A muffled sneeze, barely audible, though there are two or three guys with colds, since it’s very cold in here. Judging from the nearness of the sound, I imagine it must be Cuéllar. I poke my head out of the engine room; Cuéllar blows his nose gently to avoid making noise, Medrano, who’s sitting in front of the sonar, gestures, and Cuéllar approaches, Medrano whispers something to him and hands him his earphones, Cuéllar puts them on, listens attentively for a few moments, nods, returns the earphones to Medrano, and while Medrano continues to listen, Cuéllar takes broad, but quiet, steps toward the control room and explains something to the communications officer; he must have told him they’ve detected noise on the hydrophones because immediately they call us to our battle stations, and so I return to the engine room. We’re in a permanent safe zone, in our patrol area, just one hundred miles from the exclusion zone, and we all know that this is no drill: for the first time in our lives, this call to the battle stations is absolutely real. Maybe it’s a sub, says Soria, huddled in his life jacket; it has to be English if it’s circling around here, Torres adds from inside his; none of our ships are in this zone. I look out toward the sonar section and see Medrano making signs. Then someone turns off the fans to eliminate even the tiniest sound, and suddenly there’s a void that seems to be sucking up everything except this new deep, desperate silence. Possibly a freighter, Medrano whispers to the communications officer. All of us standing close enough to hear look at one another; no one utters a word, no one moves. Cuéllar presses his handkerchief to his nose; a sneeze right now would be unfortunate. Soria adjusts the buckles on his life jacket, Torres copies his movements, I stare at the black grease stains on the toes of my socks. Almaraz directs his gaze to the oxygen meter, Polski grips the horizontal rudder he’s operating. Freighter withdrawing, sir, Medrano announces—in a soft, but confident voice—a few eternal seconds later. We breathe, we calm down, though just a little because we remain in silence, a cautious, superstitious silence, till Medrano confirms that the sounds on the hydrophone have stopped. Not until then do we take a deep breath, our bodies loosen up, our faces relax. The cook brings coffee to the sonar technicians, saying have some coffee, boys, and he hands over the two pitchers with a smile. Medrano and Cuéllar thank him, look at one another, clink the pitchers together, satisfied, toasting, and we all begin to move around, each one doing his own thing, nothing happened, not this time. The nurse comes by with his first aid kit; I follow him with my eyes to see what’s going on. Nothing, apparently; he chats with the Executive Officer, who gets up from his chair at the control table and heads for the officers’ cabins, followed by the nurse. I decide to go back to my bunk for a handkerchief, I think I may have caught cold, too; when I pass by the officers’ cabins, the half-open door allows me to see that the Executive Officer has removed his right sock, and he’s having another treatment. I continue on my way to my bunk to get the handkerchief and I see that my boots have disappeared; the blanket I use to cover my feet is neatly folded, just like the day we set sail and I made my bed, folded in thirds in that special way I do it, just as if the boots had never been there. I run my hand over it to make sure of what at first glance seems obvious, confirming their absence. I can’t try to look for them now; it’s my shift in the engine room, I’ll do it when I’m done. I take the handkerchief I keep under the pillow, it’s damp but I blow my nose anyway, I adjust the pillow, which also feels damp, the sheets are damp, the blankets are damp, the towels, clothing, socks, skin, tools, the dry crackers, everything’s damp in here. I stick the handkerchief in my pocket and walk to my post next to the engines; I cross paths with the nurse, who has finished the Executive Officer’s treatment and is now on his way to the galley. Someone asks Almaraz about the pain in his chest. Almaraz replies that the pain has gone away and that he feels okay. I continue on my way to the engine room; a drop suddenly falls on the middle of my head from a manifold above: even our breath condenses and rains down on us. When I pass by the control room, someone mentions that there are problems with the fire control computer; I see an officer sitting next to Marini, both of them at the keyboard. I pass through the control compartment, arrive at the engine room. Soria looks at me without seeing me; a heavy, slow drop of water breaks off from the lower buckle of his life jacket and starts to fall and will keep on falling till it bursts, if nobody gets in its way, right on the tip of the sock on his right foot.
It’s Sunday, somebody says, which means it’s already been a week since we weighed anchor. We’ve had no communications or news, we don’t know what’s happening outside. Today the technicians were working on the computer again, it seems there are operational problems that prevent us from calculating the torpedo launches precisely, leaving us helpless and hopelessly ridiculous. My shift is over, and before going off to take a nap, I go on a quest to recover my boots; I decide to return to the bunks in the red light district to see if someone has hidden them there again; it doesn’t seem likely they would choose the same place, but I can’t think of where else to begin, and so that’s where I’m going. There are noises in the galley, I peek in through the open door and see them, Almaraz and Polski, opening a couple of boxes of powder, one of them preparing to make cakes, the other cracking eggs, both of them standing before an enormous metal bowl. Now Polski uses a spoon to pry open the cover of the tin of powdered milk that sits on the counter, then—spoonful by spoonful—he transfers the white powder to a plastic measuring cup with lines to indicate measurements, adds water, stirs. Almaraz takes a huge pot from the pantry and places it on a burner. Now Polski beats the milk with the rest of the preparation. Almaraz greases a large mold, turns on the oven, dumps cocoa powder into the pot, adds several measures of powdered milk, a few tablespoons of sugar, then enough water to combine, stirs, lowers the flame under the pot, while Polski pours the batter into the greased mold and puts it in the oven. I continue walking toward the bow; there are a few people gathered there, playing truco again. At the same table Olivero writes something on some papers, concentrating hard; he writes and crosses out and writes again. Heredia asks them to let him know when they’re done, as Polski has put him in charge of cleaning and setting the table. I take advantage of the situation to slip unnoticed behind those who are sitting around the table, and suddenly I see them, in the same spot where I found them last time, both boots, their tips barely visible beneath the bunk’s drawn curtains. What a stupid joke, I say to myself, and suddenly the dark groove at the tip of the left boot reminds me—I don’t know why—of the Hyena’s grimace. We’re on a mission, sailing in the Lemere Canal, near the Picton Islands, at that time in conflict with Chile; it’s very shallow where we are, and the sonar tech reports that he can hear noise on the hydrophones that he thinks is a launch. The Hyena is the commanding officer and he’s taking us to a place where we shouldn’t be, so shallow that if it does turn out to be one of the Chilean torpedo boats patrolling the strait, it could destroy us even if it launched candies. At the sonar tech’s warning, the Hyena’s face wrinkles up, he turns even paler than usual, we all see the fear on his face and the fact that he doesn’t know what to do. Like every other day, he’s wearing his red bathrobe with the white scarf around his neck, acting for all the world like a German submarine captain from the Second World War. Suddenly, to our collective relief, the sonar tech announces: Sir, I classify the contact as a crabbing launch or a fishing boat. Then he half-collects himself and orders the periscope raised to confirm what the sonar tech petty officer has just announced, immediately followed by the order to lower periscope at full speed because the launch is getting closer, closer, it starts to pass over us, very nearby, continues on its way, still above us, till it passes by, starts moving away, away; we were lucky, that’s all, just a bit of luck. A few hours later, now out of the strait, we emerge: the Hyena, in his red robe and white scarf, peers out of the sub’s sail with a pair of binoculars. I stand there watching him as if all that were happening right now; suddenly a fog begins to cover him, a fog thick enough to hi
de his loud bathrobe and his bright scarf, though not solid enough to conceal his smile, which is now a laugh, a thunderous burst echoing inside the dark dent in my left boot. My boots! I grab the boots, I don’t know how much time has passed, sometimes I’m not fully aware of that, time turns elastic here, it goes by quickly or stops indefinitely, but the fact is that now the others have finished their card game and are gathering the cards together, tidying the table. Olivero picks up his papers, covered with strikeouts, folds them, and stores them, together with the ballpoint pen, in his jacket pocket; Heredia has returned from the galley with a damp dishrag, waiting for everybody to finish so he can start wiping down the table. Since they’re busy, I use their distraction to remove my jacket and wrap up my boots in it, and I slip away to my bed, wondering why the hell I’m so concerned with getting my boots back if I don’t wear them, if the joke is just an innocent detail in the midst of all we’ve living through, but there I go, making my way down the corridor, boots in hand. When I pass by the galley, Polski is taking the sponge cake out of the oven, Almaraz has put the pot on the countertop and is stirring the steaming chocolate with a wooden spoon, no doubt to avoid forming that kind of skin the milk forms on the surface when it cools. I keep moving till I reach my bed, where I lay the package with the boots, looking both ways as I think about where to hide them; two or three of the others are sleeping in their bunks; from one of them, behind the little corduroy curtain, you can hear Torres’ voice whispering, I’ll bet he’s recording a cassette for his girlfriend; Torres has a little tape recorder, half the size of the one Soria uses for listening to music; Soria’s always making jokes about that, telling Torres—referring to their tape recorders—that they’re father and son. I see Polski coming along toward the control room; I pretend to be straightening out the blanket and the jacket; Torres keeps talking to his girlfriend as if she were here, recording words he knows there’s no way she’ll receive. Polski returns with a sheet of lined paper and goes into the galley again; no one’s coming, so I take the jacket with the boots and head for the engine room. Now there are four men hunched over the fire control computer; it looks like they can’t figure out the problem and this is a big, scary deal. In the engine room Soria and Albaredo are busy with one of the engines and don’t even notice me, so I go ahead and hide my boots behind the convertor. When I leave the engine room, I see that the CO has joined the group around the computer, so I keep on going and run into the Executive Officer, who’s also headed there. Before joining this boat, the XO was chief engineer on the Santiago del Estero; one time I visited that sub because the bubble on ours was broken, and they sent me there to get the part because they had one on the Santiago del Estero. I go below, and when my eyes grow accustomed to the interior of the sub, I see people gathered in the periscope area; I start to move forward, but someone breaks away from the group, takes a couple of steps toward me and arrogantly says, Hey, you, what are you looking for? I try to explain, but he cuts me off before I can finish and says: Wait here, someone will help you. Now Maceda is the XO on this boat and he’s going toward the fire control computer. I try to be positive, not to worry, if each one does a good job with what he has to do … Then I sneeze and taka-taka-taka, taka-taka-taka-tak, again that damn noise, maybe I’ll go to the galley and get something hot, a nice cup of coffee will do me good, and then I’ll lie down to rest because by the time I remember, it’ll be my shift again. I leave the jacket on the bed and set out for the galley, the cake that was in the oven just a while ago now rests on a tray. I stand there, watching how Polski frosts it with dulce de leche and now he writes HAPPY BIRTHDAY NOBREGA with thick blue marker on a sheet of office paper, which a few minutes earlier he had brought to the galley from the control room, making a cone with it and pressing it into the thick frosting layer on the cake. He carries the tray with the cake on it toward the multiuse table in front of the torpedo area. I turn my eyes toward the galley counter in search of the coffeepot; with a large spoon, Almaraz is completing the process of pouring the hot chocolate into some cups on a tray; now he carefully picks up the tray and leaves. Heredia walks in, drops the dishrag in the sink, and walks out again, most likely also on his way to the bow. I decide it would be better not to take anything, the coffee will just keep me awake, so I leave the galley and for a few seconds I stand there in the doorway, hesitating, not quite knowing what to do. At the bow someone is giving out cups of hot chocolate; you can hear laughter; I finally head back to my bunk; someone else emerges from the galley carrying cider and glasses; I climb up into my bed and from there I can hear them being served, now they’re singing Happy birthday, happy birthday Nobrega, and many more, applause, some howling, the crowd is celebrating, spirits are high today after what happened yesterday, and I’d like to be a part of it, I’d like to be there, too, but I’m exhausted, with a weariness that drags me toward the dark pit of sleep. I look forward again, the others are posing for pictures, squeezed together around the table, somebody yells whiskey, then a click, applause, more laughter. I lie down just as I am; I don’t even feel like getting undressed; Torres has finished talking to his girlfriend and is coming down from his cot, still wearing his life jacket; Soria’s coming, also bundled up in his life jacket, he leaves the engine room and goes into the petty officers’ head; Torres walks over to the table where everyone is celebrating. I close my eyes and lose contact with my surroundings.
Now that the festivities seem to have ended, a uniform murmur reaches me from the bow: some people are praying, maybe because it’s Sunday, maybe because they’re lonely, maybe because they’re afraid. I don’t pray, not even from here, from bed, I don’t know why, but today I can’t, my voice doesn’t work, not even that quiet inner voice people use for praying.
I’ve just climbed into my bunk and see that Polski, standing next to his, is preparing one of those towels they supply us with before we set sail, the ones with a blue anchor printed on them, I suppose to remind us that we’re in the Navy. Today is bath day, though around here bathing is just a figure of speech, an expression whose meaning is quite different from what it means to outsiders. Here water is conserved, you have to use it sparingly, the distillers don’t work right: they use a lot of energy and, besides, they make a terrible racket. Polski’s towel is new, just like the others; new means waterproof, with a layer of sizing, or paraffin, or I don’t know what, in any case something that will keep it from absorbing a single drop of water—at least for a good, long time. Polski starts to undress beside his bunk, tugging at his sneakers to take them off, a pair of sporty sneakers that he bought himself to keep from making noise when he walks; then he takes off his left sock and, after dropping it on top of one sneaker, he pulls off the right one and drops it on top of the other sneaker. Next, his pants, standard-issue navy blue cloth—first one leg, then the other—now turned a kind of dark, grayish black, with all sorts of stains, like the pants and overalls of the rest of the crew. Then the blue shirt, which he rolls up into a ball, leaving it on the bunk, and the undershirt, the “elastic,” as it’s called around here, with a double layer of flannel at chest level; he wraps the towel around his waist and slips off his undershorts beneath, maybe his first change of underwear in several days, of those shorts provided by the Navy, the “regulation” ones, stiff with sizing or elastic, hard like the towel, capable of causing the most uncomfortable irritation you can imagine. He makes a knot in the towel, and then holds it closed with his hand, just in case some joker—and there’s no lack of those—should yank it off, leaving him buck naked. With his free hand he picks up some soap, a brush, and toothpaste and proceeds toward the petty officers’ head. The red, night navigation lights flash on, and for a second it reminds me of a cheesy nightclub, the scene makes me laugh, and I turn over to get ready to sleep. Right under the head door is the air conditioning equipment; if Polski has to wait because someone is in there, he’ll freeze his ass off. Then he’ll go inside, of course, shivering a little, or a lot, he’ll close the door because if he doesn�
�t he won’t be able to shower, since the shower is right behind the door and in front of the metal toilet full of handles and levers that serve to eject toward the tank whatever gets dumped in there. But Polski isn’t really going to shower, there’s not enough water for every man to take a shower, and so once he’s inside the head, he’ll leave the door half-open, undo the knot in his towel, and—sticking his hand through the narrow opening he’s left—he’ll hang the towel from the low-pressure air manifold out in the passageway, to avoid putting it down in the limited head space that so many others have already used today (there’s no room in there for a towel that never dries); then he’ll close the door and turn to the left in order to face the sink—stuck right in there—with its stainless steel mirror that barely allows him to recognize himself in it, partly because it’s all scratched, partly because of the beard he’s been growing, and maybe because after a while you stop recognizing yourself and don’t even want to see your reflection. Standing in front of the sink, he’ll press down on the valve and put his cupped, hollowed palms underneath to catch the water that comes out, and right after that he’ll wash his face, to refresh himself and also to rinse off a little of the routine or discouragement or sleepiness or fear, depending on whichever happens to apply to the “bather.” Then he’ll repeat the routine, the steps necessary to use another little bit of water, and he’ll wash his arms, his armpits, with soap. Once more he’ll maneuver to catch the water in his hands, and he’ll splash it over himself to rinse off, and again fill his hands to aim straight for his dick, and then his asshole, and then his feet, raising one, then the other, gathering water, dampening himself, soaping, gathering water, rinsing, lots of patience, lots of skill, lots of maneuvers, lots of balance. Then he’ll half open the door, stick out his hand, and grope for the towel from the manifold to dry himself with, or in any case to distribute the water up and down his whole body, still slightly damp, slip back to his bunk, the undryable towel rolled around his waist, to put on new underwear, clean and white, tugging on it a little to force it over his too-damp skin. And after Polski, someone else will go in to “bathe,” and another, and another; and that’s how it’ll go all night and all day. Somebody asks, no doubt peeking into the galley, what’s for dinner today? Pizza and steak with tomatoes, the cook’s voice replies, and for dessert, torta Balcarce with meringue. I stay where I am, all curled up with my back to the passageway, not eating, not bathing, and still unable to catch a wink of sleep.
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