The Island of Last Truth (4 page)

He stops swimming and loses consciousness.

Later, completely disorientated, the first incongruity that occupies Mathew Prendel's mind is the thought, just as he feels the roughness of the damp sand against his face, that he doesn't know if he is alive. It is pitch-black night, and he doesn't know if being alive is a stroke of luck either. He remembers the salty hell of the last few hours. How he has managed to arrive at a beach is unknown. It wasn't a mirage.

With an effort he drags himself along. He moves away from the water. Once again, he loses consciousness.

* * *

The next thing Dr. Prendel feels is someone's hands holding his head. Although he doesn't have the strength to open his eyes, the doctor knows it is day by the light reaching him through his closed eyelids. The other person tries to give him water to drink. Prendel is frightened. Where is he?

“Drink, drink,” the person tells him. He speaks his language. “You'll survive,” he says. “Don't worry. You'll survive. Drink.”

Will he survive?

Dr. Prendel drinks. Very slowly. He is no longer thirsty. Or he doesn't feel it. He only wants to sleep. Forever. In fact, when he has drunk a little, the voice says, “Rest.” Afterwards he hears some footsteps moving away, then nothing.

He doesn't wake until night. He opens his eyes. It's difficult to focus. The first thing he sees is the fire beside him. Then a man. He deduces that this is the man who saved him. He hears the sound of the waves nearby. He lifts his head a little and checks that, in fact, the shore is just a few feet away. Prendel is covered with a jacket. He has dry clothes and feels warm. He throws the cover off. He tries to sit up but fails. He is very weak. He remains lying on the ground.

“My name is Nelson Souza,” the other's voice sounds in the darkness. Prendel guesses that he is a white man. Against Prendel's wishes, this fact unsettles him. “You should eat and drink something. Here.” He passes him a cup of water. And something solid. “It's fish,” he tells him.

Prendel accepts; he's too weak to ask or question anything. He drinks anxiously; now he is thirsty. Then he eats. The fish is hard and rubbery.

“Thank you.” His voice surprises him: he hasn't heard it for many hours. It comes out weak. “Where are we?” he asks. Now, he sits up little by little. He feels sick. He feels strange. Shouldn't he be dead?

“On a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic,” the man answers. “Southeast of the Gulf of Guinea.”

Prendel thinks that's impossible.

“We can't be,” he says.

Souza doesn't answer. Now he is pouring a hot drink, in the same cup as before.

Prendel looks around him, but can't manage to make anything out. Perhaps some shadows. The worst has passed; nevertheless, he is uneasy.

“Are you from here?” Prendel asks Souza.

“As much from here as you are.”

“So it's deserted, the island?” Prendel, despite his weak­ness, realizes he's asked a stupid question.

“Completely,” Souza informs him. “We've been shipwrecked on a minuscule, deserted island.

“We have?” With an effort Prendel swallows a last bit of fish.

“I haven't been here much longer than you,” Nelson informs him.

Prendel sees that the man is wearing a bandage on his ankle.

“You're injured,” he states more than asks.

“Yes, from a gunshot.”

The image of the man falling over the side of the pirate ship appears instantly in Prendel's head. He swallows. His life has been saved only to lose it again. It couldn't be any other way, he thinks. Life, sooner or later, is lost. “A gunshot?”

“Your shot, yes.” He looks the pirate in the eyes. Prendel thinks he has a frank gaze. Too frank for his taste.

“I thought I'd killed you,” clarifies Prendel, while he feels overwhelmed by a strange relief, and thinks how reversible everything in life is, even the most extreme things. He was convinced he'd killed a man and was on the verge of dying. Instead, neither the one nor the other. For that reason hope is the last thing one loses, he thinks; life has so much more imagination than human beings, is never, even in the face of the most conclusive proof, predictable or definitive.

“No, as you can see.”

“Why didn't you raise the alarm? Why didn't you go back to your friends' boat?”

“They're not my friends,” Souza clarifies, laconically. Then he sees Prendel looking at the revolver he is wearing inside his trousers, fastened to his belt.

“You've got nothing to be afraid of. Things have changed now.”

Prendel thinks that indeed things have changed and men are who they are depending on who is around them.

“You mean we're not enemies.” Prendel clearly sees that the other man holds considerable power. The other man is himself plus his gun. Might is a sad but infallible way of constituting a majority.

“Here we're nothing but survivors.” Souza, who was standing, squats down opposite him and stirs the branches; the fire revives. Prendel takes advantage of the light and looks at his surroundings. The outline of a low mountain is drawn against the full moon.

“How do you know there's no one else on the island?”

“When day breaks you'll see why. It's barely six or seven square kilometres. We're lucky there's water, plants, trees, fish. Enough to survive a good while, I think.”

“Why did you save me?” Dr. Prendel, who has saved so many lives, doesn't understand why a man has saved his.

“You don't kill a man who may be useful to you.” Souza stares at Prendel.

“But you know that he who saves another man's life makes himself responsible for him until the end of his days . . . ”

Nelson Souza interrupts him.

“If I'd known that, I'd have left you to die. Anyway, who knows if we'll manage to get out of here some day.”

“Well,, maybe some boat, sooner or later . . . ”

“No sooner or later, no boat, no nothing. This island is a long way from all the commercial routes. In fact, it's a miracle our boat was so close . . . but that's another story. We're scarcely a few hours' swim from the place of attack. You were swimming in circles for sure. And I . . . well, you get here faster when you know where you're going.”

“How did you know where . . . ?” Prendel begins to ask, but Souza interrupts him once more.

“The thing is no oil tankers or merchant ships or yachts pass anywhere near here. Where were you going? To São Tomé? You should have been sailing closer to the coast, but I imagine you wanted to avoid the traffic of the big ships or wanted to take advantage of the wind. The only ones who come close to here from time to time are the ones that belong to
Solimán
.”

Prendel remembers the boat moving away, the name painted on the stern.

“They could have rescued you. If they find me, they'll kill me for sure, but you . . . ”

“They think I'm dead. Drowned at the bottom of the Atlantic. And that's what they have to think. You're either with them or you're against them.”

“I don't know if I understand.”

“You don't need to understand,” says Nelson Souza, while he presses on his injured ankle with a grimace of pain. “All you have to know is that if you try to make signals from the island so they find us . . . I'll have to kill you. It will be me who decides when and how we leave here, is that clear?”

Prendel nods because he realizes that the tone Souza is using leaves no room for questions or complaints. He is too tired to argue. He looks around him. All his priorities are changing. What was important before is no longer so. What wasn't, will be. A man doesn't know what it costs to revise the list of his values until he has to do it. He had been somewhat used to it, given the changes involved in leaving the land to go to sea, but . . . this was totally different. This was land in the middle of the sea. It was like sailing without managing to move from the place. It was terrible. He looks back at the man in front of him.

Nelson Souza is thin but strong, tall, with thick black hair. Now he's got a beard of a few days. Prendel reckons that Souza is about his own age. He tries to ignore the threat. He doesn't want to ask the reason for it; he knows he won't answer. He points at his wound.

“It hurts, right? If you'll allow me, I can take a look at it. I'm a doctor. A doctor with no instruments or medication.”

“A doctor? Hey, then I did well in saving you. A doctor and a pirate: clearly all we're missing is a priest and we could be a bad joke, couldn't we?” Nelson smiles. Prendel imitates him. Souza keeps talking. “I have some medicine. A first-aid kit. I've been taking antibiotics.”

“The surprised look on Prendel's face forces Nelson to give some explanation.

“I didn't fall into the water empty-handed. I fell prepared. I was hoping to fall. It was lucky you shot me. Thanks.”

Prendel smiles, though with bitterness. He misses Frank a lot, a guy who liked this kind of situation. Two men alone, shipwrecked on a desert island, and one thanks the other for having fired a bullet into his ankle. Frank was a guy who liked westerns and war films.

“Move your leg closer to the fire.” He says it in an authoritative tone. The other man obeys. Mathew uncovers the wound and examines it. “It should have had stitches. Not now, it's too late.”

He is lying on the sand. Prendel feels the dampness of the ground. He is exhausted. He looks at the time. It is two o'clock in the morning, but in the situation he's in, time means nothing.

“Too much light, for my liking. I like to sleep in the dark,” he comments calmly, almost as if this were any other night. At the moment, he is more struck by his having survived than by being in an open-air prison.

“The firelight will go out on its own, shortly. The moonlight . . . will take a little longer.”

Souza has spent almost two days alone. He wasn't expecting anyone. Prendel gathers that his presence is a relief, and for that reason he wasn't capable of letting him die. He closes his eyes and hears Souza going away. His footsteps, slightly unequal in intensity because of his wound, move away surely over the sand. Prendel remembers Frank and Katy. He realizes he should have ordered them to throw themselves overboard the instant the pirate demanded it. Now he knows they too would have been saved. And having them with him would have given him peace. Nelson Souza had saved his life, yes, but he can't forget where he comes from. In any case, he has said it clearly: he doesn't plan on killing a man who might be useful to him. But he will kill him if he tries to give signal any ship that might appear on the horizon. Until when?

Two days later, Prendel still feels weak, but he is able to stand up. He has slept, he has rested, and he has recuperated, thanks to Souza's help. His eyes run over his surroundings: he sees the whole island in all its negligible size. Or almost all. The expanse of fine white sand broken by sticks, algae, all types of shells, where he has lain for so many hours is bordered on one end by the Atlantic and on the other by intricate vegetation extending to the foot of a forested mountain, which, according to what Souza has explained to him, ends in a cliff on the other side. Going up isn't easy, but it's worth the effort, because on the top you can find bird's eggs. Souza, who was standing next to him when he awoke, tells him that on the other side of the mountain there is a minimal strip of sand, which disappears when the tide comes in and can only be reached on foot at low tide from the western side of the island, or by swimming.

Nelson Souza is carrying a medical kit under his arm. He starts unwinding the bandage on his leg. Prendel watches, carefully cleans the skin, tells him it will scar in a few days; he gives instructions on how to keep the injury clean and all the while tries to overcome the hatred rising within him; a hatred mixed with gratitude for having saved his life.

“Where did you get the medical kit?” Prendel wants to know. Souza doesn't respond. From a pouch he takes out a tin, a cup, a couple of hooks with fishing lines, a water bottle, and a lighter. He leaves it on the ground, beside the medical kit.

“You'll need them,” he announces and starts walking. He is limping. “We have work to do,” he says.

Mathew Prendel doesn't yet dare ask where this arsenal of objects has come from. He follows Souza.

“Work?” Prendel looks around him. “Is there something lacking on this island?” His sarcasm, as usual, is closely linked to rage, to pain.

The humidity is suffocating. He looks at his watch: it is ten in the morning and the heat is already unbearable.

“I have to show you the island, we have to establish some rules of coexistence,” says Nelson. “We'll be spending some time here. It will be better to be clear on some rules.”

Rules? Prendel waits for clarification. Rules?

“Are rules necessary between two men on a desert island?”

Nelson answers: “Yes, they are. Over there, on the other side, I have my hut. It's important we mark out territories; I presume you understand.”

His tone is authoritative. It is clearly an order. Prendel thinks Souza doesn't trust him. He also thinks it's better not to argue with an armed man, at least for the moment, so he immediately says yes, that seems like a good idea.

“In my territory there is nothing that might interest you. In other words, you have no reason to enter it, under any pretext. However, I will need to come here, to look for water and food.”

Prendel doesn't feel comfortable with the idea that only his part of the island is to be shared but while this sensation is coming over him, he realizes that this desire for ownership is stupid in a situation in which all that matters is survival. He is thirsty and hungry. Hot and scared. Does he need a piece of island just for himself? Instead he says: “I too should have a territory, a place where you can't go.”