Foe Read online

  ‘ “Oh, Friday, how can I make you understand the cravings felt by those of us who live in a world of speech to have our questions answered! It is like our desire, when we kiss someone, to feel the lips we kiss respond to us. Otherwise would we not be content to bestow our kisses on statues, the cold statues of kings and queens and gods and goddesses? Why do you think we do not kiss statues, and sleep with statues in our beds, men with the statues of women and women with the statues of men, statues carved in postures of desire? Do you think it is only because marble is cold? Lie long enough with a statue in your bed, with warm covers over the two of you, and the marble will grow warm. No, it is not because the statue is cold but because it is dead, or rather, because it has never lived and never will.

  ‘ “Be assured, Friday, by sitting at your bedside and talking of desire and kisses I do not mean to court you. This is no game in which each word has a second meaning, in which the words say ‘Statues are cold’ and mean ‘Bodies are warm,’ or say ‘I crave an answer’ and mean ‘I crave an embrace.’ Nor is the denial I now make a false denial of the kind demanded, at least in England (I am ignorant of the customs of your country), by modesty. If I were courting I would court directly, you may be sure. But I am not courting. I am trying to bring it home to you, who have never, for all I know, spoken a word in your life, and certainly never will, what it is to speak into a void, day after day, without answer. And I use a similitude: I say that the desire for answering speech is like the desire for the embrace of, the embrace by, another being. Do I make my meaning clear? You are very likely a virgin, Friday. Perhaps you are even unacquainted with the parts of generation. Yet surely you feel, however obscurely, something within you that draws you toward a woman of your own kind, and not toward an ape or a fish. And what you want to achieve with that woman, though you might puzzle forever over the means were she not to assist you, is what I too want to achieve, and compared in my similitude to an answering kiss.

  ‘ “How dismal a fate it would be to go through life unkissed! Yet if you remain in England, Friday, will that not become your fate? Where are you to meet a woman of your own people? We are not a nation rich in slaves. I think of a watch-dog, raised with kindness but kept from birth behind a locked gate. When at last such a dog escapes, the gate having been left open, let us say, the world appears to it so vast, so strange, so full of troubling sights and smells, that it snarls at the first creature to approach, and leaps at its throat, after which it is marked down as vicious, and chained to a post for the rest of its days. I do not say that you are vicious, Friday, I do not say that you will ever be chained, that is not the import of my story. Rather I wish to point to how unnatural a lot it is for a dog or any other creature to be kept from its kind; also to how the impulse of love, which urges us toward our own kind, perishes during confinement, or loses its way. Alas, my stories seem always to have more applications than I intend, so that I must go back and laboriously extract the right application and apologize for the wrong ones and efface them. Some people are born storytellers; I, it would seem, am not.

  ‘ “And can we be sure that Mr Foe, whose house this is, whom you have never met, to whom I entrusted the story of the island, did not weeks ago pass away in a hiding-hole in Shoreditch? If so, we shall be forever obscure. His house will be sold under our feet to pay the creditors. There will be no more garden. You will never see Africa. The chill of winter will return, and you will have to wear shoes. Where in England will we find a last broad enough for your feet?

  ‘ “Or else I must assume the burden of our story. But what shall I write? You know how dull our life was, in truth. We faced no perils, no ravenous beasts, not even serpents. Food was plentiful, the sun was mild. No pirates landed on our shores, no freebooters, no cannibals save yourself, if you can be called a cannibal. Did Cruso truly believe, I wonder, that you were once a cannibal child? Was it his dark fear that the craving for human flesh would come back to you, that you would one night slit his throat and roast his liver and eat it? Was his talk of cannibals rowing from island to island in search of meat a warning, a masked warning, against you and your appetites? When you showed your fine white teeth, did Cruso’s heart quail? How I wish you could answer!

  ‘ “Yet, all in all, I think the answer must be No. Surely Cruso must have felt the tedium of life on the island as keenly in his way as I did in mine, and perhaps you in yours, and therefore have made up the roving cannibals to spur himself to vigilance. For the danger of island life, the danger of which Cruso said never a word, was the danger of abiding sleep. How easy it would have been to prolong our slumbers farther and farther into the hours of daylight till at last, locked tight in sleep’s embrace, we starved to death (I allude to Cruso and myself, but is the sleeping sickness not also one of the scourges of Africa?)! Does it not speak volumes that the first and only piece of furniture your master fashioned was a bed? How different would it not have been had he built a table and stool, and extended his ingenuity to the manufacture of ink and writing-tablets, and then sat down to keep an authentic journal of his exile day by day, which we might have brought back to England with us, and sold to a bookseller, and so saved ourselves this embroilment with Mr Foe!

  ‘ “Alas, we will never make our fortunes, Friday, by being merely what we are, or were. Think of the spectacle we offer: your master and you on the terraces, I on the cliffs watching for a sail. Who would wish to read that there were once two dull fellows on a rock in the sea who filled their time by digging up stones? As for me and my yearnings for salvation, one is as soon sated with yearning as one is with sugar. We begin to understand why Mr Foe pricked up his ears when he heard the word Cannibal, why he longed for Cruso to have a musket and a carpenter’s chest. No doubt he would have preferred Cruso to be younger too, and his sentiments towards me more passionate.

  ‘ “But it grows late and there is much to do before nightfall. Are we the only folk in England, I wonder, without lamp or candle? Surely this is an extraordinary existence we lead! For let me assure you, Friday, this is not how Englishmen live. They do not eat carrots morning, noon and night, and live indoors like moles, and go to sleep when the sun sets. Let us only grow rich and I will show you how different living in England can be from living on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Tomorrow, Friday, tomorrow I must settle down to my writing, before the bailiffs come back to expel us, and we have neither carrots to eat nor beds to sleep in.

  ‘ “Yet despite what I say, the story of the island was not all tedium and waiting. There were touches of mystery too, were there not?

  ‘ “First, the terraces. How many stones did you and your master move? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? On an island without seed, would you and he not have been as fruitfully occupied in watering the stones where they lay and waiting for them to sprout? If your master had truly wished to be a colonist and leave behind a colony, would he not have been better advised (dare I say this?) to plant his seed in the only womb there was? The farther I journey from his terraces, the less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like tombs: those tombs the emperors of Egypt erected for themselves in the desert, in the building of which so many slaves lost their lives. Has that likeness ever occurred to you, Friday; or did news of the emperors of Egypt not reach your part of Africa?

  ‘ “Second (I continue to name the mysteries): how did you come to lose your tongue? Your master says the slavers cut it out; but I have never heard of such a practice, nor did I ever meet a slave in Brazil who was dumb. Is the truth that your master cut it out himself and blamed the slavers? If so it was truly an unnatural crime, like chancing upon a stranger and slaying him for no other cause than to keep him from telling the world who slew him. And how would your master have accomplished it? Surely no slave is so slavish as to offer up his parts to the knife. Did Cruso bind you hand and foot and force a block of wood between your teeth and then hack out your tongue? Is that how the act was done? A knife, let us remember, was the sole tool Cruso saved from
the wreck. But where did he find the rope with which to bind you? Did he commit the crime while you slept, thrusting his fist into your mouth and cutting out your tongue while you were still befuddled? Or was there some berry native to the island whose juice, smuggled into your food, sent you into a deathlike sleep? Did Cruso cut out your tongue while you were insensible? But how did he staunch the bleeding stump? Why did you not choke on your blood?

  ‘ “Unless your tongue was not cut off but merely split, with a cut as neat as a surgeon’s, that drew little blood yet made speech ever afterward impossible. Or let us say the sinews that move the tongue were cut and not the tongue itself, the sinews at the base of the tongue. I guess merely, I have not looked into your mouth. When your master asked me to look, I would not. An aversion came over me that we feel for all the mutilated. Why is that so, do you think? Because they put us in mind of what we would rather forget: how easily, at the stroke of a sword or a knife, wholeness and beauty are forever undone? Perhaps. But toward you I felt a deeper revulsion. I could not put out of mind the softness of the tongue, its softness and wetness, and the fact that it does not live in the light; also how helpless it is before the knife, once the barrier of the teeth has been passed. The tongue is like the heart, in that way, is it not? Save that we do not die when a knife pierces the tongue. To that degree we may say the tongue belongs to the world of play, whereas the heart belongs to the world of earnest.

  ‘ “Yet it is not the heart but the members of play that elevate us above the beasts: the fingers with which we touch the clavichord or the flute, the tongue with which we jest and lie and seduce. Lacking members of play, what is there left for beasts to do when they are bored but sleep?

  ‘ “And then there is the mystery of your submission. Why, during all those years alone with Cruso, did you submit to his rule, when you might easily have slain him, or blinded him and made him into your slave in turn? Is there something in the condition of slavehood that invades the heart and makes a slave a slave for life, as the whiff of ink clings forever to a school-master?

  ‘ “Then, if I may be plain – and why may I not be plain, since talking to you is like talking to the walls? – why did you not desire me, neither you nor your master? A woman is cast ashore on your island, a tall woman with black hair and dark eyes, till a few hours past the companion of a sea-captain besotted with love of her. Surely desires kept banked for many years must have flamed up within you. Why did I not catch you stealing glances from behind a rock while I bathed? Do tall women who rise up out of the sea dismay you? Do they seem like exiled queens come to reclaim the islands men have stolen from them? But perhaps I am unjust, perhaps that is a question for Cruso alone; for what have you ever stolen in your life, you who are yourself stolen? Nevertheless, did Cruso in his way and do you in your way believe I came to claim dominion over you, and is that why you were wary of me?

  ‘ “I ask these questions because they are the questions any reader of our story will ask. I had no thought, when I was washed ashore, of becoming a castaway’s wife. But the reader is bound to ask why it was that, in all the nights I shared your master’s hut, he and I did not come together more than once as man and woman do. Is the answer that our island was not a garden of desire, like that in which our first parents went naked, and coupled as innocently as beasts? I believe your master would have had it be a garden of labour; but, lacking a worthy object for his labours, descended to carrying stones, as ants carry grains of sand to and fro for want of better occupation.

  ‘ “And then there is the final mystery: What were you about when you paddled out to sea upon your log and scattered petals on the water? I will tell you what I have concluded: that you scattered the petals over the place where your ship went down, and scattered them in memory of some person who perished in the wreck, perhaps a father or a mother or a sister or a brother, or perhaps a whole family, or perhaps a dear friend. On the sorrows of Friday, I once thought to tell Mr Foe, but did not, a story entire of itself might be built; whereas from the indifference of Cruso there is little to be squeezed.

  ‘ “I must go, Friday. You thought that carrying stones was the hardest of labours. But when you see me at Mr Foe’s desk making marks with the quill, think of each mark as a stone, and think of the paper as the island, and imagine that I must disperse the stones over the face of the island, and when that is done and the taskmaster is not satisfied (was Cruso ever satisfied with your labours?) must pick them up again (which, in the figure, is scoring out the marks) and dispose them according to another scheme, and so forth, day after day; all of this because Mr Foe has run away from his debts. Sometimes I believe it is I who have become the slave. No doubt you would smile, if you could understand.” ’

  * *

  ‘Days pass. Nothing changes. We hear no word from you, and the townsfolk pay us no more heed than if we were ghosts. I have been once to Dalston market, taking a tablecloth and a case of spoons, which I sold to buy necessaries. Otherwise we exist by the produce of your garden.

  ‘The girl has resumed her station at the gate. I try to ignore her.

  ‘Writing proves a slow business. After the flurry of the mutiny and the death of the Portuguese captain, after I have met Cruso and come to know somewhat of the life he leads, what is there to say? There was too little desire in Cruso and Friday: too little desire to escape, too little desire for a new life. Without desire how is it possible to make a story? It was an island of sloth, despite the terracing. I ask myself what past historians of the castaway state have done – whether in despair they have not begun to make up lies.

  ‘Yet I persevere. A painter engaged to paint a dull scene – let us say two men digging in a field – has means at hand to lend allure to his subject. He can set the golden hues of the first man’s skin against the sooty hues of the second’s, creating a play of light against dark. By artfully representing their attitudes he can indicate which is master, which slave. And to render his composition more lively he is at liberty to bring into it what may not be there on the day he paints but may be there on other days, such as a pair of gulls wheeling overhead, the beak of one parted in a cry, and in one corner, upon a faraway crag, a band of apes.

  ‘Thus we see the painter selecting and composing and rendering particulars in order to body forth a pleasing fullness in his scene. The storyteller, by contrast (forgive me, I would not lecture you on storytelling if you were here in the flesh!), must divine which episodes of his history hold promise of fullness, and tease from them their hidden meanings, braiding these together as one braids a rope.

  ‘Teasing and braiding can, like any craft, be learned. But as to determining which episodes hold promise (as oysters hold pearls), it is not without justice that this art is called divining. Here the writer can of himself effect nothing: he must wait on the grace of illumination. Had I known, on the island, that it would one day fall to me to be our storyteller, I would have been more zealous to interrogate Cruso. “Cast your thoughts back, Cruso,” I would have said, as I lay beside him in the dark – “Can you recall no moment at which the purpose of our life here has been all at once illuminated? As you have walked on the hillsides or clambered on the cliffs in quest of eggs, have you never been struck of a sudden by the living, breathing quality of this island, as if it were some great beast from before the Flood that has slept through the centuries insensible of the insects scurrying on its back, scratching an existence for themselves? Are we insects, Cruso, in the greater view? Are we no better than the ants?” Or when he lay dying on the H obart I might have said: “Cruso, you are leaving us behind, you are going where we cannot follow you. Is there no last word you wish to speak, from the vantage of one departing? Is there not something you wish to confess?” ’

  * *

  ‘We trudge through the forest, the girl and I. It is autumn, we have taken the coach to Epping, now we are making our way to Cheshunt, though leaves lie so thick underfoot, gold and brown and red, that I cannot be sure we have not strayed from the pa
th.

  ‘The girl is behind me. “Where are you taking me?” she asks for the hundredth time. “I am taking you to see your real mother,” I reply. “I know who is my real mother,” she says – “You are my real mother.” “You will know your true mother when you see her,” I reply – “Walk faster, we must be back before nightfall.” She trots to keep pace with me.

  ‘Deeper into the forest we go, miles from human habitation. “Let us rest,” I say. Side by side we seat ourselves against the trunk of a great oak. From her basket she brings forth bread and cheese and a flask of water. We eat and drink.

  ‘We plod on. Have we lost our way? She keeps falling behind. “We will never be back before dark,” she complains. “You must trust me,” I reply.

  ‘In the darkest heart of the forest I halt. “Let us rest again,” I say. I take her cloak from her and spread it over the leaves. We sit. “Come to me,” I say, and put an arm around her. A light trembling runs through her body. It is the second time I have allowed her to touch me. “Close your eyes,” I say. It is so quiet that we can hear the brushing of our clothes, the grey stuff of hers against the black stuff of mine. Her head lies on my shoulder. In a sea of fallen leaves we sit, she and I, two substantial beings.