The Nautical Chart (54 page)

With great care Coy removed the tank of compressed air, lifting it forward over his head. He took a large mouthful of air and set the cylinder on the deck with the mouthpiece anchored beneath the valves. Then he pushed half his body through the open hole over the companionway, careful not to get hooked on anything, and moved toward the half-buried lamp until he could touch it. It was very light and came free from the bottom with little difficulty. At that moment he saw the eyes of a large grouper observing him open-mouthed from an opening beneath a bulkhead. He waved a hand in salute and gradually worked his way backward until he was again out on the deck, careful not to release the last bit of oxygen, which he would need to clear the mouthpiece of the regulator and start taking air again. He clamped the mouthpiece in his teeth, exhaled into the bubbling regulator, and breathed fresh air without a problem. He slipped the cylinder back over his head and tightened the harness. On his wrist, El Piloto's waterproof Seiko indicated he'd been down thirty-five minutes. It was time to go up, pausing at the knot that marked ten feet and waiting the seven minutes required by the decompression tables. He tugged five times on the line that was tied to a cleat on the
Carpanta
and began to swim upward, carrying the lamp in his hands, going slower than his own bubbles, seeing the water change from dark greenish shadows to green, and from green to blue. Before he got to the surface he stopped at the ten-footmark, holding onto the knot in the line, with the black shadow of the motionless sailboat sitting overhead on a surface like polished glass. The glass shattered into foam as Tanger, wearing a diving mask, her hair flowing in the water, jumped in and stroked down toward Coy. She swam around him like an exotic siren, and the light filtering from above turned her freckled skin pale, making her appear naked and vulnerable. Coy showed her the lamp from the
Dei Gloria
and saw her eyes widen with wonder behind the glass of her mask.

FOR
four days, taking turns, Coy and El Piloto tore away part of the brigantine's deck at the level of the captain's cabin. They stripped it away, removing rotted planks from top to bottom with crowbars and picks, taking care not to weaken the structure of the frames and beams that kept the shape of the hull beneath the poop. To lift large sections of wood they called on Archimedes' principle, using a volume of air equivalent to the weight of the object to be raised. Once the heavy planks were free, they used nylon line with floats resembling plastic parachutes, which they filled with compressed air from reserve bottles tethered off the side of the
Carpanta.
The work was slow and tiring, and at times the cloud of sediment was so thick that they were forced to rest until the water cleared.

They found human bones. They would come across them trapped in a tangle of planking or half-buried in sand, occasionally with fragments of what had been belts or shoes. Like the skull with an entry wound in a parietal that Coy found beneath a thin layer of sediment near one of the gun ports and quickly reburied in the sand, moved by an atavistic impulse of respect. The sailors of the
Dei Gloria
were still there, manning their sunken ship, and as he moved around amid the ruined wood of the brigantine, his only company the sound of the regulator, Coy could feel them close by in the green semidarkness.

There was an accounting every night beneath the midship cabin light, in meetings that resembled war councils, headed by Tanger with the plans of the brigantine spread out before her, and with Coy and El Piloto in sweatshirts despite the mild temperature, to offset the cold they still felt after so many hours in the water. Then Coy would sleep a heavy sleep barren of dreams or images, and the next morning start diving again. His skin was like soaked garbanzo beans.

On the third day, as he was ascending, ready to stop at the ten-foot mark to purge his blood of dissolved nitrogen, he looked up and felt a jolt. The dark silhouette of another hull lay beside the
Carpanta,
rocking in the increasing swell. He came to the surface without completing the decompression, with a stab of alarm that intensified when he saw the Guardia Civil patrol boat. It had stopped by to take a look, its crew curious about the
Carpanta's
immobility. Fortunately, the lieutenant in command was an acquaintance of El Piloto, and the first thing Coy picked up when his head emerged from the water was a calming glance from his friend. Everything was under control. El Piloto and the lieutenant were smoking and talking, passing the wineskin back and forth between boats, while a pair of young
Guardias
dressed in green fatigues sent definitely unsuspicious looks at Tanger, who was reading on the stem deck in sunglasses, bathing suit, and baseball cap, apparently indifferent to what was happening. The story El Piloto had just finished telling in offhand bits and pieces was about these tourists who liked to dive and had leased his boat. For a lark they were searching for a fishing boat that had sunk a couple of years before in these same waters—the
Leo y Vero,
out of Torrevieja. His invention had sounded reasonable to the lieutenant, especially when he learned that the man climbing aboard the
Carpanta,
who looked vaguely surprised but gave him a wave after hanging his tank and harness on the stern ladder, was a native of Cartagena and an officer in the Merchant Marine. The patrol boat pulled away after the lieutenant perfunctorily checked Coys diving license and recommended he renew it, since it had lapsed a year and a half before. As soon as the boat was half a mile away, at the end of a straight white wake, and Tanger had closed the book of which she'd been unable to read a single line, and the three of them had looked at each other with silent relief, Coy jumped back into the water with the bottle of compressed air, sank to the ten-foot mark, and stayed there, surrounded by white and dark jellyfish slowly drifting by in the current, until the nitrogen bubbles formed in his blood by the precipitous rise to the surface had dissipated.

ON
the fifth day enough of the brigantine's poop had been removed to allow a first serious exploration. Almost all the deck planking was gone, and the naked structure of the hull at the stern revealed part of the captain's cabin, the remains of an intact bulkhead, and a passengers' locker in the steerage. Working from outside, Coy could undertake the search by sorting through jumbled objects, splintered wood, and residue that formed a layer nearly three feet thick. He dug with gloved hands and a short-handled spade, tossing useless material over the side, away from the hull, moving back again and again to let the sediment settle. He pulled out things that normally would have piqued his curiosity, but that now he simply discarded—assorted tools, pewter jugs, a candelabrum, broken glass and pottery. He came across the large bronze hilt and enormous hand guard of a sword, with the stump of a badly corroded wide blade, a cutlass whose only purpose was to slash human flesh during a boarding operation. He also found a block of musket balls fused together in the shape of the box in which they'd sunk, though the wood itself had disintegrated Buried in sand he found half a door, complete with hinges and a key in its lock, and also balls for the four-pounder, a clump of iron nails hollowed out by rust, and bronze nails that had fared much better. Beneath the loose boards of a cupboard, Coy found Talavera pottery cups and plates that were miraculously clean and intact, so perfect he could read the mark of their makers. He found a clay pipe, two muskets covered with tiny snails, blackened disks that were probably silver coins, the cracked glass of a sand clock, and an articulated brass ruler that had once traced routes on Urrutia's charts. For reasons of security, especially following the visit from the Guardia Civil, they had decided not to bring up any object that could raise suspicion, but Coy made an exception when he unearthed an instrument encrusted with lime. It had originally been composed of wood and metal, although the wood crumbled between his fingers when he shook off the sand, leaving only an arm with metal parts on the upper portion, and an arc below. Deeply moved, he had no difficulty identifying it as the brass or bronze metal parts corresponding to the index bar and the graduated arc of an ancient octant, probably the one the pilot of the
Dei Gloria
had used to establish their latitude. That was a good trade, he thought. An eighteenth-century octant in exchange for the sextant he had sold in Barcelona. He set it aside where it would be easy to find later. But what truly hit him hard in the gut was what he found in a corner of the locker, fuzzy with minute dark filaments, behind the boards of a chest: a simple length of line, perfectly coiled, with a knot tightened in the last two hitches, just as it had been left by the expert hands of a conscientious sailor who knew his trade. That intact coil of line affected Coy more than anything he had found, including the bones of the
Dei Gloria's
crew. He bit on his rubber mouthpiece to contain the bitter smile of infinite sadness he felt knot in his throat and mouth the closer they came to the sailors who had died in this shipwreck. Two and a half centuries before, men like him, sailors accustomed to the sea and its dangers, had held those objects in their hands. They had calculated courses with the brass rule, coiled the line, measured the quarters of the watch by turning the sandglass, and shot the stars with the octant. They had climbed to the yards, struggling against a wind fighting to tear them from the shrouds, and had howled their fear and humble courage into the oscillating rigging as they gathered canvas in stiff fingers. They had faced the Atlantic's northwesters and the murderous mistrals and
lebeches
of the Mediterranean. They had battled gun to gun, hoarse from yelling and gray with powder, before going to the bottom with the resignation of men who do their job well and fight bravely to the end. Now their bones were scattered amid the detritus of the
Dei Gloria.
And Coy, moving slowly beneath the plume of bubbles rising straight up into that shroudlike darkness, felt like a furtive grave robber violating the peace of a tomb.

LIGHT
from the porthole was seesawing on Tanger's naked skin, a small square of sun bobbing up and down with the movement of the boat, slipping down her shoulders and back as she lifted herself from Coy, still breathless, gasping like a fish out of water. Her hair, which days at sea had faded almost white at the tips, was stuck to her face with sweat. Dribbles of sweat ran down her skin, leaving tracks between her breasts and beading on her upper lip and her eyelashes. El Piloto was eighty-five feet below them, working his dive. The nearly vertical sun had turned the cabin into an oven, and Coy, sitting on the bench beneath the companionway to the deck, let his hands slip down Tanger's sweaty flanks. They had made love right there, impulsively, when he had taken off his diving vest and was looking for a towel after his half hour at the site of the
Dei Gloria
and she walked by, brushing against him accidentally. Suddenly his fatigue was gone and she was quiet, looking at him the way she sometimes did, with that silent thoughtfulness, and an instant later they were locked together there at the foot of the companionway, attacking one another furiously, as if the emotion they shared was hate. Now he was leaning against the back rest, drained, and slowly, inexorably, she was withdrawing, shifting her weight to one side and freeing Coy's moist flesh. That small square of sun was sliding down her body, and her gaze, which was again metallic blue, dark blue, navy-blue, the blue of blued steel, was directed toward the light and the sun tumbling through the opening from the deck. From where he was still sprawled on the bench, Coy watched her walk naked up the ladder, as if she were leaving forever. Despite the heat he felt a chill crawl across his skin, precisely in those places that held a trace of her, and the thought came: one day it will be the last time. One day she will leave me, or we'll die, or I'll get old. One day she will walk out of my life, or I out of hers. One day I won't have anything but images to remember, and then one day I won't even be alive to reconstruct those images. One day it will all be erased, and maybe today is the last time. Which was why he was watching her closely as she climbed up the companionway and disappeared onto the deck, engraving every last detail in his memory. The last component in the image was the drop of semen that slid down the inside of a thigh, which, when it reached her knee, reflected the amber flash of a ray of sun. Then she was out of his field of vision, and Coy heard the splash of someone diving into the sea.

THEY
spent that night anchored above the
Dei Gloria.
The needle of the wind gauge fluctuated indecisively atop the mast and the mirror-flat water reflected an intermittent spark from the Cabo de Palos lighthouse seven miles to the northeast. So many stars were out that the sky seemed right on top of the sea, so many it was actually difficult to see individual stars. Coy was sitting on the stern deck, studying them and tracing imaginary lines that would allow him to identify them. The summer triangle was beginning to rise in the southeast, and he could see tendrils of Berenice's hair, the last to disappear of all the spring constellations. To the east, bright above a landscape black as ink, the belt of the hunter Orion was very visible, and following a straight line from Aldebaran to him, above Canis Major, he saw light that had traveled eight years from Sirius, the most brilliant binary star in the heavens, there where the Milky Way trailed to the south toward the regions of the Swan and the Eagle. All that worid of light and mythic images moved slowly overhead, and he, as if in the center of a unique sphere, was part of its silence and infinite peace.

"You're not teaching me the names of the stars anymore, Coy."

He hadn't heard her until she was at his side. She sat close but not touching him, her feet on the stern steps.

"I've taught you all the ones I know."

Water splashed as she put her feet in the water. At regular intervals the flicker from the lighthouse affirmed the hazy outline of her shadow.