Hrvoje Bertović came to see me today. We met in Zagreb a few months ago and hit it off at once. He, too, got a master’s degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design, albeit much more recently. He was in Pula at a conference, and he stopped in Motovun on his return to Zagreb. We talked about many things, most of them having to do with architecture and urban planning in Croatia. Before he left, he asked me about my paintings. When I told him a few words about the connection between the so-called abstract art and cave art, he grew pensive. “I just remembered a guy I used to see year after year at a small resort by the sea,” he ventured. He was a butcher from Germany. “Each night he would spend the whole night staring at the sea and sipping wine from a bottle he always had with him.” The bottle would be empty by the morning. “I often wondered what was going on in his mind,” he concluded. Hrvoje left soon afterwards, but his story refused to go away. To my surprise, I was quite mesmerized by the German butcher.