Proceed With Caution

by Patricia Ratto

  On the other side of the passageway, Soria makes his bed. Lying in my bunk, I watch him take the sheets out of his light-blue bag; they look coarse, stiff with that starch, that rubber sizing they have from the factory. It’s a sure thing they didn’t give him time to wash them, no way did they give him enough time, like so many of us. He’s picked the top one, the third bunk from the bottom. He touches the mat; it probably feels damp. I had the same reaction when I went to lie down, but in fact it was cold; everything is cold here. Later on it’ll be a little warmer, human warmth, the warmth of machines, too, of being enclosed. He unzips the mattress cover, a kind of envelope made of tightly woven sailcloth. He takes out the blanket and leaves it on the lower bunk. He flips the mattress over, adjusts it, slaps it gently with his open palms, spreads out the fitted blue sheet, navy blue, now the top sheet, also blue, but with stripes, some lighter, others darker, and every so often a very thin white one. He tucks one corner underneath the mattress, fastening it in place with a knot; it seems Soria doesn’t like his sheets to come loose while he’s sleeping. The thing is, he’s very tall. He picks up the pillow, slightly sunken in the middle, exchanges it for the one on the lower bunk (he hasn’t noticed I’m watching him; he must think I’m sound asleep), fluffs it a little with his hands, slips on the pillowcase and places it at the head of the bed. He takes the blanket he left on the lower bunk, unfolds it with a firm shake in the air, and spreads it over the mattress, smoothing out the fold lines, tucks in all the edges along the entire bunk bed. It’s ready now. He picks up his bag again, rummages in his things till he finds his wallet, checks inside, pulls out a bill that looks like a fiver (judging from the color), folds it, and puts it back. He takes out a small photo, studies it intently, then looks upward. There’s a slot: he wedges the photo in and stares at it for a few seconds; he seems satisfied. Now he pulls out a tape recorder, the kind with keys, and some boxes of cassettes, which he sets under his pillow. He pulls on the cords, closing the bag with the rest of his belongings inside, takes a few steps toward the lockers, opens the door to one of the cubbies and sticks the bag inside, squashing it a little toward the bottom and the back; he closes the door. Voices are approaching; you can hear laughter, too. Somebody announces that it’s Monday, two-thirty. I pretend to be asleep so they won’t say I’ve been spying, and in fact I don’t want them to say anything. And I hear the order: we’re diving; from now on we’ll be traveling submerged.

  For days now I haven’t been able to find my boots. I’ve looked for them everywhere, but it’s hopeless; just in case, though, I look under the bunks once more. Slightly toward the direction where the torpedo launchers end, Almaraz is writing in a little black notebook, in a very neat script; on the table beside him, there’s a photo of a woman with a baby in her arms. I keep searching for my boots; no doubt someone hid them to play a gag on me, though it doesn’t matter now—who wants to wear knee-high leather boots, only to get them covered with grease and walk around uncomfortably, making noise, on a submarine? Sometimes I think that someone on land, behind a desk, making decisions about clothing or so many other issues, tries really hard to screw us up because he’s bored, as if all of us were part of a huge joke. When I think about those things, I can see the Hyena’s smile: it follows me around, sticks to me, and it’s hard for me to make it go away. Some people brought sneakers; others of us—like Soria and Heredia and Albaredo and so many more—walk around in our stocking feet, two or three pairs, one on top of the other, because it’s starting to get cold in here now that we’re submerged and are pretty far south. In the engine room socks get very dirty, everything gets dirty, full of grease, hardened by grime. On the other hand, the engines give off heat, more heat than they should, more than what’s safe, and maybe we ought to be turning back to get them fixed, but the CO said no, with the icy waters of the southern sea, that overheating will be balanced out. Even though the logical thing would’ve been to head north to intercept any subs or boats coming our way, we’re going in the opposite direction, and for the time being, that’s better for our engines. And so we keep navigating, paying a little more attention to the engines, more attention to the negotiations, as well, even though all we’ve had till now is silence. Most people say that this business will get straightened out and we’ll go home soon, but nobody can be sure of it; nobody knows anything here; nothing is for sure. Uncertainty, that’s the word—everything these days is uncertainty, except for the grime in the socks we’re wearing.

  When you’re submerged the silence is complete, like deafness, like when a person has a bad cold and their ears are stopped up. We’re all used to the permanent noise; that’s why this sudden silence almost hurts. Until you get used to it, you have a strange feeling, like an empty space; then, little by little, your hearing returns to normal when it recovers the sounds of movement on board: voices, footsteps, the clanking of tools, the cook’s pots crashing together. Just the same, it all ends up in a muffled din: if you’re in the bunk area, you’re close to the guys who are in the dining room, talking, but the sound hardly reaches you; it turns into a cottony murmur, even though the others are talking loudly. That’s how things are in here.

  There are times when I start thinking about food. I linger over the details of every dish I might eat, the colors, the exact flavor of every ingredient, but then, when it comes time to sit down at the table, I hardly eat a thing, nothing, really. Even though the food is good here, and the cook is excellent; but water is scarce, restricted, that’s for sure; you have to be careful not to use it all up. Today the others had potato omelets and fish for lunch. I heard Almaraz say it was very good. This morning Almaraz complained of pain in his chest; he blamed it on the effort he made carrying things aboard on Saturday. The pain’s not too bad, he explained, but it’s annoying. He seems better now, though quite a few guys must have been thinking about my case: the terrible pain a few days ago that knocked me to the floor of the engine room. Of course I’m fine now and I’ve already forgotten about all that. Besides, I haven’t felt the pain since. We’re going to start cleaning the boat, you’ve got to do something, waiting isn’t easy if you’re not doing something concrete. We all get moving, each one heading for the job he’s been assigned. When I pass by the CO’S cabin, I can see, through the little gap exposed by the half open door, that the nurse—standing against the curtain with those little yellow squares inside red squares that covers the shelves with our clothes—is taking his blood pressure. There’s no doctor on board. A few steps beyond that, the cook is reading a D’Artagnan comic book, leaning against the galley counter. Grunwald goes to the head, for three days he’s been running to the head again and again—to our head, the one for the petty officers—in spite of the charcoal that the nurse prescribed for him. We have one head for 28 petty officers, and there’s one head for seven officers. The cook puts aside the D’Artagnan he was reading and picks up another comic that he’s now starting to read. Grunwald comes out of the head, his face pale, and retreats down the passageway toward the bow, swearing softly. We may all be characters in a ridiculous comic strip.

  I guess it’s dawn because we’re rising to periscope depth in order to snorkel. The sub is rocking, the sea must be rough on the surface; the sub veers from port to starboard, and immediately you can hear the noise of things falling, rolling, crashing, breaking, some glasses, maybe cups that weren’t stowed away in the galley. In the half-light of nighttime, the first mate gets up to see what’s happened. Suddenly I hear him grumble and swear; then I peek out from my bunk and see him lift his foot, maybe the right one, and grab his toes. The nurse, who also has gotten up because of the noise, goes to him and checks him out. I’m very drowsy and go back to sleep.

  I’ve just finished my shift and leave the engine room for my bunk. On the way there I see the CO walking from the first periscope to his cabin. I take a few steps down the narrow passageway behind him, and when he reaches his cabin he suddenly turns around to go back the way he came. I stand aside to let him pas
s and take up my course again. I watch him go back and see that when he reaches the first periscope, he turns again to return to his cabin. I lower my eyes; it makes me uncomfortable to think that he may have caught me watching him, and so I continue walking toward the bunks as the CO once more arrives at his cabin, no doubt with the intention of turning yet again and walking back to the periscope. Standing in front of my bed, I discover that someone is lying in it. That happens sometimes, so I climb up to the top one, which is empty. Meanwhile I see Soria arrive, climb up, and collapse in his own bunk, at the same level as the one I’m in now, but on the opposite side of the passageway. I rearrange the pillow and lie down. Soria lies down too, and now he stretches his arm up in the air. There must be some 40 centimeters between him and the ceiling; everything is narrow here, compressed, and he’s passing his hand over the little photo he had placed in the slot. Forty centimeters to the ceiling, and then, tons of icy water, tons of ocean above my head, above the heads of the others, above the head of the CO as he comes and goes from the first periscope to his cabin and from his cabin to the first periscope, everyone under tons of water. I never stopped to think about this in spite of all the time I’ve been a submariner, never until now, maybe because now everything seems to be different. So much endless water out there, so many things together in the narrow space of this tube. The fluorescent lights go out, the night navigation lights go on. If not for that, it would be impossible to tell: there’s no day or night in here.

  The little black curtain of the bunk beneath Soria’s moves: someone is opening it, he stands up and consults his watch: it’s Heredia, it must be time for his shift, they’re probably going to take advantage of the night to rise to snorkel altitude and do the venting. Heredia climbs out of his bunk, straightens the sheets a little, zips the case shut to cover everything, picks up the crate of apples that’s sitting on the lower bunk and places it on his bunk. For a moment he stands there looking at the fruit, and so do I, some of them wrapped in delicate, purple paper, others unwrapped, red and shiny, crossed by a few green streaks. And Heredia emerges slowly, walking toward the torpedo area. Apples, apples, one on top of another, next to one another, under one another, apples in an apple crate. We’re rising now; I can feel it in my body. Besides, the apple crate has slid a few centimeters sternward.

  They’re playing truco on the aft table. Almaraz is writing in his little black notebook again, someone is drinking coffee, Polski smiles as he draws a cartoon of one of us on a piece of paper with the shield of the Argentine Navy. I pass behind the benches, circling around them, and suddenly I think I see—underneath the curtain separating the table from the bunks at stern, which we call the red light district—the tips of my boots. I think they’re my boots because one of them has a small, dark, curved nick at the tip, which I made some time ago. I don’t say anything. Either someone is playing a gag on me or else I must have left them there by mistake, because it was in this section that I fell asleep during the previous campaign. And yet I remember looking for them and not seeing them. Or maybe I just think I looked for them, but I only meant to, I don’t know: lately I’ve been getting things mixed up; it’s as if facts and thoughts have the same weight, as if everything is consistent, but at the same time slippery. No matter: just in case this was only a gag, I carefully pick up the boots and don’t say anything; once more I pass behind the card players and silently walk back to my bunk, placing them on top of it—resting against one of the edges of the bed—and I cover them with the blanket I sometimes use to cover my feet.

  For a few days now we’ve had a certain noise; it comes from above, probably from someplace between the hull and the deck. When the sub rolls, the noise begins: taka-taka-taka, taka-taka-taka, tak, and then taka-taka-taka, taka-taka-taka, but we don’t know what causes it. Then it suddenly disappears and we don’t hear it again and we go on doing our usual thing. Today is clothes-changing day, and since we need to save water, the clothes aren’t washed, so all of us put our dirty stuff in a bag and someone adds rocks, too, the rocks that were loaded on board specifically to act as ballast when they throw the filled bags out the garbage ejector at the stern. Nobody wants them to float to the top for the Brits to discover, so that’s why the rocks, to leave our dirty rags at the bottom of the sea. Taka-taka-taka, taka-taka-taka, here comes the noise again. I hope someone will decide to do something, though surfacing at a time like this would mean revealing our presence, taka-taka-taka, taka-taka-taka-tak. The noise, that noise—sooner or later it’s going to give us away.

  I watch Soria and Torres work; for days now they’ve been wearing their life jackets all the time. A submariner’s life jacket has its special features: an inflatable part that goes around the neck, and on the chest a metal sheet under which there’s a bottle with gas that’s used to fill up the inflatable part, in addition to a series of straps and loops to adjust it to the body. Well, it’s obvious this isn’t exactly the most comfortable thing in the world. All day and all night Torres and Soria wear their life jackets for doing their work as machinists, for eating, for sleeping, for taking a shit. They’re afraid, though if not for the life jackets, nobody would notice their fear because they keep doing what they have to do like the rest of us. Now they’re calling us to our stations; it’s a drill so that we’ll be prepared in case the day comes when we really do have to man the battle stations. I see Olivero pass behind Marini, who’s standing in front of the fire control computer; Olivero advances, his head hanging, maybe as a precaution to avoid exchanging looks with Marini in case he should accidentally turn around. Ever since we started the campaign they haven’t been talking to each other; they were always good friends, but now they avoid one another all the time. Something must have happened between them. Marini sits down in the computer operator’s seat; we all occupy our stations, Torres and Soria with their life jackets on their backs. The tension has grown, you can tell by certain gestures; I, on the other hand, feel fairly calm even though I can’t really explain why.

  Beards have grown, nobody shaves; we’re surrounded by water but there is no water, not for shaving; there’s no reason to shave, either, no motivation, no one to do it for. That’s why they all go around scratching themselves; a beard itches when it starts to grow, it itches a lot for a few days; later you get used to it and the hair grows and stops itching. That time will come soon, and by then we’ll surely have our hands—and our minds—busy with other things. All of us bearded, except Soria, who’s too young, so young that his whiskers haven’t even started to grow yet.