“Now I know you know I have a boat, Prendel. Now I won’t lower my guard. Careful what you do. I guarantee you we will leave here. I told you I had a plan. And I have. But it will be when I say, understood?”
Prendel nods. He has no choice but to obey orders.
“I can’t trust you, you made that clear. The book was a test, Prendel. I thought: if he doesn’t bring it back to me after a week, he can’t be trusted. Pacts, although they might be made about small things, are made to be fulfilled. You have to keep your word. And also, you invaded my territory. If you’d stayed in your zone until I came to look for you . . . ”
“Would you have come?’
“No doubt.”
“When?”
“Whenever, a month, three months, a year.”
Prendel laughs in a stentorian manner.
“A year!”
“Time passes quickly. Life does, Prendel. A year here is nothing. Nothing changes in a year, except how you see someone. In a year, we would have built a solid trust.”
“And why do I want your solid trust?”
“To get off the island, for example? To share in the privileges I have at my disposal?”
Souza heats water in a small saucepan, to make coffee.
“And where has all this come from?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“What could I do with your information, apart from eat it?”
Prendel’s tone was defiant, in spite of his situation being much worse than Nelson’s. “We’ve been here over half a year,” Prendel comments, as if he is speaking to himself, but sure the other man is listening. And he adds in a hostile tone: “Half a year of sacrifices decided by you. Wasn’t it enough for you to see me lose my friends, my yacht, my life? How did you expect me not to try to steal a damn book from you?”
Nelson takes the saucepan off the fire. He asks:
“Coffee?”
“Whiskey?” Prendel dares to suggest. Souza agrees and adds a few drops.
“I won’t repeat it. It was a test. We are all put to the test, Prendel. Everyone is suspicious of everyone. Proof, proof, we ask for proof for everything. The other man’s word isn’t enough for us, we need him to prove what he says. That’s our tragedy. How do I know I can trust you? How do I know I can take you into the boat when we can finally leave here?”
“You can’t.” Prendel knew he was risking his life with that declaration. He knew, however, Nelson wouldn’t believe him if he said the opposite.
Souza laughs. Prendel smiles.
“How did you know there was a boat on the island?”
“Telling you won’t help you.”
“To satisfy my curiosity, at least.”
“Gerardo, the Solimán’s cook left all this here. He felt sorry for me, Gerardo. He confessed the island’s existence to me and assured me that, for pertinent circumstances he’d kept enough stuff to survive. He told me so I might try to escape, I suppose. Because he thought I wouldn’t succeed, certainly. Or perhaps he thought I’d propose we escape together, I don’t know. Old Gerardo, if he’s still alive, must think from time to time that maybe I am here. If he said it to the others, however, he would have to admit that he spoke to me about the existence of the island and that revelation would compromise his safety. His hands are tied.”
“And how much time has to go by before they will have forgotten about you?”
“Mortality among pirates is high, Prendel. They die, they kill each other, their victims kill them. I’m confident that within a few years some will be caught and others will have snuffed it.”
Prendel, determined to return to his cage, begins to walk towards the apron of sand which leads to the other part of the island.
“I’ll take advantage of low tide,” he says.
Souza stops him: “Wait.”
He gives him the binoculars. Another test? wonders Prendel. And after Prendel thanks him and begins walking once again towards his zone, Souza follows him and says:
“I think this is yours now.”
He is referring to the Conrad. Prendel takes it. He looks at Souza, guards the book under his T-shirt, pulls down his cap and leaves, limping, little by little.
4.
From that moment on, Prendel lives in desperation. Knowing about the existence of the boat has upset him. Now, indeed, he feels like a prisoner. He can’t escape, he can’t attack. All he can do is wait, survive and wait.
But now things are clear between them. Souza is seen more often. There are nights he even plays a game of chess, which Prendel always wins.
“You have to obtain a victory in something,” Nelson provokes him. “Where I won’t tolerate losing is in life,” he adds.
And Prendel asks him how he knows if he is winning or losing in life. How does he know, if so often when it seems one is losing, in reality he is winning.
Prendel will keep the chess game forever. It symbolizes the game he won against life, if surviving is winning.
Some storms, calm days, crests of unbearable anxiety and moments of complete neglect.
Prendel can’t stop going over the same thing: he doesn’t understand why Nelson is postponing the departure. He doesn’t believe his explanations. They don’t add up. He contemplates the possibility that Nelson is not right in the head, that he has truly lost the ability to perceive. What does he do, day after day, on his minuscule strip of island?
He knows it’s risky, that he shouldn’t do it, because the Atlantic might betray him, because the sharks aren’t far away, because Souza might see him, but Prendel decides to swim, to wade into the sea straddling a tree trunk to help him float and get to the peak of the island where the enemy lives. He wants to see what he is doing. He needs to know more.
So on a relatively calm day, a day when the wind is not blowing too strong and the sea is not too deep, a day with good visibility, Prendel calculates the hour at which the sun won’t blind him when he faces the island and goes out determined, with the binoculars around his neck.
Shortly after starting to swim he becomes paralyzed. He is scared of drowning. The days spent in the sea, just after losing his friends and boat, haunt his imagination. His legs stiffen, his breathing is labored, he feels he is about to have a heart attack. He flounders, swallows water, comes up to the surface again, coughs, feels dizzy, the trunk slips away, he can’t see anything, he feels something hard brush again his legs, a shark, he shouts, his thigh injury stabs him so painfully it is almost unbearable, he is lost. Prendel thinks Souza is about to be left alone on the island. And this thought, as if it were a needle sticking into a nerve ending, revives him, returns him to the world. Nothing. No interruptions. One stroke after another. He goes out far enough that Nelson, should he see a shape, won’t be able to identify him. Nelson doesn’t have binoculars. He arrives at the place he has calculated, just opposite Souza’s cave. He leans on the trunk again, grabs the binoculars, adjusts them and searches for the man. It doesn’t take him long to find him. And it doesn’t take him long, either, to realize that he doesn’t understand what he is doing. It seems as if Nelson Souza is looking for something. He hits some objects he can’t identify with a tool he can’t identify either. He moves from side to side. He sits down, waits, goes back. Suddenly he shoots his gun. Prendel hides his face under the water. Has he seen him? When he returns to the surface he discovers that Souza is still shooting, but he is shooting first into the sand, then at the mountain and a moment later into the air. Now Prendel is convinced: Nelson has lost his mind. Sometimes, from his part of the island he had heard shots, but he’d thought Nelson was shooting at a snake, a fish. He watches him a little longer, which only confirms his worst fears. Nelson Souza appears to be a half-wit with a foolish obsession.
Clearly he has been under the yoke of a madman, a man with no capacity for reason, or even worse, an armed man with no capacity for reason. How many times do weapons accompany dementia, or the reverse? Maybe Nelson Souza had lost his mind working for the pirates, while he
swam terrified towards the island, conscious that his bleeding injury could attract sharks. Or perhaps it had been on the island. Indeed it was no secret that islanders have a tendency to delirium, and how, then, would he not go mad, a man arriving on the island accidentally, a man who has been forced to stay there.
Prendel begins to swim towards the shore again, supported by the trunk. Night is falling, the little light remaining simply outlines the profile of the mountain, intensifies the color of things; he has the sensation of looking at an Impressionist painting, a painting that can only be appreciated from afar, that loses its meaning up close. Maybe it is he who doesn’t know what he is saying. Can he be sure he still has the ability to reason? And in that case, what is he doing swimming in the Atlantic to spy on an armed man who has threatened him with death?
Maybe neither of them is in his right mind. How can they be sure they still have their mental health? What type of test should be done to find out? They don’t have visions, they don’t hear voices inside their heads, they don’t think of themselves as Messiahs. Is that enough?
Prendel arrives at his beach. He is naked. Weary, he lies down on the sand. He remembers when he always used to do the same, as a child, when his parents took him to the beach. His flesh would be covered and his mother would scold him because she used to find sand in the house for days and days afterwards. And for the first time since his arrival on the island, Prendel weeps.
5.
A man with no objective begins to abandon his condition as a man and move closer to that of an animal. Prendel no longer has any purpose. He’d wanted to catch Souza by surprise, he has tried to steal his weapons, he has pleaded, he has begged him. He has waited. He has despaired. He has reasoned. He has been useless. He has fruitlessly tried to build a boat. He has swum kilometers to escape, and he’s had to return, beaten.
In the end, he has given up. He has abandoned himself to the island, has become part of it. He has renounced any purpose in life and has reduced himself to surviving the way his prey do, be they worms, lizards or insects. He moves only when strictly necessary. He has completely lost any notion of time and his memory is blocked. He has thrown his watch into the sea, he does not mark the days that pass on the stone calendar. He assumes he will never be able to leave there. He is in no hurry, but he has decided that one day or another he will end up committing suicide.
Prendel spends the days beside his shelter, which is now no more than a ruin under a sunshade. He’s had to construct a few since his arrival. They crumble from the rain, the wind, and the sun. He feels that in some way he is the perfect reproduction of his father in the garden of his house in Georgetown. He thinks that if he had to end up like the old man, he loses nothing by bringing it forward a few years. At times he gets up, wets his feet at the sea’s edge and returns. Every day he chooses a fixed point on which to keep his gaze. From time to time he sees Souza pass by. They haven’t spoken for a while. They don’t need to.
Souza has sometimes come over to him, brought him something to eat, told him to have patience, not much longer now. Prendel doesn’t listen. He doesn’t believe him and doesn’t care.
* * *
One day, probably months later, Nelson Souza comes running over to him, exultant.
“We can go. In two or three days we can go, Prendel. We only have to get things ready and we can go.”
Prendel doesn’t answer, or even look at him. Maybe he doesn’t believe him, maybe he doesn’t hear him.
“Prendel!” Souza shouts, comes close, shakes him. He is excited. We can go. And you know why? Because I’ve found what I was looking for. You hear? I’ve found what I was looking for. So we can go.”
These are the words Prendel needed as a hook to grab onto and return to reality. Hope always needs a point of departure. He has found what he was looking for? Is that what he said? In other words, he was looking for something, it wasn’t his imagination, Souza was mad but there was a method to his madness.
“We have to gather enough water and food. It’ll be many miles before we find some ship that can rescue us, you hear?” Souza doesn’t seem the same, he talks fast, in a very firm voice. He’s beside himself. He truly seems like another man.
What can he have found? Prendel doesn’t dare ask for an explanation. What does it matter, if they’re going to leave at last. Little by little his brain begins to stir. He notes that at the moment the wind is blowing from the south-west, the wind most favorable to their leaving the island in the lifeboat. The current will help them get away. His heart races. Maybe, he thinks. Yes, maybe. The man living within him reacts.
He finally gets up, looks at Souza. How can he be sure that man isn’t going to kill him as soon as they get into the boat, or even before, or after they’re spent days at sea and begin to run short of water and food. But each of them needs the other. Better two than one for rowing. Better two than one for everything. Souza had said very clearly that there no reason to kill a man who might be useful. They need to trust one another. It’s not that they trust each other, it’s that they need to.
They divide the work. Prendel will see to the water. He will have to fill all the containers he can find, in addition to the canteens. Souza is in charge of the food. Once they leave the island they can’t go back. They have to be sure they are taking all the necessary steps.
They are three frenetic days. They go through what they will need again and again. They’re anxious. They’re euphoric. They’re about to leave.
The night before departure they drink what whisky they have left. They relax. They are in Souza’s hut, in his territory. They know that soon they are going to share a much smaller and dangerous space than an island. Some difficult days.
“I don’t owe you an explanation,” says Souza, but I’m going to give you one.”
Prendel waits. There is a full moon. The fire they used to cook dinner is now only embers. Souza had kept some cigarettes. They smoke. There is a kind of normality in what they are doing, as if they have come back to civilization.
“I told you that I’d found what I was looking for.”
Prendel shrugs his shoulders and confesses, down to the last detail, his excursion with the binoculars, the way in which he’d spied on Souza and discovered that he was looking for something. He has nothing to lose now.
Souza gives no importance to the revelation, as if he already knew what had happened. He explains that he’d been on the verge of going mad, he’d come to think that what he was seeking didn’t exist, that it had all been a practical joke of Gerardo’s, or the product of delirium.
Prendel listens, expectant.
“This was what I was looking for,” says Nelson Souza, and shows Prendel three small dark bags. “Diamonds.”
Then he tells him that the Solimán runs the guns that feed African wars and gets paid in diamonds. A while before, Gerardo had convinced his assistant, a naive young boy, that they should make the most of a chance to keep some of the loot. Gerardo had a plan. They’d moored in a port for a few days.
“They were in Nigeria, in the harbor at Lagos. They were supposed to stay there a couple of weeks. They were waiting for a new shipment of weapons. The diamonds from the last delivery were aboard. Gerardo knew where. He persuaded the assistant that they could steal a yacht to reach the island. Once there, they would hide the diamonds and return aboard without anyone knowing. After a time, when everything calmed down, they would go back for them. Everything went to plan. But as to be expected, Gerardo hadn’t explained the whole plan to the young man. Once they got to the island and hid the loot, Gerardo killed the assistant, lowered the lifeboat, and returned alone to leave the yacht where he’d found it. With luck, nobody would have missed it. The pleasure yachts spend months sleeping in the ports with nobody visiting them. And anyway, he had invented a culprit. Nobody on the Solimán would doubt that the assistant had stolen the stones and escaped without a trace.”
Prendel looks at Nelson with horror and says: “So easy. A clean job,
indeed.”
“Life is hard, doctor. And when one sees he is approaching the end, sometimes he takes drastic measures.” Nelson takes a gulp from his cup of whisky. He finishes it and pours himself more.
Prendel follows his example and asks Souza to finish telling him the story. He figures Souza has lowered his guard, he knows that he is no longer a threat, that the only thing he wants is to leave the island and now that he has admitted it, he has nothing to fear now.
“Gerardo thought about returning to the island one way or another. Precisely because he didn’t know how or with whom, he’d left a full survival kit. A little before the attack on the Queen, the old cook had come down with a fever. Malaria. At times he was delirious. The doctor said he wasn’t going to make it.”
Souza told the story to the end. Prendel listened to him as if, in fact, he was narrating a fictional adventure.
When the Solimán attacked Dr. Prendel’s boat, Gerardo, plagued by the threat of death, had already told the whole story to Souza. He didn’t tell him, however, where he’d hidden the loot, maybe because he thought keeping the secret was the only way of making sure Souza would try to keep him alive.
Souza had decided that he wouldn’t leave the island without the diamonds. It was a matter of a real fortune. Enough for numerous men to live numerous lives of real luxury.
“To compensate you, I’ll give you some.” And he throws him one of the bags.
Prendel can’t believe it; he’s speechless. Souza could have taken much longer to find the diamonds, years perhaps. It could have been a cook’s delirium. Others could have found them before Souza got to the island. They could have spent the rest of their lives there alone because this man had the stupid ambition of making himself rich. He is furious and explodes. He screams at him, insults him, feels deceived, cheated, mocked. He throws the bag of diamonds in Souza’s face.
The Island of Last Truth Page 7
