The Nautical Chart Read online

  When Coy looked back, the little man was still there, strolling with his hands clasped behind his back, casual as you please.

  By now they were at the door of the Club de la Pipa. Coy quickly calculated how much he had left in his wallet and decided that he could invite her for another drink, and that in the worst case Roger, the manager, would run a tab for him. The girl seemed surprised by the look of the place, the bell at the door, the ancient stairs, and the room on the second floor with its curious bar, sofa, and engravings of Sherlock Holmes on the walls. There was no jazz that night, and they stood at the deserted counter while Roger worked a crossword puzzle at the other end. She wanted to try the Sapphire gin because she liked the smell. She declared her enchantment with the place, adding that she never would have imagined there was anything like it in Barcelona. Coy said it was going to be closed down because the neighbors complained of the noise and the music; a ship soon to be scrapped, one might say. She had a drop of gin and tonic at a corner of her mouth, and he thought of how fortunate he was to have only three drinks in his belly, because with a couple more he would have reached out and wiped that drop off with his fingers, and she didn't seem the kind who would let anything be wiped away by some sailor she had just met and whom she studied with a mixture of reserve, courtesy, and gratitude. Finally he asked her name and she smiled again—this time after a few beats, as if she had pushed herself to do it—and her eyes met Coy's for a long, intense second before she spoke her name. It was a name as unique as her look, he thought, and he pronounced it once aloud, slowly, before the distant smile was erased entirely from her lips. Afterward Coy asked Roger for a cigarette to offer her, but she didn't want to smoke anymore. She raised the glass to her lips and he saw her white teeth through the glass, and heard the ice tapping against them with a moist clicking. His eyes traveled to the silver chain quietly gleaming at the open neck of her shirt, on skin that in that light seemed warmer, and he wondered whether anyone had ever counted those freckles all the way to Finisterre. Whether they had been counted one by one, on a southerly heading, just as he longed to do. It was then, when he raised his eyes, that it was evident she had sensed his look, and he felt his heart skip a beat when he heard her say it was time to go.

  ON the landlady's daughters radio the same voice was now launching into "La reina del barrio chino." Coy turned off his Walkman— Miles Davis was soloing "Saeta," the fourth theme on "Sketches of Spain"—and stopped staring at the stain on the ceiling. The book and headphones fell to the bed when he stood up and walked across the narrow room, about the size of the cell he had occupied for two days in La Guaira that time the Torpedoman, Gallego Neira, and he, fed up with eating fruit, had left the ship to buy fish to make a bouillabaisse. Neira had said, "Have a cup of coffee and wait for me, just fifteen minutes for a quickie and I'll be back." After a while they'd heard him call for help through the window, and had run inside and busted up the bar, busted everything— tables, bottles, and the ribs of the thug who'd taken the Galician's wallet. Captain don Madas Norena, mad as hell, had to get them out by bribing the Venezuelan police with a handful of dollars he then systematically deducted, down to the last penny, from their pay.

  Coy felt a tug of nostalgia, remembering all that. The mirror over the sink reflected his muscular shoulders and weary, unshaven face. He let the water run until it was good and cold and then splashed it over his face and the back of his neck, snorting and shaking his head like a dog in the rain. He toweled himself vigorously and stood for a while studying his face: strong nose, dark eyes, rugged features, as if he were scoring points in his favor. Zero, he concluded. This bird is not going to be feasting on a peach.

  He pulled the dresser drawer out and felt behind it until his fingers found the envelope where he kept his money. There wasn't much, and in the last few days it had dwindled dangerously. He stood rooted there for a moment, mulling over his idea, and finally he went to the closet and took out the bag containing his meager belongings: a few dog-eared books, his officer s bars, on which the gold was beginning to verge toward a mossy green, jazz tapes, a wallet-size photo album—the training ship Estrella del Sur, close to the wind, Torpedoman and Gallego Neira at the counter of a bar in Rotterdam, Coy himself wearing a first officer's stripes, leaning on the rail of the Isla Negra in New York harbor—and the wooden box in which he kept his sextant. It was a good sextant, a Weems & Plath with seven filters, black metal and a gilt arc, that Coy had bought in installments, beginning with his first salary after earning his navigator's certificate. Satellite positioning systems had sounded the death knell for that instrument, but any sailor worth his salt knew its reliability—as a guard against electronic failures— in establishing the latitude at midday, when the sun reached its highest point in the sky. Even at night, using a star low on the horizon, there were the nautical ephemerides, tables, and three minutes of calculations. In the same way that military men clean and coddle their weapons, Coy had kept the sextant free of saline corrosion and dirt over all those years, cleaning its mirrors and testing for possible lateral and index errors. Even now, without a ship beneath his feet, he often carried it on his walks along the coast, to sit on a rock with the horizon of the open sea before him and calculate angles. That custom dated from the time he was sailing as a student on the Monte Pequeno, his third ship if you counted the Estrella del Sur. Monte Pequeno was a 275,000-ton tanker owned by Enpetrol, and her captain, don Agustin de la Guerra, liked to solemnify the stroke of midday by inviting his officers to a tot of sherry after they and the young midshipmen had compared calculations made on the flying bridge, the captain with watch in hand and they shooting the sun's tangent on the horizon through the smoked niters of their instruments. He was a captain of the old school; a little behind the times but an excellent sailor from the days when large tankers steamed to the Persian Gulf in ballast through the Suez Canal and returned laden with cargo around Africa, past the Cape. Once he had thrown a steward down the ladder because he lacked respect. When the union complained, he replied that the steward was a lucky man, because a century and a half before he would have been hanged from the mainmast. On my ship, he had told Coy once, you're either in agreement with the captain or you keep your mouth shut. That was during a Christmas dinner in the Mediterranean, sailing into terrible weather—a hard, force 10 wind that obliged them to cut back the engines off Cape Bon. Coy, an apprentice seaman, had disagreed with some banal remark by the captain, who had thrown his napkin on the table and ordered Coy to stand watch outside, on the starboard flying bridge, where Coy passed the next four hours in darkness, whipped by the wind, rain, and spray breaking over the tanker. Don Agustin de la Guerra was a rare survivor from other times, despotic and hard on board, but when a Panamanian cargo ship with a drunken Russian watch officer had rammed de la Guerra's stern one night, when rain and sleet saturated radars in the English Channel, he'd been able to keep the tanker afloat and steer her into Dover without losing a drop of crude, saving the company the cost of tugs. Any knothead, he said, can sail around the world these days by pressing buttons. But if the electronics go down or the Americans decide to black out their damn satellites—the devil's own invention—or some Bolshevik sonofabitch runs up your ass, a good sextant, a compass, and a chronometer will still get you anywhere. So practice, my boy. Practice. Obedient, Coy had practiced tirelessly for days and months and years; later too, and with that same sextant, he had performed more difficult observations on cloudy, dangerous nights, or in the middle of strong storms racing across the Atlantic, clinging, soaked, to the .gunnel while the bow slammed down like a machete and he, glued to the eyepiece, awaited a glimpse of the faint gold disk among clouds driven by a northwesterly wind.

  He felt a quiet melancholy as he hefted the familiar weight of the sextant in his hands, sliding the index arm and hearing it tick along the toothed arc that marked from 1 to 120 the degrees on any terrestrial meridian. He computed how much he could get for it from Sergi Solans, who had been admiring the instrume
nt for years. After all, Sergi would say when they were raising a glass at the Schilling, they weren't making sextants like that anymore. Sergi was a good kid who had been buying almost all the drinks since Coy found himself ashore and out of money; nor did he hold a grudge because Coy had gone to bed with Eva the night the Brazilian beauty was wearing a T-shirt diabolically clinging to the size 40 breasts that never saw a bra and Sergi was too drunk to fight for her. He had also studied sailing with Coy, and shared a ship for a few months when both were trainees on the Migalota, a Ro-Ro owned by Rodriguez & Saulnier. Now he was studying for his captain's exam as first officer on a Trans-Mediterranean ferry that plowed the Barcelona-Palma line twice a week. It's like driving a bus, he said. But with a sextant like that in your cabin, you'd feel like a real sailor.

  Coy centered the arm in the middle of the arc and carefully returned the Weems & Plath to its case. Then he went to the dresser, opened his wallet, and took out the card the woman had given him three days earlier when she said good-bye at the corner of the Ramblas. No address, no telephone number, nothing but the two parts of her name: Tanger Soto. Below, in a rounded, precise hand, with a small circle dotting the i, she had written the address of the Museo Naval in Madrid.

  After he closed the cover of the sextant, Coy was whistling "Noche de samba en Puerto Espana."

  The Trafalgar Showcase

  There are nothing but problems on land DIETRICH VON HAEFTEN,

  How to Cope-with Storms

  Later he learned what it meant to leap into the void, a unique experience for Coy, who could not remember having made a precipitous move in his life. He was the kind of person who took all the time he needed to plot a meticulous route on the nautical chart. Before he found himself on mandatory shore leave, that had been a source of satisfaction in a profession where accomplishing safe passage between two points situated at far-spread geographical latitudes and longitudes was essential. There were few pleasures comparable to deliberating over calculations of course, drift, and speed, or predicting that such and such a cape, or this or that lighthouse, would come into view two days later at six in the morning and at approximately thirty degrees off the port bow, then waiting at that hour by a gunnel slick with early-morning dew, binoculars to your eyes, until you see, at exactly the predicted place, the gray silhouette or the intermittent light that—once the frequency of flashes or occultations is measured by chronometer—confirms the precision of those calculations. When that moment came, Coy always allowed himself an internal smile, serene and satisfied. Taking pleasure in the confirmation of the certainty achieved through mathematics, the on-board instruments, and his professional competence, he would prop himself in one comer of the bridge, near the mute shadow of the helmsman, and pour himself a lukewarm coffee from a thermos, content that he was on a good ship, rather than in that other, uncomfortable world, the one on dry land, now reduced by good fortune to a feint radiance beyond the horizon.

  But such rigor in plotting a vector on the nautical charts that regulated his life had not shielded him from error or failure. Saying "land ho!" and then physically corroborating the presence of terra firma and its consequences did not always occur in that sequence. The land was there, whether it was on the charts or had popped up unexpectedly, as such things tend to do, piercing the fragile refuge—that little dot of iron floating on an enormous ocean— where Coy felt completely safe. Six hours before the Isla Negra, a container ship of the Minguez Escudero company, split open her hull halfway between Cape Town and the Mozambique Channel, Coy, the first officer, had warned the captain that the British Admiralty chart corresponding to that area called attention, in a special box, to certain imprecisions in the surveys. But the captain was in a hurry, and besides, he'd been sailing those waters for twenty-five years using the same charts, without a problem. He was also two days behind schedule because of bad weather in the Gulf of Guinea, and because he'd had to evacuate by helicopter a crew member who had broken his back when he slipped down a companionway near the Skeleton Coast. English charts, he had said during mess, are so meticulous they handled them with kid gloves. The route is clear: two hundred twenty fathoms at the highest shoal and not a flyspeck on the paper. So we'll pass straight between Terson and Mowett Grave. That was what he'd said: kid gloves, flyspeck, and straight between the islands. The captain, don Gabriel Moa, was a sixty-plus-year-old Galician, small, with a ruddy forehead and gray hair. In addition to his blind trust in the Admiralty charts, he wore four decades at sea in the wrinkles on his face, and in all that time no one had ever seen him lose his composure; not even in the early nineties, it was said, when he'd sailed a day and a half listing twenty degrees after losing eleven containers in an Atlantic storm. He was one of those captains for whom owners and subordinates would put their hands in the fire—curt on the bridge, serious in his cabin, invisible ashore. He was an old-time captain, the kind who addressed officers and trainees formally, and whom no one could imagine making an error. And that was why Coy held to the course on the English chart that pointed out imprecisions in the surveys; and that was also why, twenty minutes into his watch, he had heard the steel hull of the Negra screech on rock, shuddering beneath his feet, before he recovered from his shock and rushed to the engine-order telegraph to call "Stop the engines!" Captain Moa appeared on the bridge in his pajamas, his hair every which way, and stared into the darkness outside with a stupid expression Coy had never seen on his face. He had stammered, "It can't be," three times in succession, and then, as if he wasn't entirely awake, had murmured a weak "Stop the engines," after the engines had been stopped for five minutes and the helmsman was standing motionless with his hands on the wheel, looking first at the captain and then at Coy. And Coy, with the terrible certainty of someone who has to his misfortune received an unexpected revelation, could not take his eyes off the honored superior whose orders he would have followed without a second's hesitation up to now, even if that meant steering through the Molucca Passage with no radar, and who, taken by surprise and with no time to put on the mask of his reputation, or maybe—men do change with the years and in their hearts—the mask of the efficient sailor he once had been, was showing his true stripes. He was a dazed old man in pajamas now, overwhelmed by events, incapable of issuing an intelligent order; a poor frightened man who suddenly saw his retirement pension fading away after forty years of service.

  The warning on the English chart was not without justification. There was at least one unmarked needle in the channel between Terson and Mowett Grave, and somewhere in the universe some joker had to be bellowing with laughter because that one isolated rock in a vast ocean had set itself expressly in the path of the Isla Negra, as expressly as the famous iceberg was in the way of the Titanic, and on the watch of first officer Manuel Coy. In any case, both men, captain and first officer, had paid for it. The investigating tribunal, composed of a company inspector and two men from the Merchant Marine, had taken Captain Moa's record into account and resolved his case with a discreet early retirement. As for Coy, that Admiralty chart had led him far from the sea.

  He was now in Madrid, becalmed beside a stone fountain in the shape of a child with a heretical smile strangling a dolphin, and looking like a shipwreck survivor who had washed up on a noisy beach in high season. Hands in his pockets, in the midst of the crush of automobiles and the racket of blaring horns, he was observing from afar the bronze galleon over the entrance to number 5 Paseo del Prado. He had no way to judge the precision of the hydro-graphic surveys of the course he was proposing to follow, but in his mind he was already far beyond the point at which it is still possible to steer a different course. The Weems & Plath sextant, which his friend Sergi Solans had acquired at a reasonable price, had paid for a Barcelona-Madrid train ticket, and ensured sufficient funds to keep him afloat for two weeks. A hefty roll of banknotes was in the right pocket of his jeans, the remainder in the canvas bag in storage at Atocha station. It was now 12:45 on a sunny spring day. Traffic was moving noisily in the direction
of the headquarters of the Navy and the offices of the Museo Naval. A half hour earlier Coy had paid a visit to the headquarters of the Merchant Marine a couple of streets away to see how his appeal was progressing. The woman in charge, mature, with a pleasant smile, and a flowerpot with a geranium on her desk, had stopped smiling after Coy's record appeared on her computer screen. Appeal denied, she reported in an impersonal tone. He would receive written notification. She dismissed him, turning back to more important matters. Maybe from that office, which was some one hundred seventy nautical miles away from the nearest coast, the woman entertained a romantic notion of the sea, and did not respect sailors who ran their ships aground. Or perhaps to the contrary she was an objective, dispassionate bureaucrat for whom a grounded ship in the Indian Ocean was no different from a wreck on the highway, and a sailor without a berth and on the outfitters' black list seemed like any individual deprived of his driving license by a strict judge. The bad thing was, Coy had reflected as he descended the stairs to the street, the woman probably wasn't all that wrong. At a time when satellites marked routes and waypoints, the cell phone had swept captains capable of making decisions off the bridge, and any executive could direct transatlantic cargo ships or a hundred-thousand-ton tanker from his office, there was little distinction between a sailor who beached his ship and a driver who drove off the road because his brakes failed or he was driving drunk.

  Coy paused, concentrating on what steps to take next, until all bitter thoughts were left behind, adrift on the blue. Then, standing beneath a chestnut tree sprouting new leaves, he made his decision. Looking left and right, he waited for a nearby light to change, then set off with conviction. He crossed the street and marched up to the door of the museum, where two marines with white belts and helmets and red stripes down their pants stared with curiosity at his double-breasted jacket before letting him pass through the arch of the metal detector. His stomach was aflutter as he climbed the broad stairway, turned right on the landing, and found himself in the lobby, next to the huge double wheel of the corvette Nautilus. To his left was the door to administration and information, and to the right the entrance to the exhibition halls. A uniformed sailor with a bored expression sat behind a desk, and a civilian stood behind a counter where museum books, prints, and souvenirs were sold. Coy licked his lips; suddenly he felt a horrendous thirst. He spoke to the civilian. "I'm looking for Senorita Soto."