"Yes."
"Honest?"
"Honest. I've read all of them. Or nearly all of them." "Which is your favorite?"
"I don't have a favorite. None is separate from the others. All books that involve the sea, from the
Odyssey
to the latest novel by Patrick O'Brian, are interconnected, like a library."
"Like Borges's library..."
She smiled and Coy shrugged, a simple gesture.
"I don't know. I never read anything by Borges. But it is true that the sea is like a library."
"Books describing things that happen on dry land are interesting too."
"If you say so___ "
At that, clutching the two books to her chest, she began to laugh. She seemed like a different woman, laughing openly, happily, and then she said, "Thundering typhoons!" She deepened her voice and spoke like a one-eyed, peg-leg pirate with a parrot on his shoulder. Then, as the sun turned the asymmetrical tips of her hair even brighter gold, she sat down next to Coy and again opened the brightly colored books and began to turn the pages. "The sea is here too," she said. "Look And adventure is still possible. You can get drunk a thousand times with Captain Haddock—Loch Lomond whiskey, in case you didn't know, holds no secrets for me. I also parachuted over a mysterious island with the green flag of the EFSR in my arms, crossed the border between Syldavia and Borduria more times than you can count, swore by the mustache of Kurvi Tasch, sailed on the
Karaboudjan,
the
Ramona,
the
Speedol Star,
the
Aurora,
and the
Sinus
—more ships than you, I'm sure. I searched for Red Rackhams treasure, westward, farther westward, and walked on the moon while Thompson and Thomson, with their green hair, performed as downs in the Hiparco Circus. And when I'm lonely, Coy, when I'm very, very, very lonely, then I light one of your friend Hero's cigarettes, make love with Sam Spade, and dream of Maltese falcons while through the smoke I summon my old friends Abdallah, Alcazar, Joryon Wagg, Chester, Zorrino,
Skut, Oliveira de Figueira, and listen to the CD of the jewel song from
Faust
on an old Bianca Castafiore recording."
As she spoke she set the two books on the table. They were old editions, one with a blue binding and the other green. The frontispiece of the first showed Tintin, Snowy, and Captain Haddock in a plumed hat, and a galleon under full sail. In the second, Tintin and Snowy were skimming along the bottom of the sea in a submarine shaped like a shark.
"That's Professor Calculus's submarine," said Tanger. "When I was a girl, I saved my money from birthdays, saint's days, and Christmas gifts to buy these books, pinching pennies as hard as Scrooge himself. You know who Ebenezer Scrooge is?"
'A sailor?"
"No, a miser. Bob Cratchit's boss." "Never heard of him."
"It doesn't matter," she continued.
"I
saved every cent so I could go to the bookstore and come out with one of these in my hands, holding my breath, loving the feel of the hard covers, the colors of the splendid illustrations. And then, all by myself, I would open the pages and smell the paper and the ink before I dived into the story. So I collected all twenty-three, one by one. A lot of time has gone by since then, but to this day, when I open a Tintin I can smell the smell that I have associated with adventure and life ever since. Along with the movies of John Ford and John Huston, Rich-mal Compton's
Adventures ofWilliam,
and a few other books, these shaped my childhood."
She had opened
Red Rackham's Treasure
to page 40. In a large illustration in the middle of the page, Tintin, dressed in a diving suit, was walking along the bottom of the sea toward the impressive wreck of the sunken
Unicorn.
"Look carefully," she said in a solemn voice. "That one picture marked my life."
With extreme delicacy she touched the page with her fingertips, as if she feared she might alter the colors. Coy was looking at her, not the book; she was still smiling absently, with an expression that made her seem as young as the girl in the framed snapshot, leaning back in her father's arms. A happy expression, he thought. From a time when the counter is still at zero. Later would come the dented silver cup with the missing handle. Junior swimming championship. First prize.
"I imagine," she said after a while, without looking up from the book, "that you had a dream too."
"Of course."
He could understand her. Not the books of the silver cup or the photo, not anything connected with things in her memory, but there was a point of contact, a territory where it was easy for him to recognize her. Maybe Tanger wasn't all that different after all. Maybe, he thought, in some way she's one of ours, even though by definition every one of ours sails, hunts, fights, and sinks alone. Ships that pass in the night. Lights in the distance, visible for a brief while, often going in the opposite direction. Sometimes a distant sound, the throb of engines. Then silence again when it passes, and darkness, and the glow extinguished in the empty blackness of the sea.
"Sure," he repeated.
That was all he said. His image, the vignette in his memory album, was of a Mediterranean port with three thousand years of history in its ancient stones, surrounded by mountains and castles with embrasures where once guns were mounted. Names like Navidad fort, de Curra jetty, San Pedro lighthouse. The smell of still water, of damp hawsers, and the
lebeche,
that south-southwest wind fluttering the flags of moored ships and the pennants on the trawl lines of the fishing boats. Idle men, men with nothing to do in retirement, facing the sea, sitting on old iron bollards. Nets in the sun, the rusting sides of merchant ships nestling against the docks, and that unique odor of salt, tar, and the age-old sea, of ports that have seen many ships and many lives come and go. In Coy's memory there was a boy moving through all that, a thin, dark-skinned boy with his schoolbag on his back, who had played hooky to gaze at the sea, to walk past the ships and watch the blond, tattooed men come ashore speaking incomprehensible languages. To see them cast off mooring lines that fell with a splash and were hauled on board before the iron hull moved away from the quay and the ship steered toward the harbor entrance, between the lighthouses, soon nothing but a strip of foamy wake, moving out toward the open sea in search of those unmarked highways to a place the boy was certain that he was going to go too. That had been his dream, the image that marked his life forever; early, before-the-fact nostalgia for a sea reached through old and wise ports peopled with ghosts that rested among the cranes huddled in the shade of the sheds. Iron worn away by the friction of cables. Men who sat quietly, motionless for hours, and for whom the fishing rod or the rum or the cigarette was only an excuse, who seemed not to care for anything in the world but to stare at the sea. Grandfathers who led their grandsons by the hand and, while the young ones asked questions or pointed to gulls, they, the old ones, turned their eyes toward the moored ships and the line of the horizon beyond the lighthouses, as if searching for some lost memory; a recollection, a word, an explanation of something that happened too long ago, or something mat may never have happened at all.
"
PEOPLE
are so stupid," Tanger was saying. "Their dreams are limited to things they see on TV"
She had returned the Tin tins to the shelf and was standing, hands in the pockets of her jeans, looking at him. Now everything about her was softer, from the expression in her eyes to the smile on her lips. Coy nodded, not knowing why. Maybe to encourage her to keep talking, or to indicate that he understood.
"What do you want to find on the
Dei Gloria,
really?"
She came toward him, slowly, and for a moment, caught off guard, he thought that she was going to touch his face.
"I don't know. I swear to you, I don't know." Now she was standing, right beside him, studying the nautical chart on the table. "But when I read the boy's testimony, transcribed in the dry language of a clerk, I felt... That ship fleeing under full sail, and the corsair giving chase... Why didn't they take refuge in Aguilas? The atlases of the time showed a castle there, and a tower with two guns on Cabo Cope, where they could have sought protection."
Coy glanced at the chart. Aguilas was beyond its boundaries, southwest of Cope.
"You made that point yesterday, when you told me the story," he said. "Maybe the corsair was between them and Aguilas, and the
Dei Gloria
had to keep sailing east. The wind could have veered. Or maybe the captain feared the risk of putting into port at night. There's a stack of explanations for that. The fact is that she ended up sinking in the cove at Mazarron. Maybe he wanted to take shelter under the tower at La Azohia. That tower is still standing."
Tanger shook her head. She didn't seem convinced.
"Maybe. In any case, she was a merchant brigantine, and yet when she saw all was lost, she engaged in combat. Why didn't she strike her colors? Was the captain a stubborn man, or was there something on board that was too important to hand over without a fight? Something worth the lives of all the crew, something not even the sole survivor said one word about?"
"Maybe he didn't know about it."
"Maybe. But who were those two passengers the manifest identified only with the initials N.E. and J.L.T?"
Coy rubbed his neck, amazed. "You have the manifest from the
Dei Gloria?'
"Not the original, no. But I have a copy. I got it from the naval archives at Viso del Marques. I have a good friend, a woman, who works there."
She gave no more details, but it was obvious that something was going through her head. Her lip twisted, and her expression was no longer soft. Tintin had exited the scene.
"Besides, there's something else."
She said that and again stopped, as if that "something else" was information he was never going to hear. Quiet, silence, for a long while.
"The ship," she said finally, "belonged to the Jesuits, remember? To Fornet Palau, a shipowner from Valencia who was their straw man. And another thing. Valencia was the destination. All this happens on February 4, 1767, two months before the royal decree of Charles III ordering 'the banishment of the Jesuits from Spanish domains and the appropriation of their temporalities___ ' Do you have any idea what that meant?"
Coy said he didn't, that eighteenth-century history and Charles III were not his forte. So she elaborated. She did so very well, with few words, quoting key dates and facts without getting mired in superfluous details. The popular uprising of 1766 in Madrid against minister Esquilache, which shook the security of the monarchy and was said to have been instigated by the Society of Jesus. The Ignatian order's resistance to enlightened ideas spreading through Europe. The enmity of the monarch and his desire to rid himself of them. The creation of a secret council presided over by the Conde de Aranda, which prepared the decree of expulsion, and the unexpected coup of April 2,1767, the immediate expulsion of the Jesuits, the seizure of their wealth, and the subsequent dissolution of the Order by Pope Clement XIV That was the historical context in which the voyage and tragedy of the
Dei Gloria
had taken place. Of course, there was no proof of a direct connection between one thing and the other. But Tanger was a historian, she was trained to evaluate events and to find relationships among them, to formulate hypotheses and develop them. There could be a connection, or perhaps not. In any case, the
Dei Gloria
had gone to the bottom. At the very least, to sum it up, a sunken ship was a sunken ship—
stat rosa pristina nomine,
she recited cryptically. And she knew where.
"That," she concluded, "is justification enough to look for it."
Her expression had hardened as she spoke, as if at the hour of dealing with facts the ghost of the girl that had emerged as she looked at the pages of Tintin had faded away. Now the smile had disappeared from her lips and her eyes were shining resolutely, not provocatively. She was no longer the girl in the snapshot. She was becoming distant again, and Coy was annoyed.
"Tell me about the others."
"What others?"
"The Dalmatian with the gray ponytail. And the melancholy dwarf who was watching your house last night. They didn't look like historians, not by a long shot. I don't think the expulsion of old Charles III and the Jesuits would ever raise their limp pricks."
She seemed to be taken aback by his vulgarity. Or maybe she was just searching for an adequate response.
"That has nothing to do with you," she said slowly.
"You're wrong."
"Listen, I'm paying you for this job."
For the love of God, he said to himself. That's a serious mistake, beautiful. That is a really serious mistake, one that's unworthy of you—coming out with shit like that at this point in the game.
"Pay? What the fuck are you talking about?"
He saw clearly that Tanger was flustered. She lifted a hand. Take it easy, cool down, I was wrong. Come on, let's talk. But he was furious.
"Do you really believe I'm sitting here because you intend to pay me?"
He immediately felt ridiculous, because in fact he was. He stood up, overturning his chair so abruptly that Zas retreated, unsettled. "You misunderstood," she said. "Really. I'm only saying that those men have nothing to do with it.
"Nothing
to do with it," she repeated.
She seemed frightened, as if all of a sudden she was afraid she would see him jerk open the door and stalk out, as if until that moment she had never considered the possibility. That gave Coy a twisted kind of satisfaction. After all, even if it was just self-interest, she was afraid she might lose him. That made him enjoy the situation. A crumb is a crumb.
"They have enough to do with it that I want you to clarify it for me or you'll have to look for someone else."
It was like a nightmare, but a nightmare that was strengthening his self-esteem. All very bitter, treading on the verge of rupture, of an end to it all, but he couldn't turn back.