This numbness in some parts of my body is very strange, yet here I am, walking once more toward the table at the bow, with my beat-up little book in my right hand. Grunwald and Heredia are drinking juice; under these conditions you have to add a little sugar; I sit down at the table, open the book to the page where I had left off reading; the animal has decided to stop wandering along the corridors in search of a new source of noise, instead devoting himself to noticing the ugly holes, the nasty cracks he’s made in the walls. The Executive Officer told Nobrega that it was suicidal to go on like that with the torpedoes not working, mutters Grunwald in front of me, and he walks around saying it would be better to go back. Yes, but he’s not the CO, he’s not the one who decides, replies Heredia, who’s sitting at the head of the table, to Grunwald’s right; suddenly the animal decides to remain in some random place and concentrate on listening; I know, says Grunwald, and we’re here to fight, but the way things are… he touches his chin with a gesture that emphasizes this unexpected silence generated by the interrupted sentence and the confusion that seems to have invaded it. Just let the Executive Officer keep talking, adds Heredia, no one’s going to follow him, at least I’m not, even if I’m dying to meet my son, how am I supposed to look the kid in the face if… And I keep on making more useless discoveries, confesses the animal in his den, and it’s just that sometimes he thinks that the noise has stopped because there are long pauses. I’m distracted for a moment and cast a sidelong glance at the black curtain that separates us from the aft bunks, the few bunks that were left standing, and underneath I spy the toes of my boots, the black dent. I keep on making more useless discoveries, the animal says, and he starts to believe it would be better to find someone without cracks to confide in. Olivero has moved over to the table, appearing suddenly, nimbly, and silently, as usual; he sits down beside me and pours himself a glass of juice. And what he wants to do, he can’t do alone, Heredia continues, he can’t do it without us; did you get the message, too? asks Olivero; Grunwald and Heredia nod yes; the first thing that needs to be done now, my animal thinks, is to inspect the den’s defense systems. Suddenly I lift my eyes from the book; the conversation distracts me and I don’t feel like reading anymore; I close the book, and just when I’m about to rest my hand on Olivero’s shoulder in a kind of greeting, he anticipates my movement, smiles at me, and says Thanks. For what? asks Grunwald; I wasn’t talking to you, Olivero replies; Grunwald looks at Heredia, Heredia shrugs; it seems like being locked up in here is affecting all of us, Grunwald remarks; Olivero gives me a smile as he looks me in the eye, blood is pulsing in my ears and for some crazy reason I think of coral again. They call us to our battle stations; we all get up immediately, the sub lists to one side, we start to peel off from the bottom, we leave the table, and everyone heads for his assigned place: Olivero, Grunwald, and Heredia uphill toward the bow, the torpedo area; me, downhill and sternward, toward the engine room. The jar of capers rolls past me, getting ahead of me; I follow it with my gaze as I advance; I see it stop right before the CO’S cabin door, against a rolled-up blue blanket that’s lying on the floor, I reach the jar and now I’m the one who’s gaining the lead and leaving it behind; as I pass through the sonar area, I find out that the sonar operators have picked up a hydrophonic sound; now the CO orders us to set a course toward the enemy in order to shorten the distance and shoot off a torpedo; now we’re level and at full speed to try to catch up with it, but with the engine malfunction, we’re moving very slowly, and we all know that unless the enemy ship slows down or stops, it will get away. I enter the engine room and someone comes up behind me; they say it’s a sure thing they’re gonna shell Puerto Argentino or Puerto Darwin; a voice catches me off guard, and then I turn and see that it’s Torres who has just walked in. Stop the engines, the voice of the engineering officer bursts in, getting ahead of Torres; Engines stopped; understood, sir, replies Albaredo, and immediately Torres and Soria obey the order; engines are stopped, Albaredo reports to the engineering officer, who now withdraws; for sure we’ll wait here till it comes back, Soria declares softly, and here it won’t get away from us; yeah, but by the time it gets back, it’ll have done some damage, Albaredo replies, just as softly; we ought to have caught up with it, but the engines we’ve got that are still operable aren’t enough. I leave the engine room, slip behind the sonar operators, who remain on alert, since another enemy ship might appear at any moment. Egea emerges from the galley with Gutiérrez behind him, both carrying plates of food in their hands, they pass in front of me on their way sternward, it’s rice with tomatoes, I confirm, you’ve got to take advantage of this pause in the action to eat, while we wait for the ship that got away from us to come back, and maybe some other one, as well. For now, I return to the table at the bow in order to read for a while; I run into Polski, who’s coming out of the NCO’S head, he takes a few steps forward, goes into the galley, and asks what there is to eat, I keep going, the jar of capers is no longer in the place where it had gotten stuck, it must have rolled somewhere else, I reach the bow, but the table is occupied, everyone’s already eating, after all, those are the only places where you can sit on something besides the damp floor, so I take a couple of steps backward and sit on the pile of clothing and blankets where I’ve been resting lately. Look where the Remington was, Polski grumbles, coming out of the galley as he aims for a corner next to the CO’S cabin and picks up the little typewriter. I take the book out of my overalls; the dampness of the atmosphere has softened it, like my hands and everyone else’s, which, from lack of sun, are also beginning to look greenish-white.
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.