there. Who is speaking to her? She sees the trees around her are dead. How long have they been that way? She sees them as an omen. Love is withering, not just his, but hers. Soon she, too, will resemble the stiff dead trees she passes, their leafless branches clawing upward for more sky. [Shades of anthropomorphic trees in The Wizard of Oz.]

      She turns around to go home. But she cannot. The more she resists, the stronger the wind blows against her.

      10:30 In the past, she could do nothing but succumb to the delusion that he loved her. There is no delusion now. Knowledge is a murderer. She knows now she will not increase the small amount of happiness she receives from her lover. It does not accumulate but disintegrates as soon as she is on the road walking home. Her love for him will always remain gnawing desire. The old argument arises: if she refuses it, she will have nothing. She will be empty. She struggles to retain the vaporous illusion of love. No longer able to decide, she lies on the road and allows herself to be buffeted by the storm. She does not protect herself from the wind. She has already given up self-will. She will soon become a ghost of desire riding a beggar’s back. Why not end it now—but which, her life or her desire?

      12:45 The storm ends. It has purged doubt, and she is grateful she has survived. She finally understands that her resistance to desire had only made desire stronger. Each time she had thought of turning back, desire surged and became fear, a madness that clawed at her until she pushed through her lover’s door again and lay on his bed. In the morning, he had let her out onto the streets where the laundry women could see her. She would then take the road home, carrying her useless satchel of self-knowledge. She had emptied her mind for him. She had welcomed him to use her body as a receptacle. She had asked for nothing. She would have done that until she disappeared—body, mind, and senses. Holding on to this terrible realization, she now turns around to go home. She pushes against strong winds. With each step, the road behind disappears.

      13:17 Anna is home. The rain is nearly over. She finds calm for the first time being alone in her house. The arguments in her head are gone. In the past, she would have been frightened by quiet and loneliness. But now she knows she can leave her house whenever she wants. She does not need a destination based on desire. She walks outside and for the first time, she sees beauty in the landscape, in the slope of a small hill, in an enormous tree whose canopy is lit so brightly by the sun it looks like a veil of gold. This tree has always been there, and she now recognizes it as a place where she once sought refuge in a thunderstorm. She runs to the tree and climbs up to its crook. The leaves brush her skin. She sees the bright blue sky through the branches. There are so many ways to see sky. She spots a fat blue bird that sings to her. There are so many ways to see blue. Loveliness is unexpected. It comes without being asked for. How had she not known this? She looks out and sees the spire of the church of the village, the dark clouds moving toward it. And then the spire punctures the clouds and dark rain pours.

      15:50 The simple diatonic melody returns. Anna is walking along the road again. Her pace is steady. She is confident. She will see him, her delusion of desire. For so many years, she had seen herself transformed in his lustful gaze. She had believed that the passion in his eyes had emanated from him, when in reality it had simply been her own reflection and longing. Without her desire, he will be empty. Without her passion, he does not exist. Without her shame, the scowling women become myth. They were all part of her delusion to make desire appear more important than it was. And with that realization, the road before her vanishes.

      That is the end of the first movement. There are two more movements. And that is good, because the story of this woman does continue beyond a vanished road.

      For the last thirty years, I’ve harbored a secret desire to compose music. I’ve had dreams that I already have. I hear it, my music, and am composing simultaneously with it being played by a full orchestra. The music is romantic in form. The song is lyrical. The strings play, the reed instruments come in, then the piano solo. The emotions are deep and wide. I know the themes of revelation. I see the partially written score before me, pages three feet wide and four feet tall. I am writing the score for all the instruments, in bars stacked atop each other. I sweep my hand over the paper and the notes appear. But then I wake and realize there is no score and that I lack the skills to transcribe even a note of what I heard. Yet I still feel a residual sense of wonder that the music came to me so easily. I’m frustrated that I can do nothing to retain it. And perhaps that is because there was nothing to retain.

      The dreams of music are like the recurring dreams of a secret ballroom—an enormous unused room always found at the back of a house, past the dining room, or through a door in the laundry room. In the dream, I always wonder why I never noticed the room before. It could have solved my need for additional space for books or for a larger study or a painting studio. In one version of the dream, the ballroom is at the back of a third-floor Victorian apartment where I lived in the 1970s. In another, it is accessed via a cave in the yard of a ramshackle cottage where I lived when I was a student at UC Berkeley. There are three more dream houses, all different, but the ballroom is the same. It was once grand but now has plaster debris on the floor and chipped French blue paint on the walls, all easily fixed. Sometimes there is a smaller room beyond the ballroom. It is a mess, filled with construction materials, mops, buckets, saws, hammers, and a big concrete washbasin holding half-filled cans of paint. These are the materials I have to use to repair the ballroom. It is an enormous task. In some dreams, I am able to clean up the mess in a day and hold a dinner party at night. In other dreams, I decide to put off fixing up the room. I sweep the floor, then leave the house and discover I actually live in another house and the place I just left is a house I lived in twenty years ago and forgot I still owned. I’m flabbergasted. How could I have forgotten I own a house? I wonder how much it would fetch on the real estate market today.

      These are the words I can use when I wake up to retain memory of the ballroom. I cannot use words to retain the music once I wake up. I don’t have the musical ability to take it with me. It lives in its own language—all except one tendril of music, which I managed to capture. As soon as I woke, I used my cell phone to record myself humming part of the dream melody before it disappeared. I played it back. It was a somber tune, almost baroque in quality. When I listened to it a month later, it did not seem like anything I would have devised. I concluded that the tune I hummed was vaguely familiar because it