Antonio Portet is a dishonorably discharged Argentine Navy sailor who flew on the plane diverted to the Malvinas in 1966, survived the Deep Ones beneath Top Malo, and may carry Deep One blood. He is also known as Alex and Antonio R. Santamaría.
| Type | Character |
| Era | 1966 |
| Places | Malvinas Islands; Borda Hospital, Buenos Aires |
| Weapon | FN FAL rifle “Natalya” |
| Spanish entry | Antonio Portet |
Background
Discharged from the Navy, Antonio lives as a civilian with depression and anger. His discharge is entangled with the Navy’s internal conflict between azules and colorados, and with an earlier loss: the sinking of his ship and the death of its crew, “the void” he cannot leave behind. His only relic is his father’s compass. His motto: «Perdí mi norte» (“I lost my north”).
History
The flight
On 28 September 1966 he boards the flight that Operativo Cóndor diverts to the islands, traveling as a drug mule with a package for Piluso. Also aboard is Lieutenant Colonel Guzmán, appointed governor of Tierra del Fuego and the South Atlantic Islands, to whom Antonio is bound from the landing on the peat.
Top Malo and the Borda
He went down with a shotgun into the mine beneath Top Malo, the one with the black lake from which the Deep Ones came. After the slaughter he sat on the peat with the empty shotgun on his knees and did not speak for two months. He was committed in Río Gallegos, then transferred to the Borda.
There, after a breakdown, he is declared indefinitely insane. He leaves through group therapy: Licenciado Falkowski’s instruction to “let the emotion out” and the father’s compass, whose meaning he finally voices (“I lost my north”), let him discharge his violence swinging an axe and recover part of his reason. By his own diagnosis he remains manageable but dysfunctional, dependent on weekly therapy.
He recovers his FN FAL, “Natalya”, through a Navy contact. At the lighthouse he shoots and wounds his companion Max.
Scars
From the lighthouse he keeps a bullet in his hand and a ruined left arm of necrotic tissue, scored with what look like tentacle marks or nail scratches; the limb is immobile. He grows his hair long.
In dreams he relives the sinking of his ship; choosing to face it, he regains some sanity. Later, awake, he throws himself into the sea in a night storm and comes out less broken.
Later
He came out alive from the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Barracas, black-armed and with a vagrant’s beard, and crossed with the other three through a box to the Dominican Republic.
Nature
He survived the sinking that took his crew because he has “something in the blood, something in the heart” — the never fully stated hint that Deep One blood runs in his veins, the fish-men of the Order of Dagon who worship Cthulhu and the powers dreaming beneath the islands. This makes him the group’s link to the dream sphere: he tunes the “egg” that crystallizes dreams and hears what the others cannot.
He also has Welsh ancestry. A castle — Caerleon, the old Kalion on Usk — recognizes him and no one else in the group. Under that Welsh light he answers to “Alex”. The chronicle records him variously as Antonio Portet, Antonio R. Santamaría and Alex; all three name the same sailor.