The Island of Desire by Robert Dean Frisbie

Author:Robert Dean Frisbie [Frisbie, Robert Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kaf Publishing
Published: 2013-01-11T18:30:00+00:00

EPILOGUE

For a long time I have been too gloomy to write. Of course I am referring to Desire’s illness. She is slipping away from me; there is no hope for her recovery.

For months I have been trying to work up enough fortitude to write this, and thereby, perhaps, lessen my pain by establishing it as a thing that cannot be avoided, a thing inexorable, destined; but always I have managed, some way or other, to postpone the unpleasant task. Even now I am not at all certain that I shall finish it. I suppose we are all that way. When we have an unpleasant task to do we unconsciously postpone it by finding other things to attend to first. Before opening my journal I found it necessary to mend my fish net; then I moved toward my writing table, but only to note some scraps of pandanus leaf on the floor where I had been making cigarette papers. So I cleaned them up, and while doing so I remembered, by a natural association of ideas, that the rubbish pile by the cookhouse needed burning. And finally, when everything had been attended to, I felt nauseated, too ill to write. I was about to give it up when Desire started coughing and thus drove me to writing to him the reality in the narration thereof.

I have told you little of Desire’s illness. If the details have been scant it is not because of callousness on my part but rather cowardice. I have been afraid to admit that the diagnosis is all too evident: tuberculosis– the same affliction that killed Tangi. I try to delude myself into believing it is something else. I study my Hughes’s Practice of Medicine, compare Desire’s symptoms with the ones described under scores of afflictions, and try to make myself believe she has some other complaint. For days I try to convince myself that she has chronic bronchitis. I distort the recognized bronchitis symptoms so they tally with those of Desire, but always in the end it comes back to the scourge of the South Seas: tuberculosis.

True to type, I am spending my time trying to escape. Sometimes I wonder if I am spending my life trying to escape from something–myself perhaps. Half my dreams are of running away from an unseen pursuer, leaping down ridges, dashing through forests, swimming across rivers, with the sure knowledge that some person or intangible danger is pursuing me. Never have I seen this pursuer or known what the danger is; but he, or it, is none the less terrifying.

But this is no dream in the little house at Yato Point. God knows I wish it were one. I am trying to escape from awareness of impending tragedy, and I am succeeding at times by telling the fribbling details of a trader’s life.

Meekly carrying the lamp, William, like a hoary wise virgin, lighted us into the house, set the lamp on the floor, and departed without a word. Desire, drowsy with morphine, dozed in my arms and did not waken when I laid her gently on the sleeping mat.

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