The Nautical Chart (5 page)

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."

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.