The Nautical Chart (4 page)

He thought of himself as nearly illiterate in music, but he loved jazz, its insolence and ingenuity. He had fallen in love with it during long watches on the bridge, when he was sailing as third officer aboard the
Fedallah,
a fruit carrier of the Zoe line whose first officer, a Galician they called Gallego Neira, had the five tapes of the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. They included musicians from Scott Joplin and Bix Beiderbecke to Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, passing through Armstrong, Ellington, Art Tatum, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and others. Hours and hours of jazz with a cup of coffee in his hands, nights beneath the stars huddled on the flying bridge, staring at the sea. The chief engineer, Gorostiola, who came from Bilbao and was better known as the Tucuman Torpedoman, was another passionate fan of that music, and the three of them—later they went on together to the
Tashtego,
a sister ship in the Zoe line—had shared jazz and friendship for six years, following the quadrangular route the
Fedallah.
cut as she carried cargoes of fruit and grain between Spain, the Caribbean, northern Europe, and the southern United States. That was a happy time in Coy's life.

From the floor below came the sound of the radio belonging to the landlady's daughter, who usually stayed up late studying. She was a sullen, graceless girl at whom he smiled courteously without ever receiving a greeting or a look in return. La Maritima had been a bathhouse—built in 1844 it said above the door facing the calle Arc del Teatre—and was later converted into a cheap rooming house for sailors. It straddled a rise between the old port and the Chinese quarter, and no doubt the girl's mother, a hard-faced woman with dyed red hair, had alerted the girl from an early age to the inherent dangers of her clientele, rough unscrupulous men who collected women in every port, hitting land with a raging thirst for alcohol, drugs, and more or less virgin girls.

Through the window, and blending with the jazz on his Walkman, he could hear every note of Noel Soto singing
"Noche de samba en Puerto Esparia."
Coy turned up the volume. He was naked except for his shorts; on his stomach, open and face down, lay the Spanish edition of Patrick O'Brian's
Master and Commander.
His mind, however, was miles away from the nautical feats of Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin. The stain on the ceiling resembled the outline of a coast, complete with capes and coves, and Coy followed an imaginary course between two extremes of the yellowish sea on the smooth ceiling.

It was raining when they left the Boadas. A fine rain slicked the asphalt and sidewalks with glimmering lights and misted halos around automobile headlights. She didn't seem to care that her suede jacket was getting wet, and they walked along the central paseo between newspaper kiosks and flower stands just beginning to close. A mime, stoic beneath the drizzle trickling down the white paint on his petrified face, followed passers-by with sad eyes after she bent down to leave a coin in his top hat. She walked on exactly as before, a little ahead of him and looking to her left, as if leaving to Coy the choice of occupying that space or discreetly fading away. He stole a glance at the hard profile behind smooth hair that rippled as she walked, and the dark-blue eyes occasionally turned toward him as the prelude to a thoughtful look or a smile.

There weren't many people in the Schilling. Again he ordered a Sapphire gin and tonic and she settled for tonic alone. Eva, the Brazilian waitress, poured their drinks while staring at Coy's companion, then arched an eyebrow toward him, drumming on the counter with the same long green-polished fingernails that had been conscientiously digging into his naked back three dawns before. But Coy ran his hand over his wet hair and smiled his inalterable smile, very sweet and tranquil, until the waitress muttered "bastard," smiled in return, and even refused to charge for his drink. Coy and the woman sat at a table facing the large mirror reflecting rows of bottles along the wall. There they continued their intermittent conversation. She was not talkative; at this point she had told him only that she worked in a museum. Five minutes later he learned that it was the Museo Naval in Madrid. He deduced that she had studied history, and that someone, maybe her father, was career military. He didn't know whether that had anything to do with her well-brought-up-girl look. He had also glimpsed a contained strength, an internal, discreet self-confidence that he found intimidating.

Coy did not bring up the guy with the gray ponytail until later, when they were walking beneath the arcades on the Plaza Real. She had confirmed that the Urrutia was a valuable if not unique piece, but it wasn't clear whether she had acquired it for the museum or for herself. It's an important maritime atlas, she commented evasively when he alluded to the scene on Calle Consell de Cent, and there's always someone who's interested in that kind of thing. Collectors, she had added after a minute. People like that. Then she dipped her head a little and asked what his life was like in Barcelona, making it obvious that she wanted to change the subject. Coy told her about La Maritima, about his walks through the port, and about the sunny mornings on the terrace of the Universal bar opposite the headquarters of the Merchant Marine, where he could sit for three or four hours with a book and his Walkman for the price of a beer. He also told her about the long weeks he had ahead of him, about the frustration of finding himself ashore, without work and money. At that moment he thought he saw, at the far end of the arcade, the short, mustached individual with the gelled hair and checked jacket who had been at the auction house that evening. He watched him a minute to be sure, and turned to the girl to ask whether she had recognized him too, but her eyes were empty of expression, as if she'd noticed nothing in particular.

When Coy looked back, the little man was still there, strolling with his hands clasped behind his back, casual as you please.

By now they were at the door of the Club de la Pipa. Coy quickly calculated how much he had left in his wallet and decided that he could invite her for another drink, and that in the worst case Roger, the manager, would run a tab for him. The girl seemed surprised by the look of the place, the bell at the door, the ancient stairs, and the room on the second floor with its curious bar, sofa, and engravings of Sherlock Holmes on the walls. There was no jazz that night, and they stood at the deserted counter while Roger worked a crossword puzzle at the other end. She wanted to try the Sapphire gin because she liked the smell. She declared her enchantment with the place, adding that she never would have imagined there was anything like it in Barcelona. Coy said it was going to be closed down because the neighbors complained of the noise and the music; a ship soon to be scrapped, one might say. She had a drop of gin and tonic at a corner of her mouth, and he thought of how fortunate he was to have only three drinks in his belly, because with a couple more he would have reached out and wiped that drop off with his fingers, and she didn't seem the kind who would let anything be wiped away by some sailor she had just met and whom she studied with a mixture of reserve, courtesy, and gratitude. Finally he asked her name and she smiled again—this time after a few beats, as if she had pushed herself to do it—and her eyes met Coy's for a long, intense second before she spoke her name. It was a name as unique as her look, he thought, and he pronounced it once aloud, slowly, before the distant smile was erased entirely from her lips. Afterward Coy asked Roger for a cigarette to offer her, but she didn't want to smoke anymore. She raised the glass to her lips and he saw her white teeth through the glass, and heard the ice tapping against them with a moist clicking. His eyes traveled to the silver chain quietly gleaming at the open neck of her shirt, on skin that in that light seemed warmer, and he wondered whether anyone had ever counted those freckles all the way to Finisterre. Whether they had been counted one by one, on a southerly heading, just as he longed to do. It was then, when he raised his eyes, that it was evident she had sensed his look, and he felt his heart skip a beat when he heard her say it was time to go.

ON
the landlady's daughters radio the same voice was now launching into
"La reina del barrio chino."
Coy turned off his Walkman— Miles Davis was soloing
"Saeta,"
the fourth theme on "Sketches of Spain"—and stopped staring at the stain on the ceiling. The book and headphones fell to the bed when he stood up and walked across the narrow room, about the size of the cell he had occupied for two days in La Guaira that time the Torpedoman, Gallego Neira, and he, fed up with eating fruit, had left the ship to buy fish to make a bouillabaisse. Neira had said, "Have a cup of coffee and wait for me, just fifteen minutes for a quickie and I'll be back." After a while they'd heard him call for help through the window, and had run inside and busted up the bar, busted everything— tables, bottles, and the ribs of the thug who'd taken the Galician's wallet. Captain don Madas Norena, mad as hell, had to get them out by bribing the Venezuelan police with a handful of dollars he then systematically deducted, down to the last penny, from their pay.

Coy felt a tug of nostalgia, remembering all that. The mirror over the sink reflected his muscular shoulders and weary, unshaven face. He let the water run until it was good and cold and then splashed it over his face and the back of his neck, snorting and shaking his head like a dog in the rain. He toweled himself vigorously and stood for a while studying his face: strong nose, dark eyes, rugged features, as if he were scoring points in his favor. Zero, he concluded. This bird is not going to be feasting on a peach.

He pulled the dresser drawer out and felt behind it until his fingers found the envelope where he kept his money. There wasn't much, and in the last few days it had dwindled dangerously. He stood rooted there for a moment, mulling over his idea, and finally he went to the closet and took out the bag containing his meager belongings: a few dog-eared books, his officer s bars, on which the gold was beginning to verge toward a mossy green, jazz tapes, a wallet-size photo album—the training ship
Estrella del Sur,
close to the wind, Torpedoman and Gallego Neira at the counter of a bar in Rotterdam, Coy himself wearing a first officer's stripes, leaning on the rail of the
Isla Negra
in New York harbor—and the wooden box in which he kept his sextant. It was a good sextant, a Weems & Plath with seven filters, black metal and a gilt arc, that Coy had bought in installments, beginning with his first salary after earning his navigator's certificate. Satellite positioning systems had sounded the death knell for that instrument, but any sailor worth his salt knew its reliability—as a guard against electronic failures— in establishing the latitude at midday, when the sun reached its highest point in the sky. Even at night, using a star low on the horizon, there were the nautical ephemerides, tables, and three minutes of calculations. In the same way that military men clean and coddle their weapons, Coy had kept the sextant free of saline corrosion and dirt over all those years, cleaning its mirrors and testing for possible lateral and index errors. Even now, without a ship beneath his feet, he often carried it on his walks along the coast, to sit on a rock with the horizon of the open sea before him and calculate angles. That custom dated from the time he was sailing as a student on the
Monte Pequeno,
his third ship if you counted the
Estrella del Sur. Monte Pequeno
was a 275,000-ton tanker owned by Enpetrol, and her captain, don Agustin de la Guerra, liked to solemnify the stroke of midday by inviting his officers to a tot of sherry after they and the young midshipmen had compared calculations made on the flying bridge, the captain with watch in hand and they shooting the sun's tangent on the horizon through the smoked niters of their instruments. He was a captain of the old school; a little behind the times but an excellent sailor from the days when large tankers steamed to the Persian Gulf in ballast through the Suez Canal and returned laden with cargo around Africa, past the Cape. Once he had thrown a steward down the ladder because he lacked respect. When the union complained, he replied that the steward was a lucky man, because a century and a half before he would have been hanged from the mainmast. On my ship, he had told Coy once, you're either in agreement with the captain or you keep your mouth shut. That was during a Christmas dinner in the Mediterranean, sailing into terrible weather—a hard, force 10 wind that obliged them to cut back the engines off Cape Bon. Coy, an apprentice seaman, had disagreed with some banal remark by the captain, who had thrown his napkin on the table and ordered Coy to stand watch outside, on the starboard flying bridge, where Coy passed the next four hours in darkness, whipped by the wind, rain, and spray breaking over the tanker. Don Agustin de la Guerra was a rare survivor from other times, despotic and hard on board, but when a Panamanian cargo ship with a drunken Russian watch officer had rammed de la Guerra's stern one night, when rain and sleet saturated radars in the English Channel, he'd been able to keep the tanker afloat and steer her into Dover without losing a drop of crude, saving the company the cost of tugs. Any knothead, he said, can sail around the world these days by pressing buttons. But if the electronics go down or the Americans decide to black out their damn satellites—the devil's own invention—or some Bolshevik sonofabitch runs up your ass, a good sextant, a compass, and a chronometer will still get you anywhere. So practice, my boy. Practice. Obedient, Coy had practiced tirelessly for days and months and years; later too, and with that same sextant, he had performed more difficult observations on cloudy, dangerous nights, or in the middle of strong storms racing across the Atlantic, clinging, soaked, to the .gunnel while the bow slammed down like a machete and he, glued to the eyepiece, awaited a glimpse of the faint gold disk among clouds driven by a northwesterly wind.

He felt a quiet melancholy as he hefted the familiar weight of the sextant in his hands, sliding the index arm and hearing it tick along the toothed arc that marked from 1 to 120 the degrees on any terrestrial meridian. He computed how much he could get for it from Sergi Solans, who had been admiring the instrument for years. After all, Sergi would say when they were raising a glass at the Schilling, they weren't making sextants like that anymore. Sergi was a good kid who had been buying almost all the drinks since Coy found himself ashore and out of money; nor did he hold a grudge because Coy had gone to bed with Eva the night the Brazilian beauty was wearing a T-shirt diabolically clinging to the size 40 breasts that never saw a bra and Sergi was too drunk to fight for her. He had also studied sailing with Coy, and shared a ship for a few months when both were trainees on the
Migalota,
a Ro-Ro owned by Rodriguez & Saulnier. Now he was studying for his captain's exam as first officer on a Trans-Mediterranean ferry that plowed the Barcelona-Palma line twice a week. It's like driving a bus, he said. But with a sextant like that in your cabin, you'd feel like a real sailor.