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.