J. Coetzee - Foe

‘To whom am I writing? I blot the pages and toss them out of the window. Let who will read them!’

‘The house in Newington is closed up, Mrs Thrush and the servants are departed. When I pronounce your name the neighbours grow tight-lipped. What has happened? Have the bailiffs tracked you down?· Will you be able to proceed with your writing in prison?’

’May 29th

‘We have taken up residence in your house, from which I now write. Are you surprised to hear this? There were spider-webs over the windows already, which we have swept away. We will disturb nothing. When you return we will vanish like ghosts, without complaint.

‘I have your table to sit at, your window to gaze through. I write with your pen on your paper, and when the sheets are completed they go into your chest. So your life continues to be lived, though you are gone.

‘All I lack is light. There is not a candle left in the house. But perhaps that is a blessing. Since we must keep the curtains drawn, we will grow used to living in gloom by day, in darkness by night.

‘It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau. The window overlooks not woods and pastures but your garden. There is no ripple in the glass. The chest is not a true chest but a dispatch box. Nevertheless, it is all close enough. Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds?’

‘We have explored your garden, Friday and I. The flower-beds are sadly overgrown, but the carrots and beans are prospering. I will set Friday to work weeding.

‘We live here like the humblest of poor relations. Your best linen is put away; we eat off the servants’ plate. Think of me as the niece of a second cousin come down in the world, to whom you owe but the barest of duties.

‘I pray you have not taken the step of embarking for the colonies. My darkest fear is that an Atlantic storm will drive your ship on to uncharted rocks and spill you up on a barren isle.

‘There was a time in Clock Lane, I will confess, when I felt great bitterness against you. He has turned his mind from us, I told myself, as easily as if we were two of his grenadiers in Flanders, forgetting that while his grenadiers fall into an enchanted sleep whenever he absents himself, Friday and I continue to eat and drink and fret. There seemed no course open to me but to take to the streets and beg, or steal, or worse. But now that we are in your house, peace has returned. Why it should be so I do not know, but toward this house — which till last month I had never clapped eyes on — I feel as we feel toward the home we were born in. All the nooks and crannies, all the odd hidden corners of the garden, have an air of familiarity, as if in a forgotten childhood I here played games of hide and seek.’

‘How much of my life consists in waiting! In Bahia I did little but wait, though what I was waiting for I sometimes did not know. On the island I waited all the time for rescue. Here I wait for you to appear, or for the book to be written that will set me free of Cruso and Friday.

‘I sat at your bureau this morning (it is afternoon now, I sit at the same bureau, I have sat here all day) and took out a clean sheet of paper and dipped pen in ink — your pen, your ink, I know, but somehow the pen becomes mine while I write with it, as though growing out of my hand — and wrote at the head: “The Female Castaway. Being a True Account of a Year Spent on a Desert Island. With Many Strange Circumstances Never Hitherto Related.” Then I made a list of all the strange circumstances of the year I could remember: the mutiny and murder on the Portuguese ship, Cruso’s castle, Cruso himself with his lion’s mane and apeskin clothes, his voiceless slave Friday, the vast terraces they had built, all bare of growth, the terrible storm that tore the roof off our house and heaped the beaches with dying fish. Dubiously I thought: Are these enough strange circumstances to make a story of? How long before I am driven to invent new and stranger circumstances: the salvage of tools and muskets from Cruso’s ship; the building of a boat, or at least a skiff, and a venture to sail to the mainland; a landing by cannibals on the island, followed by a skirmish and many bloody deaths; and, at last, the coming of a golden-haired stranger with a sack of corn, and the planting of the terraces? Alas, will the day ever arrive when we can make a story without strange circumstances?

‘Then there is the matter of Friday’s tongue. On the island I accepted that I should never learn how Friday lost his tongue, as I accepted that I should never learn how the apes crossed the sea. But what we can accept in life we cannot accept in history. To tell my story and be silent on Friday’s tongue is no better than offering a book for sale with pages in it quietly left empty. Yet the only tongue that can tell Friday’s secret is the tongue he has lost!

‘So this morning I made two sketches. One showed the figure of a man clad in jerkin and drawers and a conical hat, with whiskers standing out in all directions and great cat-eyes. Kneeling before him was the figure of a black man, naked save for drawers, holding his hands behind his back (the hands were tied, but that could not be seen). In his left hand the whiskered figure gripped the living tongue of the other; in his right hand he held up a knife.

‘Of the second sketch I will tell you in a moment.

‘I took my sketches down to Friday in the garden. “Consider these pictures, Friday,” I said, “then tell me: which is the truth?” I held up the first. “Master Cruso,” I said, pointing to the whiskered figure. “Friday,” I said, pointing to the kneeling figure. “Knife,” I said, pointing to the knife. “Cruso cut out Friday’s tongue,” I said; and I stuck out my own tongue and made motions of cutting it. “Is that the truth, Friday?” I pressed him, looking deep into his eyes: “Master Cruso cut out your tongue?”

‘(Friday might not know the meaning of the word truth , I reasoned; nevertheless, if my picture stirred some recollection of the truth, surely a cloud would pass over his gaze; for are the eyes not rightly called the mirrors of the soul?)

‘Yet even as I spoke I began to doubt myself. For if Friday’s gaze indeed became troubled, might that not be because I came striding out of the house, demanding that he look at pictures, something I had never done before? Might the picture itself not confuse him? (For, examining it anew, I recognized with chagrin that it might also be taken to show Cruso as a beneficent father putting a lump of fish into the mouth of child Friday.) And how did he understand my gesture of putting out my tongue at him? What if, among the cannibals of Africa, putting out the tongue has the same meaning as offering the lips has amongst us? Might you not then flush with shame when a woman puts out her tongue and you have no tongue with which to respond?

‘I brought out my second sketch. Again there was depicted little Friday, his arms stretched behind him, his mouth wide open; but now the man with the knife was a slave-trader, a tall black man clad in a burnous, and the knife was sickle-shaped. Behind this Moor waved the palm-trees of Africa. “Slave-trader,” I said, pointing to the man. “Man who catches boys and sells them as slaves. Did a slave-trader cut out your tongue, Friday? Was it a slave-trader or Master Cruso?”

‘But Friday’s gaze remained vacant, and I began to grow disheartened. Who, after all, was to say he did not lose his tongue at the age when boy-children among the Jews are cut; and, if so, how could he remember the loss? Who was to say there do not exist entire tribes in Africa among whom the men are mute and speech is reserved to women? Why should it not be so? The world is more various than we ever give it credit for — that is one of the lessons I was taught by Bahia. Why should such tribes not exist, and procreate, and flourish, and be content?