Page 19 of Slanting Towards the Sea
Asier’s eyes widen ever-so-slightly, like he’s going huh on the inside, and for the first time since we met, the terrain between us evens out a notch.
After our meal, he invites me to the construction site where Stipe’s company is working on the renovation of the fund’s latest acquisition. “To show you what we’re going for,” he justifies, but I sense there’s more behind it, a current of curiosity passing between us in both directions.
After I’d mentioned olive oil, he seemed to stop rushing through the conversation.
Instead, he ordered another coffee and asked me a set of questions.
How come I own a hotel if I’m not in the hotel business?
How did I come to run the construction company?
Am I a civil engineer? Normally, questions like these would’ve made me nervous.
But my thoughts kept going back to the gray hair I discovered in the bathroom.
And the need that emerged after that, to move, to live, to grow.
I’ll admit I’m curious about him too, how he got into this line of work, his accent, the origin of his unusual name.
When I ask him about the latter, he tells me that it’s Basque.
His mother was Basque, but she fled to the UK when she was twenty, supporting herself as an au pair.
“A bomb,” he says, “exploded near her, miraculously leaving her unharmed. Her decision to leave was sealed as soon as she counted all her fingers and toes.” He says it in a practiced way, like reciting a stanza by memory.
It must’ve been repeated the exact same way in his family for ages.
People tend to do that with painful memories, I think, remembering the night Vlaho told me, in pretty much the same way, about his sister dying.
They reduce those painful events to a set sequence of words, so that it’s easier to get them out.
I wonder if this helped Asier’s mother at all, or if she too would duck under the table if she found herself in Zagreb’s center at noon, when the cannon goes off.
“Sorry, you said your mother was Basque?” I ask.
He tells me she died when he was seventeen.
His father is American; he worked for the Foreign Service when Asier was growing up.
His parents met in London, had him, and then spent their life moving around.
“My mother died in French Polynesia, of all places.” His voice doesn’t inflect or deepen when he says this, and it makes me think of Astrid’s color wheel and how she said some people saw only basic colors.
I wonder if Asier is one of those people or if it is true that time heals all, because whenever I mention my own mom dying, I have to rush through words.
They always threaten to reel me someplace deeper.
“It must’ve been awful to have to move all the time,” I say as we walk up Marjan, the hill on the side of the old town.
But what I really mean is, to have to leave her in a place that far away, if that’s what they did.
I struggle visiting my mother’s grave, and reduce my visits to a sequence of tasks, much like Asier reduced his mother’s trauma to a sequence of words.
But it puts my mind at ease that I can go to her whenever I like.
That I will be able to go there and talk to her one day, when I’m ready.
Asier looks at me with an air of surprise. “Not at all. It was a great way to grow up.”
We arrive at the construction site, and he shows me around.
The historic structure is barely visible behind the scaffolding and tarp, but the building, I can already tell, will have an ancient, ethereal feel, with its elongated windows, blue shutters, and elaborate stucco decorations under the roof.
“We are restoring it back to the way it used to be,” he says. “Our architect did a substantial amount of research in the National Archives to reconstruct its original appearance, inside and out.” He turns to me. “I wanted you to see that we treat our investments with respect.”
His eyes are olive-green.
His voice has a deep, masculine timbre to it.
I haven’t had sex in nine years.
The thought is so sudden, so raw, I almost choke on it.
“It looks beautiful,” I say, turning away to rebound.
“We have villas like these in my hometown, along the seaside near the center. We call them Italian villas, though I’m not sure why.
Maybe because they were influenced by Italian architecture, or perhaps they were built during the Italian occupation. ”
I often walk by those villas on my way to the town center, daydreaming of waking in one of the rooms with high ceilings, gossamer white curtains swaying in a gust of sea air, framing a view not unlike this one.
Not because I dream of being rich, but because there’s something about waking up to such a view that makes you take life in big gulps. “You’ve done it justice,” I say.
Asier smiles, then looks toward the sea, and nudges me to do the same.
In front of us the navy-blue mass rolls slowly. It’s chilly, the air cleansed and sharpened by last night’s storm, the islands ahead seeming thrice closer than yesterday. I tighten the lapels of my coat across my chest. “Gorgeous,” I say.
I’m not looking at him, but I can feel his eyes targeting me as he says, “Gorgeous, indeed.”