“We have nothing of value,” he told them.
The one who seemed to be calling the shots didn’t delay in answering him.
“The boat’s enough. Into the water.”
“We’ll die.” It was Frank.
“Sooner or later, yeah,” said another. And at that moment he pulled out a gun. They were getting impatient. “But if you prefer, we can kill you. Right now.”
“At least let us lower the lifeboat,” pleaded Katy.
The man who had just taken out his gun shot at the boat.
“No use now,” he clarified needlessly.
Feeling scared and having nowhere to run to was a terrifying feeling. Mathew saw there was no way out, but he had to try.
“Look, I’m the owner of the boat, I mean, I’ll jump overboard, OK? But let these two people off at a port or near some coast so they can swim to it.”
“Are you negotiating with us? Do you think you’re in a position to bargain?” He gave a signal. The one carrying the revolver shot and wounded Frank in the arm.
Desperate, Prendel took out his weapon. He only had time to shoot once and, unexpectedly, he gave it to one of those who had remained on the pirate ship. The man fell into the water and sank immediately. He didn’t have to wait long for the pirates’ response. Infuriated by the death of one of their own, they started shooting. As he threw himself overboard Mathew Prendel saw Frank and Katy gunned down. He swam furiously, conscious of the difficulty of avoiding the shots in that calm sea. However, the men didn’t persist. Why waste bullets if Prendel would end up dying anyway? Of exhaustion or prey to some shark. Of hunger or thirst. Of desperation. Of loneliness. Drowned.
2.
Prendel doesn’t feel the warm temperature of the water until he sees the pirate ship moving away. On the stern he can still make out the name, Solimán. Tugging his Swan 42; they had lowered her sails, defeated her. Even so, without meaning to, Prendel admires the line of her; he can tell himself he’s had the boat of his dreams. He can tell himself he’s made some of his dreams come true. He wonders if this is what counts, now that the moment has come to take stock.
He is surprised to feel cold just as the enemy leaves. He observes them. There’s nothing else he can do. He knows that swimming is pointless. The only hope is that a boat may pass, but he knows that’s unlikely; so much so that it is almost impossible. He is going to die. This idea causes him to shiver as he never has before. Within a short time he will have done two radical things: killed and died. About dying, the only thing that surprises him is the manner. About killing, everything. He would never have thought himself capable of killing anyone, even in extreme circumstances. Although he hasn’t practiced for some time, being a doctor used to weigh heavily on him. So he had thought. And instead, he’d proven that his survival instinct functioned like the mechanism of a Swiss watch: silently, with precision. It wouldn’t be useful to him anymore.
After a while, he sees them throw the bodies of Katy and Frank overboard. Mathew cannot forgive himself. He is going to die with the sorrow of having sacrificed his friends; the only ones he’d had in New York in all the years since his family left Baltimore and moved to the Big Apple for him to go to university. He remembers how he convinced them to join him: it was April and Prendel had just begun a sabbatical year. He’d gone looking for Katy and Frank at their nautical bookshop. They’d opened it six years before. Frank and Katy had been friends, and sometime lovers, since university. They’d both studied marine biology. It was lunchtime and he invited them to the place of their choice, although he already knew the answer if it were Frank who chose; he always suggested PJ Clarke’s on the off chance he’d run into an old girlfriend of his, a tour guide he was still in love with.
“I have to tell you a dream which I’ve been going over in my mind for years and that now, finally, I can make come true,” he told them en route from 57th to 55th Street. And little by little, while they each devoured one of those famous burgers, he seduced them. They would depart in May, to take advantage of favorable winds. They had already sailed on the Queen once and knew she was safe and comfortable. He would take care of the expenses. And the preparations. He’d requested a sabbatical year thanks to some stock market investments which had paid more than generous dividends. The lives they were leading would await them quietly. The two sales people they’d hired could mind the bookstore. They were talking about five months, six at the most.
“We have to do things in life that later on we’ll want to remember. Look back and feel it’s been worth it. Going over our history and feeling that it’s not like anyone else’s, it belongs to us, we invented it. We’re young. We have to do it now. Now. I can’t stand any more of this predictable life. Whatever we do, we’ll end up dying. Worth doing what we want, isn’t it?”
Prendel knew very well that everyone carries within himself a person who wants to break the routine, who wants to show that he is unique, who says there is only one life and it has to be seized. He also knew, as practicing medicine had allowed him to corroborate it on more than one occasion, that when a patient receives a terminal diagnosis, the first feelings to overwhelm him are sadness and regret for not having done anything special with the life he’d been given. And that was what counted.
Everyone carries within himself a person who believes he is better than their living self. Prendel addressed his friends’ inner beings. And it was a good move, because they didn’t know how to say no.
Now, on the contrary, he thinks it wasn’t a good move but an unfair manipulation. Now that he is floating in an improvised cemetery he feels guilty. They should have fled as soon as Katy saw the boat. Or afterwards. They should have tried. He should have trusted Katy’s intuition, or more simply, respected her fear. But fear, when it isn’t contagious, is as untransferable as desire or disgust. Now the man has the sensation of having surrendered without resistance. He cannot manage to forgive himself, he isn’t capable of telling himself he acted as he did because he thought it was the best way to stay alive. He feels stupid. He is angry at himself.
Many times he has feared dying in the sea, but he never imagined it would be this way. He’d feared storms and calms. Even feared the coast, when he’d seen it too close on stormy days. Feared darkness. How true it is that life surprises us even on the terrain we believe we have mastered most.
Since it seems worse to resign himself to dying motionless than to dying while moving, he begins to swim. But beforehand, and as though it matters at all, he calculates in which direction the nearest shore lies. He tries to remember: at the moment of the attack they were seven hundred miles north of Jamestown; Ascension Island was almost six hundred miles southeast of them; it’s clear that the Ivory Coast is closer than Gabon, although the difference between dying six hundred or eight hundred miles off the coast is ultimately irrelevant. Finally he decides: north. He mocks his instinct for survival and settles for thinking that it gives meaning to his every stroke. Giving meaning to things is an inevitable part of human aspiration and now in his situation, alone as never before, if there is a predominant feeling it is, no doubt, that of being profoundly human.
Hours of sun remain. He will roast before he drowns. He would prefer to die in the water than in fire. He would prefer not to die at all. He tries to imagine he has the boat at his side and he is taking a dip, so he can enjoy one more moment before fear overcomes him. He takes an inventory. He is dressed in a red T-shirt, jeans, and non-slip boating shoes, a genuine irony if he thinks about how little he’ll be able to walk. In his trouser pockets he is carrying a multiuse penknife and a watch with a compass, barometer, thermometer, alarm, and stopwatch on his wrist. He lost his revolver jumping into the water. His sunglasses are still hanging on a cord around his neck. He looks around. Despite realizing it is one of the last images he will ever see, its beauty excites him. He would like to describe to someone the sensation of abundance he is feeling. Suddenly, he understands the here and now.
By night the water tempera
ture will drop and he will experience slight hypothermia, not enough to kill him. He will die of thirst. A topical thought overpowers him: “Water, water everywhere!” But he knows very well he cannot give in to the temptation: if he drank seawater he would dehydrate much more rapidly. So what? he thinks. Strange, the instinct to cling to life even when you know you have no chance of survival. Under normal conditions it would take between three and five days to die of dehydration. Given the circumstances, it will all be much quicker. Sometimes he had wanted to die. Now he realizes, no. Never. He didn’t know then what it meant to face your own death.
He keeps swimming. He is not a great swimmer. He doesn’t breathe well, he tires. He does the dead man’s float again. Face up. Then he relaxes into the fetal position. Luckily, from time to time a cloud blocks the sun. He looks at the time. Four o’clock. The time has passed quickly. His hands and feet are wrinkled. His skin itches. He feels a cramp in his legs. He would like to have a nap. He would like to have something to eat. Most of all he would like to have something to drink. Impossible. He is in the corridor of death. He touches the knife in his pocket. The wait is unbearable. He could use it and end it all. Life is not a decision. Death, yes. He grabs the knife, opens it. Vein at the wrist? Jugular? He takes a deep breath.
He can’t do it. Kill himself. Let death come and take him. Make it hard for her. He has no intention of making her a gift of his life. What has he been thinking? Mathew Prendel is a survivor. This isn’t the first time death has been near. On more than one occasion, when he has distanced himself from the crowds of people that gather on land, when he has gone off to find himself, to feel the freedom of not being in the place assigned to him and is accountable only to himself, the price has been almost losing his life. Time and again he has proven that the only victory the sea concedes is survival. Until now. This will be his final crossing. Now he is alone forever. There is a bitter sting in the thought that no one will be able to feel his disappearance at the moment it strikes. He has been able to mourn the deaths of Katy and Frank. He has accompanied them. He accompanies them still now as he thinks of them, lifeless.
Dr. Prendel thinks of his widowed father, there in Georgetown, that lost Texas town where many well-heeled retirees live.
“Texas? Why are you going to Texas? Aren’t you happy in New York? You can live with me, if you like.”
But the man preferred the climate of the South, the calm of a small town.
“If your mother were still alive, I would stay here. She couldn’t bear small places, she adored cities, and New York more than any other. Remember when we left Baltimore, even her personality changed! But I feel lonely, son; you have your work and a lot of the time you go off to those remote seas for months at a time, and I don’t know what you’re looking for so far from our country. You’re away more than you’re here, and I feel lonely, son, and there are many people my age there, people who have lost their spouse, people looking for meaning in the final years of life, you’ll understand when you grow old.”
But Mathew Prendel will never grow old. And his father will never be as alone as he is right now, at six in the evening on the day Mathew’s slow death begins.
It will take his father months to realize that they won’t see each other again. It will destroy his heart and he knows this. He will say: “How many times did I tell him to forget about all those adventures, settle down, how many times did I tell him it would end badly if he continued like that.”
His father is seventy-one years old. His mother would be sixty-one, if she were still alive. Death didn’t pay attention to the age difference. It took her five years before in less than a month. The liver.
Mathew was an only child. He’d have liked to have had a sibling. He thinks it’s safe to say they’d be together now, and this thought consoles and distresses him at the same time.
Many times he has felt sadness imagining his father alone, in the small living-dining room of his house. Sitting on the crimson plastic sofa, the television on at a deafening volume. Dozing and taking gulps of coffee served in one of those cups you get with points from yogurt or paper napkins. His shirt and trousers freshly washed, but with old stains on them. And it is curious, because now he feels an even more profound pity for him. A pity, he supposes, that has to do with knowing how alone he is leaving him while his father still thinks he can count on his company.
3.
Night has fallen. It is two o’clock in the morning. He is exhausted. He is cold and afraid. He hadn’t been afraid while it was light. Seeing his body through the water helped him to be sure there was nothing worrisome nearby. The sea, when everything is dark, is like an immense animal with black skin moving restlessly as it sleeps and may wake up any moment. He has been swimming for hours, with brief interruptions to do the dead man’s float. Dead man’s float, what an expression for a moment like this. He would swell up and the fishes would eat him. Better that than being cremated or buried. He’d always thought he’d like his ashes to be scattered at sea. The sea, the tomb. Now they wouldn’t be ashes but all of him. Wasn’t that what you wanted? Now you have it. He smiles. He hasn’t lost his sense of humor. Or maybe this is what death is: hoping, smiling, despairing, understanding nothing while on the verge of understanding everything.
His mother had been buried. Afterwards, for a long time, Prendel had nightmares in which bodies emerged with huge worms slithering through them. His mother, unlike his father, always told him: “It’s good that you go all over the world, that you value things that aren’t bought or sold or measured, that you don’t always have your feet on the ground, that you start over again.” Who knows if he’ll find her again. Who knows if there is a place where the dead reunite to go over their lives, comment on them, project them like a film. Forward, rewind, pause, slow motion, freeze image.
The cold has relieved the sensation of thirst. But his head hurts. He knows that’s normal. The first symptoms of dehydration. Increased heartbeat and respiration. Spasms, nausea. And afterwards he’ll have hallucinations. He’ll see an island, a boat, he’ll hear voices. Mirages. He’ll see salvation.
He keeps going. Very slowly. It’s difficult for him to move his arms. He can hardly feel his hands or feet. He orientates himself by the stars. He keeps swimming towards the continent. In the depths of his heart he believes that maybe he’ll get to a shipping lane for merchant ships or oil tankers; maybe some boat will change direction for an unforeseen reason, a breakdown perhaps. In any case, he is still mocking his survival instinct.
Sailing means knowing where we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. Therefore it is perhaps more difficult to sail than to live. Right now, Prendel can calculate where he is. He can calculate the speed at which he has been swimming, his approximate direction, and the amount of time he has spent in the water. He is sailing without a vessel. This is what will kill him. Although he is lost, he hasn’t lost himself. He is a good sailor. Frank and Katy knew that, and so they had set sail with him. They had trusted too much in his skill. Or perhaps they didn’t figure that sooner or later the sea kills you; the only difference is that if you are a good sailor, you know where you are at the moment of dying.
Mathew rebukes himself for having thought that things happen to other people. Everyone wants to choose. Loneliness won’t happen to me, failure won’t happen to me, not ruin or sickness or pirates. Pain, hunger, the ending of a love story won’t happen to me. But it has to happen to someone.
The ending of a love story happened to him. Worse than that. He remembers Mary Stradform with a mixture of nostalgia and rage. Professor of pediatric surgery during his final year of medical school. They fell in love after a few classes. Contrary to habit, he asked her out for coffee. She said yes. They had coffee. The following day they woke up together in Mary’s flat. He remembers the white cotton sheets and on top, her underwear, midnight blue. The salty taste of her skin, so similar to the taste of the waves. Loving her gave meaning to his life. He introduced her to his pa
rents. He went to live with her. First and last love.
When they’d been together a little over two years, that operation happened. A little girl seven years old, a transplant, a disaster. Mary Stradform, prestigious surgeon, drowning in anxiety. She lost her touch. I didn’t have the hands for the operating theater any more, she’d say. It was my fault, she’d say. The little girl would have survived. I didn’t do it right, she’d repeat. I killed her. She’d killed her. And Mary Stradform committed suicide. She disappeared forever. She left him alone. But not as alone as he finds himself now, facing his own death, rather alone in a different solitude, the one felt only after the death of others.
Afterwards, to avenge Mary, to find peace, to get even with himself, and even with her, Dr. Prendel started to operate on seven-year-old girls. He specialized in pediatric surgery. To save himself and save her. Not long afterwards, however, his firm resolve began to waver and he sought refuge as a professor at Columbia University. He’d built up a good rèsumè and they accepted it without objections. He never picked up a scalpel again. He didn’t want this godlike power, to give and take life. He wanted to be responsible only for his own. Many lamented his resignation. Prendel was a great professional. An honest person. Also an unsociable man with the soul of an adventurer. Few had understood his flight.
But Dr. Prendel hadn’t fled. You don’t flee from something when you go searching for something else, and he’d seen that life could be something else. That there were other possibilities. Sailing was a way of finding himself, of knowing what he wanted. Knowing what he didn’t want. And now, despite the cold, his wrinkled, cramped hands and feet, physical and mental exhaustion, imminent death, Mathew Prendel knows that there are many things he doesn’t want in his life from before. He is sure that rather than return to it, he prefers to move forward, directly to the destiny reserved for him at the bottom of the sea, with Katy, Frank, and darkness.
The Island of Last Truth Page 2
