The Nautical Chart (3 page)

"Thank you," said a woman's voice from behind him.

DESPITE
appearances, Coy was not a pessimist. For that it's essential to have lost all faith in the human condition, and he had been born without any to lose. He simply viewed life on land as an unreliable, lamentable, and unavoidable spectacle, and his one desire was to stay as far away as necessary to keep the damage to a minimum. Despite everything, he still had a certain innocence in those days, a partial innocence related to things and areas outside his calling. Four months in dry dock had not been enough to wear away a candor more suited to the world of the sea, the absorbed, slightly absent distancing sailors often maintain when dealing with people who feel solid ground beneath their feet. At that time he still looked at some things from afar, or from outside, with a naive capacity for surprise not unlike what he had felt as a boy when he was taken to press his nose against the toy-shop windows on Christmas Eve. But now there was also the certainty—as much a relief as it was disillusion—that none of those exciting marvels was destined for him. In his case, knowing he was outside that perimeter, and that his name was not on the list of good boys to receive presents, was calming. It was good not to expect anything from anyone, for his seabag to be light enough that he could sling it over his shoulder and walk to the nearest port, without regret for what he was leaving behind. Welcome aboard. For thousands of years, even before Homer's hollow ships set sail for Troy, there were men with wrinkles around their mouths and rainy November hearts, men whose nature leads them sooner or later to look with interest into the black hole of a pistol barrel, men for whom the sea was a solution and who always sensed when it was time to make an exit. Even before he knew it, Coy was one of them, by vocation and by instinct. Once, in a cantina in Veracruz, a woman —it was always women who phrased this kind of question—had asked him why he was a sailor and not a lawyer or a dentist. He could only shrug his shoulders, and after a long pause, when she was no longer expecting an answer, he said, "The sea is clean." And it was true. At sea the air was fresh, wounds healed more quickly, and the silence became so intense that it made unanswerable questions bearable and justified silence itself. On a different occasion, in the Sunderland restaurant in Rosario, Argentina, Coy had met the sole survivor of a shipwreck, one of nineteen men. Three o'clock in the morning, anchored in mid-river, a leak, all men asleep, and the ship on the bottom in five minutes. What most impressed Coy about the survivor was how quiet he was. Someone asked him how that was possible—eighteen men going down with their ship, without any warning. The man had looked at him, silent and uncomfortable, as if it was all so obvious it wasn't worth the trouble to explain, and then raised his glass of beer and drank. City sidewalks filled with people and brightly lit shop windows made Coy uneasy. He felt clumsy and out of place, like a fish out of water, or like that sailor in Rosario, who was almost as silent as the eighteen men who had been lost. The world was a very complex structure that could bear contemplation only from the sea, and terra firma took on soothing proportions only at night, while on watch, when the helmsman was a mute shadow and you could feel the soft throbbing of the engines issuing from the belly of the ship. When cities were reduced to tiny lines of lights in the distance, and land was the shimmering radiance of a lighthouse glimpsed on the swell. Flashes that alerted you, repeating again and again: careful, attention, keep your distance, danger.
Danger.

He didn't see any warning flashes in the woman's eyes as he returned to her with a drink in each hand in the crowded Boadas bar. That was his third error of the night. There are no handbooks on lighthouses and perils and signals for navigating on land. No prescribed routes, no updated charts, no outlines of shoals measured in feet or fathoms, no markers at such and such a cape, no red, green, or yellow buoys, no conventions for boarding, no clear horizons for calculating latitude. On land you have to navigate by blind reckoning, and you are aware of reefs only when you hear their roar a cable's length from the bow, when you see darkness grow light in the froth of the sea breaking on a reef just below the surface. Or when you hear the unexpected rock—all sailors know there's one waiting for them somewhere—scraping the hull with a murderous screech that makes the bulkheads shudder, in that terrible moment when any man at the helm of a ship would rather be dead.

"You were quick," she said.

"I'm always quick in a bar."

She watched him with curiosity, amused, as he cleared a path through the people clustered around the bar with the decisiveness of a small, compact tugboat. He had ordered a Bombay Sapphire gin and tonic for himself and a dry martini for her, carrying them back with a skillful, pendular motion of his hands, without spilling a drop—a feat that deserved no little credit in the Boadas at that hour.

She looked at him through her glass, blue eyes very dark behind the crystal and the clean transparency of the martini.

"And what do you do in life, besides move well through bars, go to maritime auctions, and help defenseless women?"

"I'm a sailor."

'Ah."

'A sailor without a ship." 'Ah."

A half hour earlier, after the man with the gray ponytail climbed into the Audi, she had said "Thank you," and he had turned to look at her closely for the first time. Standing mere on the sidewalk, he reasoned that the easy part was behind him, that now it wasn't his move, but that of the woman whose thoughtful and vaguely surprised gaze was checking him over from head to toe, as if she were trying to catalogue him with one of the species of man she knew. There was nothing for him to do but try a modest, restrained smile, the same smile you give the captain when you sign on to a new ship, at that initial moment when words mean nothing and both parties know there will be time to sort things out. But for Coy the problem was precisely that he had no guarantee they would have the necessary time, that there was nothing to keep her from thanking him once more and marching off in the most natural way, disappearing forever. He bore the ten long seconds of scrutiny silently and motionlessly. LUF: Law of the Unzipped Fly. I hope to God it's zipped, he thought. He watched as she tilted her head to one side, just enough so the left side of her smooth blond hair, cut asymmetrically with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel, brushed her freckled cheek. After that, no smile, no words, she just walked slowly along the sidewalk, up the street, hands in the pockets of her suede jacket.

She was carrying a large leather shoulder bag that she tucked close to her side with her elbow. Her nose was not as pretty seen in profile. It was a little irregular, as if it had once been broken. That didn't diminish her attractiveness, Coy decided, it gave her a touch of unexpected toughness. She walked with her eyes to the ground and focused a little to the left, as if offering him the opportunity to occupy that space. Together they walked in silence, a certain distance apart, without exchanging glances or explanations or commentary, until she stopped at the corner, and Coy understood that this was the moment either for good-byes or for words. She held out a hand and he took it in his large, clumsy one, feeling a firm, bony grasp that belied the juvenile freckles and was more in line with the calm expression of her eyes, which he had finally decided were navy blue.

And then Coy spoke. He spoke with the spontaneous shyness that was his usual way with people he didn't know, bunching his shoulders with a simplicity and accompanying his words with a smile that, although he didn't know it, lighted his face and took the edge off his roughness. He spoke, touched his nose, and spoke again, with no idea whether someone was waiting for her somewhere, or whether she was from this city or from out of town. He said what he thought he had to say and then stood there, moving nervously and holding his breath, like a child who had just recited a lesson and was waiting, without much hope, for the teachers verdict. She looked him over for another ten seconds, and again tilted her head so that her hair brushed her cheek. And then she said yes, why not, she too felt like having a drink. They walked toward the Plaza de Cataluna, and then toward the Ramblas and calle Tallers. When he held the door of the Boadas for her he caught her aroma for the first time, vague and subtle, a scent that came not from cologne or perfume but from skin dotted in tones of gold, skin he imagined to be smooth and warm, with the texture of a peach. As they headed for the bar against the wall he noticed that all the men and women in the place looked first at her and then at him, and he wondered at how men and women always look first at a beautiful woman and then shift their gaze toward her companion in an inquiring way, to see who that fellow might be. As if to decide whether he deserves her, whether he's up to the test.

"
AND
what does a sailor without a ship do in Barcelona?"

She was sitting on a tall bar stool with her bag across her knees, her back against the wood bar that ran the length of the wall beneath framed photographs and bar souvenirs. She wore two small gold balls in her ears, and not a single ring on her fingers. Almost no make-up. At the open neck of her white shirt, which revealed hundreds of freckles, Coy caught the gleam of a silver chain.

"Wait," he said. Then he took a sip of gin and noticed that she was studying his old jacket, that she may have hesitated at the darker lines on his cuffs, where the missing stripes had been. "Wait for better times."

'A sailor ought to sail."

"Not everyone agrees."

"Did you do something bad?"

He nodded, with a sad half-smile. She opened her bag and took out a pack of English cigarettes. Her fingernails were short and wide, not carefully filed. She must have bitten her nails at one time, he was sure. Maybe she still did. One cigarette was left in the box, and she lit it with a match from a pack that bore the logo of a Belgian shipping line he was familiar with, Zee land. She protected the flame in the hollow of her hands in an almost masculine manner.

"Was it your fault?"

"Legally, yes. It happened on my watch." "You ran afoul of another ship?" "I touched bottom. A rock that wasn't on the charts." It was true. A sailor never said "I hit a rock," or "I ran aground." The common verb was "touched." I touched bottom, I touched the

dock. If you cut another ship in half and sank it in the midst of the Baltic fog, you said, "We touched a ship." At any rate, he noted that she had used the marine term "ran afoul," instead of "accident" or "collision." The cigarette pack was tying open on the bar and Coy looked at it—the head of a sailor framed by a life belt, and two ships. It had been a long time since he'd seen a pack of unfiltered Players, cigarettes he'd seen his whole lifetime. They weren't easy to find, and he hadn't known they were still producing them in the white cardboard box. It was funny that she was smoking that brand. The auction of naval memorabilia, the Urrutia, he himself. LAC: Law of Amazing Coincidences. "Do you know the story?"

He pointed to the box. She looked at it and then looked up.

"What story?"

"The one about Hero."

"Who's Hero?"

He told her. He told her about the name on the ribbon of the cap worn by the sailor with the blond beard, about his youthful years on the sailing ship that appeared on one side of the picture, and about the other ship, the ironclad that was his last berth. About how the elder Player and his sons had bought his portrait to put on their cigarette boxes. Then he sat while she smoked— the cigarette had been burning down between her fingers—and looked at it.

"That's a good story," she said after a while.

"It isn't mine. Domino Vitale tells that story to James Bond in
Thunderball.
I sailed on a tanker that had all of Ian Fleming's novels."

He also remembered that the ship, the
Palestine,
had spent a month and a half blockaded in Ras Tanura, in the midst of an international crisis, with the planks of the deck burning beneath a vicious sun and the crew flat in their bunks, suffocated by heat and boredom. The
Palestine
was a bad luck ship, one of those where the men turn hostile and hate each other and lines get tangled. The chief engineer grumbled deliriously in a corner—they'd hidden the key to the bar but on the sly he was drinking methyl alcohol from the infirmary mixed with orange soda—and the first officer wouldn't speak to the captain, not even if the ship was about to run aground. Coy had had more than enough time to read those novels, and many more, on his floating prison during those interminable days when the scorching air that filtered in through the portholes made him gasp like a fish out of water, and every time he got out of his bunk he left the sweat-imprinted silhouette of his naked body on the dirty, wrinkled sheet. A Greek tanker three miles away had been hit by a bomb from an airplane, and for two days he could see the column of black smoke rising straight to the sky, and the glow that stained the horizon red and outlined the dark, vulnerable silhouettes of the anchored ships at night. During that time, he often woke up terrified, dreaming he was swimming in a sea of flames.

"Do you read much?"

"Some." Coy touched his nose. "I read some. But always about the sea."

"There are other interesting books."

"Could be. But those are the only ones that interest me."

The woman stared at him, and he shrugged his shoulders and rocked back and forth on his feet. They hadn't said a word about the guy with the gray ponytail, he realized, or about what she was doing there. He didn't even know her name.

THREE
days later, Coy was lying in bed in his rented room in La Maritima, staring at a mildew stain on the ceiling while he listened to "Kind of Blue" on his Walkman. After "So What," in which the bass had been sliding sweetly, the trumpet of Miles Davis came in with his historic two-note solo—the second an octave lower than the first—and Coy, suspended in that empty space, was waiting for the liberating release, the unique percussion beat, the reverberation of the cymbal and the drumrolls smoothing the slow, inevitable, amazing path for the trumpet.