Proceed With Caution

by Patricia Ratto

  The others are in bed, each one in his bunk, calm, quiet, eyes closed, trying to sleep. I’m in my bunk, too, but I still can’t fall asleep, I’m staring upward, the bottom of the bunk above me is like a ceiling, or a cover, for mine; I look up and see that bunk, knowing that mine is beneath it and underneath mine, in turn, there’s another, with someone who’s also sleeping or trying to sleep; we’re all piled up, maybe all of us are dead, one coffin on top of another, only we don’t realize it yet. Is it possible for someone to die and not know it?

  I wake up startled; I’ve had nightmares again, some dreams are repeated. They’re more or less the same, with small variations. There’s activity in the sonar area, something’s going on. I head for the galley to get a coffee; Almaraz is pouring himself a cup from one of the little steel pitchers, and just as the coffee reaches the middle of the cup, they call us to our battle stations. I forget about the coffee. Almaraz takes a gulp from his cup, leaves it in the sink, and starts out toward the control compartment; he’s handling the stern planer in combat. I head for the engine room and on the way I see the three sonar operators working: Elizalde and Medrano seated, with their earphones on; Cuéllar, standing, takes the earphones from Medrano to confirm a sound and then returns them to him. They’re really not there in the sonar, they’re not here, they’re outside, in the water, all ears, penetrating the depths of a labyrinth of echoes and sounds, waiting for whatever the sea will bring them. Hydrophonic sound detected at azimuth zero seven nine, says Cuéllar after consulting Elizalde and Medrano, and they begin plotting for classification of the target. Direction zero seven zero, turn forty degrees to port, the CO orders, and we set course for the enemy ship, following the sonar operators’ estimates. Albaredo, Soria, and Torres are in the engine room; the crew for this shift is complete yet again, I don’t understand why the hell there’s someone extra every time, probably someone got confused when they were setting up the shifts. In any case I take a walk around to check the engines, even though I’m sure Albaredo’s done it already, I need to be busy, like everyone else, during the wait, this time of “we’ll see what happens.” Just then I discover that my boots are no longer where I left them, that prank again, no doubt they took them to the usual place, but now that’s the least of our worries: we’re definitely at war, the enemy is approaching, and who knows how the hell this will all turn out. And so I stick around here in case they need me, but looking out a little toward the rudder area, and with my ear alert to what the sonar operator might be saying so as to detect the tiniest gesture. They must be listening to the beating of the ship’s motor blades and trying to detect … Destroyer, type twenty-one or twenty-two, Medrano suddenly whispers toward the control room. A sonar emission, type one eight four, he adds. And everything grows silent and slow, only gestures, movements synched to the rhythm of our waiting. The CO orders us to turn in the direction of the target—Almaraz and Polski operate the diving planes; Navarrete, the rudder—and to increase speed to the maximum in order to shorten the distance, engines going full blast and in the control room there’s a lot of activity. The CO orders the combat periscope up; an officer stands next to him; now he prepares to look outside, trying to sight the target. There’s a lot of fog, the CO says to the officer, and while the officer, in turn, looks through the periscope, I tell myself that maybe it’s that same fog that hid our departure from the port, the same one that’s always surrounded us and sails with us like just another silent crew member. Down periscope, orders the CO; the officer wasn’t able to see anything, either, nothing beside the fog. The target is operating with choppers, Elizalde announces toward the control room, at a speed of eighteen knots, he adds. Now, even though nobody says anything, we all know that it’s going to be a tricky business; it won’t be easy to fire a torpedo and then flee from the choppers. I walk slowly forward. Rocha comes out of the head and walks toward his post. Egea crosses my path with a tray holding two empty glasses and walks into the galley; I keep on going, the cook is lying in his bunk, reading a Nippur of Lagash comic book; farther along, on the table opposite the torpedoes, a pencil wobbles, swaying lightly, nervously back and forth, unable to decide if it should roll toward one side or the other. From the bow I see Olivero leaning against one of the torpedo launcher tubes. Grunwald and Heredia sit on the bench on the port side, their profiles toward the torpedoes; I stop a few steps away from them. The CO’S order to fire a torpedo at the detected target reaches us. It will be a manual launch because the fire control computer still doesn’t work. The sub’s engines are shut down in order to be able to operate and do the calculations more precisely. An officer appears with the necessary data: Olivero starts the maneuvers, opens the valve to flood the tube; you can hear the torpedo propellers start up with a dull hiss; the launching hatch opens. Behind me the others carefully begin to disassemble the bunks and pile them up at starboard so as to leave access open to the torpedo room. Grunwald looks at Heredia: we have to give it a name, he says; it’s the first real torpedo launched by the Argentine Navy. A name? Heredia asks. Yeah, for the torpedo—Mar del Plata, let’s call it Mar del Plata, and let’s cross our fingers for it to hit the target. No doubt Marini has just pushed the launch button on the computer (which actually works, the launch command, but not the firing calculations), because I hear the rotor blades speed up and the torpedo shoots off, it tips a little as it enters the sea, remains suspended in the water for a fraction of a second, and then speeds toward the target, connected to the boat by a thread, an umbilical cord that feeds it with data so it can find its objective, unwinding to let it advance. We wait in anticipation, the others behind me have stopped, each in the middle of what he was doing, at the exact moment the torpedo took off, speechless, staring toward Olivero, toward the tube, now empty of the torpedo and full of water. It cut the thread, Olivero whispers, and now we all know that it will be guided by its acoustic head searching for a noise to attack. And then I imagine what it might be like, that thing we’ll never see from this enclosed, blind ship, the torpedo explosion against the enemy boat, the fire, the smoke, the shock, the wounds, the blood, things we sometimes see in movies but which now can happen in reality, though how can we know it, we won’t see anything, we’ll just sense the echo of the blast and maybe feel a kind of jolt, but not the screams, the screams of pain and fear, the noise of death silenced by the water, the others—those outside–floating by. But the detonation doesn’t happen, minutes go by and nothing, maybe the torpedo kept on going, maybe its battery ran out and it sank to the bottom of the sea, deactivated, dead. Then I see Grunwald elbowing Heredia and pointing upward, tracing circles in the air with his raised index finger: I can hear them too, chopper rotors, the convoy of choppers that escort the boat we’re trying to hit have detected the wake of our torpedo from the air and are looking for us. Just then Grunwald closes his eyes, opens them with a start, and says to Heredia: Hey, buddy, your wife had the baby, a boy, look at the time, you’ll see exactly when he was born. Heredia checks his watch and hugs him. Evasive maneuvers begin. We dive. The others go back to their work of dismantling the bunks; soon they’ll have to load another torpedo. I decide to return to the engine room. The boat lists, the curtain behind the aft table falls open a little and I can see my boots. We’re diving deeper and deeper, you can hear the rotors of the choppers, a little muffled, but we know they’re still there.

  Torpedo splashdown in the water, says Elizalde, and even though his voice is gentle I leap up as if I’d heard a scream. With the bunks dismantled, we sleep right on the floor, on top of whatever blankets or clothing each one can find and pile up in any available corner. Maximum depth, the CO orders, and evasive maneuvers begin. Fernández is ordered to eject an Alka-Seltzer to produce bubbles and disorient the torpedo, so he runs to the petty officers’ head, where the ejector is kept, but the door is closed, there’s someone inside; he bangs on the door desperately, some people whisper at him not to make noise, the torpedo searches out the noise, searches us out as if sniffing the sound
, any tiny thing it might detect. Heredia steps out of the head buck naked, pulling on his underwear, his overalls down around his ankles; Fernández goes inside and starts maneuvers: he opens the ejector compartment, inserts the decoy into the tube, now he has to open the valve to fill the tube with water, but he decides to skip that step in order to save a few seconds; then he goes to open the air valve above the toilet so that the pressurized air injected in the ejector tube will propel the fake target, but he can’t, he applies pressure, tries with both hands, but the valve is stuck and doesn’t move a millimeter. Nobrega, who’s watching him, makes a sign toward the bow and also pops into the bathroom to help; Grunwald comes from the bow with a crowbar, uses it as a lever, and manages to open the valve. The decoy shoots out and starts to bubble; Heredia finishes pulling up his overalls, crosses himself, heads for the torpedo area; a mouthful of water enters through the ejector, which all the guys remaining in the head try to seal off; the three of them gush water as they listen to the enemy torpedo approach—its humming rotor spinning wildly—with greater and greater force; Linares clutches the rosary that dangles from his neck and moves his lips silently, he must be praying as the torpedo comes closer, closer, and I say to myself that maybe in the ship that fired it there’s someone imagining our explosion, the terrible hole in the sub’s armor that will increase pressure till it smashes us to bits, from the inside to the outside, each and every one of us, as if it’s inflating us and inflating us till it makes us burst. There won’t be time for anything, not even to scream or run away or hear or see, the blood will tint the water a crackling red that will be diluted little by little till it turns back into plain water. The lights flicker, our batteries are running low, the CO asks: Battery remaining? Twenty percent, they reply. The torpedo whizzes by to starboard. Remaining? Fifteen percent, and the torpedo continues on course, I hear it, it whizzes and keeps going, whizzes and keeps going. Remaining? Ten percent, the sub vibrates, the CO orders us to turn off the machines to conserve the batteries, an even greater silence falls, there’s no sound at all, we float gently and the transparent water goes back to red again, and the blood returns to our limbs and our limbs to our bodies and our bodies to the sub and the hole seals up and the metal plate is restored while the torpedo continues on course till we can’t hear its fucking little rotor blade anymore.

  A crash, as if a giant piece of glass has broken, startles us. Depth charge at port, whispers Elizalde, and so the maneuvers to avoid the enemy begin again, an enemy we can hear but never see. A new depth charge shakes us even harder, we dive quickly, everything tilts, a jar of something rolls past my feet, I follow it with my eyes. Another depth charge, this time near the bow, jolts us; that’s three, says Heredia, nervously scratching his head; the jar has stopped by Grunwald’s feet, which are wrapped in several pairs of socks; Green peas? Grunwald asks Heredia, whose only reply is a shrug. We turn to port and another charge shakes us, though less violent this time; I look up toward the pipes, there’s a small leak, one of the other guys shows up with pliers, one of those pliers whose handles Heredia had covered so patiently; some people have started putting on their life jackets even though the CO hasn’t given the order; then comes the wallop of another explosion as we dive even deeper, now the jar goes rolling from Grunwald toward me; four more explosions, Heredia continues to count, the jar stops next to my feet, which are wrapped in several pairs of blue socks, one on top of another. Capers, the label says, they’re capers. Grunwald looks at Heredia: Relax, he says, it’ll pass. Another depth charge whips us, and another right after that one, each one feels like you have a metal helmet on your head and somebody’s hammering on it. Just relax, we’ll come out of this and go home, Grunwald says to Heredia, and How do you … ? but Heredia’s question is swallowed up by the noise of a new explosion and now there are no more questions or answers; no one’s talking anymore. Another charge stuns and shakes us, that’s eight so far, Heredia tallies. We dive even deeper, trying to dodge them, fucking choppers; nine anti-submarine charges, but this time no one says anything, not even Heredia; others imitate the first guys and put on their life jackets; now the jar rolls down to Heredia’s feet, as he watches its gentle rocking, like tremors; Capers, capers, he starts to read aloud, what’s this for? No idea, Grunwald replies; another new charge stuns us and shakes us, and why the life jacket, I wonder, if at this depth and with this pressure no one will be able to survive. Another charge, now the jar rolls past my feet and then, together with the new quake, a noise startles me, it startles the others, too: it scrapes the metal plate of the boat, it creaks as if it’s about to split open against the rocky ocean floor. Grunwald jumps out of his chair, a few of the others run toward the bow to add weight to the boat. Olivero desperately struggles to fill the tanks with ballast; most likely the navigation chart got messed up and we’re touching bottom, so Olivero—and now Grunwald—work to keep us from ricocheting and having the rotor blade break on us, keeping us trapped here on the bottom forever, those with life jackets and those without, all of us, the same, smashed to pieces. Another explosive charge falls, but this time it doesn’t seem so close; the jar shakes but doesn’t move. The CO orders all machinery stopped; the sub, heavy now, floats gently; everyone is silent and still, grabbing on to whatever they can to keep from falling while the boat carves a cradle in the ocean floor, which seems sandy now; it rocks a little, finds its place. The jar moves, I follow it with my eyes and see Soria rushing into the head, the door doesn’t shut: here at the bottom the boat compresses and now the door to the head, which was open when we started to dive, doesn’t fit in its frame anymore and won’t close all the way; another charge explodes but we barely move. The other guys’ faces look white, transparent, damp, we turn paler and paler, all of us, the others and, no doubt, me too, sort of moldy for lack of natural light, from so much breathing condensed in here. Another charge; it feels like they’re sweeping the area, most likely behind the choppers there are destroyers or aircraft carriers. And then another, this one jerks us with greater force, it feels like my head’s about to explode, the jar hasn’t come back, it’s stuck against a blanket that’s lying on the floor, all rolled up. The others look ridiculous with those life jackets that couldn’t save them anyway; the CO, however, hasn’t put his on; neither has Grunwald, but he has put on his wire-framed glasses and is making faces at Heredia to crack him up; Torres rummages in his locker till he finds and removes the three cassettes he’s recorded for his girlfriend and puts them in a little plastic bag which he ties to his life preserver. Now we’re quiet down below, I feel kind of weak and decide to move around a little; I take a few steps aft, there’s another guy stashing a small white towel and a little axe in his plastic bag; I want to see how things are going in the engine room so I head in that direction; Nobrega stows a towel and a deodorant in a plastic bag and ties it to his waist; another charge shakes us, I think my head’s going to explode, I hold it between my hands, not moving, and suddenly I have a vision of the scene with the horse from that book I was reading, but I still don’t know if I finished it after I was hospitalized (if, in fact, I was). I forget certain things I’d like to remember and I remember the ones I’d like to forget; they come to me now at awkward times without my calling them, they barge in and force me to deal with them: the horse smells rotten, like corpses, like a dead man, but he’s alive and on his feet, tied to the post so he won’t run away, so he won’t lie down on the ground to wait for death; tied and standing, he waits, not knowing what for, but he waits, his back raw, the only living thing in the middle of so much death, alive, stinking, and filled with pus, with streams of pus dripping down his flanks. I don’t want to see the horse, I don’t want to smell him, I don’t want to, but I see him and I smell him and my stomach turns over and I rush toward the head, not making any noise, sick to my stomach and light-headed, but the damn toilet I’m supposed to use is occupied and I bang on the door with my closed fist, the door that doesn’t close, while at the same time I feel something liquid and
acid rising from my stomach to my mouth, and in a desperate attempt to keep from vomiting and spilling it all out, I swallow it, I swallow it together with the disgusting, disturbing memory of that war horse I once read about, I swallow it together with this endless, uncertain wait. I give up waiting to use the head, it won’t be necessary now; I also give up on the idea of going to the engine room, I turn on my heels and return to the bow; the sub shakes once more, the jar of capers rolls past my feet again, thirty-four, Heredia says, that makes thirty-four, and it looks like I’ll never meet my son, he adds. We’ll go home, Grunwald tells him, the woman who does cures with dogs told me so. Who? Heredia asks. A woman from Tres Arroyos who does cures with dogs, she told me I’d get back home safely; But she told you, not me; you, too, you’ll … A new charge. That makes thirty-five, Heredia counts, will they ever stop? I feel uneasy, though better, and I’d rather move, I set off again toward the engine room; on the way I see someone stowing a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste in his plastic bag, he rolls it all up and sticks it inside his life jacket; I cross paths with the CO, who’s heading from the control room to somewhere behind me. The open door of the officers’ cabin allows me to see the Executive Officer stashing cigarettes in a plastic bag, and the Hyena’s smile appears before my eyes again. I continue on my way; when I reach the control room I see that Polski is sitting on the stool at the map table, the lamplight turned on very low, he bends over a little, carefully studying the maps, he follows some lines with one finger, jots something down on a blank sheet of paper, looks again, traces his finger along the paper once more, jots some-thing down again; I watch him out of sheer curiosity. The CO returns from his regular route from the control room to his cabin and back again; this time he walks up to the chart table, stops behind Polski, observes him, What are you doing, Polski? he asks; I’m marking the locations of the ranches closest to the coast, sir, and the distances we’d have to walk in case we need to disembark. The CO looks him right in the eye as he zips his jacket up to his neck; Take it easy, Polski, nobody’s going to get out of here, he replies and continues on his way, from the control room to his cabin, and then, no doubt, from his cabin to the control room. Polski folds the sheet of paper again and again until it’s just a tiny, compact rectangle which he tosses into the basket secured underneath the table, turns off the lamp, and returns to his post. It’s been a while now, a moment—how can you tell how long it’s been when time behaves so randomly around here—since we’ve been jolted by a depth charge; it seems they’ve given us up for lost. I keep on walking; in front of the sonar equipment, Elizalde is stuffing packs of cigarettes into a little bag; I continue on to the engine room. Albaredo, Soria, and Torres are there, standing next to one another, calmly, looking down. Then the ping of enemy sonar echoes in our ears like a sharp twinge, it repeats, penetrating from one end of the boat to the other, it stalks us and studies us. Those on the outside are looking for us. We stay here, on the inside, our only possible place, waiting. The only damn thing we can do is wait.