The Nautical Chart (37 page)

He kept seeing the lights of the
Carpanta,
and it seemed to him they were taking in the Genoa. From his position relative to her and to the merchant ship, Coy realized that as soon as El Piloto saw him go overboard, he had dropped the sails, slowing the ship, and now was preparing to backtrack and try to reach the point Coy had gone over. Undoubtedly he was on one rail and Tanger on the other, searching for him in the tossing sea. Maybe they'd launched the emergency life raft with the luminous buoy attached by a short line, and were heading there now to see if Coy had found it. As for his own light, the one on his life jacket, he was sure the swell hid it from them.

The green starboard light went by close in front of him, and Coy yelled, futilely waving an arm. The movement plunged him beneath a breaking crest, and when he reemerged, snorting the saltwater that smarted in nostrils, eyes, and mouth, the green light had become the white light at the stern. The
Carpanta
was moving away from him.

This is really stupid, he thought. He was beginning to feel the cold, and the light sparkling at his shoulder seemed invisible to everyone but him. The jacket inflated around his neck kept his head above water most of the time, but now he couldn't see any of the
Carpanta's
lights, only the glow of the merchant ship in the distance. There is a good possibility, he told himself, that they won't find me. And that this damned light will wear out the batteries and go dead, and I'll be out here in the dark. LLOOOW: Law of Lights Out and On Our Way. Once, playing cards, an old engine man had said, "There's always one fool who loses. And if you look around and don't see him, it's because you're the fool." He looked around him. Dark water splashed against the inflated collar. No one. Sometimes someone dies, he added to himself. And if you don't see another person, the one who may the is you. He looked up at the stars. With their help he could establish the direction of the coast, but it wouldn't do any good, he was too tar to reach it swimming. If El Piloto, who would have pinpointed where he went overboard, radioed a Mayday, man overboard, the search wouldn't get underway before dawn, and by that time he would have been in the drink five or six hours, with serious hypothermia. There was nothing he could do except husband his strength and try to slow the loss of body heat. Position HELP, Heat Escape Lessening Posture, as the manuals called it. Or something like that. So he tried to adopt a fetal position, pressing his bent legs to his belly and folding his arms across his chest. This is ridiculous, he thought. Tucked up like a baby, at my age. But as long as the strobe light kept flashing, there was hope.

LIGHTS. Drifting, josded by the waves, eyes dosed, and moving as little as possible, to conserve warmth and energy, with the white flashes rhythmically blinding him, Coy kept thinking about lights, to the point of obsession. Friendly lights, enemy lights, stern, anchor, port and starboard, green beacons, blue beacons, white beacons, buoys, stars. The difference between life and death. A new crest whirled him around like a buoy in the water, once again dunking him. He emerged shaking his head, blinking to dear the salt from his burning eyes. Another crest and again he whirled, and then, right before him, at less than forty feet, he saw two lights, one red and one white. The red was the portside of the
Carpanta,
and the white was the beam from the flashlight Tanger was holding at the bow as El Piloto slowly maneuvered to place Coy to windward.

LYING
in his berth, Coy listened to the sound of water against the hulL The
Carpanta
was sailing northeast again, with a favorable wind. And the castaway was rocked to sleep and cozy in a sleeping bag and warm layer of blankets. They had pulled him on board at the stem—after tossing him the bight of a line beneath his arms— exhausted and clumsy in his life jacket and dripping clothes, and with the light that kept flashing at his shoulder until once on deck he himself yanked off the jacket and threw it into the water. His legs gave way by the time he reached the cockpit. He had begun to shake violently, and between them, after throwing a blanket around him, El Piloto and Tanger got him to his cabin. Dazed and docile as a baby, devoid of will and strength, he let them undress him and towel him down. El Piloto tried not to rub too hard, to prevent the cold that had numbed Coy's arms and legs from rising toward his heart and brain. They had stripped off his last clothing as he lay on the bunk, lost in the mist of a strange daydream. He had felt the rough touch of El Piloto's hands, and also Tanger's smoother ones on his naked skin. He felt her fingers taking his pulse—which beat slow and steady. She had held his torso as El Piloto pulled off his T-shirt, his feet as they took off his socks, and finally his waist and upper legs when they eased off his soaked undershorts. At one moment, the palm of Tanger's hand had held his buttock, just where it joined the leg, resting there, light and warm, a few seconds. Then they zipped up the sleeping bag and pulled blankets over the top, turned out the light, and left him alone.

He wandered through the green darkness that called from below, and stood interminable watch through a daze of snows and fog and echoes on the radar. With his wax pencil he traced straight routes on the radar screen while up on deck horses ate wooden containers marked "Horses" and silent captains strode back and forth without a word for him. The calm gray water looked like undulating lead. It was raining on seas and ports and cranes and cargo ships. Seated on bollards, motionless men and women, soaked by the rain, were absorbed in oceanic dreams. And deep below, beside a bronze bell silenced in the center of a blue sphere, sperm whales slept peacefully, their mouths curving in something like a smile, heads down, tails up, suspended in the weightless dreams of whales.

The
Carpanta
pitched slightly and heeled a bit more. Coy half-opened his eyes in the darkness of the cabin, cuddled in the comforting warmth that was gradually restoring life to his stiff body, rolled tight against the hull by the list of the ship. He was safe. He had escaped the maw of the sea, as merciless in its whims as it was unpredictable in its clemency. He was on a good ship steered by friendly hands, and he could sleep whenever he wanted without worrying, because other eyes and other hands were watching over his sleep, helping him follow the ghost of the lost ship that waited in the shadows into which he had nearly sunk forever. The woman's hands that had touched him as they removed his clothes returned to turn back some of the blankets and then feel his forehead and take his pulse. Now, at the recollection of that touch, that palm against his naked buttock, a slow, warm erection swelled in the haven of warming thighs. That made him smile, quiet and drowsy, almost with surprise. It was good to be alive. Later he went back to sleep, frowning because the world wasn't as wide as it had been, and because the ocean was shrinking. He dreamed of forbidden seas and barbarous coasts, and islands where arrest warrants, and plastic bags, and empty tin cans never washed ashore. And he wandered at night through ports without ships among women accompanied by other men. Women who looked at him because they weren't happy, as if they wanted to pass their unhap-piness on to him.

He wept silently behind closed eyes. To console himself-he rested his head against the wooden side of the ship, listening to the sea on the other side of the thin planking separating him from Eternity.

XI

The Sargasso Sea

"... the sun-resorts of Sargasso where the bones come up to lie and bleach and mock the passing ships."

THOMAS
PYNCHON
,
Gravity's
Rainbow

When he went up on deck, the
Carpanta
was becalmed in the windless dawn, with the sheer coastline very near and a cloudless sky shading from blackish gray to blue in the west. The sun's rays shone horizontally on the rock face, the sea to the east, and the
Carpanta's
mast, painting them red. "It was here," said Tanger.

She had a nautical chart unfolded on her knees, and beside her El Piloto was smoking a cigarette and holding a cup of coffee. Coy went back to the stern. He had put on dry pants and a T-shirt but his lips and tangled hair still had traces of salt from the nocturnal dip. He looked around him at the circling gulls that cawed and planed before alighting on the waves. The coast stretched not much more than a mile to the west, and then opened in the form of a cove. He recognized Punta Percheles, Punta Negra, and the island of Mazarrdn in the distance. Some eight miles to the east rose the dark mass of Cabo Tinoso.

He went back to the cockpit. El Piloto had gone below to get a cup of warm coffee for him, and Coy gulped it down, his face screwing up as he tasted the last drops of the bitter brew. On the chart Tanger pointed to the landscape that lay before her eyes. She was wearing the black sweater and was barefoot. Blond strands of hair escaped from beneath Piloto's wool cap.

"This is the place," she said, "where the
Dei Gloria
sprang her mast and she had to fight."

Coy nodded, eyes fixed on the nearby coast as Tanger described the details of the drama. Everything she had researched, all the information gathered from yellowed files, manuscripts, and Urrutia's old nautical charts, was woven together in her calm voice, as if she had been there herself. Coy had never listened to anyone with so much conviction. Listening to her as his eyes searched the semicircle of dark coast stretching to the northeast, he tried to reconstruct his own version of the facts. This is how it was, or more precisely, how it could have been. To do that, he called on the books he'd read, his experience as a sailor, and the days and nights of his youth, when he was borne by silent sails across this sea she had brought him back to. That was why it was easy to imagine it, and when Tanger paused and looked at him, and El Piloto's blue eyes also turned to him, Coy bunched his shoulders a little, touched his nose, and filled in the holes in the narrative. He gave details, ventured situations, and described maneuvers, placing them all in that dawn of February 4, 1767, when the
lebeche
veered to north as the sun rose, making hunter and prey alike sail close to the wind. In those circumstances, he said, the apparent wind was added to the true wind, and the brigantine and the xebec would have been sailing close-hauled, making seven or eight knots—driver, mainsail, jibs, topsails, and the yards braced well to leeward on the
Dei Gloria,.
lateens on the fore- and mizzenmast sharp as knife blades on the corsair, and sailing closer to the wind than her prey. Both heeling to starboard, with water pouring through the lee scuppers, helmsmen alert at the tiller, captains focused on wind and canvas, knowing that the first to commit an error would lose the race.

Errors. At sea—as in fencing, Coy had heard somewhere—everything turned on keeping your adversary at a distance and anticipating his moves. The black cloud forming flat and low in the distance, the slightly dark area of choppy water, the almost imperceptible foam breaking around a rock just beneath the surface—all augured deadly thrusts that only constant vigil could parry. That made the sea the perfect metaphor for life. The moment to take in a reef, went the sensible seafaring saying, was precisely when you asked yourself if it wasn't time to take in a reef. The sea hid a dangerous and stubborn old scoundrel, who lay waiting in apparent camaraderie for the chance to bare his claws at the first sign of inattention. With ease but no pity, he killed the careless and the stupid, and the best good sailors could wish for was to be tolerated and not harassed. To pass unnoticed. Because the sea had no sense of remorse and, like the God of the Old Testament, never forgave, unless by chance or by whim. The words "charity" and "compassion," among many others, were left behind when you cast off. And in a certain way, Coy believed, it was fair.

The error, he decided, had in the end been committed by Captain Elezcano. Or maybe it wasn't an error, and it just so happened that the law of the sea tilted in favor of the corsair. With the enemy drawing nearer, preventing her from reaching safe haven beneath the guns of the Mazanon tower, the brigantine had set her topgallants despite the damage to the topmasts. It wasn't difficult to picture the rest: Captain Elezcano staring upward, apprehensive, while sailors, swaying on the footropes and overhanging the sea to starboard, untie the gaskets securing the upper sails, which snap free with a brief flap, straining to lift them to the yards and haul the sheets. The ship's boy approaching the poop with the latitude and longitude obtained by the navigating officer, and the distracted order to enter them in the logbook from the captain, who never shifts his gaze from on high. Then the boy by his side, gazing upward as he tucks the paper with the penciled coordinates into his pocket. Suddenly the sinister creaking of the wood as it splits, and halyards and canvas dropping to leeward, tangled by the wind, and the suicidal lurch of the ship and all men aboard with their heart in their mouth, knowing at that instant their fate is sealed.

There must have been sailors aloft, cutting the useless rigging and throwing the wreckage of the topmast and sail into the sea, while on deck Captain Elezcano gave the order to open fire. The gun ports would have been open since first light, loaded and ready, gunners waiting. Maybe the captain decided suddenly to swing and surprise the approaching pursuer, undoubtedly giving him the starboard broadside, with men bent behind the guns, waiting for the hull and sails of the xebec to bear across before them. Battle waged almost yardarm to yardarm, said the report written by the maritime authorities from the ship's boy's testimony. That meant that the two ships would have been extremely close, the men on the corsair ready to fire and board, when the
Dei Gloria
showed her starboard beam with open gun ports spouting smoke from lit fuses, letting fly a cannonade at point-blank range—five guns spitting four-pound balls. It had to have caused some damage, but at that moment the corsair must have come around to starboard, unless the lateen sails allowed her to maintain her course, sailing close to the wind, and cut the wake of the brigantine, in turn loosing a mortal broadside in retaliation, sweeping the
Dei Gloria's
deck from stern to stem. Two long six-pounders and four four-pounders; some twenty-eight pounds of ball and shot shattering line, wood, and body parts. Then, as the gunners aboard the corsair yelled jubilantly, seeing the wounded and dying enemy drag themselves across decks slick with blood, the two ships would have approached each other, more slowly each time, until they were nearly motionless, firing ferociously at each other.