We’re in a deep sea channel, a bubble of water that’s even colder than the already-cold water we’ve been sailing in; the engines have been turned off and the sub floats gently, following the current, with us inside, and that way it becomes undetectable; sounds bounce off the thermal barrier of the channel and it’s as if it didn’t exist, as if it had suddenly become water, all water: the boat, us, objects, time, just water in the water.
From my bunk I see the row of four, of those that are on the other side of the passageway, diagonally across from mine: in the lower one, Bighead Cuéllar is opening his Bible, a small Bible he carries with him on all the campaigns; in the bunk right above his, Helmsman Navarrete is resting; above him, Linares, and in the last one, the one closest to the ceiling, there’s someone, but from here I can’t make out his features; judging by the skinny body and the sneakers peeking out from beneath the blankets, it looks like Egea, the waiter, who, ever since we weighed anchor on this trip has always gone to bed fully dressed and with his sneakers on. Rest easy, you guys, Cuéllar reassures them in a whisper, I’m going to pray for us, all four of us in this row, so nothing will happen to us. Then he opens his Bible and reads, with the gentle intonation of prayer: Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. He said: You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me. When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple. Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them. But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, “Salvation comes from the Lord.” And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.
A couple of the guys bring out the whip antenna and listen. There’s a group of men gathered around the radio, all wanting to know how the negotiations are going, if there’s any news; sometimes they get Radio Colonia and manage to catch some information. Those who are listening gossip among themselves, hands on hips, now somebody breaks away from the group, walks along the passageway by the bunks and remarks—nervously scratching his overgrown beard—that Chile seems to be prepared to assist the Brits. Now I see him, the guy that just announced this news, retracing his steps and heading for the fire control computer, maybe with the intention of lending a hand to see if he can fix it, but that computer can’t be fixed, not with the equipment we’ve got here; the logical thing would be to turn back toward Comodoro to get it fixed, but for now we’re not moving, we’re waiting for orders, and—most of all—hoping that the enemy won’t find us. Against all foreseeable predictions, we’ve been ordered to stay right where we are until further notice, so we’ll have to get along without a computer. And what about those guys who were in Germany, with their families, perfecting their knowledge of this kind of equipment for the 209, where are they? Not here. They never boarded this boat, maybe they were there that foggy day when we embarked, waving from the docks, but now, right now, when we need them, they’re not here. We’ll have to calculate the launching manually, like in the Second World War, by hand, and one torpedo at a time, instead of two or three, launching torpedoes we’ve never tried before. Suddenly the Hyena’s smile appears before me, floating in the air, just his smile, separated from the face it belongs to, like some stupid ad for toothpaste, but instantly it disappears and I feel overcome by this stubborn exhaustion I’ve been lugging around lately. Voices reach me from the computer area, several different ones, arguing about something I can’t quite hear, or don’t want to hear. So I decide to go back to the bunks and get into bed, plunge into my damp, cold, deep sea channel, my water bubble, so I can become invisible for a few hours.
We’ve been snorkeling now for a long time; several of the others are gathered around the periscope and the masts because that’s where the sea air, the fresh air, gets in; a few of them are smoking; all of them, those who smoke and those who don’t, look upward even though you can’t see anything, just feel the damp, icy, penetrating air of this sea against your face; I’m standing close by. Navarrete approaches, too, and remarks that they’re not receiving signals on the radar screen, so they’re going to retract the antenna to see what’s happening. There’s tension: whenever we snorkel, the sub becomes vulnerable, easier to spot, and besides, we have no radar now, which is one of the pieces of equipment that allow us to spot the enemy. They lower the antenna; some of the smokers move aside, Navarrete and Marini come over with tools and start checking it; it seems the receiver is broken. Even though it’s not time for my shift yet, I decide to go to the engine room to see what they’re doing, but no sooner do I take a couple of steps than a song hits me; in spite of the low volume, I think I recognize the voice of Joan Manuel Serrat—Which of my many loves will buy flowers for my funeral?—the voice grows louder as I approach, Who will take care of my dog?, and now, as I reach the control compartment, I run into Soria, who’s sitting in the helmsman’s seat, opposite Polski and Almaraz, each one in his seat at the horizontal rudders. Who will pay for my burial and a metal cross? On his knees, like a curled-up cat, Soria has his little tape recorder with its colored keys that reproduces the Catalonian singer’s voice, Who will lie down in my bed, wear my pajamas, and support my wife? Damn, I say to myself, it’s as if the guy was here among us saying what we’re all thinking, Who will that good friend be, the one who’ll die with me, even a little? Polski draws spirals on his thigh with his index finger, on top of the wrinkled cloth of his blue pants; Almaraz adjusts the beret he’s wearing today and strokes his beard; Soria moves the little metal extension on one of the open buckles of his life jacket up and down; Who will finish my diary … all three of them listen silently, … when the last page falls from my calendar? Some voices come up behind me; I turn toward the control room, the radar screen is registering signals, it seems they were able to fix the antenna, there’s no enemy in sight, the helmsman comes and occupies his place, the snorkel operation is over and we’re going to total immersion. Soria presses the black key, turns off his tape recorder, and stands, but the song still repeats in my head: Who will finish my diary…? Which will be the last page on my calendar?
I dream about Mancuso, Mancuso from the Santa Fe. He looks tired, very tired, with rage or worry; we did a few campaigns together and I know how his face looks when things aren’t going well. Someone’s coming, he’s coming in through the battery hatch at the stern, not one of our guys, he has a weapon in his belt and he stops a few feet away from Mancuso; the intruder’s eyes are too blue, and it seems like he’s watching him. It’s a silent dream, I can’t detect any sound at all, and that makes it terribly annoying. Suddenly the sub lists, Mancuso jumps up and starts to open one of the valves at port to avoid a disaster, but just then I see him slump over abruptly. The guy who isn’t one of ours looks at his drawn weapon in shock, two other guys show up in the same crisp uniforms as the one with the weapon, but I don’t see them anymore, just Mancuso’s face, lying on his side on the floor, with a grimace of rage, as if he had asked a question that no one will ever answer.
I dream about Marini, our fire control computer operator. I see him swimming, swimming desperately in a stormy sea, beside a brightly colored fishing boat, he paddles, picks up momentum, and dives, once more emerges, paddles, picks up momentum and dives again, as if he’s looking for someone, and so on for a time that feels maddening, eternal, to me, because I can see him from here but can’t do anything to help him. And then his arms no longer appear emerging from the water, I can’t see him anymore, only the sea, the sea, and the tiny boat whose colors slowly fade from my view.
I don’t know why I have these dreams that sometimes don’t seem like dreams, it’s as if I was living them, as if I could momentarily access another time and another place, as if all that was real, too.
I dream about Polski: I’m standing on a broke
n-up stretch of sidewalk and I see him driving a taxi; I motion for him to stop, I want to say hello, and besides, I urgently need for him to take me someplace, though I don’t yet know where, but he doesn’t stop, it’s as if he doesn’t see me, as if I’m not there, but I run after him anyway, I shout out his name and run behind the car for a couple of blocks, but in the end I lose sight of him down some dark little streets on the outskirts of Mar del Plata.
I dream again about Polski driving a taxi, but this time when the dream starts I’m inside the taxi; he’s picked me up as a passenger, but I have the feeling he doesn’t recognize me, I give him an address and he seems to nod in agreement, but after a few blocks I see that he’s taking a different route and we’re going, going, going, never stopping, not braking, not accelerating, as if the car was mounted on a conveyor belt: I look down and see that I’m wearing my boots, I’m absorbed, staring at the dent in the left toe, as we keep on going, till I lift my head and realize that we’re approaching the cemetery. Polski stops the car, turns around toward the passenger seat and sees me, he sees me and I understand that he knows who I am; we’re here, he announces. But I don’t want to get out of the taxi, not at a cemetery I didn’t ask to be taken to. And so I stay there, just looking down, absorbed by the dent in the tip of my boot, which is growing deeper, deeper and warmer and finally cozy.
Sometimes I dream of a circus, with a tent all made of more and more triangles of brightly-colored canvas, and edged with thousands of little electric lights; I dream, as if seeing all that from the air, flying over it. There’s some land behind the circus, and on it a cage with an enormous Bengal tiger that always paces from one side to the other, in a back-and-forth that falsely expands the space he doesn’t have, and, as I float a little lower and closer now, I see Grunwald, too, walking over to the cage and talking to the tiger as if the tiger was a person and could understand him, he talks to him and through the bars he offers him a huge chunk of meat; then the tiger approaches with his heavy, but silent, steps, stretches out his neck, brings his head over to the bars, spreads his jaws and bites the meat: Grunwald screams, it’s an automatic, piercing scream that lasts as long as it takes for him—also automatically—to pull his hand away, now bleeding and missing the thumb. Grunwald curses as he rips off his tee shirt and wraps the wound, and then I see it peeking out from underneath his tee shirt, creeping and obvious against his skin, a black line that grows and rises quickly, quickly, as though time were speeding up, it climbs up his arm without stopping, and I begin to fall in a spiral toward a void, also black, where nothing more remains: neither Grunwald nor the tiger nor the colored triangles of the circus tent, nor the little electric lights, nor me.
Other times I dream that someone, who I can’t identify because I see him from behind, is moving around the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics at night, groping, half-naked, as if just out of bed, the skinny body of a teenager gropes his way as though looking for something. Then he reaches a door, tries to open it but can’t, turns a little to his right and continues walking close to the wall; suddenly he stops, places his ear against the wall and listens, moves away, looks toward the door, comes back to rest his ear again, as if his extreme attention might scratch the wall in search of the echo of a voice or maybe a repeated moan; he listens once more. Now he quickly returns to the door, turns the doorknob in vain, the door won’t yield, he shakes it; he wants to get out of there, it seems, but the door remains closed, the lights go on, and the boy stands there quietly, petrified, his eyes fixed on the floor; the officer in charge of the school comes toward him, jostles him: you’re asleep, you’re sleepwalking, cadet, go back to bed and don’t let it happen again. Two other officers appear out of nowhere and take him away, subdued. Then I wake up and think I hear footsteps, but there’s no one walking here, it’s the bilge pump that keeps making noise and I can’t go back to sleep.
A group, larger this time, is gathered around the radio, there must be six or seven of them, packed in tight, trying to find out how things are going outside. I imagine they couldn’t possibly be worse: I have the strange feeling we’re alone. Somebody raises an arm with a closed fist, shaking it as though he’s celebrating something. Soria goes over to him and asks him a question, whispering in his ear, then he comes over and says—I don’t know if he’s talking to Albaredo or to me but it doesn’t matter—that an English helicopter fell into the water and a petty officer has died. Some people smile, happy, and I wonder if it’s good or bad, given the state of things, that an English helicopter has fallen into our sea. I turn around and head for the galley; maybe—to the English, anyway—the death of a petty officer doesn’t matter much. Now I’m walking past our head, the one for the petty officers, and I see Torres waiting outside because the head is occupied; he scratches his scalp, poor Torres, he must be struggling to hold it in because it’s his bad luck to be a petty officer and have to share the head with 27 others like him. I reach the galley and look for a little juice; the nurse is at the counter helping himself to some coffee. Lieutenant Rabellini walks in, rubbing the back of his neck, he says something about a terrible headache, then the nurse leaves his full pitcher on the counter and walks away, going for his satchel, I imagine, because Rabellini follows him. In the end I give up looking for the juice and return to the engine room. Torres is still waiting outside our head while the officers’ toilet is unoccupied.
Today several of the others are standing around the radio again, all of them silent, leaning over the device waiting for some news from outside. One of them straightens up, turns around, and says something about the English landing at South Georgia Island. Faces change, shrink: this time there’s no turning back. The one who delivered the news returns to the radio. More silence. Then he looks this way again and announces: The Santa Fe was captured and strafed near South Georgia. And that’s all, no message from the Submarine Forces, no order to indicate how this story is playing out, nothing to do but lower the antenna and dive once more at full speed. The Santa Fe strafed, there must be wounded, no doubt they’ve been taken prisoner, our comrades, prisoners, maybe someone’s dead; then I think of Mancuso and the dream I had about him, the boat tips as we descend. The Santa Fe’s out of circulation, someone behind me remarks, and the Santiago del Estero was in such bad shape that it probably never even left port. I return to Mancuso, I can’t get Mancuso out of my head, I go back to the bullet in Mancuso’s body, the last breath escaping from Mancuso’s body. Where are you now, old buddy? We’re alone, says one of the others, we’re alone down here, and he touches his shirt at chest level, right on the pocket where we all know he carries the photo of his mother. Almaraz opens his black leather notebook and tries to write something, leaning against the control room map table. Farther along, in one of the upper bunks, the cook looks at his wristwatch, closes the comic book he’s been reading, Tony this time, he places it under the pillow, climbs down, and sets out for the galley.
Finally a message today from the Submarine Force, but no one feels calmer. Make our presence known in the Malvinas area, and so in a little while, around midnight, we’ll start moving toward the islands. That means we’ll have to cross the exclusion zone set by the English. Several of us go to bed with our clothes on; we have to be ready in case they call us to our battle stations. From this point on water and electricity are severely restricted. I climb up to my bunk, fully dressed too; for days now I’ve been going to bed in my clothes. I arrange the pillow and once more think about Mancuso’s death, if that thing about Mancuso’s death was really a dream. If it wasn’t a dream—and I’m more and more convinced it wasn’t—if that wasn’t a dream, it’s likely that the others weren’t either, that somewhere down the line there’ll be a tiger waiting for Grunwald, a cadet who hears voices through the walls of the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics, a taxi that Polski will drive through the streets of Mar del Plata, a grave with my name on it. Suddenly everything in here turns red: the night navigation light has just been turned on, and that gives the b
oat a ghostly appearance. I close my eyes to make everything go black, an opaque surface where I can project those images I thought I’d dreamed.
I’m sitting at the aft table with a book I found somewhere, old, yellowing, missing a cover, who knows how it made its way onto the boat, but you’ve got to do something while you wait, especially when you’re not on duty, so I read the story of a creature that’s just finished building his den deep in the earth; next to me, Almaraz writes in his black-covered notebook, from here I can make out a few phrases: We leave today at 0:00 hours, soon we’ll enter the two-hundred mile zone that’s under English control. Opposite me, on the other side of the table, Nobrega is drawing on legal-size paper with a very soft black pencil, retouching the shading on the figure of a beautiful, curvy woman; many of the others are sleeping; Grunwald, on the bench next to the torpedo launchers, is working with pliers and a piece of steel wire; Heredia is cutting strips from a burlap bag that just a few days ago held potatoes, but they’re gone now, all we eat now are dried foods that need to be rehydrated; my animal, the animal in my book, runs through the tangled tunnels of his lair and reaches the center, the storeroom for provisions, but he can’t keep still and he destroys walls and builds new tunnels. The computer is still broken, Almaraz notes, as he stares at the torpedo launchers, with the pencil suspended between his fingers and resting against his mouth. Nobrega prints in capital block letters in the empty space on the page above the woman’s head: I’M WAITING FOR YOU; Grunwald maneuvers the pliers and turns the obedient wire into a small circle with a stub on one side and the rest of the wire, still unbent, at the other; Heredia has grabbed a monkey wrench and is wrapping the handle with one of the burlap strips he’s just cut. I go back to my book; the animal rubs his forehead against the dirt wall of the enclosure to smooth and harden the structure till his skin bleeds: the damn animal seems crazy. Radio Colonia talks about an English attack on the Malvinas any moment now, writes Almaraz in his notebook, and once more he raises his head and gazes at the torpedo launchers. DON’T MAKE NOISE WHEN YOU’RE AT SEA, Nobrega has written on the poster of the woman, this time on the right side of the sheet, which was empty, and now he goes over and over each letter, darkening them with his pencil. Grunwald puts the finishing touches on his wire construction, a pair of eyeglasses that look like John Lennon’s, and he tries them on; his pale blue eyes shine, sparkle: So? What do you think? he asks; Almaraz stares at him, smiles, You’re a real wacko, he replies. Soria shows up inside his life jacket, holding a pitcher of steaming coffee, which he deposits on the table just as Nobrega adds to the poster: YOU DECIDE, beneath the woman’s bare feet; Heredia leaves the wrench with the wrapped handle in a tool box on his right and takes another wrench from a box on his left, then he picks up another burlap strip and begins to roll it around the naked handle of the naked tool; Grunwald struts around in his little wire glasses, making exaggerated gestures. Soria watches him and smiles, it’s the first time I’ve seen Soria smile since we weighed anchor; Almaraz jots down something else in his notebook, and I return to the animal who is piling up the pieces he’s hunted in the central part of his den and gloating over the smell of the pile of meat; Nobrega draws something on another sheet of legal paper, at first it looks like a skull. Almaraz closes the notebook and tucks it away, along with the pencil, in one of the top pockets of his blue shirt; Soria has walked over to Grunwald, who puts the wire glasses on his nose, and pats him on the back; you look like a bookworm, he says, laughing; my animal runs back and forth, digs, carries, sighs, yawns, stumbles; Nobrega’s sketch, which he now retouches and shades in, looks like the outline of a skull; Almaraz gets up from the table and heads for the galley; Heredia keeps plugging away at his task of wrapping tool handles; Cuéllar comes over to the table with another pitcher of coffee; he stands there watching the scene between Grunwald and Soria with those useless glasses; Nobrega writes I’M WAITING FOR YOU on the sketch; I close my book and watch him; MAKE NOISE WHEN YOU’RE AT SEA, he’s added. Why are you doing that, man? Cuéllar asks Heredia, who keeps on rolling ragged strips around the tools; to muffle the noise when we use them, and especially if they capture us. Che, Bighead, c’mon Cuéllar, Nobrega interrupts, would you put that drawing over there in the control room for me? The one of the woman? Cuéllar asks; yeah, the one of the woman, replies Nobrega as he darkens the letters on the second poster. No, says Grunwald, moving toward the table, send the guys in the control room the one with the skull, and leave us the one with the woman. Okay, says Nobrega, put it over there near the torpedo control panel, then shhh, goes someone from the control room; everybody falls silent. My animal tries to decide whether or not he should leave the den; I close the book, leaving the creature alone while he makes up his mind, and I set out for my bunk; I’ll either read for a while or I’ll fall asleep. As I climb up, I feel my feet all damp and cold, their usual condition ever since I’ve been here.
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