The Island of Last Truth by Flavia Company

Author:Flavia Company
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions UK
Published: 2012-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

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?

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.

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