The Nautical Chart (25 page)

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 the 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.

"Don't you think that's interesting?" "Oh, very."

She studied him appraisingly, as if she had caught the irony in his response. Coy kept a straight face. One of these times, he thought, she's going to end up telling me something that's actually worth listening to. He looked over her shoulder. The children were running back, sweaty, victorious; as trophies they were carrying tail feathers from the male, who at this moment. Coy calculated, must be winging toward Ciudad El Cabo at about one hundred and ten miles an hour. Maybe, he thought, Herod's massacre dispatched more than innocence.

Tanger had fallen silent again, as if considering whether it was worth the effort to continue. Her head was tipped to one side and her fingers were drumming on the edge of the table with a rhythm that may have betrayed impatience.

'Are you at all interested in what I'm telling your

"Of course I'm interested."

For some reason, her irritation made him feel better about himself. He settled into a more comfortable position and adopted an expression of keen attention.

After a slight hesitation, Tanger went on. "When Charles in decided to create the cabinet for the
Pesquisa Secreta,
he appointed Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Conde de Aranda, as head. He was from Huesca in Aragon, twice a grandee of Spain, and had been a military man and a diplomat He was captain general of Valencia when, right in the middle of Esquilache's mutiny, the king summoned him to Madrid to entrust him with a governorship, the presidency of the Council of Castile, and the position of captain general of New Castile. Intelligent, cultivated, and enlightened, he went into the history books as a Mason, although it was never proved that he belonged to any lodge, and modern historians deny that affiliation. To the contrary, there was evidence that he was an eclectic, and, of all the members of the secret cabinet, he may have been the one who best knew the Ignatians, by whom he had been educated and with whom he had many ties, including a brother who was a Jesuit. Compared to rabid anti-Jesuits like the treasurer, Campomanes, the minister of justice, Roda, and Jose Monino, the future conde de Floridablanca, Aranda could be considered moderate in his feelings toward the Society. Even so, he agreed to head the cabinet and countersign its conclusions. The inquiry began in Madrid on June 8,1766, with Aranda presiding. He was accompanied by Roda, Monino, and other confirmed anti-Jesuits, or, as they were called then, Thomists, to contrast them with the pro-Ignatians or 'friends of the fourth vow.' And the investigation was carried out so discreetly that even the confessor to the king was not apprised.

"Nevertheless," Tanger continued, "there was an important connection between one man in the secret cabinet and a renowned Ignatian__ Paradoxically, one of the best friends of the Conde de Aranda was a Jesuit from Murcia, Padre Nicolas Escobar. Their relations had cooled slightly, but we know absolutely that until Aranda left his post as captain general of Valencia, bidden by the king, they were close friends. Although Aranda later destroyed his correspondence with Escobar, a few letters survive that corroborate their friendship."

"Have you seen those letters?’

"Yes. There are three, and they're in the library of the Universidad de Murcia, signed in Aranda's own hand. I obtained copies through a professor of cartography there, Nestor Perona, when I consulted him by telephone about the corrections we needed to apply to Urrutia's chart."

Another conquest, Coy thought. He imagined Tanger's effect, even by telephone, on any professor, Devastating.

"I have to admit that you've done your homework."

"You'll never know how hard I've worked. Which is why I'm not eager to let anyone snatch it out of my hands."

Now, Coy conceded, things were getting interesting. The story was moving away from handbooks and getting down to the fine print. Letters from this fellow Aranda. Maybe after all her ho-hum stories of secret cabinets and uncompromising kings, she was actually getting somewhere.