Patricia Ratto - Proceed with Caution - Stories and a Novella

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.

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.