Proceed With Caution

by Patricia Ratto

  The CO has ordered us to find out where the noise is coming from, the noise whose signature—as we submariners say—will make us identifiable. Today, since there must be rough seas, judging from how we’re moving, you can hear it all the time, so several guys are running from one end of the boat to the other with their heads tilted up to try to detect from inside more or less where the noise is being produced, most likely in the free circulation zone between the deck and the resistant hull. Everyone is quiet, in order to hear better, but it’s not easy, there are echoes, rumbles, and the possibility of being discovered at any moment. Then the CO decides to send out two men, and I see Olivero putting on his orange waterproof overalls and I wonder, why risk a torpedoman, why send the man who knows the torpedo launchers and the torpedoes better than he knows himself, but down here logic must be different from common sense, or maybe they’re sending him because he’s small and skinny, or because he volunteered for the mission, I don’t know. Now I see Rabellini coming over, the officer in charge of the deck and armaments, also dressed in orange, apparently they’re both going to go because they’re both underneath the ladder that goes up to the sail. They’ve been given ten minutes to access the deck, investigate what the hell is causing the noise, and solve it; the sub will surface, the two men have to come out through the escape hatch that’s in the exhaust canopy in the conning tower. I see Olivero with his safety harness and the rope with a hook to secure himself, in case he has time for that, a couple of tools wedged into the loops of his harness, the coarse leather gloves, also orange, in both hands. They begin the maneuvers to reach the surface; since it’s not my shift I’m not in the engine room; I decide to hang around nearby, just in case, I tell myself; everything here is in case, anyway. A flash of light suddenly takes us by surprise, Olivero, who’s on a rung of the ladder, Rabellini, who’s still down here and hasn’t put on his gloves yet, and me, standing a few steps behind him; somebody takes our picture, or else they take a picture of the moment. I’m sure I’m not in it because, seen from the photographer’s perspective, Rabellini is hiding me; I’m like the dark side of the moon. Olivero climbs, somebody clicks the camera again, and I figure this one is of Rabellini alone, who—now I notice his boots wrapped in two black plastic bags—is holding the ladder tight and looking up, but not climbing yet; I’m still on the dark side, and maybe Mainieri—who’s moved a couple of steps forward on my right—will show up in the background with that worried expression I can see in profile, but in the photo it’ll be seen from the front. Imagine: surfacing and keeping planes and radar from detecting the submarine and the men. Trying to keep them from being seen and dressing them in orange! I’m getting nervous. Rabellini hasn’t gone up yet; beside me, the Executive Officer has put on his life jacket and as he pours himself a whisky he tells Gutiérrez not to take his eyes off the Magnavox; someone turns to Rabellini and tells him something I can’t quite hear, he takes his hands off the ladder and moves aside a little, then I take advantage of the opportunity to slip away, just as I am, in my dark overalls, and I start climbing up the tube in the conning tower: up there Olivero, who has just reached the upper hatch and is opening it, is outlined, orange against black. Then, through the hole at the end of the tube, a dense blue sky appears, announcing the night and one of those fierce storms that will soon be here; sea water pours in at brief intervals and falls on Olivero in buckets, and then, less heavily, on me. Now Olivero gets out through the side of the conn, most likely he’s clutching the iron handrail because the deck has become awfully slippery after several days of submersion. From there he’ll probably try to observe, to get his bearings so he can find whatever is causing the noise. He probably looks small and fragile in the light that the day and the storm grudgingly dole out to him, whipped by the constant, dangerous movement of the sea, and paralyzed by the biting cold, in an outfit that’s not designed for that cold. Like me, he probably has the strange feeling that nothing exists now, nothing but the endless, gloomy sea that beats furiously against the sub’s sail, against us, nothing and no one, only the two of us and something that was making a noise somewhere but which can’t be heard anymore because all that greater noise has swallowed it up. I don’t know how much time has passed if, in fact, time has passed at all, if it’s passing now, but I’m sure I haven’t stopped climbing, I climb to the next-to-last rung, and just when I’m about to reach Olivero, I see him let go of the handrail and struggle into the free circulation zone, and I see—to be honest I only half-see and guess the rest—that Olivero is kneeling on a metal sheet, he’s taken off his gloves and is busy unscrewing the long, thick, stubborn screws that hold the metal sheet in place. A sharp jolt throws me off balance and I can’t get to him; I yell out that I’m coming to help him, but he’s still concentrating on his task, besides, even though we’re so close, it’s impossible for him to hear me or see me in these dark overalls and this near-total darkness. Another jolt, I grab on tightly to keep from falling—the sub keeps moving, if it stopped, the violent rocking would be even worse—and behind the water gushing in, enclosed in a small space where he barely fits, I think I see Olivero lift up the black metal sheet, stick in his hand and remove something, something I can’t make out but suspect he’s caught, because of the shape one of his hands seems to be taking now as it crawls up his waterproof overalls in search of a pocket where he can deposit his prey. Now he tries to replace the metal sheet he just removed a few moments ago. I can’t do anything to help him from here, because the two of us won’t fit in that space, but I stick around anyway, maybe I can say something so he’ll know we haven’t left him alone. Olivero knows—we both know—that if the radar operator gets a signal, the hatch will close and the boat will start to dive, leaving him outside, forever floating, a ridiculous orange fallen from a tree into the water. If that should happen, I decide, I’ll stay behind too, it’s terrible to die alone, though maybe it’s not all that bad to die in the sea; I would rather die in the sea if I could choose, and I think I remember hearing Olivero once say that—or something like that. It’s nighttime now, you can’t see a thing, barely a shape that he’ll no doubt try to put back in place, groping to insert those long screws into the holes at either end of the metal sheet, screws that we all know will never fit back in again. I cross my fingers and think I can see—or imagine I see—in the thick darkness my eyes are adjusting to, Olivero’s smile, as if he’s seen me in spite of the darkness, as if he knew that, in the depths of this darkness, I’m here.

  I think someone is yelling from below that we’ve run out of time, that we’re being tracked by radar, but I don’t know—with all this noise—if it’s true or if I’ve imagined it; regardless, I stand still and wait. Now I hear Olivero come out; extending my hand, I grope my way till I manage to grab his arm and squeeze it for a second; there’s not much time left, and we begin our descent right now; he responds by grabbing mine for a moment, a greeting between two blind men, an act of recognition between two ghosts; and so I understand that I should go down first and start descending, while he closes the upper hatch; without saying a word to one another each of us imitates the other’s movements, skipping rungs. Close to the bottom I fall and roll astern, leaving room for Olivero; now I hear him fall in the same place where I had been a fraction of a second earlier. Someone above us closes the second hatch and announces: we’re diving, they’re looking for us. Olivero reaches into his raincoat pocket and takes out a pair of soldering pliers that someone left behind on a repair job, shows it to Grunwald, who has come dashing over, helpfully, from the torpedo launcher. Olivero is white, a yellowish white that gleams against the orange of his raincoat; sitting on the floor, he smiles with his purple lips, waving the pliers in his right hand. I stand, dripping, my overalls are dripping, my socks are dripping, a pool of water is forming around me. Grunwald clutches the pliers, shows them to the rest of the guys who have come over, curious to see what was causing the noise; he makes exaggerated gestures with his hands, like he usually does when he talks, his h
ands intact, each one with its five fingers. The electronic equipment goes off to indicate approaching aircraft. Olivero stands and starts walking toward his station by the torpedoes. Those remaining head for their battle stations. And so do I.

  We keep traveling toward the patrol area we’ve been assigned. Today we’re not listening to the radio, so we don’t know anything about what’s happening outside. We go about our daily routine, nothing new, it’s an empty day. Empty like the day of the chest pain that knocked me to the floor of the engine room and all the ones that followed until the moment when the noise woke me up. Days I can’t quite recall, which disappeared from my memory as if a worm had eaten them, like the house borer that attacked the tie beams in the little chalet. It was about waking up in the middle of the night and hearing the sound of the house borer, a unique, recognizable sound, it was turning on the light, staring up at the portion of wooden roof I could see and not finding anything. The house borer works from the inside, the beetle eats greedily, patiently, until the wood weakens, hardly more than sawdust, and breaks. Sometimes I would wake up all sweaty, with a strong pressure in my chest, convinced that the roof had fallen down on us. During the day we didn’t hear it; the noises of activity during the daylight hours tend to cover it up completely. When I was on campaign, days submerged in the sea, I had the feeling that all of it was just a distant nightmare, a nasty trick played by my imagination. But it was a question of putting my feet back on the ground, going back home, and, once night fell, hearing it again. Everyone seemed to have solutions to offer, some of them obviously ridiculous, others impossible. In the end we found a company that guaranteed its elimination. And then, when they finished the job and made sure the extermination was thorough and we thought we were going to finally get some peace, we became even more alert to it than before; I remember how Mama suddenly turned down the volume on the radio: Just a minute, let me listen, she would say to us, and we’d all wait quietly—María, my mother, and I—to see if we could hear the house borer. I also remember sitting around chatting and suddenly falling silent, in the middle of dinner, not saying a word to one another, each of us looking up slyly, out of the corners of our eyes, as if focusing on some spot on the ceiling would help us hear better, and then taking up the discussion again if nothing had happened, as if it had just been a natural pause in a family’s dinner conversation. Once I came home from the base and found Mama sitting at the kitchen table with Doña Aurelia, a mate in her hand, both of them silently looking at the ceiling. Sometimes we thought the noise had gone away, and with it the house borer, because we never did see that house borer, we heard it: the noise was the beetle. Other times, I woke up again in the middle of the night, convinced I had heard it; I’d turn on the light like before, like always, and I couldn’t tell if I was really hearing it or only thought I did, the illusion of sound, like an echo lodged in my memory. Maybe it never left; it hung around quietly for a while to confuse us and came back later, not for the tie beams in the little chalet, but to swallow up those days of my life that I can’t get back again and try to reassemble hypothetically, to keep everything from collapsing on me suddenly—life, you know?—as if it was the roof of the chalet, and to keep it from squashing me altogether. Then I imagine that one of the boys who worked with me in those days trying to fix the engine we could never manage to jump-start, Albaredo maybe, cried out, yelling that I was on the destroyed floor, unconscious, and a few of them together pulled me out through the forward hatch and the ambulance came and took me to the Naval Hospital, and meanwhile someone called the neighbor lady because at our house—even though we’ve been asking for years—they still haven’t put in a phone, to notify María, taking care not to frighten Mama, and I was there for one day, connected to monitors, with medication and some tests, and they must have told them later that it was nothing serious, that it had just been a scare, that maybe I should watch what I ate, that I should use less salt and stuff like that, and that I should rest a little and then just go back to work, to the sub and the engines, since that’s my thing, after all. And I must have used those days to rest and recover, to finish reading that book I left off at the war scene, the one with the horse whose back was raw, which left such an impression on me. That’s what happened to me, I repeat it in my head over and over again, with some variations, but more or less the same, so often that I don’t know anymore if I made it up or if it really took place, like what happened to us with the house borer, which we don’t know if it was or wasn’t there. Anyway, that’s starting to happen to me with other things, too; today I tried to remember Javier’s birthday, my cousin who’s like a brother to me, and I couldn’t, or that way María has of drying her hands on her apron when she’s finished washing the dishes, and I always used to be able to see her as if she was right in front of me and now I can only capture it in a couple of vague words that don’t mean anything: what is “that way” if you can’t add a moving image to whatever it is you’re saying, the details of the moment itself, what it awakens in you? It’s as if my memory is filling up with holes, like the stinking, wounded back of that horse in the book, as if the house borer was inside me, devouring my memories, slowly but constantly, leaving me empty, a pure present that sooner or later will also be devoured.

  Today, as expected, we arrived at our patrol area and stayed there all day long. I’m tired of sleeping. My sleep has changed, I’ve gotten used to sleeping in the afternoon, and at night I’m wide awake. Since we can’t be up when it’s not our shift but need to stay lying down instead so we won’t get tired and also to save oxygen, we don’t know what to do in bed anymore. Now I’m in my bunk: from here I can see Olivero, he’s on his stomach, half propped up, the weight of his body resting on his forearms, a notebook on the bed quilt, and he’s writing, writing, sometimes he stops to think a little, slowly adding one word or another and then he picks up speed and writes, writes, writes. Could it be a letter? Could it be stories for a personal journal? Some of the others say he writes poems for those girlfriends of his. Now he’s picked up the notebook, turned over on his back, and is reading what he wrote. I take out the book I’d left under my pillow and start reading, too: the animal couldn’t handle being outside his den and ended up returning to his blind, enclosed world. Olivero climbs down from his bunk, takes a few steps aft and goes into the galley. The animal in the book now suspects he’s being stalked, he’s scared and listens constantly for the sound of something approaching but which can’t be seen from the lair. Olivero returns from the galley with a couple of small bottles that he deposits in his bunk while standing in the passageway; he carefully tears some pages out of his notebook, they’ve been written on, most likely the ones he’s just finished writing; he places one sheet on top of another, rolls them up, unscrews the top of one of the little bottles, sticks the pages in the bottle, replaces the top. He stands there for a few seconds and looks at the two bottles resting on his bed, then goes to his locker and stores them there. Till gradually, says my animal, sobriety takes over as I wake up altogether. I can hardly understand what the hurry is, I take a deep breath and inhale the peace that reigns in my house and which I have disturbed, I return to the place where I rest, and fall asleep immediately, overcome by exhaustion. Olivero has gone back to his bunk, he’s stretched out there; now he closes the little black curtain, most likely he’s getting ready to sleep.