The Nautical Chart

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  They'd talked earlier. A long discussion after Horacio Kiskoros said good-bye and "hasta la vista" in a way that would have sounded friendly to someone who didn't know of his past what Coy now knew. As the two of them departed, Kiskoros watched them from those deceptive, sad little frog eyes, and when they left the plaza he was still in the same place, standing in front of the cathedral like a harmless nocturnal tourist. Coy looked back, and then up to read the name of the street they were on—calle de la Compania. In this city, he told himself, everything was signs and symbols and markers, exactly like those on a nautical chart. The difference was that the ones having to do with the sea were much more precise, with their colored shoals and scales for miles in the margins as opposed to timeless stone, supposedly accidental meetings, and plaques with unique street names. He didn't doubt that signs and dangers were visible to the eye in the city's streets and alleys, just as on printed charts, but here there were no codes to interpret them.

  "Calle de la Compania, a street named after the Society of Jesus," she'd said when she saw the name. "This is where the Jesuits' school of navigation stood."

  She never said anything casually, so Coy scanned the area, the old building on the left, the decaying house of Gravina on the right. He suspected that later, for some reason or other, he would need to remember something about this place. They walked for a while, slowly climbing toward the Plaza de las Flores. Twice he turned toward Tanger, but she kept walking, expressionless, eyes straight ahead, purse tight to her ribs, tips of hair brushing the stubborn chin and mouth rhythmically, until he took her arm and made her stop. To his surprise, she didn't protest, and there she was, so close, after she'd whirled to face him, almost as if she had been waiting for an excuse.

  "Kiskoros, at Nino Palermo's instigation, has been watching me for quite a while," she volunteered. "He is an evil and dangerous man."

  She paused, as if wondering whether there was something more she should say.

  "Earlier, at the Guardiamarinas arch," she added, "I was afraid for you."

  She said it straight out, with no emotion. And afterward was again silent, looking over Coy's shoulder in the direction of the plaza, the closed flower kiosks and post office, the outdoor tables of the corner cafes where the last customers of the long day lingered.

  "Ever since he came with Palermo to see me," she concluded, "that man has been my nightmare."

  She wasn't asking for sympathy, and maybe Coy couldn't help feeling sorry for her for that very reason. There was something childlike, he decided, in that obstinate adultness, in the poise with which she faced the consequences of her adventure. Again the silver cup. Again the framed snapshot. The girl within the protective arm of the man no longer around, the vulnerability of the eyes laughing from the threshold of a time when all dreams were possible. He recognized her in spite of everything. Or, to be more exact, the more time he spent with her, the more of her he recognized.

  He suppressed the caress vibrating on his fingertips, and pointed with that hand to the bar behind her. Los Gallegos Chico, it was called. Domestic wines, good coffee, outside food allowed— all that was advertised on placards on the door and in the window. The word "liquors" was enough for Coy, and he realized that she needed a drink as much as he. So they went in. Elbows on the zinc counter, he ordered a gin and tonic for himself—he saw no shade of blue anywhere—and, without asking, a second for her. Gin gleamed moistly on her lips when she looked at him and recounted in minute detail Palermo's first visit, relaxed and friendly, and later a second visit, this time with the cards face up, the pressures and threats seasoned by the sinister presence of Kiskoros. Palermo had wanted to be sure she would recognize the Argentine, that she would know his story and not forget his face, so that when he was standing under her window, walking down the street, or in her bad dreams, she would always think hard about the intrigue she was getting herself into. So she would learn, the treasure hunter had said, that bad little girls cannot walk through the forest with impunity, without exposing themselves to dangerous encounters.

  "That's what he said." A vague, somewhat bitter smile hardened her expression. "Dangerous encounters."

  At that moment, Coy, who was listening and drinking in silence, interrupted to ask why she hadn't gone to the police. She laughed quietly, a muted laugh, slightly hoarse, as filled with disdain as it was devoid of humor. "The fact is," she said, "I am a bad little girl. I tried to put one over on Palermo, and as for the museum, I'm working on my own. If you haven't picked that up by now you're more naive than I thought."

  "I'm not naive," he said, uncomfortable, twirling the cold glass.

  "I agree." She gazed into his eyes, her lips not smiling but less hard. "You aren't."

  She barely tasted her drink It's late, she said, after looking at her watch. Coy tossed down his gin, signaled a waiter, and left a bill on the table. One of his last, he confirmed disconsolately.

  "They'll pay for what they've done," he said.

  He didn't have the remotest idea of how he could execute that statement, or what he could do to help, but he thought it was the right thing to say. Such sayingp exist, he thought. Soothing phrases, consoling words, cliches that you hear in films and read in novels, and that have their value in real life. He glanced at her, afraid she might be scoffing at him, but she was holding her head to one side, absorbed in her own thoughts.

  "I don't care whether they pay or not. This is a horse race, you understand. The only thing that matters to me is to get mere before they do."

  IT was almost time for the sax. Tanger was like jazz, Coy decided. A melody line with unexpected variations. She evolved constantly around an apparently fixed concept, like a thematic structure of AABA, but closely following those evolutions required a consistent attention that definitely did not exclude surprise. Suddenly he would hear AABACBA, and a secondary theme would emerge that no one had imagined was there. The only way to follow was to improvise, wherever it might lead. Follow without a score. Courageously. Blindly.

  A nearby clock on the plaza struck three. Coy heard it, muffled by the headphones and the music, and finally came the sax of Hawkins, the third solo that tied together all the lines of the tune. He listened with half-closed eyes, calmed by the cadence of familiar notes, soothed by the repetition of the expected. Now Tanger was in the melody, altering its delicate structure. He lost the thread, and an instant later he clicked off the Walkman and held the headphones in his hand, frustrated. For a moment he thought he heard footsteps overhead, just as the crew of the Pequod heard the sound of the bone leg as their captain played over his obsessions alone at night on deck. He stood there alert, waiting, then he threw the Walkman onto the unmade bed with irritation. That didn't follow; it brazenly mixed genres. His Melville phase, like the preceding one, the Stevenson phase, had been left behind long ago. Theoretically, Coy was very clearly in his Conrad phase, and all heroes authorized to move through that terrain were weary heroes, more or less lucid, aware of the danger of dreaming when at the helm. Men stranded in resignation and boredom, from whose restless dreams had vanished the endless processions of whales swimming two by two, escorting in their midst a ghost hooded like a snow-capped mountain.

  And yet the conditional yes at the gate of the oracle of Delphi, whom Coy knew from Melville, but which that author had taken in turn from other books Coy hadn't read, still echoed in the air, a storm playing the harp in the rigging, even after the sea closes over the pinioned albatross and the flag, and the Rachel rescues another orphan. All at once, to his great surprise, Coy discovered that literary or life phases, call them what you will, are never neatly closed, and that although the heroes have lost their innocence and are too exhausted to believe in ghost ships and sunken treasure, the sea is unchanging, filled with its own memory. It's all the same to the sea if men lose their faith in adventure, in the hunt, in sunken ships and treasure. The enigmas and the stories the sea holds have a life of their own, they are sufficient unto themselves, and will be there foreve
r. And that is why, until the very last instant, there will always be men and women who question the sperm whale as it turns its head toward the sun and dies.

  So, despite all the lucidity he could muster, there he was again, calling himself Ishmael after having been shipwrecked as Jim; again, at his age, preparing the harpoon with his own blood and the ancient obligatory cry: let drink or the devil take him to the end, and get on with the disabled boat and the disabled body, et cetera, et cetera. Watching—fascinated by the certainty of an inevitable fate because he had read it a hundred times—the woman with the freckled skin affix her doubloon of Spanish gold to the wooden mast. But that sound wasn't only in his imagination. He had gone to the window, hoping for a breeze from the ocean, and when he heard it again he had looked toward the ceiling. Now he did think he could hear restless footsteps overhead, on the deck. Tap tap tap. Apparently, like him, she couldn't rest, and was hunting her own white ghosts, funeral carriages with elaborate wrought iron. And he had never dreamed, in any of his ships or books or ports or previous, innocent lives, of such a seductive Ahab enticing him to sail over his tomb.

  He lay down on the bed. Until the last port, he remembered before felling asleep, we all live tangled in the line of a whale harpoon.

  "THERE is a direct connection," said Tanger, "between the voyage of the Dei Gloria and the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain."

  It was Sunday, and they were having a breakfast of hot bread, cocoa, coffee, and orange juice beneath the awning of the Cafe Parisien, across from the hotel. There was a gentle breeze, bright light, and pigeons strutting across the sunny rectangle of the plaza among the feet of people coming from mass. Coy was eating half a roll, and between bites he stared at the white and ocher facade and the bell tower of the church of San Francisco.

  "In 1767 Charles III, who earlier had been king of Naples, was ruling Spain. From the very beginning of his reign the Jesuits were opposed to him, because, among other reasons, at that moment the battle of new ideas was being unleashed across Europe, and the Society of Jesus was the most influential of all the religious orders. That had created enemies for it everywhere. In 1759 the Jesuits had been expelled from Portugal, and in 1764 from France."

  She was drinking chocolate milk from a tall glass, and every time she lifted it to her hps a line of foam was left on her upper lip.

  She had come outside straight from her shower, her still-wet hair dripping on the red-and-blue-checked shirt she was wearing outside her jeans, sleeves rolled above her wrists, her hair drying into soft waves, making her skin look fresh and young. From time to time Coy stared at the line of cocoa on her mouth and shivered inside. Sweet, he thought. Sweet lips, and she had made the drink sweeter by adding a packet of sugar. He wondered how those lips would taste to his tongue.

  "In Spain," she continued, "tensions between the Ignatians and Charles's enlightened ministers were growing. The fourth vow of obedience to the Pope placed the Society in the center of the polemic between religious power and the authority of the kings. It was also accused of controlling a lot of money and of excessively influencing university teaching and administration. Besides, there was the recent conflict between the missions in Paraguay and the Guarani war." She leaned across the table toward Coy, glass in hand. "Did you see that Roland Joffe film, The Mission! The Jesuits taking the part of the natives?"

  Coy vaguely remembered the film—a video on board ship, one you end up seeing three or four times, in bits and pieces, during a long voyage. Robert De Niro, he seemed to remember. And maybe Jeremy Irons. He hadn't even remembered they were Jesuits.

  'All that," Tanger added, "meant that the Spanish Jesuits were sitting on a powder keg, and the only thing missing was the match."

  No sign of Horacio Kiskoros, Coy noted as he looked around. A young married couple was sitting at the next table, tourists with two blond little boys, an unfolded map, and a camera. The kids were playing with plastic slingshots similar to the ones from his childhood, when he'd played hooky to wander the quays. He'd made his sling himself from a V-shaped piece of wood, strips of old inner tubes, a scrap of leather, and a few inches of wire. Now, he thought nostalgically, such things were sold in stores and cost an arm and a leg.

  "The match," Tanger continued her story, "was Esquilache's uprising. Although the direct intervention of the Jesuits in the disorder hasn't been proved, it is true that about that same time

  they were trying to boycott Charles's enlightened ministers______ Esquilache, who was Italian, proposed, among other things, that the broad-brimmed hats and capes the Spanish cloaked themselves in be banned, and that was the source of serious disturbances. Calm was restored, the minister was dismissed, but the Jesuits were thought to be the instigators. The king decided to expel the Society and to seize its wealth."

  Coy nodded mechanically. Tanger was talking more than usual, as if she had prepared her comments during the night. It was only logical, he told himself. With the appearance of Kiskoros on the scene and the meeting suggested by Nino Palermo, she had no choice but to compensate by giving him more information. The closer they came to the objective, the more she realized that Coy was not going to be satisfied with crumbs. Basically stingy with her information, however, she kept doling out her supply with an eye-dropper. That may have been why, to Coy's disappointment, he didn't feel the same interest he had at other times. He too had had a long night to reflect. Too many facts, he was thinking now. Too many words, but very few were concrete. Everything you tell me, beautiful, I studied more than twenty years ago in school. You hope to string me along with historical swill, without ever getting to the meat of the matter. You are pretending to show with one hand what you're hiding in the other fist.

  He was fed up, and he thought less of himself for staying. And yet... That line of foam on her upper lip, the reflection of the bright morning light in the navy-blue irises, the damp tips of the blond hair framing her freckles—taken together, it worked a singular, nearly seductive magic Every time he looked at this puzzling girl, Coy was sure he was in too deep, he was sailing so far into the dark area on the nautical chart of his life that it was impossible to turn back now. Knights and knaves: I will lie to you and deceive you. The truth was that he didn't give a damn about the mystery of the lost ship. It was the girl—her doggedness, her quest, all that she was prepared to undertake for a dream—that kept him on this course despite the unmistakable sound of the sea perilously breaking on rocks nearby. He wanted to get as close to her as he could, to see her face as she slept, sense her waking and looking at him, touch that warm skin and know, in the depths of the skin and flesh that contained her, the smiling girl of the photograph in the silver frame.

  She had stopped talking and was studying him suspiciously, silently asking whether he was paying attention to what she was saying. Not without effort, Coy pushed his thoughts aside, fearful that she could read them, and looked back at the pigeons. Among them, one male, very sure of himself and very much the gallant, puffed out his chest amid a bevy of feathered beauties running in circles and casting sidelong glances at him, kiss-kissing and cooing. And at that moment, the boys at the next table swooped toward the peaceful birds, shouting war whoops. Coy checked out the father, very calmly occupied with his newspaper. Then the mother, making sure that occasionally she cast a lazy eye over the plaza. Finally, he turned to Tanger. With her back to the scene, she picked up the story.

  "Everything was prepared in the greatest secrecy in Madrid. By direct order of the king, a small group was formed that excluded anyone who was a partisan of the Society, or even impartial. The objective was to gather evidence and prepare the decree of expulsion. The result of what came to be called the Pesquisa Secreta, the secret inquiry, was a prosecutorial document that accused the Ignatians of conspiracy, defense of the doctrine of assassination, loose morals, an appetite for wealth and power, and illegal activities in America."

  The business of the secret inquiry sounded good, and Coy felt a stir of interest as he observed th
e boys again. They had caught the male unaware, and with one stone had interrupted both the idyll and the digestion of crumbs pecked beneath the tables. Emboldened by their success, the children fired at the pigeons with the lethal precision of Serbian snipers.

  "In January of 1767," Tanger went on, "meeting in deepest secrecy, the Council of Castile approved the expulsion. Between the night of March 31 and the morning of April 2, in an efficient military operation, the one hundred and forty-six houses in Spain belonging to Jesuits were surrounded. The priests were loaded onto ships; Rome had to take responsibility for them, and six years later Clement XIV dissolved the Society."

  There was a pause while Tanger finished her chocolate, and wiped her mouth with a hand. She had shifted in her chair to survey, indifferently, the romping boys and the pigeons, but soon turned back to Coy. I can't imagine her with children, he thought. And I know that, whatever happens, I won't be growing old beside her. He could imagine her in later years, amid books and papers, slim and elegant despite the gnawed fingernails. A single woman with class, and wrinkles fanning from her eyes, drawing on memories of a long red glove, an antique nautical chart, a broken fan, a jet necklace, a record of Italian songs from the fifties, the photo of an old lover. My photo, he fantasized. Oh God, if only it could be my photo.

  He snapped to attention because she was talking. What happened after the expulsion of the Jesuits from the dominions of the Spanish wasn't of much interest to them, she said. The important period was the year between Palm Sunday of 1766, the first day of Esquilache's uprising, and the night of March 31, 1767, when the decree of expulsion was served on the Spanish Jesuits. During that interval, in a way that recalled what had happened to the Knights Templar in the fourteenth century, the Society ceased to be a respected, feared, and powerful force. Instead, the Jesuits found themselves exiled and imprisoned.