The Nautical Chart by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page B

silence is a language she has spoken to perfection for centuries. The woman who possesses the knowing lucidity of luminous mornings, red sunsets, and cobalt-blue seas, one tempered with stoicism, infinite sadness, and a fatigue for which— Coy had this curious certainty—one lifetime is not enough. In addition, and above all else, you had to be female, a woman, to achieve that blend of boredom, wisdom, and weariness in your gaze. To demonstrate a shrewdness as keen as a steel blade, inimitable and born of the long genetic memory of countless ancestors stowed like booty in the holds of black, hollow ships, thighs bloodied amid smoking ruins and corpses, weaving and ripping out tapestries through countless winters, giving birth to men for new Troys and awaiting the return of exhausted heroes, of gods with feet of clay whom they at times loved, often feared, and nearly always, sooner or later, scorned.
    "Would you like more ice?" she asked.
    He shook his head. There are women, he concluded with a shiver of fear, who have that gaze from the day they're born. Who look at you the way she was looking at him that moment in the small sitting room whose windows were open to the Paseo Infanta Isabel and the illuminated brick-and-glass building of Atocha station. I am going to tell you a story, she had said as soon as she opened the door and led him to the sitting room, escorted by a shorthaired yellow Labrador that lay down close by, its dark, sad eyes fixed on Coy. I am going to tell you a story about shipwrecks and lost ships. I'm sure you like that kind of story, and you are not going to open your mouth until I finish telling it. You will not ask me whether it's real or invented, and you will sit quietly and drink tonic without gin, because I am sorry to inform you I don't have gin in my house, not Sapphire blue or any color. Afterward I will ask you three questions, and you may answer yes or no. Then I will let you ask me a question, just one, which will be enough for tonight, before you go back to the inn and to bed. That will be all. Do we have a deal?
    Coy had answered without hesitation, a little surprised but with reasonable sangfroid. We have a deal. Then he sat down where she indicated, on a beige upholstered sofa. They were in a sitting room with white walls, a desk, a small Moorish-style table with a lamp on it, a television with a VCR, a pair of chairs, a framed photograph, a table with a computer next to a bookcase filled with books and papers, and a cabinet for tapes and CDs with speakers from which the voice of Pavarotti—or maybe it wasn't Pavarotti—issued, sounding something like Caruso. Coy read the spines of a few of the books: Los jesuitas y el motin de Esquilache, Historia del arte y ciencia de navegar, Los ministros de Carlos in, Aplicaciones de Cartografica Historica, Mediterranean Spain Pilot, Espejos de una biblioteca, Navegantes y naufragios, Catologo de Cartograph Historica de Espana del Museo Naval, Derrotero de las costas de Espana en el Mediterraneo. There were numerous references to cartography, shipwrecks, and navigation. There were also novels and literature in general: Dinesen, Lampedusa, Nabokov, Durrell—the Quartet fellow from Moyano hill—something titled Green Fire by Peter William Rainer, Joseph Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea, and a number of others. Coy had not read one of those books, with the exception of the Conrad. His eye lighted on a book in English that had the same title as a movie— The Maltese Falcon. It was an old dog-eared copy, and on its yellow cover were a black falcon and a woman's hand holding coins and jewels.
    "It's a first edition," Tanger said when she saw him pause at that title. "Published in the United States on Valentine's Day, 1930, at the price of two dollars."
    Coy touched the book. "By Dashiell Hammett," it said on the cover. "Author of The Dain Curse."
    "I saw the movie."
    "Of course you saw it. Everyone's seen it." Tanger pointed to a shelf. "Sam Spade is