They call us again to cover our combat posts, one-thirty in the morning, goddammit, says Gómez alongside me as he stands and smooths out his damp, wrinkled overalls, what’s going on with those English, don’t they ever sleep? he complains, walking away toward the torpedo area. Although my legs have become numb, I stand, too—not without a certain clumsiness—and start out for the engine room; Soria, Torres, and Albaredo are already there, but I stick around anyway. Albaredo goes out for a while; Soria and Torres look at each other, one of them bearded, the other clean-shaven, from inside their life jackets; they look like reflections of one another in a warped mirror. Albaredo comes tiptoeing back, the noise has returned, he explains in a whisper; What noise, asks Soria, also in a very quiet voice, passing his right hand over his head; The same one we heard before we launched the torpedo, Albaredo replies; But, what does that mean? Are we the same as before? No way of knowing, but there’s no propeller noise, so maybe it’s a swarm of krill. And then a memory hits me like an avalanche: once, on the Piedrabuena, someone lit a reflector on the stern to fish and the krill came toward the light, it appeared before the light as if blooming from nothing, you couldn’t see it because of how tiny it was, but minutes after lighting the reflector we found ourselves in the middle of a stain so red and thick that it looked like the boat had been stabbed and was bleeding, slowly and merrily, on the dark sea that moonless night.
We haven’t bathed in so long that the smell clinging to us must be awful, a mix of old grime and diesel oil, but we’re so covered in it that we don’t even smell it. Everyone goes around with full beards, some longer, some shorter, Soria not at all, but you don’t see anybody scratching himself anymore; the itching days have passed. Maceda, the second in command, walks by me and stops—a few steps before reaching the periscope and without taking his eyes off what’s happening at the command post—to talk to one of the officers. His mouth is a slit in the middle of the bush of reddish hair of his beard; he gestures, emphasizing his words with his hands, I have the impression he’s trying to convince him of something. It’s dawn, comments someone nearby, and the murmur reaches me crossing this spatial silence that the boat seems to be wrapped in when it’s settled at the bottom with the engines turned off. Now suddenly I see myself in my white school smock, reciting: At the bottom of the sea there’s a glass house, with a motion of my right hand drawing an imaginary sea bed for the rest of my schoolmates, to an avenue of coral… but I don’t know what coral is and I feel like I can’t go on, Señorita Elsa looks at me and her pink-painted lips stretch into an endless smile, and I wonder if she knows what coral is, and then I forget how the rest of the poem goes, my classmates look at one another, I repeat it from the beginning to see if that way I’ll be able to continue: At the bottom of the sea there’s a house… but no, after the coral there are no more words, they’ve been erased, and everyone that lives in them has disappeared, too, Señorita Elsa’s not there anymore, in her place is the Hyena, with his everlasting smile, his shaved face and his white scarf, he orders me to continue because everyone is lined up on deck waiting for me to recite so they can weigh anchor, so there I go again: At the bottom of the sea there’s a… metal house, I stammer, but at last I go on, a blind whale with its belly full of Jonahs, the water surrounds them, the abyss surrounds them, and some algae is about to entangle itself around their heads. I stop talking, lower my eyes, smooth out my smock, the Hyena applauds loudly and emotionally, he applauds and applauds and applauds, and a dense fog descends over all of us.