The Island of Last Truth (6 page)

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 was 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.

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?

I don't know why we cling to life in such a stubborn way. There are lives not worth living. You will disagree, I know. Our experiences are very different. Your island was Vienna. And your unknown man, your Nelson, was your husband. Your shipwreck, your marriage. You didn't have any reason to take down sails. Or maybe you did? Every­one's own reasons seem the most important. I am not the one to comment on your threshold of endurance.

Our island was not an inhospitable place, not at all. I would even say it received us well. Everything a man needs to survive was there. In fact, a place like that is where one realizes what a man truly needs to survive. And the only essential thing the island couldn't give us was granted by chance: human company. I even understood why Nelson might have saved my life. He wanted a witness to his existence. Someone with whom to be someone. He probably knew that solitude can be equally or even more corrosive than that situation, and it would have sapped his strength. What would I have done? The very same thing: I would have saved the enemy to control him like a dog.

The first phase of not seeing each other had been liberating. The construction of the shelter had kept me busy. I had almost forgotten Nelson's existence, the island, the situation in which I found myself. I mean it, beloved. There came a time when I had the feeling of being exactly where I'd decided to be. Perhaps I hadn't even realized I couldn't escape. I hadn't really noticed, I mean. The aware­ness of this reality came afterwards, by virtue of the meeting with Souza and his clear, emphatic warnings. I wasn't accustomed to being told what to do. The tension was palpable, you know? That man felt my rebellion, he knew he couldn't lower his guard. And you know what men are in a pure state: savages. Don't look at me with that serious face, Dr. Westore. I know you think we men lack the compassion gene.

We were animals at war. An underground war. Two men alone can be at war, yes, now I am certain. We simply hadn't declared it. But I wanted what he had, and he wanted my obedience: that was enough.

I wanted power, weapons, and above all to control his territory. He'd been able to choose. He must have had some weighty reason to reserve for himself the seeming worst part, don't you think? The narrowest part, with no access to the forest or the mountain, flooded twice a day by the tide. He could have left me there, he would have exercised absolute power over my movements, because that was a natural prison. Why would a man act so, if he wasn't mad? This was one of the obsessive thoughts that was boring into my head. Why? Why? It's easy to have obsessive thoughts on an island, Dr. Westore. Distractions are few and the days are identical to one another, to the point that one feels they are not passing, that time is a mirage, nothing more, and that you have stayed still, as if in a photograph, forever.

Things as they were, however, couldn't go on forever. You know very well that inertia sooner or later will find an obstacle.

Nelson and I went on living our routine. I didn't invade his space, from fear of death, and he didn't let himself be seen, maybe because he thought I was going to ambush him. But, my dear Phoebe, my head never stopped spinning and although I didn't especially want to go back to New York, I became obsessed with the idea of getting out of there.

But let's break this down. Despite the fact that Nelson disappearing again was at first a relief, after a time that as I've already said, I didn't even bother to calculate, I began to feel worried. What if he'd left the island and I hadn't noticed? What if I'd been left alone?

When the tide was low I walked over to his area. From the border I shouted his name a number of times. I knew I was risking my life if I entered his territory without his consent. Nelson didn't answer. Up to a point, it was natural that he didn't hear me, but my unease grew. I decided to respect the pact and not trespass on his land. I couldn't forget that he was armed and, whatever way you look at it, he was a criminal, a pirate, certainly without scruples.

I left my T-shirt tied to a branch near our border. It stood out. Nelson would see it and understand that it was some sort of message. He would come near. Beside the T-shirt, I wrote on the trunk, with a rock, the word “help.” I waited nearby until dusk, in case he appeared. He didn't. And I returned to my shelter. That day I had hardly eaten anything except some seaweed. I was hungry and thirsty. When I arrived home, I prepared a little of the fish I had dried days before and I drank a brew of herbs I used as tea.

I spent my nights close to the fire to take advantage of the light, carving chess pieces out of wood I had stripped with the knife. I was working out how long it would take me to finish them and wondered if by the time they were done we would still be there. I was making them to play by myself and with Nelson, if the opportunity arose. For something to do, as well. Just as a God bored of his empty islands had had to carve Nelson and me, for something to do. That was the only time I was on the verge of believing in God. A God as sleepless as I was. Insomnia has always pursued me, as you know. Invariably, every night. Sometimes I gazed up at the stars, I observed with admiration the figures the clouds formed in the black sky or the channels the moonlight sketched on the surface of the sea. I told myself stories, tales, conversations, memories, but it got to the point at which contemplation was killing me, Phoebe, because I identified it with a manner, the most anguished manner, of waiting. And I did count sheep or grains of sand, but it didn't work. Then the idea of chess came to me. To play. Play in that situation? Absolutely. You know my taste for games of any sort, above all those in which intellect plays a special part, and although it may seem strange, in those circumstances this interest didn't abandon me. I had even discovered a plant from which to extract a red dye, to paint and thus distinguish one piece from another. With this same dye I had drawn faces on a rock, I'd written my name and I'd even written down, so they might accompany me, or who knows why, an Auden verse:

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

I suppose in some way, I was fantasizing about revenge. Fantasies were the only thing I could allow myself.

My signals worked. So the next day, at first light, Nelson was waiting for me at the door of my shelter. As soon as I stuck my head out I heard his voice.

“What do you want? What's wrong? Why are you asking for help?” he asked me, almost without breathing.

“I thought maybe you had left,” I said. Why should I lie to him? I saw he was wearing binoculars around his neck. Then it was as if he was watching me. What else did he have that I didn't know about? “Binoculars,” I said as I pointed to them.

“Yes. So?”

“I just wanted to know if you were still here. And that you hadn't died. We could take turns visiting,” I proposed. “I don't know, once a week, for example.”

“I don't think that's necessary,” he said.

“One of us could get injured or need help.” It seemed reasonable to me to agree on a certain routine. I don't know why I was afraid that Nelson might deceive me. “You have binoculars,” I insisted. “You can see me from a distance. I'm not in the same position.”

“Of course you're not. So what?”

He started moving away towards his territory.

“Wait, man, wait. It's just you and I, here. I mean we could talk a little. I'll end up going mad, if we don't.”

“We'll end up going mad anyway,” he assured me. “Losing your mind is part of this experience.”

“I want to see your territory,” I said straight out. “I think I have a right, and I'm curious to see the other side of the mountain.”

“I think you haven't understood anything at all, doctor.” Nelson was chewing something and he spat it out. “You say you have a right?”

“This situation isn't fair.”

“I saved your life. Full stop. If I hadn't saved you, you wouldn't be here bothering me now.” He took off his cap and wiped the sweat with the back of his hand. “This remains as a border. You'll continue to respect it. It hasn't even been four months.”

Four months? We'd been on the island that long? However long it was, it had passed almost quickly. There, as I've said, Dr. Westore, time was made of a different material. It really gave the sensation of being fixed, like space, and we moved around inside it as though we were walking through it.

“You mean you'd just as soon we didn't even communicate?”

“Exactly,” he said. “When it is time for us to leave, I will tell you. But don't worry.” He started walking along the strip of sand, which was beginning to flood. And he added, just before disappearing, “It will be years.”

At that point I collapsed, doctor. I became truly conscious of my situation.

“Years?” I was aware that I was shouting. “Years?” I repeated. “What do you mean, years?” I was petrified.

He came back. He grabbed a branch of a nearby tree, as if he might strangle it. And then he said: “Let's see if we understand each other. Although I say you can leave tomorrow, I don't know how you would do it. In the first place, you know as well as I do that there isn't enough wood to build a boat nor the tools necessary to make one more or less reliable. Secondly, the only way to make the pirates believe I'm dead is to die. That is to say, to disappear for as long as possible. I saved your life, don't make me regret it. Technically, you're dead. Got it?”