The Nautical Chart Read Free

the secretary—not, however, without first directing a furious glare at the blonde. Nor did she lift her paddle again. The thin, bearded individual ended up in possession of a very handsome marine telescope, and a gentleman with a stern expression and dirty fingernails, sitting in front of Coy, obtained for only slightly more than the opening price a model of the San Juan Nepomuceno that was almost three feet long and in quite good condition. The last lot, a set of old charts from the British Admiralty, remained unsold. The auctioneer called an end to the session, and everyone got up and moved to the small salon where Claymore treated its clients to champagne.
    Coy looked for the blond woman. In other circumstances, he would have devoted more attention to the smile of the young receptionist, who came up to him with a trayful of goblets. The receptionist recognized him from other auctions. She knew that he never bid on anything, and was undoubtedly aware of the faded jeans and white sneakers he wore as a complement to the dark navy-blue jacket with two parallel rows of buttons that at one time had been gold and bearing the anchor of the Merchant Marine, but now were a more discreet plain black. The cuffs showed the marks of the officer's stripes they had once sported. Coy was very fond of the jacket—when he wore it he felt connected with the sea. Especially at dusk when he made the rounds of the port district, dreaming of the days when just calling at hiring offices you could pick up a ship to sign on to, times when there were remote islands that were a man's haven, reasonable republics that knew nothing of two-year suspensions, and where arrest warrants and subpoenas from naval tribunals never arrived. He had had the jacket made to order fifteen years earlier, with regulation trousers and cap, at the tailor shop of Sucesores de Rafael Vails. After he passed the examination for second officer, he would sail everywhere with it, wearing it on the ever rarer occasions in the life of a Merchant Marine officer when it was obligatory to wear correct attire. He called that ancient treasure his Lord Jim jacket—still very appropriate to his present situation—because it dated from the beginning of what he, an assiduous reader of seafaring literature, denned as his Conrad period. In that vein, Coy had previously lived a Stevenson period and a Melville period. Of the three, around which he ordered his life whenever he decided to take a glance back at the wake that every man leaves behind him, this one was the least happy. He had just turned thirty-eight, and was feeing twenty months on suspension and a captain's examination that had been postponed without a set date. He was stranded on land, burdened by a court action that drew a frown from the hiring officer of any shipping company whose door he darkened, and the boarding-house near the Ramblas and his meals at Teresa's were mercilessly devouring his savings. A couple of weeks more and he would have to accept a berth as an ordinary seaman aboard some rusting freighter with a Ukrainian crew, Greek captain, and Antillean registry, the kind that ship-owners scuttle for the insurance from time to time, often with a bogus cargo and no time to pack your seabag. Either mat or give up the sea and look for a job on dry land. The mere idea nauseated him, because Coy—even though it had been of little use aboard the Isla Negra —possessed the principal virtue of every sailor: a certain sense of insecurity that took the form of mistrust, something comprehensible only to someone who has seen a barometer drop five millibars in three hours on the Bay of Biscay, or has found himself being overtaken by a half-million-ton, quarter-mile-long oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz, at closer and closer quarters. It was the same vague sensation, or sixth sense, that woke you at night when there was a change in the throb of the engines, that raised apprehension at the sight of a black cloud on the far