The Nautical Chart (53 page)

They were lucky, Tanger declared that first night as they rode at anchor above the wreck. The three of them were grouped around Urrutia's chart and the plans of the
Dei Gloria
in the feint light of the cabin lantern, celebrating the find with a bottle of white Pescador that El Piloto had on board. They were lucky for many reasons, but the main one was that the brigantine went down bow first. That gave them better access to the captain's cabin, which was where valuable objects were usually stored for safekeeping. It was likely that the emeralds, if they were still on board at the time of the sinking, were either there or in the adjacent orlop reserved for passengers. The feet that the stern was not completely buried made their task much easier, because searching beneath the sand would have required suction hoses and more complex equipment. As for her state of preservation—optimum after so much time at the bottom of the sea—that was owing to the rocky ridge she lay behind, with natural channels and rocks protecting her from the action of the waves, marine sediment, and fishermen's nets. The gentle current of cold water flowing from Cabo de Palos had also lessened the work of teredos, those marine mollusks that devour wood and find their most favorable conditions in warm waters. For all these reasons, the work that lay ahead would be exhausting, but not impossible. Unlike archaeologists conducting research on a sunken ship, they did not have to preserve anything; they could destroy anything in the way of their objective. They did not have the technical means or the time to move with care. So the next day, acting in compliance with Tanger s work on the plans spread out on the bulkheads and chart table, Coy and El Piloto spent one whole day in successive dives, laying a white halyard from bow to stern of the sunken vessel, following the apparent center line. Then, moving cautiously through shattered wood and limy growths that could cut like knives, they laid out shorter pieces of lead-weighted halyard in seven-by— seven feet squares, perpendicular to both sides of the longitudinal line. That divided the wreckage into segments corresponding to those Tanger had drawn with pencil and ruler on the plans of the brigantine, establishing rudimentary points of identification between reality and paper, locating the site of each part of the hull according to the 1:55 scale on the plans provided by Lucio Gamboa. The day that the barometer began to fall and the weather dispatches drove them to take shelter in Cartagena, they had already succeeded in calculating the position of the after part of the orlop, steerage, and the captain's cabin located beneath the poop. But what condition would they find Captain Elezcano s cabin in? Would the internal structure have withstood the pressure of sediment on rotting wood? And would it be possible to move around once they had discovered how to get inside, or would everything be so flattened and mixed up that they would have to begin at the top, breaking and clearing away debris until they came to the hundred thirty square feet next to the escutcheon at the stern which made up the captain's living space?

The rain was still trickling down the windowpanes and Charlie Parker was fading from the landscape, cloaked on the road to eternal dreamland by the trumpet of Dizzy Gillespie. It was Tanger who had given Coy that recording, which she'd bought in a record shop on cafle Mayor. They had been sitting by the door of the Gran Bar with El Piloto, after walking through the rain to the city's Museo Naval. Along the way they had gathered provisions in marine supply shops, supermarkets, hardware stores, and pharmacies. Tanger had withdrawn the money from an ATM—after two attempts that had failed for lack of available funds. I'm diving with my reserve tank too, she said sarcastically as she put the wallet into the back pocket of her jeans. They had been able to buy everything they needed, from hardware to chemicals, and the purchases were in bags beneath their chairs. The bar's canvas awning protected them from the warm drizzle, which had slicked the street, putting a melancholy face on the empty balconies of modernist buildings whose ground floors, which Coy remembered alight with cafes, had been turned into lugubrious banking offices. And there they were, the three of them, drinking aperitifs and watching raincoats and wet umbrellas pass by, when Tanger laid the local newspaper on the table—it was open to the page on ship arrivals and departures, Coy observed—got up and walked to a record shop opposite the Escarabajal bookstore. She came back carrying a package, which she put in front of Coy without saying anything. Inside were two double CDs with the master cuts of eighty pieces Charlie Parker had recorded for the Dial and Savoy labels between 1944 and 1948. Given the circumstances, he truly appreciated the gesture. This Parker was really a gem.

That same day Coy thought he saw Horacio Kiskoros. They were on their way back to the
Carpanta,
laden with their purchases. When they came to the walls of the old Navidad fort, next to the ship graveyard, Coy had turned and looked around. He did that often, instinctively, whenever he was ashore. Although Tanger seemed indifferent to Nino Palermo's threats, Coy still had them in mind; he hadn't forgotten the last encounter with the Argentine on the beach at Aguilas. He was following Tanger and El Piloto toward the mole where the
Carpanta
was tied up when he saw Kiskoros at the foot of the old tower. Or thought he saw him. That was a path often followed by fishermen on their way to the breakwater, but the silhouette, black against the gray light, between the tower and the dismantled bridge of the
Korzeniowski,
did not look like any fisherman. He was small and dapper, with some resemblance to a full-page ad for Barbour. In green. "There's Kiskoros," he said.

Tanger stopped, surprised. She and El Piloto turned to look where he was pointing, but there was no one there. Anyway, Coy thought, LWLHMBM: Law of White, Liquid, and Homogenized, Must Be Milk. So Barbour, dwarfish and
there,
could only be Kiskoros. Besides, when bad guys hang around, sooner or later you're going to get a glimpse of them. He set the packages on the ground. It wasn't raining, but gusts of the warm southwest wind that had come whistling down the slopes of San Julian were rippling the puddles as his feet splashed toward the tower. There was no one there when he reached it, but he was sure he'd seen the hero of the Malvinas, and the abrupt disappearance reaffirmed his conviction. He looked around among the piles of blowtorched metal plate, the twisted iron staining the sand red, and stood still to listen. Nothing. There was a hollow clang of metal as he climbed the ladder of the scrapped bridge of the packet, staining his hands with rust. Runoff from the rain dripped from its roof, soaking the rotted wood of the deck; some boards yielded to his weight, so he tried to be careful where he stepped. He went down the other side and over to the split-open belly of the bulk carrier, its interior bulkheads filthy with caked black grease. This was a labyrinth of old iron, with junk piled everywhere. He skirted the base of a crane and went onto the ship by way of a listing passageway where water puddled against the hatchway coamings. His heightened senses absorbed the oppressive sadness of all that desolation, which was only intensified by the dirty light filtering in. On the far side of a stripped and empty cabin with all its cables pulled out and piled in a corner, he peered into the dark cavity of a hold. He dropped a piece of scrap and from the depths the sinister echo bounced back and forth between unseen metal plates. Impossible to go down there without a flashlight. Then he heard a noise behind him, at the end of the passageway, and he retraced his steps with his heart jumping in his chest. It was El Piloto, frowning and tense, with a foot-long iron bar in his hand. Coy cursed silently, caught between disappointment and relief. Tanger was waiting behind him, leaning against a bulkhead, hands in her jeans pockets, a somber expression on her face. As for Kiskoros, if in fact it had been he, he had disappeared.

COY
took off the headphones as the distant clock on the city hall struck seven. Its dong-dong-dong seemed to sound the last notes. Sipping lemonade, he continued to watch Tanger, asleep on the mussed bed. Gray light cast faint shadows on the sheet partially covering her. She was sleeping on her side, with one hand out from her body and the other between her pulled-up knees, her back to the uncertain light of dawn. The sweep of her naked hips was a slope of light and shadow on freckled skin, dimpled flesh, chasms, and curves. Motionless in the rocking chair, Coy studied the hidden face, hair falling onto wrinkled sheets that denned the shape of shoulders and back, the waist, the expanse of hips and inner line of thighs seen from behind, the beautiful V of flexed legs, and the soles of her feet. And especially that sleeping hand whose fingers lay between her thighs, very close to the intimation of pubic hair, golden and shadowed with darker tones.

Coy stood up and walked closer to the bed, to fix the image in his memory forever. The dresser mirror on the opposite wall reflected Tanger's other hand, resting on the pillow, the tip of a knee, and Coy himself integrated into the picture, a portion of his body reflected in the quicksilver of the mirror—one arm and one hand, the line of a naked hip, the physical certainty that the image belonged to him and no other, and that it was more than a play of mirrors in his memory He regretted that he didn't have a camera to record the details. So he made an effort to engrave on his retina the half-waking, half-sleeping mystery that so obsessed him, the intuition of a mutable, all too brief moment that might perhaps explain everything. There was a secret, and the secret was in plain view, barely disguised in the obvious. It was another matter to isolate and understand it, though, and he knew he would never have enough time, and that in an instant drunken and capricious gods, unaware of their ability to create as they slept, would yawn and awake and everything would dissipate as if it had never existed. Possibly, he thought with desolation, that fleeting moment would never be repeated with such clarity, that flash of lucidity capable of placing things in their proper perspective, of balancing void, horror, and beauty. Of reconciling the man reflected in the mirror with the word "life." But Tanger began to stir, and Coy, who knew that he was on the verge of grasping the key to the enigma, felt that one-tenth of a second too late or too soon would distort the connection between scene and observer, like the fuzzy focus of an image impossible to decipher. And in the mirror, beyond the foreshortening of his own body and that of the woman lying on the bed, ships in the rain were once again reflections of black ships on a millenary sea.

Tanger awoke, and with her all the women in the world. She woke warm and lazy, her hair stuck to her face and her lips parted. The sheet slipped from her shoulders and back, uncovering the extended arm, the line of armpit to dorsal muscles, and the firm indication of a breast compressed beneath the weight of her body. The back tanned by the sun, lighter below the line of her swimsuit, appeared full length and, as Coy watched, the small of that back arched and Tanger emerged from sleep like a beautiful, tranquil animal, eyes squinting against the square of gray light in the window, discovering Coy's proximity with a smile first of surprise, then warmth. Suddenly, however, the eyes were serious and grave, aware of her nakedness and the scrutiny of which she was the object. Finally the challenge—turning, slowly and deliberately, onto her back before his eyes. Now her body was entirely free of the sheet, one leg stretched out and the other bent, one hand near her sex without hiding it, the other limp on the sheet, the lines of her stomach converging toward the inner face of her thighs like signals of no return. Motionless. And always the unwavering stare, the eyes fixed on the man observing her. After a few moments, she slid over to one side of the bed and rose to her knees before the mirror, showing him her naked back and hips. With her lips almost touching the glass, she breathed on it until it clouded over, and, without taking her eyes from the image of Coy, she left the print of her lips in the mist obscuring their reflection. Then she got out of bed, slipped into a T-shirt, and sat at the other side of the table, near the platter of fruit. She peeled an orange and began to eat it without separating the sections, biting into it, juice dripping from her lips and chin and hands. Coy sat down across from her. Tanger looked at him the same way she had when she was lying on the bed, but now with a smile. She held up her wrists and licked the juice trickling down to her elbows, and the shredded membrane and pulp in her fingers disappeared into her mouth. Coy shook his head as if he were refuting something. He sighed as if all his sadness and resignation were escaping in a moan. Very deliberately, he went around the table, took her hands, and just as she was, sitting there in a T-shirt barely covering her torso and with the taste of orange on her lips, he went in search of the road to Ithaca that lay on the other shore of the sea ancient and gray as memory.

THEY
returned to the
Dei Gloria
as soon as the storm had passed, after the last clouds fled with dawn, streaking the horizon with red. Once again the sea was intensely blue and the sun blazed on the white houses along the coast, leading a gentle breeze by the hand. It was a shift for the better according to El Piloto. That same day, with vertical rays casting his shadow on the surface, Coy dived again, descending from a marker buoy—one of the
Carpanta's
side fenders—attached to an anchored one-hundred-foot line that had a knot every ten feet. He touched bottom a short distance off the port beam of the sunken vessel, more or less at the waist, and swam along the hull to check whether the grid they had laid before the storm was still in place. Then he consulted the chart he'd brought down—wax pencil on a plastic tablet—calculated distances with the help of a tape measure, and began to clear away debris on the companion, crusted with marine growth. Using an iron crowbar and a pick, he tore away rotted planking, which collapsed in a blinding cloud. He worked slowly, trying not to do anything that would increase his air intake. Occasionally he moved back a little to rest and let the sediment settle enough for him to see. He succeeded in breaking through the companion, and when the water cleared he looked inside as he'd done the day before when he peered into the hold of the bulk carrier. This time he cautiously thrust in the arm holding the light and illuminated the chaotic innards of the brigantine, where fish disoriented by the brightness darted about madly, seeking ways to escape. The light returned the natural colors to everything, annulling the monotonous green of deep water. There were sea anemones, starfish, red and white coral formations, multicolor seaweed swaying gently, and the glittering scales of fish slicing through the beam like silver knives. Coy saw a wooden stool that seemed to be well preserved. It had fallen against a bulkhead and was covered with some green growth, but he could distinguish the carved spiral legs. Straight down from the opening he'd made was something that looked like a crusted spoon, and beside it was the lower part of an oil lamp, the brass clotted with tiny snails and half buried in a small mound of sand that had filtered through the rotted deck. Shooting the beam in a half-circle, Coy saw the remains of what looked like a collapsed cabinet in one corner, and in a heap of broken planks he could identify coils of cordage covered with brown fuzz, and objects of metal and clay—tankards, jugs, a few plates and bottles, all of it covered with a very fine layer of sediment. In other aspects, however, the panorama was not very encouraging. The beams that supported the deck had collapsed in many places, and half the cabin was a jumble of wood and sand that had sifted in through the broken frame. The beam of light revealed openings large enough to enable him to move around cautiously inside, as long as the frames and beams that supported the structure of the hull did not give way. It would be more prudent, he decided, to tear away as much of the planking of the poop as possible, and work from the outside, in the open, pulling away the timberwork with the help of air flotation devices that would reduce the effort involved. That would be slower, but it was preferable to having him or El Piloto trapped in the wreckage at the first careless move.