Air circulation has stopped, and the absence of that faint, familiar, constant noise throws me into a state of alarm and awakens me; I sit up and look toward the sonar; the three sonar operators are there, a sign that they’ve detected something. It seems to be coming from the two ships that were on their way to Puerto Argentino earlier, comments Heredia as he crosses in front of me, loping toward the torpedo area. I stand and listen to the CO order a course that will cut off the enemy’s retreat and also issue an order to pass out life jackets. Olivero is in charge of the life jackets, which are stored at the bow, in the row of cots that were left assembled, and now he starts handing them out, starting at the bow and moving toward the area of the disassembled cots where I am—I don’t want one, I don’t think they’ll do us any good if a torpedo hits us—he keeps distributing them near the command post, all the officers put on their life jackets, the CO refuses with a shake of his head—he hasn’t used one in all the time we’ve been crossing and he’s not about to use one now, and he heads for the periscope, most likely in order to spot enemy targets. Olivero walks toward the fire control computer, about to hand a life jacket to Marini, who he hasn’t spoken to since they boarded the sub that foggy Sunday when we weighed anchor. When he reaches the computer, he stops next to the seat Marini occupies at the monitor; he taps him on the shoulder, Marini turns his head and watches as Olivero unties a little bag he wears knotted to his belt. They’re chocolate bars, Olivero says to him, try not to get them wet, they’ll come in handy if we have to disembark; Marini stands up and keeps staring at him, he seems surprised, as if he doesn’t exactly know what to do; suddenly he gives Olivero a hug and hears Olivero say: What assholes we were, right? I hear him, too, and stand there watching how they disentangle themselves from that embrace and how Olivero hands Marini the lifejacket, which Marini accepts with a smile. Now Olivero continues with the distribution, moving toward the sonar area; then he’ll go on toward the control compartment, and finally toward the engine room. The night is too dark, says someone passing nearby on his way to the officers’ cabin, his face concealed by the periscope. Since it’s not my shift in the engine room, I set out for the bow; Grunwald and Heredia are once again sitting on the bench near the torpedo launchers, both of them in lifejackets. Grunwald is wearing the little wire glasses, Heredia has a rosary dangling from his neck; Olivero shows up, having finished handing out the lifejackets; we’re within firing range now, between the two ships, an ideal location, he remarks; it looks like one of them is a missile boat, and just as he says it I see the dead: they’re floating in the frozen, gray sea, around twenty of them, and behind them is a seriously damaged Argentine ship, fuming its defeat into the equally gray sky. Movement in the torpedo area jostles me out of these imaginings, two lights flicker on the screen next to the torpedo launchers, number one and number eight; that means we need to prepare two SST-4 torpedoes for launching; Olivero and somebody else flood tubes one and eight, the air comes out of the tubes and a little water spills out, the outside door opens; they’re probably working at the command post to coordinate data, another light goes on, indicating that the doors of torpedo launchers one and eight are open, Olivero activates one of the lights, then the other, to notify the command post that the torpedoes are ready. The CO issues the order to fire number one, I imagine Marini at this moment pressing the computer button to fire it off, you can hear the torpedo’s engine revving up, but seconds go by and the computer doesn’t fire, while a couple of men work quickly to stop it, the CO gives the order to fire the other readied torpedo, the engine starts up, you can hear the buzz it makes as it slides along the torpedo launcher, its fall into the water, the slightest pause, the beginning of its trajectory. Luckily the torpedo that failed has been deactivated, or it would have exploded, along with us, here inside. Grunwald looks at his watch through his empty glasses, Heredia, in turn, stares at him gazing at the watch, Olivero observes both of them; I turn toward the bow and see the rest of the crew looking this way, toward the valves of the activated torpedo launcher, their eyes fixed on it, as if by all of them looking at the same point they might achieve a concentration of will that could hit the target and explode these unpredictable torpedoes that up to now have done nothing but fail us. One minute, Grunwald shouts, and after that brief phrase, silence; a couple of meters forward, the cook, sitting on the floor, reads another comic book, and I think that in one of the drawings I can see the floating dead, and in the panel following that one, a burning ship, THE ISLA DE LOS ESTADOS SINKS, announce the upper-case letters that I can’t quite see from here, but can guess; two minutes, Grunwald says, Heredia clasps the cross on his rosary with one hand and I find myself looking at the poster Nobrega drew a few days ago, from there the woman looks back at me, framed by her long, blond hair; the cook turns the page to keep reading, I hear “the torpedo cut the wire, sir,” over the fire control console, two minutes thirty, Grunwald pronounces; it’s too soon, Olivero mutters in a very faint voice, stating what we all know, or maybe he didn’t really say it, he’s thought it but kept his mouth shut; in this state of silence and these brushes with death, it sometimes happens that I hear everything that the others seem to hear, the others’ voices, what they’re going to say and never say. Then there’s a crash of sheet metal, as if someone is striking a giant gong, the gong from the Rank Organization films I used to watch with my father when I was a boy, about war, about con-BOYS, as my old man used to call cowboys, with an “n” and stressing the last syllable, but there’s no explosion: the torpedo has hit the target without exploding; fucking torpedoes, everyone shouts with their mouths closed, they shout it in their heads, in the midst of a sea of curses, motherfucking torpedoes, to be here and be unable to do anything, to be here and accomplish nothing, nothing. Somebody next to me snorts the air of his disappointment; a tear rolls down the cook’s face; he stops it with his blue shirt cuff and conceals the action by turning his eyes to the magazine again; Ships retreating, sir, Elizalde announces from the sonar area, and we all know—even though nobody says so—that it will be impossible to catch up with them. In any case that doesn’t make us feel any better: even if these two ships don’t attack us, they’ll report our position and soon they’ll come after us.
I bring my book over to the table at the bow, settle myself in, open it, but instead of reading, I sit there watching what Almaraz is writing in his black notebook: the CO sent a wire where he explained everything. This afternoon they replied, ordering us to return. We’re to arrive at Puerto Belgrano on the nineteenth at 2 AM. The Executive Officer must be happy we’re going back, Heredia remarks; I, on the other hand, am really angry that we’re leaving just like that; Nobrega pulls up to the table with paper and pencil in hand, sits in the empty place that was left next to Heredia, but that’s where they’re fixing the computer and the engine, so we go back. Soon those Brits will get what’s coming to them! Grunwald promises, smiling; I don’t know, I think we all have that bitter taste in our mouths, right? pipes up Almaraz, who’s stopped writing and now closes his black notebook; Nobrega gets ready to sketch; Yeah, Heredia says, we’re returning with the feeling that all the stuff we went through was totally useless; Nobrega raises his eyes from the sheet of paper and stares at it without offering an opinion; But we’ll never know it, locked up in here with no communication, we’ll soon find out what things are like, says Grunwald; Nobrega draws a line that twists and straightens and twists and folds back on itself; deep down, I think we all know what things are like, says Almaraz, and adds, turning to Heredia: At least think of this, you’re going to meet your son, and we’re going to see our loved ones, our families, and in a few days … now Nobrega retouches the line, giving it thickness and depth, as if he were drawing the wall of an endless labyrinth; Sure, sure, of course, Heredia replies, but first we have to get back, right? Then I return to my book; the animal complains that he no longer understands his earlier plan, he can’t find anything reasonable in it; Almaraz stashes the notebook in the pocket of his over
alls and gets up from the table; Nobrega’s labyrinth becomes compact and gray; once more the animal abandons his labors as well as his eavesdropping task, he doesn’t want to discover that the noise is growing louder, he puts everything aside in order to try to calm his inner conflict; They’ll be looking for us, no doubt about it, Grunwald announces; meanwhile, the animal doesn’t know what he’s looking for, possibly just trying to buy himself a little more time. We’re going back, and I wonder how you can return to a place you no longer remember; ever since I woke up that day of the noise, everything seems to be limited to what happens in here, plus a few scraps of the past that my memory arbitrarily cuts short. Nobrega’s labyrinth is now dense and indecipherable, and it looks like it’s going to lift off from the paper.
We’re sailing northward, always submerged and alert to every noise; we have to cross a zone we imagine to be loaded with English ships and subs, they’ve mapped a defeat for us that starts in the Malvinas and goes straight north, near Necochea, and from there we’ll have to go back hugging the coast, returning southward as far as Puerto Belgrano. Since we can’t shoot off those worthless torpedoes anymore, the CO has given the order to set up the bunks again, so several people are busy securing them in place and then picking up the mats, sheets, and blankets that are still on the floor. I gather up some sheets to help out a little, but they fall from my hands a couple of times, so I give up and leave to keep from getting in the way. I walk toward the torpedo area and sit on the bench opposite the instrument panel, I sit there staring at my hands, without feeling them; I bring my right hand to my eyes, raise it, and move it to my head; when we were cabin boys we didn’t wear sailors’ caps because we were too new and didn’t even know how to salute; whenever a superior passed by, we had to put our hand against our head to pretend we were covered; everybody was superior to us at the Naval Mechanics’ School, even the pigeons, and there were enough of those to be a real pain. Now I can’t feel my hand against my head, I move it down to stop it, with the palm turned inward, right before my eyes, and what I see is a map of slightly faded grooves.
Meanwhile the operator snorkels and some of the others take the opportunity to listen to Radio Carve. It seems an English warship was attacked by a torpedo that hit but didn’t explode, more or less in the area where we were; it might have been the torpedo we thought was lost. The others say they hear that the aircraft carrier Hermes won’t be received for repair in Curaçao; they also heard that the prisoners from the Santa Fe arrived today in Argentina from the South Georgia Islands. But we won’t know anything, really, till we get there. I think of Mancuso again. It won’t be long now, the others say; I’m sleepy nearly all the time, and, even though I sleep a lot, the days of this return trip seem long. So, to keep myself entertained, when this semi-permanent drowsiness I’ve fallen into lets up or a few moments, I go back to reading my book, the ridiculous digressions of the animal in his den, who lately has caught on to the fact that the other threatening thing, which he doesn’t understand and which he sometimes calls a noise and sometimes an animal, seems to have a plan whose meaning he can’t figure out; then he surrounds the noise, digging circles around it because he understands that the fact that the noise comes back louder each time means that the circles are growing narrower and that the other thing is coming ever closer.
Today is Navy Day, one of the others remarks, and that phrase—coming from nearby, though I can’t say exactly from where—rouses me; we’re nearly opposite Necochea, the voice adds, so now we’re starting to turn south. I had fallen asleep with the book open on my chest; now I close it and stand with the intention of getting up and walking a little to see what’s going on; we’ll be emerging shortly and will travel on the surface till we arrive in port. Book in hand, I gather momentum and scramble down from my bunk just as the jar of capers, which obviously had been in my bed and which I might have accidentally pushed with my numb feet, rolls with a dull noise into a jacket that’s fallen from another bunk, and comes to a halt at the feet of someone passing by. This jar again? It’s a miracle it didn’t break, says one of the others, startled by the noise and poking his head out from a bunk on the other side of the corridor; it’s been rolling around from one place to another; why doesn’t somebody take it to the galley? I did, replies the guy who had been walking down the corridor a moment ago and who now bends down and grabs the jar; I took it there but it showed up again somewhere or other, he adds as he heads to the galley with the jar and disappears behind the door. At that very moment, a few steps closer to me, someone comes out of the head bare-chested, a grease-stained towel rolled around his waist, on his way to the bunks, crossing paths with another guy going by, also bare-chested, but with a dry towel—or rather, as dry as a towel or anything else can be in here—a towel, at any rate, rolled around his waist. Most likely they’ve given him permission, and water, to wash himself, as we’ve nearly arrived. The grubbier one has disappeared behind the bathroom door; the recently bathed guy rummages through his belongings, I imagine in search of a clean change of clothes. I’ll stay here, says Soria, who has just drawn the curtains of his bunk and is now sitting up there, legs dangling, for the first time in weeks without his life vest; with all the filth I’m carrying around, I need liters and liters of water and at least one packet of Camello detergent. He pauses, and as nobody says anything, he continues: Besides, I’ve run out of clean clothes, I’ve got that new shirt they gave me when we left, it was so stiff that the first day I tried it on, it hurt my neck and I had to take it off. The guy who came out of the bathroom and is now changing, stares at him as he balances on one leg and sticks the other into a seemingly clean pair of blue overalls; he looks at Soria as if he’s trying to make a comment he can’t quite express in words; then Soria explains, in reply to that question, which didn’t need to be pronounced: That’s fine for you because you’re nice and comfortable sitting in front of the radio, but those of us who are in the engine room, stinking of diesel and with greasy hands … for us a little bit of water makes no difference. At last, taking long strides, I set out for the table at the bow; with all this commotion going on at the head, the place is pretty calm: Almaraz writes in his black notebook, Nobrega takes down the poster he drew a few weeks ago, which someone hung next to the torpedo indicator panel; he folds it in quarters and returns aft, possibly to take down the other poster, which at this point is no longer necessary.
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