A story for superstitious

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The sailors who accompanied Ulysses were tied to the masts so that they would not throw themselves into the sea. They, desperate after months of female abstinence, in the presence of female manatees sunning themselves on the beaches, thought they saw female mermaids calling them with their passionate and pitiful moans. More than one, if not drowned in the dip, was on land with a beast of 700 pound. From there comes that of being deceived by the "Mermaid songs."

Not only the Greeks. In many cultures, they forbade women near boats. But in modern times, they are on board and, by ceremony, the christening of the ship is performed by an important woman, who crashes a bottle of champagne against the steel hull. Sailors say, superstitious as anyone, that is an order of Poseidon, God of the seas.

And there was a time when Poseidon took revenge because they did not listen to him.

During the Cold War, the Soviets longed to equalize the Americans in the destructive power of nuclear submarines, capable of launching infernal missiles anywhere in the world, from the depths of the seas. Then they made the K-19 and, for some unknown reason, the tradition was broken. He was not baptized by a woman, as always, but by a man. It was a Russian official big as a polar bear, almost two meters and weighed 150 kilograms, who took the bottle of champagne and with all possible force, threw it against the steel case of the submarine. Strange as it may seem, the bottle bounced, like a ping-pong ball, slipped off the chain, and fell into the sea. "Bad luck," said the sailors.

During its construction, this ship had cost so many lives in work accidents, that they called him Mister Hiroshima. And in one of its journeys, it was left without communication with Moscow, and it had a radioactive leak that could hardly be contained by some sailors who, scorched by radiation, paid with their lives for their heroic gesture.

Then, the K-19, already recovered, was about to collide underwater, with a nuclear submarine from the US, which would have been understood as an act of war. The captains, playing neighborhood gangsters, attacked each other. The Soviet took off at the last moment and the American submarine barely passed 3 meters. We are all saved but, in the case of nuclear games, it has only been for the moment.

In chess, unlike life, luck does not exist. Here the one who has to be saved is saved.

This story was originally written by my friend Ramiro Díez in Diario EL TELÉGRAFO under the following address: https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/columnistas-3/1/gente-de-segunda-categoria
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