The Island of Last Truth by Flavia Company, Laura McGloughlin Page B

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,