The Nautical Chart (43 page)

Pizza delivery, he repeated. Then he sat back, a slight smile on his lips. Tanger was very quiet, as if afraid she might tumble a house of cards.

"What has changed, Coy?"

"Everything." The smile disappeared, and he took another drink, savoring the analgesic scent of gin slipping down his throat. "No such thing as a voyage today, almost all the real ships are gone. Now a ship is like an airplane. It's not a
voyage;
they transport you from point A to point B."

'And it used to be different?"

"Of course. A person could find solitude. You were suspended between A and B, and it was a long passage— You carried very little baggage, and not putting down roots didn't matter."

"The sea is still the sea. It has its secrets and dangers."

"But not the way it used to be. It's like arriving too late at an empty pier and seeing the smoke from the funnel disappearing over the horizon. When you're a student you use the correct vocabulary, port and starboard, and all the rest. You try to preserve traditions, you trust a captain the way a child trusts in God    But

that doesn't work anymore. I dreamed of having a good captain, like Mac Whirr on the
Typhoon.
Of being one myself some day." "What is a good captain?"

"Someone who knows what he's doing. Who never loses his head. Who comes up to the bridge during your watch and sees a ship closing in on the port beam, and instead of ordering 'Hard to starboard, we're bearing down on her,' keeps his mouth shut and looks at you and waits for you to perform the correct maneuver."

"You had good captains?"

Coy grimaced. That was a real question. Mentally he turned the pages of an old photo album stained with drops of saltwater. And not a little shit.

"I had every kind," he said. "Miserable and drunk and cowardly, and some remarkable men too. But I always trusted them. All my life, until just recently, the word 'captain' inspired respect. I told you that I associated it with the captain Conrad describes: 'The hurricane... had found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a few words.' I remember a bad storm, a nor'wester, the first of my life, in the Bay of Biscay, with huge waves that swept over the bow of the
Migalota
to the bridge. She was fitted with McGregor hatches that didn't fit right, and the ship was taking a beating. Water was coming in every time the seas broke over her, and the cargo was a mineral, which shifts when it gets wet. Each time the bow plunged into the water and looked like it was never coming up, the Captain, don Gines Saez, who was welded to the wheel, would mutter 'God' very low, to himself.... There were four or five people on the bridge, but since I was standing beside him, I was the only one who could hear. No one else noticed. When he glanced my way and saw how close I was, he never opened his mouth again."

The three performers had finished their set and were taking their bows amid applause. The break was filled with canned music over loudspeakers installed in the ceiling. A couple got up to dance. "You're leaving because I want you to leave." Bolero. For a fraction of a second Coy was tempted to invite Tahger to dance. Ha. The two of them there, embracing, faces nearly touching. "I want other lips to kiss you," the song said. He imagined himself with a hand on her waist, stepping on her toes like a duck. Oh well, she was sure to be one of those women who jams an elbow between your body and hers.

"It used to be," he continued, forgetting the bolero, "that a captain had to make decisions. Now he's signing documents in the port; there's a difference of half a ton and he's telephoning the owner. Do I sign the papers? Do I not sign the papers? And in some office are three guys, three pieces of garbage in ties, who say, Don't sign. And he doesn't."

'And what's left of the sea? When do you feel you're still a sailor?"

When there are problems, he explained. When someone on board was hurt, or broke something, people tended to rise to the occasion. Once, he told her, the mother of all waves had torn the rudder plate off the
Palestine,
near El Cabo. They were adrift for a day and a half, until the towboats arrived. And for that time the crew were all true sailors. For the most part, they're nothing but truck drivers on the ocean, or union officials, but in crises they all work together. Shifted cargo, serious damage, bad weather, tempests. All that.

"That word sounds terrible: 'tempest.'"

"Some are bad and others are worse. The unpleasant time for a sailor is when he calculates his course and the course of a major

storm, and there's a convergence_______ I mean when the two get to the same place at the same time."

There was a pause. Some things he would never be able to explain to her, he decided. Force n winds off Terranova, walls of gray and white water boiling in a mist of foam blending into sky, waves pounding the bow, a shuddering, creaking hull, crew yelling with terror, tied to their bunks, the radio saturated with the Maydays of ships in distress. And a few men with calm heads on the bridge, or securing loose cargo in the hold, or below manning the engines amid boilers, turbines, and pipes, not knowing what was going on topside, tending to controls and alarm lights and orders, concerned about the sloshing of diesel in the tanks, about the split in the hull that was leaking water into the fuel, about damage in the burners that might leave them at the mercy of the sea. Sailors trying to save a ship, and with it their lives, accelerating in the downward slopes to maintain control, moderating just before the crests, searching for troughs between the largest waves to veer into when the ship could no longer take it head on And the moment of anguish when, in mid-maneuver, a murderous wave strikes the hull dead abeam and the whole ship heels forty degrees while the men, clinging to anything they can, look at one another with frightened eyes, wondering whether the ship will right herself or not.

'At times like that," Coy concluded aloud, "things go back to how they used to be."

He was afraid he sounded too nostalgic. How could you long for horror? He was nostalgic for the way some men behaved facing horror; but that was impossible to explain at a restaurant table, or anywhere, for that matter. So he breathed hard, disturbed, looking around. He was talking way too much, he thought suddenly. It wasn't a bad thing to talk, but he wasn't used to telling about his life that way. He realized Tanger was the kind of person who chatted easily, the kind whose conversation consisted of asking the right questions and then leaving a silence so the other person could pick up and respond. A useful trick—you learn something and you come off well without giving up anything. After all, people love to talk about themselves. He's a brilliant conversationalist, they say later. And you haven't opened your mouth. Cretins. And he? Besides being a cretin, he was a blabbermouth, from truck to keel. Nevertheless, even with all that, he realized that talking about those things, at the most basic level, with Tanger there and listening, made him feel good.

"Today," he said a moment later, "the kind of romantic sailing you dreamed of as a kid is reduced to a handful of small ships with strange registries that go around picking up coast trade, tubs with rusted hulls, the name painted over another, and greasy, poorly paid captains. I was on one of them just after I got my license as a second officer, because I couldn't find a berth anywhere else. She was named the
Otago,
and there weren't many times I was as happy as I was then. Not even on the ships of the Zoe line... But I didn't learn that till later."

Tahger said that maybe it was because Coy was young then. He thought about it a minute. Yes, he admitted, it was likely that he was happy then because he was young. But with flags of convenience, businessmen captains, and owners for whom a ship isn't much different from an eighteen-wheeler, the whole thing had gone to hell. Some ships were so short of crew that they had to get men from the port in order to dock. Filipinos and Hindus were now elite crew, and Russian captains filled with vodka stove in their tankers a little here and a little there. The one possibility for experiencing the sea
as
sea was on a sailboat. There everything was still a matter of it and you. But you couldn't make a living that way, he added. And a good example of that was El Piloto.

There was nothing but ice in Tanger's glass. Her fingers with those ragged nails were poking inside, rattling the cubes. Coy made a move to call the waitress, but Tanger shook her head.

"The other night, on the bow with the flare, you impressed me."

After saying that, she fell silent, looking at him. Her smile widened. Coy laughed quietly, again at himself.

"That doesn't surprise me. I was the one who was impressed, when I hit the water."

"I'm not talking about that. I was paralyzed as I watched those lights coming toward us. I didn't know how to react. But you went about doing things, one after the other, without even thinking. A kind of predisaster routine. You didn't lose your calm, your voice didn't change. Or Piloto's either. You both exhibited a kind of fatalism. As if it was all part of the game."

Coy bunched his shoulders modestly. He studied his own wide, clumsy hands. He had never imagined having to talk about such things with anyone. In his world, that is, the saltwater world from which he'd recently been expelled, everything was obvious. Only on dry land did they ask you to explain things.

"Those are the rules," he said. "Out there you assume disaster is part of the deal. Not willingly, of course. You pray and you curse, and if you have any class you struggle to the end. But you accept it. That's how the sea is. You can be the best sailor in the world, and the sea comes along and wipes you out. The one consolation is to do the best you can. I imagine that's how the captain of the
Dei Gloria
must have felt."

At the mention of the brigantine, Tanger's face darkened. Suddenly she tilted her head, distracted, her elbows on the table, her chin in her hand.

"That's not much consolation," she commented.

"It is to me. Maybe it was to him, too."

The beacons that marked the outlines of the bay had come on, and the water near the shore shone yellow in the drizzle, scored by shimmerings, as if schools of tiny fish were swimming near the surface. The light of the lighthouse was more concentrated, and in the moisture its piercing beam seemed almost substantial as it circled again and again toward the inky blackness slithering across the sea.

"It must be very dark out there," she said.

Coy heard an involuntary tremor in her voice, and that made him look at her more closely. Her eyes were lost in the night.

"Falling overboard in the dark," she added after a few seconds, "must be terrible." "It isn't much fun." "You were very lucky."

"Yes, I was. When you go over like that, you don't normally get rescued."

Tanger's silver bracelet jingled as she put her right hand on the table, very near Coy's arm, but not actually touching. He felt his hair stand on end.

'Tve dreamed about that," she was saying. "I've dreamed that for years. Falling into thick, dense blackness."

He searched her face, a little abashed by the confidential tone. And by the way she kept turning toward the shadows.

"I suppose it's about dying," she continued in a low voice.

She seemed almost frozen, staring with apprehension into the rain. She seemed, he thought, to be looking far beyond the shadowy sea.

"To die alone like Zas. In the dark."

She spoke those words after a long silence, in a tone that was almost a whisper, barely audible. Suddenly she seemed truly frightened, or moved, and Coy shifted in his chair, inhibited, as he shuffled through his emotions. He raised his hand to place it over hers, but dropped it back at his side without completing the gesture.

"If that ever happens," he said, "I would like to be around, to hold your hand."

He had no idea how that might sound, but he didn't care. It was sincere. Suddenly he saw a little girl who was afraid of the night, terrified of traveling alone through infinite darkness.

"It wouldn't help," she replied. "No one can accompany you on that voyage."

She had studied him closely when he said that about being around to hold her hand. Very serious and very intense, analyzing what she'd heard. But now, as if she didn't believe it, she was shaking her head with resignation, or defeat "No one."

After that, nothing. She was still looking at Coy so intently that he shifted in his chair again. He would have given everything he had—though he didn't have anything to give—to be good-looking, to be suave, or at least to have enough money to smile self-confidently before putting his hand on hers. Her protector. To say, I'll look after you, my dear, to a woman whom he'd called a goddamn scheming witch only a few minutes before, and suddenly he thought of the freckled little girl smiling in her father's arm in the framed snapshot, the champion of the swim meet, the winner of the silver cup that now, dented and missing a handle, was turning black on a shelf. But he was only a pariah with a seabag over his shoulder, aboard a sailboat that wasn't his, and he was so far from her that he couldn't even aspire to consoling her, or having the last hand that pressed hers before a hypothetical voyage to the end of the night He felt a bitter impotence as she contemplated the distance that separated their hands on the table and smiled sadly, as if smiling at shadows, ghosts, and regrets.

"I fear that," she said.

This time, without even thinking, Coy reached out and touched her hand. Eyes boring straight into his, she slowly removed it. And he, flustered by his gaffe, his blunder, looked away so she couldn't see him blush. But after only half a minute he was struck by how life can produce unique situations that might have been choreographed or directed by the malice of a joker hunched down in eternity. Because at the precise moment he turned toward the railing and the beach, embarrassed by the sight of his clumsy, solitary hand on the table, he saw something that came to his aid so opportunely that he had to choke back his jubilation—a blind impulse, totally irrational, that tensed the muscles of his arms and back and filled his brain with a flash of incomparable lucidity.