Montero opened the sack at six in the morning as he had opened every sack for twenty-seven days, with the knife he kept hanging on the hook above the sink, the knife with the black handle he had brought from the previous ship and from the ship before that, because a ship’s cook changes ships but not knives. The sack was the last one. Inside there were about four kilos of rice, which was the right amount for fifteen people’s lunch if the rice was a side dish, and for eight if the rice was the main course, and Montero had been making rice as the main course for eleven days because the chicken had run out on the sixteenth day and the frozen beef on the nineteenth and the fish on the twenty-first, and the rice had stayed because rice is always the last thing to run out on a ship, like water is the last thing to run out in a desert.

The strait was closed. The ship had not moved for twenty-seven days.

The cargo manifest said fourteen days. Fourteen days of navigation, fourteen days of provisions, fourteen days of fuel for the kitchen and the generators and the air conditioning, because a tanker anchored in the Gulf in March without air conditioning becomes an oven in three hours, and Montero knew this because the air conditioning had broken on the ninth day and they had repaired it on the tenth, and in those twenty-four hours the kitchen had reached forty-eight degrees and the rice was boiling before you even put it in the water, ‘boiling on its own’ as Vargas the engineer had said, and Vargas was someone who exaggerated about everything except temperature.

The provisions had been calculated with a twenty percent margin, which meant two and a half extra days, which meant sixteen and a half days, which meant that from the seventeenth day Montero was rationing. Rationing on a ship is not like rationing on land, because on land you can buy and on a ship you can only use less, and using less means smaller portions, and smaller portions on a ship where no one works and everyone waits means that food becomes the only thing that marks the day, and the only thing that marks the day is the only thing that diminishes.

«Montero.»

«Tell me.»

«How many days?»

«With what’s left, today.»

«One day.»

«One day.»

Vargas stayed in the doorway of the kitchen. Montero poured the rice into the water. Four kilos. Fifteen portions. The last time.

The deck was empty at that hour. The other ships were all visible, a line of dark points in the clear Gulf water, and every point was a ship and every ship had a kitchen and every kitchen had a cook counting the sacks. Montero knew this because he spoke by radio with three other cooks — Petersen from the Stavanger, Liu from the Jade Fortune, Karim from the Al-Shifa — and all three had run out of something: Petersen the potatoes, Liu the soy sauce, Karim the bread, and all three were rationing, and none of the three knew when the strait would reopen because knowing was not part of a cook’s duties, a cook’s duties were to feed fifteen people three times a day, and Montero did that.

The rice boiled for twelve minutes. Montero drained it. He divided it into fifteen equal plates, counting with the ladle, four ladles per plate, as he had done every day, as he would have done tomorrow with something else if there had been something else, but there was nothing else, there were onions and there was salt and there was water from the desalinator, and tomorrow lunch would be onions with water and salt, which is a soup if you call it a soup and which is hunger if you call it by its name.

«Montero.»

«Tell me.»

«How long do the onions last?»

«Three days. Four if I cut them thin.»

«And after?»

Montero did not answer. After was not a question for a cook. After was a question for whoever decided when the strait reopened, and whoever decided did not eat onions.

I know these things. I did eighteen months on a cargo ship, not in the Gulf, in the Pacific, but the kitchen is the same. When provisions run out nothing happens as an event, a silence happens: the cook says nothing, the crew asks nothing, and everyone counts the same number without saying it. I have seen cooks rationing without the captain ordering it, because a cook counts the days better than a captain, and a cook’s days are counted in kilos.