Rachel and I walked into Hvar from our hotel, along the stone walkway curving along the shore. The weather was humid, almost tropical. There was a high soaring moon. It’s intense. Beauty like this. (I heard from someone that she was unable to see the pictures. They were downloading huge into WordPress and I had trouble sizing them down. I think I figured it out – if you click on the photos, they SHOULD show up bigger. Please let me know if they do not, if you get some kind of weird message when you do click on them.)
As a side note: Rachel and I, of course, have known each other all our lives. We are part of a huge raucous family, devoted to seeing one another, keeping up with one another, including one another. We are scattered about, but we participate in group chats, we have private Facebook groups, we all text one another during the World Series. This is a CLOSE family. And yet … there are things we learned, from talking to each other. Our fathers were brothers. So the stories we got are not necessarily the stories they got, although there are the mythical stories everyone knows. “Oh, so that was the night they got in a fight and Joe broke his leg?” My uncle Jimmy was a wild man (and my godfather) and every time he got in trouble, when the cops would ask for his name, he would say “Terrence” – Rachel’s dad’s name. JIMMY. MY GOD WHAT THE HELL. This story is legendary in O’Malley Lore. And uncle Terry was a quiet bookish kid with an eyepatch over one eye who never got in trouble. The cops would show up at the door, and they would say to my grandmother, “Is Terrence here?” This happened many many times, and my grandmother would say, “I think Jimmy is the one you’re looking for.” I am laughing out loud as I type this. My grandmother knew the score. Rachel said, “And Mummy Gina would be like, ‘Yes, Terrence is in his room reading The Scarlet Letter for the 10th time, what seems to be the trouble?” She and I have never spent this much time one on one, so we caught each other up on our lives, our men, our book preferences, our goals for when we got back (we made very specific ones, and told them to each other). And she told me stuff I had never heard. Uncle Terry commenting, “The O’Malleys have always had a strain of hysteria.” I was DYING. And Terry is such a quiet white-haired man, a lawyer, who spends his retirement traveling to different state capitols so he can tour the buildings, visiting as many former President’s homes as possible, and reading 8 volume biographies of Napoleon. So to hear he admitted to having a “strain of hysteria” is the best thing I’ve ever heard.
Oh, and we tried to get Ante to come out for a drink with us. I called him and he picked up the phone, already laughing, because we had said, “We’re going out, we’re gonna call you!” And here I was calling. He was comfortable on the terrace of his friend’s house in Hvar, where he was staying, so he demurred, telling us to have fun. There are probably rules about not going out and getting drunk with your clients, but still, we so wanted to go to a nightclub with Ante.
One other cool fact about Hvar: it has one of the oldest (maybe THE oldest) public theatres in Europe. Here it is, and I loved the marking on door:
We had dinner at a restaurant in the main square, with an INSANE sunset going on behind us. Blaring neon pinks. We walked along the shore, gawking at the huge yachts parked there. “So … is this like Brad Pitt’s yacht or something?” The entire square is marble – super slippery – and the architecture is Venetian, which we were starting to be able to differentiate. More ornate, with arches and points and doo-hickeys.
And then we turned and looked up at the Venetian fort where we had gone earlier that morning with Ante.
A sleeping fire-breathing dragon. On guard for threats. Waiting. Ready.
We woke up the next morning. It would be another busy day, with a drive over the island to Stari Grad (“Stalingrad??” said Rachel. “Stari. Grad,” clarified Ante), where we would pick up the ferry to go to Split … Split, my entire reason for coming here in the first place, although I was thrilled to see everything else. But Split was the hook. Thank you, Rebecca West. I was almost NERVOUS to see Split. I’ve avoided even looking at pictures of Split, and of Diocletian’s palace, because I wanted to “save it” for whenever I visited. I’ve been “saving it” for 20 years. I am nothing if not patient.
We both woke up early and headed down to the beach for a goodbye swim. Nobody was there.
Morning light in Hvar. Heaven.
