Decompression (2 page)

How was your flight, how’s the weather in Germany?

How big is the island, how many people live here?

I chose the route through the wine-growing region. Innumerable funnel-shaped ditches, in each of which a vine found protection and fertile soil. That there were people who gouged out a one-yard-deep hole in the lapilli layer for every single plant, reinforced the borders of each ditch with a little stone wall, and thus perforated an area of twelve thousand acres like a Swiss cheese—that fact never ceased to fascinate me. In the distance the craters of the Timanfaya glowed red and yellow and purple and green from the lichen covering the volcanic rock. The only plant growing anywhere around us was a mushroom. I waited to see which of my companions would be the first to say, “Like being on the moon.”

“Like being on the moon,” said Jola.

“Sublime,” said Theo.

When Antje and I arrived in Lanzarote fourteen years ago, equipped with two backpacks and a plan to spend the largest-possible portion of our future on the island, though not necessarily
together, she was the one who’d said, “Like being on the moon,” when she first saw the Timanfaya. I’d thought something along the lines of
Sublime
but hadn’t found the right word. “If you like rubble,” Jola said.

“You have no feeling for the aesthetics of the austere,” Theo replied.

“And you’re just glad to be back on solid ground.”

Jola took off her boots and socks and cast a questioning glance in my direction before bracing her bare feet against the windshield. I nodded in approval. I always liked it when my clients relaxed as quickly as possible. They were
not
supposed to feel at home.

“So you don’t like to fly either?” I asked Theo.

He gave me a scathing look.

“He pretends to be asleep,” said Jola. She’d taken out her telephone and was tapping in a text message. “Like all men when they’re afraid.”

“I get drunk as fast as I can,” I said.

“Theo takes care of that before boarding.”

A cell phone chirped. Theo reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, read the caller’s number, and answered.

“Do you go back to Germany often?” Jola asked me.

“Not if I can help it,” I said.

Jola’s cell phone chirped. She read the screen and poked Theo in the side. When she laughed, she curled up her nose like a little girl. Theo looked out the window.

“I like this landscape,” he said. “It leaves you in peace. It doesn’t require you to marvel at it and admire it all the time.”

I understood exactly what he meant.

“For the next two weeks, I’m only interested in what’s underwater,” Jola said. “The world above the surface can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”

I understood that too.

We reached Tinajo, a small town of white houses with little oriental-looking towers rising from the corners of their flat roofs. At the bookstore, which looked as though it had been renovated and then closed, we turned off to the left. After a few hundred yards, the last of the well-tended front gardens were behind us. They were followed by terraced fields wrested from the rubble. Here and there a couple of zucchini lay on the black soil. A flat-topped shed with a German shepherd tied up on the roof in the blazing sun was the last sign of civilization. The road turned into a gravel track that was marked off by whitewashed stones and wound like a ribbon through the volcanic field. This was the stretch where most clients would begin to get excited. They’d cry out jokingly, “Where are you taking us?” and “We’re at the ends of the earth!”

Jola said, “Wow.”

Theo said, “Awesome.”

I abstained from historical and geological tourist tips. I said nothing about the volcanic eruptions that had buried a quarter of the island between 1730 and 1736. I held my tongue and left my clients to their astonishment. All around us was nothing but rocks in various bizarre shapes. The silence of the minerals. There wasn’t even a bird in sight. The wind shook the van as though it wanted to get in.

We rounded the last volcanic cone and suddenly the Atlantic was spread out before us, dark blue, flecked with white foam,
and a bit implausible after so much rock. The breakers exploded against the cliffs and sent up high clouds of spray that rose and fell as though filmed in slow motion. The sky, gray-blue and white and windblown, was a continuation of the sea by other means.

“Oh man,” said Jola.

“Do you know the story about the two writers walking along a beach? One of them complains that all the good books have already been written. The other writer shouts, ‘Look!’ and points out to sea. ‘Here comes the last wave!’ ”

Jola laughed briefly, I not at all. The silence of the minerals always wins out. A few more minutes’ drive brought us to Lahora. The entrance was marked by an unfinished building, a concrete cube on a foundation of natural stone. The building’s empty window openings looked out over the sea. The gravel track now turned into a strip of slippery sand that climbed steeply up to the village, if
village
was the right word for a group of thirty uninhabited houses.

While I’m thinking about the best way to describe Lahora, it occurs to me that I’ve been using the past tense to talk about the island and everything on it. The first time I drove Theo and Jola to Lahora was barely three months ago. As usual, I hugged the cliff at the upper end of the village so my clients could enjoy the view. I explained that contrary to what you could read in many travel guides, Lahora was by no means an old fishing village. It was rather a collection of weekend houses built by wealthy Spaniards who already owned estates in Tinajo, handsome properties but utterly lacking in ocean views. The government of the island, I went on, had granted title to the building site, which lay in the middle of the biggest volcanic area, but hadn’t bothered to
provide any infrastructure. Lahora had no building plan, I told them. No street names. No sewer system. All in all, except for Antje and me, Lahora didn’t have any inhabitants either. Lahora was a mixture of abandoned building site and ghost town, a variation on the blurry boundary between not-yet-finished and falling-into-ruin.

In fact, the Spaniards had long since given up tinkering around on their half-finished houses; instead they would sit on their driftwood-fenced roof terraces while the salty wind gnawed the plaster off their walls. Wooden cable spools served as tables, stacked construction pallets as benches. Lahora was a terminus. A place where everything came to a halt. Furnished with objects that would have landed on the rubbish pile long ago if they were anywhere else. The ends of the earth.

We sat in the van and looked out over the flat roofs, with their accumulations of water tanks and solar panels and satellite dishes, and then down to the first row of houses, which practically stood in water at high tide. I promised my clients they’d find the place uniquely silent. The owners of the houses came, if at all, only on weekends.

I ended my little discourse by announcing two rules for their stay in Lahora: no swimming, and no going for walks. The little cove was a seething cauldron in any weather, I said, and the volcanic fields regularly broke headstrong hikers’ bones. In Lahora you could sit around, look out over the sea, and contemplate the smaller islands to the north, which crouched like sleeping animals in the haze between the water and the sky. Besides, when all was said and done, they were here for diving. Every day we’d drive to the best diving spots the island offered, and if in addition they
wanted to do a little sightseeing, then, as arranged, I’d be available to act as their chauffeur and guide.

They 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 from
the 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 led
up 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. The only dog in the universe that would voluntarily lie on hot sheet metal in blazing sunlight. This was his way of making sure Antje wouldn’t drive away without him. Or so she believed. When she saw us coming, she jumped up and waved; her dress was a big, shiny spot. She owned an entire collection of vivid cotton dresses, each in a different pattern. She’d accessorize from a range of flip-flops in various matching colors. On this particular day, little green horses on a red background galloped over her body. When she extended her hand to Jola, it looked for a few seconds as though someone had taken still shots of two different women in two different films and artfully spliced them together. Theo gazed at the ocean with his hands in his trouser pockets.

I set the luggage on the dusty ground. Antje raised her hand in thanks. We’d greeted each other rather scantily. I didn’t like her to touch me in the presence of other people. Even though we’d lived together for many years, it always struck me as funny that we were a couple. In public, at any rate.

While I lugged the empty scuba tanks from the morning dive
into the Residencia’s garage, where the fill station was located, Antje showed our guests around their vacation home. Getting clients settled in was one of her responsibilities. In addition to the Casa Raya, she also managed a few holiday apartments in Puerto del Carmen for their owners. My diving students made up the majority of the guests. Antje did bookings, turned over keys, settled up, cleaned up, tended the garden, supervised workers. At the same time, she ran the business end of my diving school—took care of the office, updated the website, did all the paperwork required by the various diving organizations. It had taken her less than two years after our arrival to make herself indispensable. She even knew how to cope with the
mañana
mentality of the Spanish islanders.