The Seventeenth Step

The preliminary report sent to the Port Captaincy pinned the coordinates of the wreck a scant four hundred meters from the Santa Catalina bastion, in a shoal of blind mud where no one with any training would expect to find anything other than ribs torn apart by marine shipworms. It is worth noting that the cartographic documentation drawn up by military engineers in 1741 already warned of anomalies at the bottom of that roadstead, though Royal Navy officers usually attributed such unevenness to defective dredging or alluvial deposits swept by tides from the swamp. In any case, it fell to the technical commission to draw up an inventory of the surviving frames of the San Jerónimo, a smaller galleon of the Mainland fleet sunk during the blockade, before the construction of the new commercial pier buried the bed under a slab of reinforced concrete.

The air above the wooden launch smelled of quicklime soaked by the morning dew, of fermenting mangrove branches, and of that dense, sulfurous stench which the vents of old colonial sewers push out toward the water when low tide uncovers the foundations of the wall. It was a lukewarm, sticky pestilence that clung to the damp cotton of the t-shirts long before turning on the compressor.

Donato Ceballos waited standing on the stern beam, wearing a raw linen shirt that sweat glued to his shoulder blades in two dark, triangular patches. He held the pressed wood board with the official forms between reddened fingers, tapping the edge of the clipboard against his thigh with a monotonous cadence.

"Four signatures, Soledad," said Ceballos without taking his eyes off the dry mangroves on the shore. "I just need you to note river ballast, rotted timber, and an absence of artillery artifact remains. With that, the dredge comes in on Thursday without the folks in Bogotá sending us another memo asking for expert reports."

Soledad Cabarcas was in no rush to reply. She adjusted the canvas strap of her lead harness, checking with the tip of her thumb for the precise two-finger looseness over her left hip. On the small pine stool that served as a seat by the gunwale rested a pewter mug with the enamel chipped off the handle and the bottom stained by cold coffee sediments that no one had bothered to rinse out.

"If the wreck still has its keel intact, I can't sign off on the abandonment," she replied, checking the rubber mouthpiece of the regulator with a slight inhalation that sounded like an old bellows.

"The keel is loose firewood," interjected Donato, clicking his tongue with that forced familiarity of government bureaucrats. "Three centuries in this broth leave nothing standing."

Leovigildo Polo, sitting on a tin tool box near the diesel engine's steering wheel, cut a strand of black tobacco with a dull pocketknife. His knuckles were covered in pale scars from moray eel bites and his nails were chewed down by the rust of the mooring cables.

"The sea of Cartagena keeps no corpses; it chews them down to limestone," said Leovigildo as he spat a dark wisp over the gunwale, toward the oily water where green plantain peelings floated.

"Nobody asked you for poetry, Polo," Ceballos muttered.

"It's not poetry, Don Donato. It's caliche. The water here swallows iron in fifty years and wood in a hundred. If anything stays whole down there, it's because it wasn't made for sailing."

Soledad adjusted her tempered glass mask against her temples, feeling the warm rubber seal her cheekbones. Old Leovigildo stretched out a bony hand to check the valve of the air hose; his fingers smelled of diesel fuel and fried fish.

"Got the short putty knife?" the old man asked.

"In my calf," she said.

"Don't dawdle in the big trench. The water's turbid like bean broth and the current pulls toward the flagstones."

"I'm just going to clear two ribs for the photographic record."

"Uh-huh."

Leovigildo opened the air supply valve with a sharp knock of his knuckles. The compressor sprang to life with a hoarse rattle that shook the frames of the barge, casting a puff of bluish smoke over the calm surface of the bay.

The descent along the descent line offered no resistance whatsoever, save for that familiar sense of isolation that sets in at six meters, when sunlight loses its golden tone and turns into a milky, greenish mantle where silt particles float suspended in absolute repose, like dust motes drifting in the oblique beam entering through the skylight of a library closed half a century ago. The water was unusually warm for the rainy season, laden with a dense salinity that left a bitter aftertaste on the lips every time the regulator expelled a curtain of bubbles.

The outer sea could not be heard. Only that dull, continuous hum was perceived —a hum akin to a sixty-cycle frequency— which did not seem to enter through the ear canal, but rather made the filled molars and the very base of the nape vibrate unpleasantly, as if deep-draft machinery were operating nearby without anyone having authorized it.

The hull of the San Jerónimo suddenly appeared amid the muddy gloom, emerging like the rib cage of a cetacean buried in a trench of soft mud. The Biscayan oak frames, pierced by thousands of wood-boring mollusk galleries, crumbled at the mere turbulence caused by Soledad's fins. It is worth mentioning that the arrangement of the timbers closely matched the naval construction layout recorded in the ordinances of 1680: short floor timbers, futtocks joined with corroded bronze nailing, and a filling of river pebbles that must have served as ballast during the crossing from Cádiz.

Soledad unsheathed the tool from her calf: a wide mason's spatula with a Lignum vitae wooden handle held by three loose rivets that rattled under the pressure of her fingers.

She knelt on the muddy bed, feeling the fine crunch of crushed shells beneath her neoprene. She rested her free hand on the main timber to stabilize the photographic shot and brought the metal blade close to the springing of the keel to scrape off the crust of coral algae that masked the inventory number.

The spatula's blade scraped the rotted hull of the galleon and struck hard against a carved block.

The impact produced a dry, crisp click, devoid of the cushioning one would expect from a beam eaten away by time.

Soledad withdrew the tool. The steel edge had left a white notch on a grayish, porous, rough-textured surface, identical to the fossilized coral stone with which the master builders of the slave factory raised the curtain walls of the vaults. The rotted wood of the galleon did not rest upon the natural bottom of the bay, but had been deposited atop a prior structure, wedged between its edges like a toy boat abandoned on a pedestal.

That did not appear on any military masonry blueprint.

Soledad brushed away a viscous mass of sediment with her open gloved palm. Beneath her fingers, the coral rock showed a sharp edge, carved with an implacable square that lacked the rounded wear typical of ballast stones subjected to the tide for three hundred years. The surface continued toward the left, piercing the mud in a straight line that completely disobeyed the concave curvature of the ship's hull.

She switched on the sealed aluminum flashlight. The halogen bulb projected a cone of pale light against the bottom, cutting out tiny specks of silt dancing with the desperate slowness of dead things.

The block was not a loose piece.

It formed the landing of a set of steps.

Soledad felt the regulator offer unusual resistance as she breathed, thick air with an aftertaste of burnt motor grease. She brought her hand to her chest, patted the cold plastic of the instrument console, and verified that the pressure gauge needle still marked one hundred twenty atmospheres. Everything was in order. The equipment functioned according to the manufacturer's specifications. The water remained at twenty-four degrees Celsius.

And yet, the stone was still there.

She leaned one handspan further into the fissure opening beneath the broken keel of the galleon. The spatula scraped the sediment again, kicking up a cloud of black mud that smelled —even through the vulcanized rubber membrane of the mouthpiece— of concentrated sulfur and ancient marine decay.

She counted the edges with her gloved index fingertip.

One.

Two.

Three.

Each step measured exactly one cubit in width, carved from fossilized marine quarry stone, with their tiny polyp skeletons visible beneath the layer of lukewarm saline slime coating them like a thick varnish. The wood of the San Jerónimo, crushed by its own secular weight, had simply snapped over the seventeenth step, adapting to the geometry of the stone like a soft body upon a blade.

Upon removing the last layer of silt, the flashlight beam revealed that the steps descended at a right angle into the darkness of the abyss.

Downward, where the bay ought to be a blind bottom of stagnant mud, the steps continued, losing themselves in a perfect vertical that the light could not reach.