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

that the other man would have killed me on the way, that he would not have been capable of sharing the diamonds with me and even less the scarce food and water for so many days as we might have needed before finding salvation. In vain. He was a real man. He would not have killed me, but I killed him to prevent him from doing so.
    The diamonds. Most of them are still in my possession. He was right. There are enough of them for many men to live many lives. They are for you.
    I have lived all these years with this secret, but I cannot die with it. Publish my story with names and surnames, Dr. Westore. And know that if I ask you this, it is so as to die peacefully, no more. I am a wretch and I think that perhaps this confession will serve in part to expiate my guilt.”

    EPILOGUE

    I stayed with Dr. Prendel until he died without questioning what opinion someone capable of killing like that, in cold blood, deserved from me. My grandfather would have said: “You can’t trust a man who sails alone. Would you trust an animal who isolates itself from the herd?”
    Afterwards I requested a leave of absence to go to Lisbon. It wasn’t part of the promise, but the letter of the doctor’s victim troubled me and I needed to meet the Souzas. I wasn’t doing it for Prendel, I was doing it for myself. Perhaps to understand why a man is capable of doing what the doctor had done, how a person is capable of transforming themselves to this extreme.
    Now that I am here, I have finished writing what Mathew told me, and I am about to meet Nelson’s family, my strength falters. Do I have to tell them that their son is dead? Should I give them an old, faraway letter, written by someone who has not existed for so long? I’m so filled with doubt that I leave the hotel, take a taxi, and give the address, still not knowing what I am going to say. I am carrying, indeed, the letter in my bag, as if my bag were the bottle a hopeful shipwreck throws into the sea. I have read it more than once: “Dear parents and siblings, if this letter reaches your hands, whenever it may come and whoever brings it to you, he will want to say that a short time ago I died . . . ” Poor Nelson, he thought that a man capable of killing him would have the decency to act as messenger.
    It wasn’t too difficult to locate the Souzas. The directions Nelson had given Mathew were enough. The family agreed to receive me because, when I contacted them by telephone from New York, I told them I had news of their missing son and I preferred to give it to them in person. Luckily, I had studied Portuguese in university and although it was rusty, I could manage.
    I arrive at the Souzas’ house. A woman of approximately my age who must be Lidia, Nelson’s sister, opens the door to me. And yes, she is Lidia, because she tells me so right away, as she leads the way to the sitting room. A small room, full of furniture covered in shiny, imitationwood Formica. It is midday, but as it is hot, they have the blind half-lowered so there is a kind of semi-darkness. They ask me to sit down at the table, covered with an oilcloth stamped with drawings of coffee pots, cups, cutlery, and all sorts of kitchen utensils. I lean on it and my sweaty arms stick to the plastic. When I raise them, embarrassed, it rises a little. They serve me a glass of red wine and some cheese tacos. They sit around me, except Miguel, the brother, who remains standing. The mother watches me anxiously. She doesn’t dare ask. Her son has been dead for years, she thinks. She hasn’t heard anything about him for almost twenty years. They have tried everything. They’ve always failed. The earth has swallowed him up. Or the sea.
    â€œNelson was an adventurer,” says the father, and he speaks in the past tense. He has discovered in my expression that his suspicions are not unfounded. “Nelson wasn’t like his siblings; he needed to fly.” And he breathes