The Nautical Chart

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  "Maybe the position the ship's boy gave wasn't accurate. In all the commotion, they may have made a mistake."

  "No. That's not possible." Tanger kept shaking her head with the stubbornness of someone hearing what she doesn't want to hear. "It was all too exact. The ship's boy even talked about how close the cape was, to the northeast— Remember?"

  In unison they looked through the open starboard porthole toward the reddish mass outlined at the end of the semicircle of coast, beyond the bay of Mazarron and Cabo Falco. "Having already sighted the cape," the ship's boy had declared, according to the report.

  "It may be," Tanger added, "that the Dei Gloria is buried in sand and we passed right over her without picking her up."

  It was possible, Coy thought. Although not very likely. In that case, he explained, the sounder would at least have signaled differing densities in the composition of the floor. But it had been constantly indicating layers of sand and mud of seven feet, and that was deep not to show anything.

  "Something would have to be there," he concluded. "Even if it was just the metal from the guns. Ten guns in one spot is a significant mass of iron. And to those ten you have to add the twelve on the corsair, even though they were scattered by the explosion."

  Tanger was drumming her pencil on the chart, chewing the thumbnail of the other hand. The furrows in her forehead resembled scars. Coy reached out to touch her neck, hoping to erase that frown, but she was indifferent to the caress, focused on the charts. The drawings of the brigantine and the xebec were also where she could see them, taped to one of the cabin bulkheads. She had even estimated the dispersion of the corsair's guns on the localized charts, taking into account the explosion, drift, and distance to the bottom.

  "The ship's boy," Coy offered, taking away his hand, "could have lied."

  Another shake of the head as the frown lines grew more pronounced.

  "Too young to come up with a deception of that complexity. He talked about the nearby cape, about a couple of miles of

  coast__ And in his pocket he had the penciled data on latitude and longitude."

  "Well, I can't think of anything else— Unless Cadiz isn't the right meridian."

  Tanger gave him a somber look.

  "I thought about that too," she said. "The first thing. Among other reasons because Tintin and Captain Haddock make a similar error in Red Rackham's Treasure, when they confuse the Paris and Greenwich longitudes."

  Sometimes, Coy thought as he listened to her, I wonder if she's pulling my leg. Or if this isn't some childish adventure she dreamed up out of a comic book. Because it sure isn't serious. Or doesn't seem to be. Or wouldn't seem to be, he corrected himself, if it didn't involve that Argentine dwarf with his knife, dogging our shadows, and that boss of his, the Dalmatian. A little girl's dream of searching for sunken ships. With treasures and villains.

  "But we know the meridians they used at that time," he said. "We have the position the ship's boy provided, and we can confirm it on the chart, along with where he was picked up after the ship went down. It can't be the Hierro meridian, or Paris or Greenwich."

  "Of course not." Tanger pointed to the scale in the upper margin of one of the charts. "The longitude is definitely relative to Cadiz. With it, everything works out. The zero meridian of our search is the Guardiamarinas castle. That's where it was in 1767 and that's where it was in 1798. Old longitude from Cadiz to the wreck: 4°51'E. Present longitude, after the correction: 5°12,E. Relative to Greenwich, 1°21'W. No other meridian can situate the Dei Gloria so perfectly on Urrutia's and modem charts."

  "That's all well and good. Perfect, you say. But we're missing the most important part—the ship."

  "We've done something wrong."

  "That's obvious. Now tell me what."

  Tanger threw the pencil down on the table and got up, still studying the chart Coy's eyes took in her bare feet against the deck planking, the long, freckled thighs and small breasts beneath the T-shirt. Again he caressed her neck, and this time she leaned a little against him. Her firm, warm body smelled faintly of sweat and salt.

  "I don't know," she said, pensive. "But if there's an error, we're the ones who made it. You and me. If we finish the search tomorrow with no success, we'll have to start over."

  "How?’

  "I don't know. With how we applied the cartographical corrections, I suppose. An error of half a minute throws things off by half a mile. And while Perona's tables are extremely precise, our calculations may not be. All it would take is a slight miscalculation in the boy's latitude and longitude. That ten seconds would be scarcely noticeable in their system of positioning, but decisive when transferred to the chart. Maybe the brigantine is a mile more to the south, or to the east. Maybe we made a mistake in limiting the search area so strictly."

  Coy took the deepest breath he could. That was all reasonable, but it meant starting anew. On the other hand, it also meant being with her longer. He circled her waist with his arms. She turned to face him and looked at him questioningly, her lips parted. She's afraid, he realized, resisting the temptation to kiss her. She's afraid that El Piloto and I will say we've had enough.

  "We don't have forever," he said. "The weather may turn bad again. And up to now we've been lucky with the Guardia Civil, but they could start to hassle us any time. Questions and more questions. And then there's Nino Palermo and his people." He pointed to El Piloto, who was clearing the table to put on the tablecloth, acting as if he wasn't listening to the conversation. 'And he has to be paid."

  "Don't do that." Slowly, gentry, she removed the hands clasping her waist. "I have to think, Coy. I have to think."

  She smiled a little, distant but embarrassed, as if trying to soften her withdrawal. Suddenly she was miles away, and Coy felt a dark sadness slip through his veins. The void in the navy-blue eyes deepened as they turned toward the porthole open to the sea.

  "But it's out there somewhere," she murmured.

  She put both hands on the porthole and leaned forward. He rubbed a hand across his badly shaven face, feeling his own desolation. Once again she seemed isolated, solitary, self-absorbed. She was returning to the cloud from which they were excluded, and there was nothing he could do to change it.

  "I know it's down there, somewhere close," Tanger added softly. "Waiting for me."

  Coy said nothing. He felt a mute, impotent anger, like an animal struggling in a trap. He knew he would spend that night with Tanger lying awake in the dark in impenetrable silence.

  Now is when I make my appearance, although brief, in this story. Or when, to be more precise, we come to the more or less decisive role I played in the resolution—to give a name to it—of the enigma surrounding the sinking of the Dei Gloria. In truth, as some perspicacious reader may have noted, I am the person who has been doing the telling all this time, the Marlow of this novel, if you will permit the comparison—with the reservation that until now I hadn't thought it necessary to emerge from the comfortable voice I was using. Those are, they say, the rules of the art. But someone pointed out once that tales, like enigmas, and like life itself, are sealed envelopes containing other sealed envelopes. Besides, the story of the lost ship, and of Coy, the sailor banished from the sea, and Tanger, the woman who returned him to it, seduced me from the moment I met the protagonists. Stories like this, as far as I'm concerned, scarcely ever happen these days, and even more rarely do those protagonists tell them, though they may embellish the tale a little, as ancient cartographers ornamented the blank spaces of still-unexplored areas. Maybe they don't tell them because we no longer have verandas dripping with bougainvillea, where dark falls slowly as Malay waiters serve gin—Bombay Sapphire, naturally—and an old captain enveloped in pipe smoke spins his story from a wicker rocking chair. For some time now the verandas and Malay waiters and rocking chairs, even the gin, have been the province of tour operators—in addition to which it is no longer permitted to smoke, whether it be a pipe or any other goddamn thing. It is difficult, therefo
re, to escape the temptation to tell a story the way they used to be told. So, to get to the heart of the matter, the moment has come for us to open the next-to-last envelope, the one that brings me, with all modesty, center stage. Without that narrative voice, and this you need to understand, the classical aroma would be lacking. Shall we just say, by way of immediate introduction then, that the sailboat that entered the port of Cartagena that afternoon was a defeated vessel, as much as if instead of returning from a few miles to the southwest it was coming back—empty-handed, not with bags of gold—from an actual encounter with a corsair that had dispelled all dreams. On the chart table, the grid on nautical chart 4631 is covered with useless little crosses, like a used bingo card, disillusioning and worthless. As they arrived, there was little conversation aboard the Carpanta. Lying to facing the rusted structures of the Graveyard of Ships With No Name, its crew silently furled the sails, and then, under motor, made their way to one of the slips in the port for pleasure craft. Together they went ashore, unaccustomed to walking on solid ground, past the Felix von Luckner, a Belgian container vessel belonging to Zeeland, preparing to weigh anchor and set sail, and started out in the Valencia and the Taibilla, followed by the Gran Bar, the Sol, and the Del Macho, and ended their Via Cruris three hours later in La Obrera, a small tavern located on a corner behind the old town hall. That night, Coy would remember later, they looked like three good friends, three sailors come ashore after a long and perilous voyage. And they drank until things got hazy, one and another and then still another, followed by the next-to-the-last, all for one and no complexes. Alcohol distances events, words, and gestures. So Coy, aware of that, was attending the party, including the main show itself, with a perverse curiosity that contained both amazement and guilt. That was also the first and last time he had seen Tanger drink that much, and so deliberately and earnestly. She was smiling as if all at once the Dei Gloria was a bad dream left far behind, and she kept leaning her head on Coy's shoulder. She drank what he was drinking, gin with ice and a little tonic, while El Piloto accompanied them with eye-watering belts of Fundador cognac chased with beer. Watching them through amused, puckish, friendly eyes, he told brief and incoherent stories about ports and ships with that serious tone and slow, careful speech one uses when alcohol thickens the tongue. Sometimes Tanger laughed and kissed him, and El Piloto, cut short, would dip his head a little, always calm, or look at Coy and smile again, elbows on the worn Formica table. He seemed to be having a good time. As did Coy, who was rubbing Tanger's stiff waist and the slim curve of her back, feeling her body against his, her lips on his ear and his neck. Everything could have ended there, and it wasn't a bad ending for a failure. Because everything was grotesque and yet logical at the same time, Coy decided. They hadn't found the brigantine, but it was the first time the three of them had laughed together, without reserve, free of problems, unself-conscious and loud. It felt liberating, and in that state of mind they drank as if playing themselves, aware of. the trite ritual the circumstances demanded.

  "To the turtle," said Tanger.

  She raised her glass, clinking it against Coy's, and emptied what remained in one swallow. That afternoon on the way to Cartagena, a mile south of Palomas Island, they had sighted in the distance something splashing in the water. Tanger had asked what it was, and Coy took a look through the binoculars—a sea turtle trapped in a fishing net. They had headed for her, watching the creature struggle to free herself. The netting was wrapped around her shell and bloody fins, strangling her as she fought to keep her head above water; she was on the verge of asphyxiation. It was rare to see a turtle in those waters, and the trouble she was in was a good indication of why. The net was one of thousands strung everywhere in the Mediterranean, a thousand feet of mesh held by plastic drums as floats, lethal labyrinths that trapped any living thing. The turtle would never be able to get free. Her strength was failing and her wrinkled eyelids were closing over bulging eyes in a death agony. Even if she got free of the net, her exhaustion and wounds had already sentenced her to death. But that didn't matter to Coy. Before anyone could say a word, blind with rage, he had jumped into the water with El Piloto's knife in his hand and was wildly slashing at the net around the animal. He hacked at the netting with fury, as if attacking an enemy he despised with all his soul. He would take a breath and dive in water blood had turned a rosy pink, and when he came up stare straight into the creature's desperate eye. He cut everything he could, roaring with outrage when he came up to breathe, then went back down to destroy all he could of the net. Even when the turtle was finally free and slowly drifting away, weakly moving her fins, he kept slashing, until his arm refused to respond. Then he took one last look at the turtle, whose dying eye followed him as he swam away toward the Carpanta. She didn't have much of a chance, exhausted and trailing blood that sooner or later would attract some voracious shark. But at least the end would come in the open sea, in accord with her world and her species, not a wretched death strangled in a tangle of cord woven by human hands.

  In La Obrera they ordered more gin, more cognac, and more beer, and Tanger again rested her head on Coy's shoulder. She was quietly singing the words of a song, and from time to time she would stop, turn up her face, and Coy would seek her lips, cool from the ice and perfumed with gin, to warm them with his. No one mentioned the Dei Gloria, and everything was being played by the rules, by what the situation demanded, and by the roles that they—perhaps not El Piloto, or at least not consciously—were performing in that contemporary version of a timeworn plot. They had lived that scene a hundred times before, and it was soothing to lose the game in times when men were trained to see a certain kind of success evaporate before their eyes. At the bar, facing the tavern-keeper Coy remembered being there all his life in his apron and with a cigarette hanging from his Hps, red-nosed drunks and steady clients with skinny, tattooed arms were putting down glasses of wine and goblets of cognac, turning from time to time to smile with complicity. They were old acquaintances of El Piloto, and now and again the three at the table would tell the tavern-keeper to serve a round for everyone. Your health, Piloto, and your buddies'. Here's to you, Gines. And you, Gramola. You, too, Jaqueta. Everything was perfect, and Coy felt at peace. He was having fun playing his own character. All that was missing, he lamented, was the piano, with Lauren Bacall shooting sidelong glances as she sang in that hoarse, hushed voice, which in the original, subtitled version sounded a little like Tinger's. A little later, when they reached a certain point, the alcohol would transpose all images to black and white. Because after so many novels, so many films, and so many songs, there weren't even innocent drunks anymore. And Coy asked himself, envying him, what the first man felt the first time he went out to hunt a whale, a treasure, or a woman, without having ever read about it in a book.

  THEY said good-night at the city wall. They had left the boat clean and secure, and that night El Piloto was going to sleep at his house in the fisherman's barrio of Santa Lucia. They stood watching him stumble off through the palm trees and huge magnolias, and then looked down toward the port, where beyond the seamen's club and the Mare Nostrum restaurant the Felix von Luckner was casting off her lines with her deck illuminated and her lights reflected in the black water. They had let the stern line go, and Coy mentally repeated the orders the pilot would be sending that moment from the bridge. Hard a-starboard. A little forward. Stop. Rudder amidships. Engines half back Cast off bowlines. Tanger was beside him, also watching the ship's maneuver, and abruptly she said, "I want a shower, Coy. I want to strip and take a really hot shower, boiling with steam, like fog on the high seas. And I want you to be in that fog, and not talk to me about boats or shipwrecks or any of that. I've drunk so much tonight that all I want is to put my arms around a tough, silent hero, someone who's returned from Troy and whose skin and lips taste like salt and the smoke of burned cities." She said that, and looked at him the way she sometimes did, quiet and very serious and focused, as if she were waiting for something from hi
m. The blue steel of her eyes was softened by gin into shining, almost liquid navy blue, and she parted her lips as if the ice of the drinks she'd drunk made her mouth so cold that it would take

  Coy hours to warm it. He wrinkled his nose and smiled the way he so often did, with that shy expression that lit his face and softened his rough features, the too large nose and chin almost always in need of a shave. Tough, silent hero, she'd said. On that particular island of knights and knaves, no one had spoken the magic words. Only I will lie to you and I will deceive you. Not even in that context of lying or betrayal had anyone yet said "I love you." At that precise instant, though with the world whirling around him and alcohol pumping through his veins, he was on the verge of being vulgar and saying it. He had even opened his mouth to say the forbidden words. But she, as if sensing it, put her fingers to Coy's lips. She came so close that the liquid blue of her eyes was sparkling and dark at the same time, and he smiled again, resigned, as he kissed her fingers. Then he took a deep breath, as he did before a dive, and looked around for five seconds before taking her hand and crossing the street, setting a direct course for the door of the Cartago Inn, one star, rooms with bath and views of the port. Special rates for officers of the Merchant Marine.

  THAT night, enclosed by white tiles and thick steam, it rained on the shores of Troy as ship after ship set sail. It was, in fact, a warm fog, gray or shades of gray, in which all colors were washed out by that gentle rain falling on a deserted beach where signs of a denouement could be seen—a forgotten bronze helmet, a fragment of broken sword half-buried in the sand, ashes carried on the wind from some burned city out of sight but sensed, still smoking, as the last ships hoisted damp sails and sailed away. It was the nostos of Homeric heroes, the return and the loneliness of the last warriors coming home after the battle to be murdered by their wives' lovers or to be lost at sea, victims of cholera and the caprices of the gods. In that warm mist, Tanger's naked body sought Coy's, foam of soapy water on her thighs, smooth, freckled skin shining wetly. She sought him with silent determination, with intense purpose in her gaze, literally trapping him at the head of the bathtub. And lying back there, warm water to his waist and warm rain falling on his head and running down his face and shoulders, Coy watched her rise slowly, lift above him and slowly descend, decisive, slow, inch by inch, leaving him no escape but forward between her thighs, deep into that intense, desperate embrace, at the very edge of a lucidity draining away with his surrender and defeat. Never, until that night, had Coy felt raped by a woman. Never so meticulously and deliberately relegated to marginal status. Because I'm not me, he reasoned with the last bit of flotsam floating from the shipwreck of his thoughts. It isn't me she's embracing, it isn't anyone who can be assigned a face, a voice, a mouth. It wasn't for me those other times, when she moaned that long, sorrowful moan, and it isn't me she is imagining now. It's the tough, male, silent hero she was calling for before. Summoning him to the dream that she, all shes, have carried in their cells since the world began. The man who left his semen in her womb and then sailed for Troy on a black ship. The man whose shadow not even cynical priests, pale poets, or reasonable men of peace and the word who wait beside the unfinished tapestry have ever been able to erase completely.