Patricia Ratto - Proceed with Caution - Stories and a Novella

I wake up. I don’t know how long I was asleep, but it’s obvious that the boat is stopped and silent. I have the feeling no one’s around, that I’m here alone. I try to stand, but I still have that strange lack of feeling all through my body; I stand up, look around: the bunks are empty. I walk toward the forward ladder, look up, and see that the hatch is open. The sky is still dark, so I assume it’s still nighttime, or it’s a different night, how can I tell with that heavy drowsiness I feel. I climb up slowly, reach one of the last rungs and look out through the round opening of the hatch: all the others are on deck, many of them smoking—I see the little red lights of their cigarette tips coming and going from their invisible mouths into the night; some of them are talking quietly. The aircraft carrier and the other boats that surround us look huge and are thick and black, like a deep hole. A voice orders the men to come down, saying we’re going to spend the night here because we still don’t have permission to disembark. Some of them complain as they start moving, they’re a bunch of shadows among the shadows. I start to come down in order to leave the ladder free for the others to follow. I head for my bunk; from behind me comes the sound of boots landing on the narrow metal rungs, boots descending, voices entering. I climb into my bed, some people go by silently, walking astern, others are still complaining as they scramble into their bunks and get comfortable. I’m already in bed; little by little things settle down; in the lower bunk of the opposite row, Cuéllar closes his eyes and clutches the Bible resting on his chest. My lids feel heavy and I drift off to sleep.

A noisy sonar ping awakens me, awakens us, I jump out of my bunk, the others do the same, no doubt each one of them thinking about covering his combat post. Then someone stops and says: Guys, the ladder is open, we’re not sailing, we’re in Puerto Belgrano. The confusion freezes us in place: no one dares to say or do anything. Nobrega, who apparently went outside to smoke or look around, is climbing down the ladder and explains loudly that what we heard was a sonar ping, produced by one of the corvettes that are in port to keep enemy divers away from the dock. It’s just five o’clock, says someone over there. Little by little everyone returns to their bed. And so do I.

We’re in formation, standing against the bunks, on both sides of the central corridor and toward the stern, skirting the periscopes in silence, because they’ve just announced that the Commander of the Submarine Force, the Hyena, is in Puerto Belgrano and is coming to greet us. Then we see our Commander, standing in the torpedo area, raise his face toward the ladder at the bow. A pair of shiny new boots appears in everybody’s line of sight, and behind them a pair of spotless white pants, without a single wrinkle, and then a navy blue gabardine jacket and a shaved nape and a white cap that turns to reveal that face with its eternal, familiar grimace of a smile. Then, I don’t know why, I get the idea of looking at my feet, maybe because the Hyena’s gesture reminds me of the dent in my boots, I look at my feet and realize I’m not wearing shoes; all my shipmates have changed clothes, but I’m still dressed in the same pair of overalls and grubby socks. The situation embarrasses me, so I try not to look at the Hyena or at our Commander, I know it seems like a ridiculous thing to do, that it’s impossible that no one will notice my socks among so many pairs of boots, but I do it anyway, I lower my head and avoid looking at them, hoping they’ll continue on their way and ignore me, that the Hyena will give his welcome speech and get done with this stuff once and for all, even though it occurs to me that the best thing might have been to explode into a thousand pieces and never come back; that way we’d be victims or heroes, not this living proof of something that doesn’t work, of something wrong, of failure. The Hyena keeps talking, I pay no attention to what he’s saying, but he keeps talking, out of the corner of my eye I see everybody looking in his direction, I don’t want to listen, so I concentrate on trying to remember something, whatever, something that happened after the day of my incident, something from my recovery, something from the hospital, but there’s no hospital, there’s no recovery, there’s nothing till that day when I woke up on the floor of the engine room; and there’s nothing now, either, except this jumble of words flying up and down the ship, trying to get into our ears.

The speech ended a while ago, and the Hyena has left us; some men went to have dinner on the Santiago del Estero , which left Mar del Plata after we took off and just barely managed, without submerging, to get here; at this point she’s our mother ship and she welcomes us aboard to eat. Other men—those who had dinner at the first seating—are asleep; still others went up on deck, to smoke, no doubt, everybody smokes now, those who always smoked, those who had given it up, those who never did it; everybody smokes except Soria and me. Polski is walking forward now, from my bunk I can see him climb the ladder and disappear; you can hear voices coming from there, and suddenly, maybe when they discover that a lot of guys are sleeping, they lower their voices; a couple of men climb down and head for their bunks. I can’t fall asleep, so I decide to follow behind Polski: I climb the ladder and remain standing on the top rung, looking out on deck through the hatch opening. Polski is outside, with his head raised like an animal sniffing the night; someone in a long black cape approaches, not a crew member from the San Luis , and gives Polski a hug that looks intense and emotional: What are you doing? What do you need? Do you guys need anything? the new arrival asks, moving away a little with his arms extended, but keeping his hands on Polski’s shoulders; I can’t exactly see, but I think I recognize Morán’s voice, the electrician from our replacement crew, who stayed behind here in Puerto Belgrano. Smokes, Polski replies in his thick, hoarse voice, and that word, “smokes,” echoes in the air as if it had been pronounced in a cave. I’m coming, says Morán, who’s just broken the embrace, turns, and moves away till he blends into the shadows. Someone else approaches along the deck, greets Polski, and gets in line for the hatch, so I move aside to let him climb down. Now I look in Polski’s direction again, a black shape comes closer with something dangling from his hand; it’s Morán, wrapped in his black cape and advancing toward Polski; he stops, picks up the package with both hands; it looks like a carton of cigarettes; Forty-Three Seventy Darks, says Morán; and I know they’ll be too strong for Polski, who I’ve always seen smoking Jockey Club Lights. Morán signals with his hand and Polski follows him, I follow them too—but with my eyes—and watch them go down to the dock, walk a few steps till I lose them in a blur of darkness and then see them reemerge in the shimmery, hazy circle of light silhouetted against the pavement by a street lamp. I hear voices, the group that had gone to the Santiago del Estero for dinner is returning, so I go down to make room for them and stand next to the torpedoes, waiting for everyone to descend. The men in here are now whispers that disperse, each one to his own thing, one to the head, another possibly to the galley for coffee, others to bed. I climb up again, look out on deck. Morán and Polski are still at the dock, sitting on the ground in the circle of light, their backs resting against a wall. Morán has placed the carton of cigarettes between them and at this moment is tugging on the paper wrapper; he struggles a little till he tears it and pulls out a pack, which he hands to Polski, then he takes one for himself and starts to open it while Polski opens his own; the scene plays out symmetrically. Morán takes out a lighter at the same time Polski takes out a lighter. Morán lights his cigarette at the same time Polski tries to light his, but as it turns out, he fails in his effort and for a moment the symmetry is broken. It’s humid, how strange, huh? and he smiles at Morán as he stashes his useless lighter in his pants pocket. Morán offers him his own lighter, which Polski accepts in his gigantic hands, he lights his cigarette on the first try and returns it to Morán; both of them puff now, and white plumes, as thick as the fog that was with us throughout our crossing, rise in incredibly parallel corkscrews. They smoke, talk, laugh, talk some more, and it all reaches me like a lost echo. I stand there looking up, a light breeze stirs, sweeping a cloud away and allowing me to see a star, and who knows why it occurs to me that it’s the last one, though I don’t know of what, maybe just the last and only star this night, because now a line of clarity tints the horizon over the sea behind me and dawn begins to break. I turn my attention back to Polski and Morán. There are several empty packs of cigarettes rolled up in a ball on the floor in the space that separates one from the other; a lot of time must have gone by without my realizing it. Now they get up clumsily, they must be numb from this cold May night, the extended calm, the hard ground. They bend down, pick up the empty packs, go over to a trash can a few steps away from the light post and throw them in there, light another couple of cigarettes with Morán’s lighter and start walking away from the sub. They walk away slowly, along the path that leads to the Stella Maris Chapel. They’re going to pray, no doubt, they’re going to talk some more and smoke some more. And then they’ll come back and they’ll say goodbye at the dock, and Polski will go up to the deck of the sub and down the ladder, and Morán will stay on the dock for a while looking at the dark outline of the San Luis , trying to understand what this business of being in a war must be like.