The Island of Last Truth Read online

  Nelson shrugs and starts walking. Prendel follows him. Nelson moves deeper into the vegetation at the foot of the mountain. He parts branches with his arms. He fills his water bottle with the water accumulated on some leaves among the vines.

  “With the rain in the area and condensation, we’re not going to be thirsty. It would be a pain to have to desalt the seawater.” Prendel imitates him. He drinks a sip. The water is good, warm but good. “There at the foot of the mountain, you’ll see there are some entrances into the rocks and in some cavities little puddles form. These entrances, by the way, will be your only possible shelter when the rain is torrential.”

  Had some ship been wrecked on the part of the island Souza considers his? Is that where he got all these things from? The cap, the small axe hanging from his belt, the revolver. Why is Souza helping him? How can he be helpful?

  Prendel doesn’t ask questions. He knows they’ll get no response. And even if they did, Prendel doesn’t ask questions because that humid heat fills his lungs so he is incapable of doing anything but pant. He stops looking at Nelson, who is clearing the path, and looks astonished at his surroundings. He sees flowers of unbelievable color combinations, insects that look like plants and plants that look like insects. After spending so much time in the sea, looking at the immensity of the horizon, it seems strange to use his capacity to see at close range, once again, to focus his eyes on small objects, and he thinks that this is one of the great differences between life on land and life on the sea. On land things are always up close, often too close, and there is a lack of perspective, distance, relativity. He thinks this and says it to Nelson.

  Nelson stops, turns round, takes off his cap, wipes the sweat of his brow, looks at Prendel with expression of incredulity.

  “This is what you’re thinking about, now, as we struggle to walk under this murderous heat? Seriously?”

  He puts his cap back on and continues walking. Prendel turns around and turns back to the beach. He doesn’t have to stay behind him. He’ll discover for himself what there is to be discovered.

  With the knife he cuts a pair of vines, one large branch, not too thick, and some palm leaves. Once on the beach, he ties the vine around the leaves, joins them to the branch, and is satisfied, when he sticks the construction into the ground, that it holds up and works for the purpose he made it: Prendel has made a sunshade. When the sun goes down he will begin building a shelter. He also wants a place where Nelson won’t have access, his own place.

  Nelson, who appears a little while later, watches Pren­del, who is sitting in the shade, from afar. Afterwards he comes closer.

  “I’ve put together material for several days,” he says. “There,” and he points to the wood—“you’ll find all manner of worms, lizards, snakes, you’ll see. Some bugs you can eat yourself, and others you can use them as bait for the fish. They’ll bite, for sure. And speaking of bites, be careful with the poisonous snakes.”

  “How do I distinguish them?”

  “You can’t.”

  Prendel nods. And Nelson adds: “Another thing: Don’t come into my territory, don’t come near me, because I won’t hesitate to shoot.”

  “I don’t understand,” admits Prendel. “You saved my life, we’re on a desert island, alone, we don’t have much chance of getting out of here. Shouldn’t we join forces?”

  “Doctor, it’s better that you don’t think. Obey and everything will be easier.”

  “Clearly your reasons are more powerful than mine,” says Prendel, while he watches Souza walk away, his feet sinking into the sand just as Prendel’s hopes have been sinking.

  6.

  After the first days of his arrival on the island, Prendel etches a calendar on the side of a rock. Although he doesn’t want to dwell on it, being shipwrecked might last longer than his watch battery. According to his calendar, it is six weeks since he arrived. If the attack on the Queen was the 14th of June, that means it is now the end of July, the 30th or 31st if his calculations are correct. He hasn’t seen Souza for forty-five days. He doesn’t know if the man comes into his part of the island by night, while he is sleeping, or if he hasn’t come back since the last time he saw him. Sometimes he thinks that Souza may have had an accident, that maybe Souza has died from drowning or a snakebite. His revenge is not to invade his territory. If he’s been injured, all the worse for him.

  The doctor has been busy also in the construction of a hut made of twigs as thick as branches and leaves, plentiful materials in the forest and subject to being manipulated by him, with no tools available. I have made myself a cell, he thinks. I live inside a closed cage, in an open-air prison. The floor is a rectangle. The walls, a little taller than him. The roof is made of leaves sewn together with thin vines. The door of the cell faces the forest. That way he is protected from the wind and what’s more he feels safer. If Nelson approaches, he will make noise.

  Now that he has at last finished the shelter, he feels exhausted and looks at the structure with a mixture of pride, which he admits with a gesture, and shame, because he has the feeling of having imitated the books he has read, having acted like a textbook shipwreck, instead of thinking seriously about what he should do in his situation. It’s done, he says out loud. He thinks that an unusually strong wind could bring the whole thing down. It’s done, he repeats. He believes that this way he’ll defend himself better from insects, from little animals, from whatever there is. He thinks that a man always wants a roof, that what he covers himself with matters more than what he treads on. It’s eight o’clock in the evening. He had calculated that he was going to finish today and he has prepared himself a kind of extraordinary dinner. For a moment, it crossed his mind to invite Souza. But then he immediately changed his mind and besides he wouldn’t have known how to contact him. He lights a fire near his cell and cooks the shellfish he has caught. He goes over the time that has passed. He realizes that for the first two weeks, despite Souza’s warnings, he’d been scanning the horizon, to try to detect the passing of a ship. By the third week, perhaps convinced that they really were alone in the middle of the Atlantic and no-one would come to save them, he’d begun to pay more attention to his needs. Almost without noticing, in that time he has learned how to collect water, catch lobster at low tide, select worms and lizards, to make a good fire, to find turtle eggs, and he knows how to distinguish certain herbs. He’s discovered, without wanting to, that some have the effect of a laxative. He knows how to exploit the tender heart of some palm trees to eat. He has tried various fruits. He’s found some entrances in the rock of the mountain. He has learned to recognize different types of silence, always mixed with the buzzing of the insects, the sound of the sea, the song or cry of a bird. All the silences allow him to listen to himself. He can’t say that he has become accustomed to this life, but neither can he say that he is suffering. Is this victory? Adaptation? In what does a man’s triumph consist? In surviving or escaping? He feels that nothing and no one is waiting for him in New York. Mary is a ghost from the past, Katy and Frank mean pain and guilt. He is conscious that his life had reached a pivotal moment, one of those moments in which things can go one way or another and are in no hurry. When he left New York it had been a while since he had found meaning in anything he did. Was that all there was to life? Nothing more? Just a series of anecdotes related to money, culture, work relations, and personal success? Was it possible that life was only this waiting to see if something happened? Could it not consist of making something happen? What could provoke someone to wish to return to a place that they’d wanted to leave? Nostalgia for comfort? Fear? Habit? The only thing that worries him is his father. Mathew remembers the last time he visited him in Georgetown he had helped him to paint the fence. The man seemed sad and tired. He’d said to Mathew, in that voiceless voice that was all he had left: “What I want is that you don’t leave me to die alone, Mathew. Your mother wouldn’t have wanted it either. Your mother was lucky that we stayed with her. Remember, Matt, the way your mo
ther used to laugh, even at the end?” He always asked Matt about his mother’s laugh, so characteristic and contagious, rising in a crescendo. His father would die still in love with her; he’d had the luck of finding love.

  He also thinks that he has not yet despaired and that maybe it has been thanks to the building of the hut. He thinks that perhaps now the anguish will begin. There is no shipwreck until someone realizes you are shipwrecked. There is no drowning in the water until the air is gone.

  Or perhaps the tragedies one imagines at a distance turn into nothing more than adverse situations when they come closer. We never know what we will be capable of; that’s unknowable.

  * * *

  Prendel is under the shade, opposite his shelter. He knows it is impossible to do anything before the sun goes down; the heat will dehydrate him. He has learned to stay still and wait for the day to pass. Strange what one learns when one must be still. Sometimes he feels he is a sick person, immobilized in bed, in a hospital, in front of a window. And then, despite everything, he prefers being shipwrecked, He imagines he is sailing, he remembers the dead hours he spent on the windless sea, so many times, waiting for the slightest breeze to get the feeling of moving. The island is a sailboat without sails, a sailboat with its keel caught, a sailboat with a permanent invisible anchor.

  “I see you’ve managed to drive stakes in the sand, you’ve had to bury them deep, right? If not, they don’t last.”

  Souza has suddenly appeared, he’s come out of the woods. He is wearing a cap and has another in his hand.

  “Take it,” he tells him.

  Prendel grabs the cap, sees that it bears the brand of an alcoholic beverage, thanks him, and puts it on. It has a good visor. What a rest for his eyes. He misses his sunglasses.

  “I thought maybe you’d died,” Prendel says to him. “I was about to come to see you. I climbed all the way up there,” and he points to the mountaintop, “but the rock juts out so far it is impossible to see what’s beneath. All you can see is the sea.”

  “You were right not to come. We were clear on that.”

  “Just one thing—will it be long before we can leave here? Try to, I mean.”

  Mathew wonders what system Nelson Souza must have come up with to keep watch over his movements. He also thinks that Souza does not need to watch him. He represents no danger, and if he approaches his area, he kills him and that’s that.

  “Enough time has to pass for them to forget me.”

  “But that’s absurd!” Prendel stands up, goes over to Nelson, who puts his hand on his revolver, a gesture that doesn’t go unnoticed by Mathew. “We could try to build a kind of raft and go look for the oil tankers’ shipping lanes.”

  “You’ve seen a lot of movies, haven’t you?” Nelson looks scornfully at the hut built by Prendel. “Do you really think we’d get anywhere with a raft? Do you really think we wouldn’t be shipwrecked less than ten meters from here? You seriously think there’s a chance of getting out of this prison other than with a real boat?”

  “Do you have a better plan? Eh?”

  Souza has started to walk straight towards the woods and Prendel follows him, shouting.

  “Eh? Do you have a better plan? Do you?”

  Souza stops, comes back, looks Prendel in the eye and says: “I’m only going to say this once. Yes, I have a plan and I will explain it to you when it suits me. I’m in charge here and that’s how it will be as long as I’m alive and I plan to stay alive for all the time it takes to get out of this hole, understand?”

  Prendel thinks it strange that Nelson has said the island is a hole. A well, yes. This means that Nelson is just as desperate as him. Prendel would attack him but he knows he is bound to lose. He realizes that he will have to come up with a plan for himself alone; first to steal Nelson’s authority, then to leave the island. Looking resigned, he asks: “OK. And how do you work out the time it will take them to forget you, your friends?”

  “They’re not my friends. And I’ll know, for sure.”

  Dr. Prendel says nothing else. He observes Souza from behind; would this be a good moment to attack him? No, no, it must be well thought-out. He cannot act on impulse. He will only have one chance. And if he fails, Souza will have realized that Mathew is not prepared to obey and will not hesitate to do away with him. He sees Souza go towards the trail they have forged in the vegetation of the forest. He follows him for a moment or two. He studies his speed. Despite the limp, Nelson walks quickly, he is agile. He is wearing his shirtsleeves rolled up, the knife open in his hand and a revolver on his belt. This man saved him only to bury him alive. Incomprehensible. Maybe he’s crazy. And he might make Mathew crazy too. What conditions are necessary for a sane man to go out of his mind?

  Prendel approaches the shore. He wets his feet, hands, splashes his face. He looks towards the horizon and thinks it’s really true that for a sailor, the feeling of having arrived isn’t always tied to the fact of touching land.

  PART TWO

  1.

  Mathew didn’t tell me his story until we’d almost arrived at the end of our own. Seven years gave me time to see him looking lost again and again, and every one of those times I’d been on the verge of asking him to confide in me even a little of his suf­fering. I longed to know the details of what happened, I wanted to comfort him about it all, whatever it might be, but I knew it was a touchy subject and I sensed there were some experiences that he in no way wanted to relive.

  Prendel wasn’t happy at my side. He wasn’t a happy man, although he was master of his time, his decisions, his life. There was nothing that he couldn’t allow himself and what’s more, he was very generous. I never had a desire that he didn’t try to fulfill. When he gave presents, however, he appeared to be paying a debt. He seemed absent. Perhaps it was true that his father’s death had deeply disturbed him. Although he never spoke of him. He didn’t have a single photograph of him, it was as if the old man had never existed. In fact, it was as if nothing from his life before the shipwreck had existed. He didn’t mix with anyone, fled from people, wanted to be alone. With me or alone. He liked to travel. And sail, of course. He’d bought a boat and named it Lisbon. When he told me his story I understood why.

  He hadn’t wanted to go back to giving classes. He said he didn’t need the money and, besides, he had nothing to teach, that, on the contrary, he just needed to learn. He hadn’t gone back to practicing medicine either. He didn’t even want to advise me and when I felt sick, he would say: “Best if you consult a doctor.” Faced with my astonishment he would assure me that one day he would explain the reason; later on, always later on.

  And that “later on” came suddenly, as do so many important things in life that one expects within a certain time and then they turn up when it’s not convenient, when one isn’t prepared.

  Prendel wasn’t well. He was nauseated, he’d lost his appetite, he had heat spots. Rather than complaining, he seemed happy. Fifty-two years seemed enough life, he would say. I’ve already seen what I had to see, he insisted.

  Finally his body demanded a solution. And we went to the specialists. He wanted them to be new people, people he wouldn’t know from the past. He said he didn’t want pity. Or even empathy. What he wanted was a clear diagnosis, nothing more.

  When he knew he was sick he decided he had to find a propitious occasion to make me a depository of what he called, with black humour, his legacy. A legacy with which he has been able to live, he said, but one with which he couldn’t die.

  I needed Prendel to explain his story to me to understand that a shipwreck is a way of disappearing forever, that there is no possible way back. As he had told me more than once, Katy and Frank weren’t as dead as him, because they weren’t conscious of it, but he was.

  He told me during the week we spent in the Boston Harbor Hotel. He said, “I can’t hand over my legacy to you in any old place,” and he said it with that characteristic expression of his, the expression that came over his mouth every time he wa
s up to one of his old tricks. I suppose he chose that hotel because from the bedroom we could see the boats sailing on the Charles River. Boats docked at the very entrance to the hotel. Prendel always said that since he’d learned to sail, his world hadn’t ended at the seashore or the riverbank. And because of that, from time to time, he would say he also wanted to learn to pilot planes: he didn’t want the air to be a limit. “I don’t have the credentials to ascend,” he would joke.

  We hired a boat. Simple and manageable. A twenty-four footer. “A boat for chatting,” said Mathew with his customary skill at assigning everything a practical use. In a twenty-four footer you can only be close. And every day of that week, sailing in the Trevor, my beloved doctor told me everything I didn’t know, all that he’d never told me, everything that I then promised him—and in doing so I remembered my grandfather who always, with every promise, made the same face of disgust as when he tasted something he didn’t like and said, “Don’t eat that, you’ll feel sick,”—I would write on his death.

  2.

  After we saw each other again,” I remember Dr. Prendel telling me as we were sailing along and he was checking that the sails were well-set, “Nelson Souza, as though he was somehow aware that I wanted to attack him some time, disappeared. During that second long absence I devised plans, systems, considered possibilities, but after a time, I began to get disoriented. I don’t know if I’m explaining this very well, Phoebe, I don’t know if I am being faithful to what I really felt back then. Being disoriented means not knowing anything about anything. For the first time, I wished I’d died. What was I doing there? What did surviving Frank and Katy mean?”

  The days went by as they go by when there is no hope, like the wind blowing over the land, with no intention. I stopped recording the passing of time on the rock. If one doesn’t know what is happening, one is not alive, not aware of being alive. Maybe it was two, maybe four weeks of not recording. I don’t know. Maybe more. The days, one the same as the next, never pass or pass in a flash. I’d gone back to scanning the horizon: no ship, ever. Would I have signaled if I had seen one? How far does the survival instinct go? Would the fear of Nelson’s threat have outweighed the impulse to try to get them to see us?