The Nautical Chart

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Tanger's lips had tightened with concentration. She was staring at the eraser as if it were actually a ship sailing along the coast printed on the paper. Coy picked up a pencil and followed the drawing on the chart.

  "This coast has shoals and sandy beaches," he explained, "but most of all areas of craggy slopes with tall rocks. There are lots of references for visual charting. I imagine the navigator of the Dei Gloria could have done it easily. Maybe he did it during the night, if there was a moon and he could make out the coast_____ Although that's more difficult. In those days they didn't have the lighthouses we have now. A tower with a beacon at most. But I doubt there was anything there."

  I'm sure there wasn't, he said to himself, looking at the chart. I'm sure that on that night of the third and early morning of the fourth of February, 1767, there wasn't any light or other helpful reference, nothing except maybe the line of the coast standing out in the moonlight, off the port side. He could imagine the scene: full sail aloft, the ship running at her best speed, the wind whistling in the rigging and the deck of the brigantine heeling to starboard, the sound of the water close to the rail, and to windward, glints of moonbeams on a choppy sea. A reliable man at the wheel, and on deck a lookout, tense and alert, staring back into the darkness. Not a single light on board, and the captain standing on the poop, his worried face turned up toward the ghostly pyramid of sail, listening to the creaking and wondering whether the yards and rigging damaged by the storm would hold out. Silent, so that none of the men who are counting on him will sense his uneasiness, but mentally calculating distance, course, set, and drift, with the anguish of someone who knows that the wrong decision will carry the ship and her crew to disaster. He clearly does not know his exact position, and this increases his apprehension. Coy imagines him casting glances toward the black line of the coast two or three miles distant, close but out of reach, as dangerous in the dark as the enemy's guns behind him; his crew too was looking into the night, where, sometimes invisible, sometimes hazily glimpsed as a vague shadow slicing through the waves, the xebec corsair was giving chase. And again the captain glances toward the coast, at the night ahead and the sea at the stern, and then again overhead, alert to the creak of the rigging or groan of the topmasts that freezes the heart of the men bunched windward of the shrouds, black, silent silhouettes in the darkness. Men who, like the captain himself—all except one—will be dead at this time tomorrow. "How does it look?"

  Coy blinked, as if he had just returned from the deck of the brigantine. Tanger was observing him closely, awaiting a reply. It was obvious that she had gone over everything forward and backward, but she wanted to hear it from his mouth. He shrugged.

  "Our first problem is that the crew of the Dei Gloria set their position on this chart, not on a modern one. And we have to chart ours on modern ones, even though we use this one as a point of departure. What we need to do is calculate the differences between Urrutia's chart and contemporary ones. Measure the exact degrees, and all that. We already know that Cabo de Palos is a couple of minutes too far south on the Urrutia." He indicated the spot with the pencil. 'As you can see, this line of coast from Cabo de Agua was drawn as if it were nearly horizontal, when in fact it rises a little obliquely to the northeast. Look where La Hormiga bay is on the Urrutia, and where it is on the modern chart."

  He took the compass, measured the distance from Cape Palos to the nearest parallel, and then placed the compass on the vertical scale at the left of the chart to get the number in miles. Tanger followed his every move, her hand motionless on the table, very close to Coy's arm.

  "Let's calculate exactly...." Coy noted the figures in pencil on a page of the notebook. "You see? We convert Urrutia's 37°35'.

  Yes. 37°38' true latitude. In fact, 37°37' and thirty or forty seconds, which, expressed in figures on a modern nautical chart, where seconds are represented as decimal fractions added to the minutes, gives us 37°37.5'. Which makes a two-and-a-half-mile error here at the tip of Cabo de Palos. Maybe even a mile at Cabo Tinoso. That difference is essential when we're dealing with a wreck... With a sunken ship. That could place it near the coast, at sixty or seventy feet, where it would be easy to reach, or it could be too far, with soundings that keep going up past three hundred, five hundred feet, or more, making it impossible to dive, or even locate it." He paused, turning to her. Still bent over the chart, she was studying the numbers of the soundings marked on the chart. It was obvious that she knew all that very well. Maybe she needs someone to confirm it aloud, Coy thought. Maybe she wants someone to tell her that it's possible. The question remains: why me?

  "Do you think you could dive to one hundred sixty-five feet?" she asked.

  "I suppose so. I've gone a little deeper than two hundred, although the safe limit is one hundred thirty. But I was twenty

  years younger then___ The problem is that at that depth you have very little time below, at least with normal compressed-air equipment. You don't dive?"

  "No. It terrifies me. And yet..."

  Coy continued to fit pieces together. Sailor. Diver. Knowledge of navigation under sail. It was dear, he told himself, that she didn't have him here because she was fascinated by his conversation. So don't get any ideas, kid. She's not interested in your pretty face. Supposing your face had ever been pretty.

  "How far down do you think you could go?" Tanger wanted to know.

  "You're going to let me go down alone, without watching what I do”

  "I have faith in you."

  "That's what bothers me. That you have too much faith in me."

  When he said that, she finally turned toward him. Damn, he thought. You would guess she spends her nights planning every gesture. His eyes were on the silver chain that disappeared into the neck of the white T-shirt, headed in the direction of suggestive curves molded beneath the open shirt. Not without effort, he repressed the impulse to pull out the chain and look at it.

  "Unless you use special equipment, the deepest a diver can go without problems is two hundred sixty feet," he explained. 'And that's very deep. Besides, if you're working you get tired and use up more air, and that complicates things. You have to use mixtures and detailed decompression tables."

  "It isn't very deep. At least that's what I believe."

  "You've already calculated it?"

  "Within a range of possibilities."

  "But you seem very sure."

  Coy smiled. Only half a smile, but she didn't seem to like it.

  "If I were very sure I wouldn't need you."

  He leaned back in his chair. The movement disturbed Zas, who got up and gave him a couple of affectionate licks on the arm.

  "In that case," he hazarded, "I may be able to go down. This matter of positions is always relative, though, even using modern charts and GPS. It isn't easy to locate a ship, or what remains of one. Much less a ship that sank two and a half centuries ago. It depends on the nature of the bottom and many other things. The wood will have rotted to hell, and the whole wreck may be covered with mud. And then there are the currents, poor visibility...."

  Tanger had picked up the cigarettes, but all she did was turn the box over and over. She contemplated Hero's picture.

  "Do you have much experience as a diver?"

  "I have some. I took a course at the naval diving center, and a couple of summers I worked cleaning ships' hulls with a wire brush, blind to anything farther away than my nose. During vacations, I also dived for Roman amphoras with Pedro el Piloto."

  'And who is Pedro el Piloto?"

  "The owner of the Carpanta. A friend."

  "That's prohibited now."

  "Having friends?"

  "Bringing up amphoras."

  She had set the cigarettes down and was watching Coy. He thought he saw a spark of interest in her eyes.

  "I knew that at the time," he admitted, "but the secrecy made it exciting. Besides, in a port where you're known, none of the guardias check your seabag when you come back from a dive. You say Hi, he s
ays Hi, you smile, and that's it. Those days, just off Cartagena, the coast was a huge field of archaeological artifacts. I was especially looking for necks of amphoras, which are very beautiful, and other vessels. I used a Ping-Pong paddle to fan away the sand that covered them. And I found dozens."

  "What did you do with them?"

  "Gave them to my girlfriends."

  That wasn't true, at least not completely. Once back on land, with the amphoras discreetly spirited past the police, El Piloto and Coy had sold them to tourists and antiquarians, splitting the proceeds. As for the girlfriends, Tanger didn't ask whether there had been a lot or a few. In truth, Coy remembered only one with special affection from those days. Her name was Eve, and she was North American, the daughter of a technician at the Escombreras refinery. A healthy, blonde, tan girl with very white teem and the shoulders of a windsurfer, with whom he spent a summer while he was still an apprentice. She laughed happily at the least thing, had beautiful hips, and was passive and tender when they made love in hidden coves tucked among steep black rocks, with the sea licking their legs and their skin coated with brine and sand. For a while, Coy carried the taste of her flesh and her sex on his fingers and lips. For a few years he had also kept a photograph of Eve by the sea, with bare breasts, wet hair, and her head tilted back drinking from a wineskin that left dribbles like blood between her small, insolent, girlish breasts. Like any good young gringa, her historical memory, only two or three centuries old, made it difficult for her to accept that the clay fragment Coy had given her from a wreck, the neck and handles of an elegant oil amphora from the first century, had for two thousand years lain at the bottom of the sea on whose shore they made love that summer.

  "You know those waters well, then," said Tanger.

  It wasn't a question but a reflection. She seemed satisfied, and he made a vague gesture toward the chart.

  "In some places I do. Especially between Cabo Tinoso and Cabo de Palos. I even dived on a couple of shipwrecks_____ But I

  never heard of the Dei Gloria."

  "No one has, for several reasons. First of all, there was some mystery on board, which was proved by the limited information

  they got from the ship's boy, along with his strange disappearance.

  As well as the position he gave the authorities__ "

  'Assuming it was authentic."

  "Let's assume that, since we don't have anything else." 'And if it isn't?"

  Tanger raised her eyebrows and lay back in her chair with a sigh.

  "Then you and I will have wasted our time."

  Suddenly she seemed exhausted, as if Coy's appraisal had made her consider the possibility of failure. She was leaning back, frowning at the chart for only a moment. Then she set a firm hand on the table, stuck out her chin, and said there were other reasons no one had searched for the ship. The position the ship's boy gave was in an area difficult to get to in 1767. Later, technical developments made that kind of dive easy, but the Dei Gloria was already buried in files and dust, and no one remembered her.

  "Until you came along," Coy pointed out.

  "That's right. It could have been anyone, but it was me. I found the document and I got to work on it. What else was I going to do?" With her fingertips, she stroked, almost affectionately, the Hero on her cigarette box. "It was one of those things you dream about when you're a girl. The sea, a treasure..."

  "You said there aren't any treasures to be found."

  "That's true. There aren't. At least in silver ingots, doubloons, or pieces of eight. But the enchantment is still there— I'm going to show you something."

  She seemed different, younger, as she got up and went to the bookshelf She moved with a vigor and decisiveness that set the tails of the open military shirt flying behind her. Her eyes were a deeper blue than ever and seemed to be smiling when she came back to the table carrying two of Tintin's adventure books in her hands: The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure.

  "The other day you told me you aren't a Tintin fan. Is that right?"

  Coy nodded in response to the strange question, and said, "Not at all, definitely not." His favorites had been Treasure Island, Jerry on the Island, and other books about the sea by Stevenson, Verne, Defoe, Marryat, and London, before he moved on lock, stock, and barrel to Moby-Dick. Conrad came later, quite naturally, with Heart of Darkness and with time.

  "Is it really true you read only books about the sea?"

  "Yes."

  "Honest?"

  "Honest. I've read all of them. Or nearly all of them." "Which is your favorite?"

  "I don't have a favorite. None is separate from the others. All books that involve the sea, from the Odyssey to the latest novel by Patrick O'Brian, are interconnected, like a library."

  "Like Borges's library..."

  She smiled and Coy shrugged, a simple gesture.

  "I don't know. I never read anything by Borges. But it is true that the sea is like a library."

  "Books describing things that happen on dry land are interesting too."

  "If you say so___ "

  At that, clutching the two books to her chest, she began to laugh. She seemed like a different woman, laughing openly, happily, and then she said, "Thundering typhoons!" She deepened her voice and spoke like a one-eyed, peg-leg pirate with a parrot on his shoulder. Then, as the sun turned the asymmetrical tips of her hair even brighter gold, she sat down next to Coy and again opened the brightly colored books and began to turn the pages. "The sea is here too," she said. "Look And adventure is still possible. You can get drunk a thousand times with Captain Haddock—Loch Lomond whiskey, in case you didn't know, holds no secrets for me. I also parachuted over a mysterious island with the green flag of the EFSR in my arms, crossed the border between Syldavia and Borduria more times than you can count, swore by the mustache of Kurvi Tasch, sailed on the Karaboudjan, the Ramona, the Speedol Star, the Aurora, and the Sinus—more ships than you, I'm sure. I searched for Red Rackhams treasure, westward, farther westward, and walked on the moon while Thompson and Thomson, with their green hair, performed as downs in the Hiparco Circus. And when I'm lonely, Coy, when I'm very, very, very lonely, then I light one of your friend Hero's cigarettes, make love with Sam Spade, and dream of Maltese falcons while through the smoke I summon my old friends Abdallah, Alcazar, Joryon Wagg, Chester, Zorrino,

  Skut, Oliveira de Figueira, and listen to the CD of the jewel song from Faust on an old Bianca Castafiore recording."

  As she spoke she set the two books on the table. They were old editions, one with a blue binding and the other green. The frontispiece of the first showed Tintin, Snowy, and Captain Haddock in a plumed hat, and a galleon under full sail. In the second, Tintin and Snowy were skimming along the bottom of the sea in a submarine shaped like a shark.

  "That's Professor Calculus's submarine," said Tanger. "When I was a girl, I saved my money from birthdays, saint's days, and Christmas gifts to buy these books, pinching pennies as hard as Scrooge himself. You know who Ebenezer Scrooge is?"

  'A sailor?"

  "No, a miser. Bob Cratchit's boss." "Never heard of him."

  "It doesn't matter," she continued. "I saved every cent so I could go to the bookstore and come out with one of these in my hands, holding my breath, loving the feel of the hard covers, the colors of the splendid illustrations. And then, all by myself, I would open the pages and smell the paper and the ink before I dived into the story. So I collected all twenty-three, one by one. A lot of time has gone by since then, but to this day, when I open a Tintin I can smell the smell that I have associated with adventure and life ever since. Along with the movies of John Ford and John Huston, Rich-mal Compton's Adventures ofWilliam, and a few other books, these shaped my childhood."

  She had opened Red Rackham's Treasure to page 40. In a large illustration in the middle of the page, Tintin, dressed in a diving suit, was walking along the bottom of the sea toward the impressive wreck of the sunken Unicorn.

  "Look carefully," she s
aid in a solemn voice. "That one picture marked my life."

  With extreme delicacy she touched the page with her fingertips, as if she feared she might alter the colors. Coy was looking at her, not the book; she was still smiling absently, with an expression that made her seem as young as the girl in the framed snapshot, leaning back in her father's arms. A happy expression, he thought. From a time when the counter is still at zero. Later would come the dented silver cup with the missing handle. Junior swimming championship. First prize.

  "I imagine," she said after a while, without looking up from the book, "that you had a dream too."

  "Of course."

  He could understand her. Not the books of the silver cup or the photo, not anything connected with things in her memory, but there was a point of contact, a territory where it was easy for him to recognize her. Maybe Tanger wasn't all that different after all. Maybe, he thought, in some way she's one of ours, even though by definition every one of ours sails, hunts, fights, and sinks alone. Ships that pass in the night. Lights in the distance, visible for a brief while, often going in the opposite direction. Sometimes a distant sound, the throb of engines. Then silence again when it passes, and darkness, and the glow extinguished in the empty blackness of the sea.

  "Sure," he repeated.

  That was all he said. His image, the vignette in his memory album, was of a Mediterranean port with three thousand years of history in its ancient stones, surrounded by mountains and castles with embrasures where once guns were mounted. Names like Navidad fort, de Curra jetty, San Pedro lighthouse. The smell of still water, of damp hawsers, and the lebeche, that south-southwest wind fluttering the flags of moored ships and the pennants on the trawl lines of the fishing boats. Idle men, men with nothing to do in retirement, facing the sea, sitting on old iron bollards. Nets in the sun, the rusting sides of merchant ships nestling against the docks, and that unique odor of salt, tar, and the age-old sea, of ports that have seen many ships and many lives come and go. In Coy's memory there was a boy moving through all that, a thin, dark-skinned boy with his schoolbag on his back, who had played hooky to gaze at the sea, to walk past the ships and watch the blond, tattooed men come ashore speaking incomprehensible languages. To see them cast off mooring lines that fell with a splash and were hauled on board before the iron hull moved away from the quay and the ship steered toward the harbor entrance, between the lighthouses, soon nothing but a strip of foamy wake, moving out toward the open sea in search of those unmarked highways to a place the boy was certain that he was going to go too. That had been his dream, the image that marked his life forever; early, before-the-fact nostalgia for a sea reached through old and wise ports peopled with ghosts that rested among the cranes huddled in the shade of the sheds. Iron worn away by the friction of cables. Men who sat quietly, motionless for hours, and for whom the fishing rod or the rum or the cigarette was only an excuse, who seemed not to care for anything in the world but to stare at the sea. Grandfathers who led their grandsons by the hand and, while the young ones asked questions or pointed to gulls, they, the old ones, turned their eyes toward the moored ships and the line of the horizon beyond the lighthouses, as if searching for some lost memory; a recollection, a word, an explanation of something that happened too long ago, or something mat may never have happened at all.