The Nautical Chart Read online

  His voice was hoarse. He glanced toward the door on the left, afraid he would find her surprised or uncomfortable. What in the world are you doing here? And so on and so on. He hadn't slept the night before. His head pressed against his reflection in the train window, he'd pondered what he was going to say, but now everything was wiped from his brain, as slick as the wake at the stern. Repressing the impulse to turn and walk out, he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, watched by the man at the counter. He was middle aged, with thick glasses and an amiable expression.

  "Tanger Soto?"

  Coy nodded. It was strange, he thought, to hear that name in the mouth of a third person. Well, apparently she has a real life after all. There are people who say hello to her, good-bye, all those things.

  "That's right," he said.

  No, he thought, this trip wasn't strange, it was absurd, as was the fact that his seabag was checked at the station. And now he was here to meet a woman whom he had seen only one night for a couple of hours. A woman who wasn't even expecting him.

  "Is she expecting you?"

  He shrugged.

  "Maybe."

  The man repeated that "maybe," his air pensive as he looked at Coy suspiciously. Coy was sorry he hadn't had a chance to clean up that morning; the beard he'd shaved the night before, just as he left for the Sants station, had reappeared as dark stubble. He raised his hand to finger his chin, but interrupted the gesture mid-course.

  "Senora Soto has gone out," the man said.

  Almost relieved, Coy nodded. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the man at the desk, leaning forward over a magazine, was checking out his shoes and threadbare jeans. Good thing, Coy thought, he had changed his white sneakers for some old deck shoes with rubber soles.

  "Will she be back today?"

  The man's eyes were on Coy's jacket, trying to decide whether that dark wool guaranteed the respectability of the person he was speaking with.

  "She may be," he said, after brief consideration. "We don't close until one-thirty."

  Coy looked at his watch, then pointed toward the nearest hall. Large portraits of Alfonso XII and Isabel II were hung on either side of a door through which he could see display cases, ship models, and guns.

  "Then I'll wait in there."

  'As you please."

  "Will you tell her when she comes back? My name is Coy."

  He smiled, an exhausted, sincere smile, the result of six hours on the train and six cups of coffee, and the man behind the counter seemed to relax.

  "Of course," he said.

  Coy crossed through the hall, his footsteps on the wood floor deadened by his rubber soles. The terror that had gripped his gut gave way to an uneasy uncertainty, not unlike the feeling you get when a ship lurches and you reach for something to hold on to, but it isn't there, so he tried to settle his nerves by looking at the objects around him. He walked past a large painting of Columbus and his men on shore—a cross, pennants in the background, and the blue Caribbean, with natives bowing before the discoverer, innocent of what lay ahead for them—and turned to his right, pausing before display cases filled with nautical instruments. It was a stupendous collection, and he admired the forestaffs, the quadrants, the Arnold chronometers, and the extraordinary collection of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century astrolabes, octants, and sextants, for which someone would undoubtedly be prepared to pay much more than he had received for his modest Weems & Plath.

  There were few visitors in the museum, which was larger and brighter than he remembered it. An old man was studying a large rectangular map of Gibraltar, a young couple, probably tourists, were looking into glass cases in the Hall of Discoveries, and a group of schoolchildren was listening to a teacher's explanations in the room dedicated to the rescue of the galleon San Diego. The noontime brightness poured through large skylights and illuminated Coy as he wandered through the central patio. Had he not been obsessed with thoughts of the woman he was there to see, he truly would have enjoyed the models of frigates and ships-of-the-line displayed fully rigged or in cross section, showing their complex internal structure. Coy hadn't seen them since his last visit to the museum, twenty years before, when the entrance had been from calle Montalban and he was still a navigation student. Despite the years that had gone by, he was thrilled to immediately recognize his favorite—a model of an eighteenth-century ship-of-the-line nearly ten feet long, with three decks and a hundred and fifty guns, housed in a gigantic glass case. It was a ship that had never breasted the waves, because she had never been built. Those were real sailors, he said to himself, as he had so many other times, studying the rigging, the sails, and the masts and yards of the model, admiring the deep topsails along which rugged, desperate men had to maneuver, keeping their balance on precarious foot ropes, clinging to the canvas during storms and battles, with wind and shot whistling and the implacable ocean beneath, and the deck swinging beneath the masts. Coy let himself sail with the ship for a moment, lost in a daydream of a long chase at the first light of dawn, of fleeing sails on the horizon. When there was no such thing as radar or satellites or sonar, ships were little dice cups dancing at the mouth of hell, and the sea was a mortal peril, but also an unassailable refuge from all things—lives lived or yet to be lived, deaths looming or already accomplished, but all of it left behind on land. "We come too late to a world too old," he had read in some book. Of course we come too late. We come to ships and ports and seas that are too old, when dying dolphins peel away from the bows of ships, and when Conrad has written The Shadow-Line twenty times, Long John Silver is a brand of whiskey, and Moby Dick has become the good whale in an animated film.

  Near a full-scale replica of a section of the Santa Ana's mast, Coy passed an officer in the impeccable uniform of the nation's Navy, an impressive-looking man whose cuffs boasted the special loop in the third gold stripe that meant commander. He stared hard at Coy, who held his gaze until the officer looked away and walked off toward the back of the hall.

  Twenty minutes went by. At least once every minute Coy tried to concentrate on what he was going to say when she appeared, if in fact she ever did, and all twenty times he was tongue-tied, unable to string together a coherent phrase, his mouth half open as if she were actually there before him. He was in the hall devoted to the Battle of Trafalgar, standing beneath an oil painting of the scene of the engagement between the Santa Ana and the Royal Sovereign, when again he was aware of the nerves in the pit of his stomach, like needles—yes, that was the exact word—needling him to get out of there. Weigh anchor, idiot, he told himself, and with that he seemed to wake from a dream, aghast. He felt the urge to scramble down the stairs, stick his head under cold water, and shake it until he cleared his mind. Damn fool, he berated himself. Damn fool, in spades. Senora Soto. I don't even know if she's living with someone or married.

  He turned, stepping back in confusion. His eyes lighted on the inscription of a showcase: "Boarding sword worn during the Battle of Trafalgar...." He looked up and there was Tanger Soto, reflected in the glass. He hadn't heard her arrive, but she was there, motionless and silent, watching him with an expression between surprise and curiosity, as unreal as she had been the first time. As vague as a shadow locked inside the glass case, a shadow that wasn't hers.

  COY was not a sociable man. As already noted, that factor, along with a few books and a precociously lucid vision of the dark corners of the human soul, had early led him to sea. Nevertheless, this was not entirely incompatible with a candor that occasionally surfaced in his attitudes, in the way he would look at others without moving or speaking, in the rather awkward way he behaved on dry land, or in his sincere, confused, nearly shy smile. He had shipped out driven more by intuition than by conviction. But life does not advance with the precision of a good ship, and gradually his mooring lines slipped into the sea, sometimes fouled in the propellers or dragging along consequences. There were women, of course. A couple of them had got under his skin, into flesh and blood and mind, effec
ting the pertinent physical and chemical procedures, the analgesic balms and prescribed havoc. LPPP: Law of Pay the Price Punctually. At this point, that trail was faint, vague pangs of regret in the memory of a sailor without a ship. Precise, but also indifferent, memories closer to melancholy for the long-gone years—it had been eight or nine since the last woman who was important to Coy—than to a feeling of material loss, or absence. Deep down, those shadows were anchored in his memory only because they belonged to a time when everything was a beginning for him— new stripes on a brand-new blue jacket, new bars on the epaulets of his shirts, and long periods of time admiring them in the same way he admired the body of a naked woman, times when life was a crackling new nautical chart with all navigational notices updated, its smooth white surface as yet untouched by pencil and eraser. Days when he himself, sighting the profile of land against the horizon, still felt a vague attraction to persons or things awaiting him there. All the rest—pain, betrayal, reproaches, interminable nights lying awake beside backs turned in silence—were in those days simply submerged rocks, murderous shoals awaiting the inevitable moment, without any chart to give warning of their presence. The fact is that he did not really miss those female shadows; he missed himself, or missed the man he had been then. Maybe that was why those women, or those shadows, the last known ports in his life, surfaced at times, hazy in the outlines of memory, for ghostly rendezvous in Barcelona, at dusk, when he was taking long walks by the sea. Or when he was climbing the wooden bridge of the old port as the setting sun spread its crimson across the heights of Montjuich, the tower of Jaime I, and the piers and gangplanks of the Trans-Mediterranean, or was searching the old wharves and bollards for scars left on stone and iron by thousands of hawsers and steel cables, by ships sunk or cut up for scrap decades before. At times he thought about those women when he walked out beyond the city center and the Maremagnum theaters among other solitary, isolated men and women absorbed in the dusk, dozing on benches or dreaming as they stared out to sea, as gulls glided above the sterns of fishing vessels cutting through the sun-red waters beneath the clock tower. Not far from the clock tower was an ancient schooner stripped of sails and rigging mat he remembered being forever in that same place, its timbers cracked and weathered by the wind, sun, rain, and time. And that often led him to think that ships and men ought to disappear when their hour came, to sink to the bottom out in the open sea instead of being left high and dry to rot ashore.

  Now Coy had been talking for five minutes, almost uninterruptedly. He was sitting beside a window on the first floor of the

  Museo Naval. He let words flow the way one fills a void that grows uncomfortable if the silences are too prolonged. He spoke slowly, in a calm tone, and smiled faintly when he paused. Sometimes he shifted his gaze outdoors, to the tender green of the chestnut trees lining the Paseo del Prado down to the Neptune fountain, then turned back to the woman. Some business in Madrid, he said. An official errand, a friend. By chance, the museum was around the corner. He said anything that came to mind, just as he had that time in Barcelona, with the candid shyness so typical of him, and she listened, her head tilted and the tips of her blond hair brushing her chin. Those dark eyes with the glints that again seemed navy blue were fixed on Coy, on the faint, sincere smile that belied the casualness of his words.

  "That tells it all," he concluded.

  That told nothing, for as yet they were merely easing toward the harbor with great care, engines throtded back, waiting for the pilot to come aboard. That told nothing, and Tanger Soto knew it as well as he.

  "Well," she said.

  She was leaning against the edge of the table in her office, arms crossed, looking at him thoughtfully with that same intensity, but this time she was smiling a little, as if she wanted to reward his effort, or his calm, or the manner in which he met her eyes, without boasting or evasion. As if she appreciated the way he had presented himself, justified his presence, and then, not attempting to deceive her or deceive himself, awaited her verdict.

  Now it was she who talked. She talked without taking her eyes off him, as if to measure the effect of her words, or maybe of the tone in which she was saying them. She talked naturally and with a hint of either affection or gratitude. She talked about that strange night in Barcelona, about how pleased she was to see him again. And then, as if everything that was possible to say had already been said, they simply observed each other. Coy recognized that once again the time had come for him to leave, or else look for some reason, some pretext, some damn thing that would allow him to prolong the moment. Either that or she would walk him to the door and thank him for the visit. Slowly, he got to his feet.

  "I hope that fellow won't be bothering you again."

  "Who?’

  She had taken a second longer than necessary to answer. "The one with the ponytail, and the two different color eyes." He touched his face, indicating his own. "The Dalmatian." "Oh, him."

  She didn't immediately add anything, but the lines around her mouth hardened.

  "Him," she repeated.

  She could either be thinking about the man or gaining time to go off on some tangent. Coy stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and looked around. The office was small and brightly lit, with a discreet sign: SECTION IV. T. SOTO. RESEARCH AND ACQUISITIONS. There was an antique print of a seascape on the wall and a large corkboard on an easel covered with prints, plans, and nautical charts. There was also a large glass case filled with books and files, document folders on her worktable, and a computer whose screen was circled with little notes written in a round, good-little-schoolgirl hand that Coy easily identified—he had her card in his pocket—by the large circles dotting the "i"s.

  "He hasn't bothered me again," she said finally, as if she'd needed time to remember.

  "He didn't seem happy about losing the Urrutia."

  Her eyes narrowed, her mouth still hard.

  "He'll find another."

  Coy looked at the line of her throat descending toward the bone-colored shirt. Open at the neck. The silver chain still gleamed there, and he wondered what hung on that chain. If it was metal, he thought, it would be devilishly warm.

  "I still don't know," he said, "if the atlas was for the museum or for you. The feet is that that auction was..."

  He stopped short as he caught sight of the Urrutia. It was with other large-format books in the glass case. He easily recognized its leather cover and gold tooling.

  "It was for the museum," she replied, and after a second added, "Naturally."

  She followed Coy's eyes to the atlas. The light from the window outlined the contours of her freckled profile.

  "And that's what you do? Acquire things?"

  She bent forward slightly, her hair swinging. She was wearing a gray wool jacket, unbuttoned, a full dark skirt and flat-heeled black shoes, with black stockings that made her seem taller and more slender than she was. A well-bred girl, he mused, appreciating her in the natural light. Strong hands and a well-bred voice. Wholesome, proper, calm. At least in outward appearance, he thought, scanning those telltale fingernails.

  "Yes, in a way that is my job," she agreed. "Check auction catalogues, oversee purchases of antiques, visit other museums, and travel when something interesting shows up. Then I make a report, and my superiors decide. The board provides limited funds for research and new acquisitions, and I try to see that the money is invested in the most appropriate way."

  Coy grimaced. He remembered the hard-nosed duel in the Claymore auction gallery.

  "Well, your friend the Dalmatian got his shot off before he went down. The Urrutia cost you an arm and a leg."

  She sighed, sounding both fatalistic and amused, then nodded, turning up her palms to indicate she had blown her last penny. As she gestured, Coy again noted the unexpectedly masculine stainless-steel watch on her right wrist. Nothing more, no rings, no bracelets. She wasn't even wearing the small gold earrings he'd seen three days before in Barcelona.

  "It did cost us. We
don't usually spend that much___ Especially

  since we already have a lot of eighteenth-century cartography in this museum."

  "It's that important?"

  Again she leaned forward from the edge of the table, and for a brief instant stayed like that, head down, before looking up with a different expression on her face. Once more the light played up the gold of her freckles, and it crossed Coy's mind that if he took just one step forward he might, perhaps, decipher the aroma of that enigmatic, speckled geography.

  "It was printed in 1751 by the geographer and mariner Ignacio Urrutia Salcedo," she was explaining, "after five years of toil. It was the best aid for navigators until the appearance of Tofino's much more precise Atlas Hidrogrdfico in 1789. There are very few copies in good condition, and the Museo Naval didn't have one."

  She opened the glass door of the case, took out the heavy volume, and opened it on the table. Coy moved closer. They studied it together, and at last he confirmed what he had thought from the moment he met her. Not a trace of cologne or perfume. Only the scent of clean, warm skin.