Decompression Read Free

weren’t listening to me. They seemed completely absorbed, holding hands and gazing at the village and the ocean. They didn’t ask, as other clients did, why I’d settled in such a remote place. They didn’t prattle on about former diving adventures. When Jola turned her face to me and took off her sunglasses, her eyes were moist—from the wind, I thought, the breeze blowing through the open window on her side.
    “It’s absolutely beautiful here,” she said.
    I shivered and turned the ignition key.
    Today it seems to me as if that first meeting took place half an eternity ago, in another century or in an alien universe. Although I can still see the Atlantic through my window as I write, the island’s no longer in the present tense. I’m literally living out of suitcases. Down at the port in Arrecife, a container holding all my equipment is awaiting shipment to Thailand, where a German from Stuttgart wants to open a dive center on some palmy island with white beaches. A second container with my personal stuff is almost empty. When I was considering what I could use in Germany, hardly anything occurred to me. What would shorts, sandals, portholes from sunken ships, and a swordfish I caught and mounted myself be doing in the Ruhr? The only suitable place for all that is the past.

    We coasted slowly down the dirt road and turned left at the touchingly hubristic little wall that divided the Atlantic fromthe dry land. My property constituted the end of the village. Standing at oblique angles and a stone’s throw from each other on the edge of a large sandlot were the two houses: the two-story, generously roof-terraced “Residencia” where Antje and I lived, and the “Casa Raya,” the somewhat smaller guesthouse. The area both houses occupied had been blasted into the black rock overlooking the sea. They stood raised up on natural stone foundations the sea spray couldn’t hurt. I’d acquired the houses for a good price and renovated them lavishly, and Antje had worked real miracles in the gardens around them. She’d fought with the contractor for days on end about how much excavation would be required, she’d drawn up irrigation plans, she’d insisted on bringing in special soil. She’d conscientiously investigated wind load and sun angles and the direction of root spread. With the passage of the years, there had sprung up on the edge of the rocky wasteland an oasis it cost me a fortune to keep watered. Royal Poinciana, hibiscus, and oleander bloomed all year round. Masses of bougainvillea threw their cascades of color over the walls, and above them two Norfolk Island pines stretched their thick-fingered needle leaves to the sky. The bloom of flowers on Lahora’s outermost edge burned a bright hole in the bare surroundings.
    “No, not possible,” said Theo, shaking his head and laughing softly, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Jola had her sunglasses back on and remained silent.
    There were clients who didn’t care for Lahora, but everybody liked the Casa Raya. The house, a simple white cube with blue shutters on its windows, contained only a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom, and a cooking niche, but in spite of its small size, there was something majestic about the place. Under the steps that ledup to the front door, the lava rocks were battered by the Atlantic, which seemed not so much raging as experienced; it’s been throwing itself against them in the same way for a couple of million years. Every two minutes the water in the cove surged up and spewed skyward a huge fountain sixty feet high. It was incredible that such a drama had nothing, not the smallest thing, to do with us humans. After guests left the Casa, they’d go back to Germany and write us to say that the fabled roar of the surf had stayed in their ears for days. It was a sound that inhabited you.
    Antje was already sitting on the Casa’s steps, waiting for us. Todd, her cocker spaniel, was asleep on the hood of her white Citroën.