The Nautical Chart

  He had taken the wineskin from the binnacle and drank head tilted back, eyes to the sky. Coy knew what he was thinking. With a wreck no deeper than that, fishermen would have snagged their nets on it. Someone would know about it. And by now someone would have taken a look, out of curiosity. Any amateur diver could do it.

  "Yes. I'm wondering why some fisherman hasn't said anything about a wreck out here. They tend to know the bottom better than the hallway in their homes."

  Tanger showed them the chart: S, M, R. The small letters dotted the area beside the numbers that gave the depths.

  "It says rocks too, see? That might be protecting the wreck."

  "Protect it from fishermen, maybe," Coy offered. "But a wooden ship sunk among rocks doesn't last long. In shallow seas the waves and currents destroy the hull. There won't be anything left like your illustration in Red Rackham's Treasure."

  "Maybe," she said.

  She was staring at the sea with a stubborn expression. El Piloto's eyes met Coy's. Suddenly, once again, the whole thing seemed crazy. We're not going to find anything, the sailor's expression said as he handed the wineskin to Coy. I'm here because I'm your friend, and besides, you're paying me, or she is, which is the same thing in the end. But this woman has your needle spinning. And the real kicker is that you haven't even got her in bed.

  THEY were in Cartagena. They had sailed close to the coast, beneath the escarpment of Cabo Tinoso, and now the Carpanta was entering the inlet of a port used by Greeks and Phoenicians. Quart-Hadasht: the Carthago Nova of the feats of Hannibal.

  Comfortable in a teak chair at the sailboat s stern, Coy was observing Escombreras island. There, below the defile in the south face, he had dived as a boy for Roman amphoras, wine and oil vessels with elegant necks, long curving handles, and the marks of their makers in Latin, some sealed just as they had sunk into the sea. Twenty years before, that zone had been an enormous field of debris from shipwrecks, and also, it was said, from navigators who threw offerings into the sea within view of the temple dedicated to Mercury. Coy had dived there many times, and come up, never faster than his own bubbles, toward the dark silhouette of the Carpanta waiting on the glossy surface, her anchor line curving downward into the depths. Once, the first time he went to two hundred feet—two hundred three, the depth gauge on his wrist recorded—Coy had gone down slowly, with pauses to adapt to the change in pressure on his eardrums, letting himself fall deeper into that sphere where colors were disappearing, shading into a ghostly, diffuse light where only tones of green remained. He had eventually lost sight of the surface and then fallen slowly onto his knees on the clean sand bottom, with the cold of the deep rising up his thighs and groin beneath his neoprene suit. Seven point two atmospheres, he thought, amazed at his own audacity. But he was eighteen. All around him, to the edge of the green circle of visibility, scattered every which way on the smooth sand, half buried in it or grouped in small mounds, he saw dozens of broken and intact amphoras, necks, and pointed bases—millenary clay that no one had touched or seen for twenty centuries. Dark fish flashed among narrow amphora mouths in which evil-looking morays had taken up residence. Intoxicated by the feel of the sea on his skin, fascinated by the darkness and the vast field of vessels motionless as sleeping dolphins, Coy had pulled the mask from his face, keeping the air hose between his teeth, to feel on his face all the shadowy grandeur surrounding him. Then, suddenly alarmed, he put the mask back on, clearing it of water with air expelled through his nose. At that moment, El Piloto, made taller by his rubber fins, turned into another dark green silhouette descending at the end of a long plume of bubbles, had swum toward him, moving at the slow pace of men in the depths, signaling with a harsh gesture to the depth gauge on his wrist, and then touching his temple with a finger to ask, silently, whether Coy had lost his mind. They ascended together very slowly, following the jellyfish of air that preceded them, each carrying an amphora. And when they were almost at the surface, and the sun's rays began to filter through the smooth turquoise above their heads, Coy had turned his amphora upside down and a shower of fine sand, shining in the watery light, spilled from inside and enveloped him in a cloud of gold dust.

  He loved the sea that was as old and skeptical and wise as the endless women in the genetic memory of Tanger Soto. Its shores bore the imprint of the centuries, he thought, contemplating the city Virgil and Cervantes had written about, clustered at the back of the natural port among high stocky walls that for three thousand years had made it nearly impregnable against the assault of enemies and winds. Despite the decay of its crumbling, filthy facades and the empty lots where houses had tumbled down and not been rebuilt that at times gave it the curious aspect of a city at war, the city looked beautiful from the sea, and its narrow alleyways were resonant with the echoes of men who had fought like Trojans, thought like Greeks, and died like Romans. Now he could make out the ancient castle on a hillock above the wall, on the other side of the breakwater that protected the inlet and entrance to the arsenal. The old abandoned forts of Santa Ana and Navidad passed by slowly to starboard and port of the Carpanta, still with empty gun embrasures that continued to stare toward the sea like blinded eyes.

  Here I was born, thought Coy. And from this port I first dipped into books and oceans. Here I was tormented by the challenge of faraway things and the before-the-fact nostalgia for all that I didn't know. Here I dreamed of rowing toward a whale with a knife between my teeth and the harpooner poised in the bow. Here I sensed, before I could speak English, the existence of what the Mariners' Weather Log calls the ESW: Extreme Storm Wave. I learned that every man, whether he encounters it or not, has an ESW waiting somewhere. Here I saw the gravestones of dead sailors on empty tombs and realized that the world is a ship on a one-way voyage. Here I discovered, before I needed it, the substitute for Cato's sword, for Socrates's hemlock: the pistol and the bullet.

  As the Carpanta motored into port, Coy watched Tanger, sitting ramrod straight beside the anchor, with one hand holding onto the Genoa rolled on its stay, and smiled at himself. In the cockpit, El Piloto was steering manually through waters he could have sailed blind. A gray Navy corvette, making for the sea from the San Pedro dock, passed on the starboard side, its young sailors hanging over the rail to get a look at the motionless woman in the bow of the sailboat—a gilded figurehead. The offshore breeze carried the scent of the nearby hills. They were bare and dry, baked by the sun, with thyme, rosemary, palmetto, and prickly pear sprouting from dark crags, dry gullies spotted with fig trees, and orderly rows of almond trees in rock-walled terraces. Despite the cement and glass and steel and steam shovels, and the interminable succession of bastard lights blemishing its shores, the Mediterranean was still there, enduring amid the quiet murmur of memory. Oil and red wine, Islam and Talmud, crosses, pines, cypresses, tombs, churches, sunsets crimson as blood, white sails in the distance, rocks carved by man and time, that unique hour in the evening when everything was still and silent except for the song of the cicada, and nights in the light of a driftwood bonfire and a slow moon rising above the sea. Sardines on the spit and bay and olives, watermelon rinds washing back and forth in quiet waves at dusk, the sound of rolling pebbles in the dawn undertow, boats painted blue, white, or red beached on shores with ruined windmills and gray olive trees, and grapes yellowing in the arbors. And in the shadows, eyes lost in the intense blue stretching eastward, men staring at the sea, swarthy, bearded heroes who knew about shipwrecks in coves designated by cruel gods in the guise of mutilated statues sleeping, open-eyed, through the silence of centuries. "What's that?" asked Tanger.

  She had come to the stern and was pointing past the Navidad dock and the large twin concrete tunnels that formerly berthed submarines, to where the black El Espalmador beach was littered with the junk of boats cut up for scrap.

  "That's the Graveyard of Ships With No Name."

  El Piloto had turned toward Coy. He had a half smoked cigarette between his lips and was looking at him with eyes flooded wi
th memories, on the verge of some emotion that he refrained from showing. On the shore, beyond rusted hulls partly sunk among frames, bridges, decks, and funnels, lay ships gutted like great hapless whales, their metal ribs and naked bulkheads exposed, their steel plates cut and stacked on the beach at the foot of the cranes. That was where ships sentenced to death, stripped of name, registration, and flag, made their last voyage before ending up under the blowtorch. City planners had fingered that graveyard for extinction, but it was taking months to finish scrapping and clearing away the junk that lay scattered on the beach. Coy saw an ancient bulk carrier of which there remained only the stern, half sunk in the sea, and whose fore two-thirds had already disappeared in the chaos of metal on the beach. There were dismantled parts everywhere—a dozen large anchors dripping rust onto the dark sand, three funnels absurdly saved and lined up in a row, the traces of paint in the colours of their owners still visible, and a little farther away, by a watchtower, the nearly hundred-year-old superstructure of the Korzeniowski, a Russian or Polish packet that had been there as long as Coy could remember. It had a rusted iron deck, once white, rotted planks, and a nearly intact bridge, where as a boy he had dreamed of feeling the movement of a ship beneath his feet and seeing open water before his eyes.

  For many years that had been his favorite place, the site of ocean-going dreams as he walked along the breakwater with a fishing pole or harpoon and fins, or later when he was helping El Piloto scrape the hull of the Carpanta, tied up at El Espalmador in shallow water. There, in the endless dusks when the sun was starting to hide behind the inert skeletons of the junked ships, El Piloto and he had talked, with words or with silence, about their belief that ships and men should always end their days at sea, with dignity, and not as scrap ashore. And later, very far from there, on Deception Island, south of Cape Horn and the Drake Passage, Coy had experienced an identical state of mind when he stepped onto a sandy beach that was as black as this one, among thousands of bleaching whale bones as far as the eye could see. The sperm oil of those mammals had been burned in lamps long before Coy was born, but the bones were still there, like a mockery, in that strange Antarctic Sargasso. Among the remains was an ancient harpoon of rusted iron, and Coy found himself staring at it with repugnance. Deception Island was a good name for that place, after all. Whales cut up for scrap, ships cut up for scrap. Men cut up for scrap. The harpoon was embedded in one flesh, because the story was always the same.

  THEY tied up with other pleasure craft and walked along the quay, feeling, as one always does when first stepping onto land, that it was rocking slightly beneath their feet. At the commercial dock on the other side of the yacht club was a standard cargo ship, the Felix von Luckner, which belonged to Zeeland. Coy knew the ship because of his familiarity with the Cartagena-Antwerp route. Just seeing her evoked long hours of waiting in the rain, wind, and yellow fight of winter, with the phantasmagorical silhouettes of the cranes rising from the flat land, the Escalda River, and the interrninable waiting to enter the locks. Even though he had known much more pleasant corners of the world, Coy couldn't help feeling a stab of nostalgia.

  The three of them went to the terrace of the Valencia bar, which was near the hundred-year-old tile featuring the verses Miguel de Cervantes had dedicated to the city in his Viaje del Parnaso. The tile was mounted at the foot of a wall constructed by Charles in when the Dei Gloria had been at the bottom of the sea only three years. There they drank big pitchers of cold beer, enjoying the view of the clock in the town hall, palm trees rustling in the freshening midday leheche, and the monument to sailors killed in Cuba and Cavite. Dozens of names were engraved on its marble plaques, along with the names of ships that like the sailors had been in the silence of the deep for a hundred years. Afterward, El Piloto went to see about the sounding equipment, and Tanger walked with Coy through the narrow, deserted streets of the old city, beneath balconies with pots of geraniums and sweet basil and past porches where occasionally a woman with her embroidery in her hands watched them with curiosity. Most of the balconies were closed and the sunporches stripped of curtains. There were whole houses with condemned windows and doors growing grimy with disuse. Coy searched vainly for a familiar, face, a familiar tune filtering through green shutters, a child playing on the corner or in the next plaza, where he might recognize someone or be recognized himself.

  "I was happy here," he said suddenly.

  They had stopped on a dark street before the rubble of a house wedged between two others that remained standing. Strips of wallpaper dangled from the walls. Rusty nails that once held picture frames, a shattered table leg, and frayed electric cords told the story. Coy's eyes took it all in, trying to recapture what he remembered— bookshelves, mahogany and walnut furniture, tiled hallways, rooms with oval skylights on the upper floors, yellowed photographs encircled by a whitish aura that intensified their ghostly air. The clock repair shop was gone from the ground floor, as were the coal merchants and the grocers at the end of the street, and even the tavern with the marble fountain in the center and ads for Anis del Mono and bullfight posters on the walls. Now there were only memories of the sharp tang of wine as he walked past the door and saw the backs of taciturn men at the counter, bent over glasses filled with red light, whiling away the hours. The boy in short pants who had walked down that same street with a siphon bottle in each hand, and pressed his nose, enchanted, to the lighted shop windows filled with toys for Christmas, had long ago been borne away by the sea. "Why did you leave?" Tanger asked.

  Her voice sounded extremely sweet. Coy kept staring at the walls of the ruined house. He nodded over his shoulder, in the direction of the port at the other side of the city.

  "There was a road there." He turned slowly. "I wanted to do what others only dream of."

  She bowed her head in a sign of understanding. She was studying him in the unique way she sometimes had, as if seeing him for the first time.

  "You went a long way," she whispered.

  She seemed to envy him as she said that. Coy shrugged, with a smile that held time and shipwrecks. A deliberate, self-conscious grimace.

  "There's something I read," he said, and then again looked at that shell of a house. 'A page I read upstairs in that house."

  He recited it, remembering without difficulty.

  "Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! Bury thyself in a life which... is more oblivious than death. Come hither! Put up thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!

  Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling."

  He shrugged again when he finished, and she kept looking at him the same way The navy-blue eyes were focused on his lips.

  "You were what you wanted to be," she said.

  Her voice was still a pensive whisper. Coy turned up the palms of his hands.

  "I was Jim Hawkins, then I was Ishmael, and for a while I even thought I was Lord Jim— Later I learned that I was never any of them. That relieved me in a certain way. Like being freed of some annoying friends. Or witnesses."

  He gave one last look at the bare walls. Dark shadows waved to him from upstairs—women in mourning talking in the waning light of late afternoon, an oil lamp before the figure of the Virgin, the soothing dick of bobbins making lace, a black leather trunk with silver initials, and the aroma of tobacco on a white mustache. Engravings of ships under full sail among the crisp pages of a book. I fled, he thought, to a place that no longer existed from a place that no longer exists today. Again he smiled, at emptiness.

  'As El Piloto is known to say, never dream with a hand on the wheel."

  Tanger had said nothing after hearing that, and said nothing now. She had taken out the pack bearing the likeness of Hero and slowly lit a cigarette, holding the box in her hands, as if that bit of
colored cardboard consoled her for her own ghosts.

  THEY ate michirones and fried eggs and potatoes in the Posada de Jamaica, on the far side of the old calle Canales tunnel. El Piloto joined them there, his hands stained with grease, and said that the sounding equipment was installed and was working well. There was a hum of conversation, tobacco smoke collecting in gray strata beneath the ceiling, and in the background, on the radio, Rodo Jurado was singing, "La Lola se va a los puertos." The old eating house had been refurbished, and instead of the oildoth table coverings Coy remembered from a lifetime ago, there was now new linen and cutlery, as well as tiles, decorations, and even paintings on the walls. The clientele was the same, especially at noon—people from the neighborhood, stonemasons, mechanics from a nearby repair shop, and retirees drawn by the family-style, reasonably priced meals. At any rate, as he told Tanger, serving her more Sangria, the name of the place alone made it worth coming.

  As El Piloto peeled a mandarin for dessert, they worked out the search plan. They would cast off early the next morning so they could begin to comb the zone by mid-morning. The initial search sector would be established between 1°20' and 1°22' W and 37°31.5' and 37°32.5'N. They would start on the outside of that one-mile-long, two-mile-wide rectangle, working from deepest to shallowest in decreasing soundings, beginning with one hundred sixty-five feet. As Coy pointed out, starting farther off the coast meant it would take longer, as they gradually came closer to land, for the Carpanta's movements to be noticed. At a speed of two or three knots, the Pathfinder would allow them to make detailed soundings of parallel tracks some one hundred sixty-five to two hundred feet in width. The area of exploration would be divided into seventy-four of those tracks, so that, counting the time lost in maneuvering, it would take an hour to run each one, and dghty to cover the complete area. That placed the hours of real work time at about a hundred or a hundred and twenty, and they would need ten or twelve days to cover the search area. If and as weather allowed.