J. Coetzee - Foe

‘Who is she and why do you send her to me? Is she sent as a sign you arc alive? She is not my daughter. Do you think women drop children and forget them as snakes lay eggs? Only a man could entertain such a fancy. If you want me to quit the house, give the order and I will obey. Why send a child in an old woman’s clothes, a child with a round face and a little O of a mouth and a story of a lost mother? She is more your daughter than she ever was mine.’

‘A brewer. She says that her father was a brewer. That she was born in Deptford in May of 1702.. That I am her mother. We sit in your drawing-room and I explain to her that I have never lived in Deptford in my life, that I have never known a brewer, that I have a daughter, it is true, but my daughter is lost, she is not that daughter. Sweetly she shakes her head and begins a second time the story of the brewer George Lewes my husband. “Then your name is Lewes, if that is the name of your father,” I interrupt. “It may be my name in law but it is not my name in truth,” says she. “If we were to be speaking of names in truth,” say I, “my name would not be Barton.” “That is not what I mean,” says she. “Then what do you mean?” say I. “I am speaking of our true names, our veritable names,” says she.

‘She returns to the story of the brewer. The brewer haunts gaming-houses and loses his last penny. He borrows money and loses that too. To escape his creditors he flees England and enlists as a grenadier in the Low Countries, where he is later rumoured to perish. I am left destitute with a daughter to care for. I have a maidservant named Amy or Emmy. Amy or Emmy asks my daughter what life she means to follow when she grows up (this is her earliest memory). She replies in her childish way that she means to be a gentlewoman. Amy or Emmy laughs: Mark my words, Amy says, the day will yet arrive when we three shall be servants together. “I have never had a servant in my life, whether named Amy or Emmy or anything else,” I say. (Friday was not my slave but Cruso’s, and is a free man now. He cannot even be said to be a servant, so idle is his life.) “You confuse me with some other person.”

‘She smiles again and shakes her head. “Behold the sign by which we may know our true mother,” she says, and leans forward and places her hand beside mine. “See,” she says, “we have the same hand. The same hand and ~he same eyes.”

‘I stare at the two hands — side by side. My hand is long, hers short. Her fingers are the plump unformed fingers of a child. Her eyes are grey, mine brown. What kind of being is she, so serenely blind to the evidence of her senses?

‘“Did a man send you here?” I ask — “A gentleman of middle height, with a mole on his chin, here?”

‘“No,” she says.

“‘I do not believe you,” I say. “I believe you were sent here, and now I am sending you away. I request you to go away and not to trouble me again.”

‘She shakes her head and grips the arm of her chair. The air of calm vanishes. “I will not be sent away!” she says through clenched teeth.

“‘Very well,” say I, “if you wish to stay, stay.” And I withdraw, locking the door behind me and pocketing the key.

‘In the hallway I encounter Friday standing listlessly in a comer (he stands always in corners, never in the open: he mistrusts space). “It is nothing, Friday,” I tell him. “It is only a poor mad girl come to join us. In Mr Foe’s house there are many mansions. We are as yet only a castaway and a dumb slave and now a madwoman. There is place yet for lepers and acrobats and pirates and whores to join our menagerie. But pay no heed to me. Go back to bed and sleep.” And I brush past him.

‘I talk to Friday as old women talk to cats, out of loneliness, till at last they are deemed to be witches, and shunned in the streets.

‘Later I return to the drawing-room. The girl is sitting in an armchair, her basket at her feet, knitting. “You will harm your eyesight, knitting in this light,” I say. She lays down her knitting. “There is one circumstance you misunderstand,” I continue. “The world is full of stories of mothers searching for sons and daughters they gave away once, long ago. But there are no stories of daughters searching for mothers.

There are no stories of such quests because they do not occur. They are not part of life.”

“‘You are mistaken,” says she. “You are my mother, I have found you, and now I will not leave you.”

‘“I will admit I have indeed lost a daughter. But I did not give her away, she was taken from me, and you are not she. I am leaving the door unlocked. Depart when you are ready.”

‘This morning when I come downstairs she is still there, sprawled in the armchair, bundled in her cloak, asleep. Bending over her I see that one eye is half open and the eyeball rolled back. I shake her. “It is time to go,” I say. “No,” says she. Nevertheless, from the kitchen I hear the door close and the latch click behind her.

‘“Who brought you up after I abandoned you?” I asked. “The gipsies,” she replied. “The gipsiesl” I mocked-“It is only in books that children are stolen by gipsies! You must think of a better story!”

‘And now, as if my troubles are not enough, Friday has fallen into one of his mopes. Mopes are what Cruso called them, when without reason Friday would lay down his tools and disappear to some sequestered corner of the island, and then a day later come back and resume his chores as if nothing had intervened. Now he mopes about the passageways or stands at the door, longing to escape, afraid to venture out; or else lies abed and pretends not to hear when I call him. “Friday, Friday,” I say, seating myself at his bedside, shaking my head, drifting despite myself into another of the long, issueless colloquies I conduct with him, “how could I have foreseen, when I was carried by the waves on to your island and beheld you with a spear in your hand and the sun shining like a halo behind your head, that our path would take us to a gloomy house in England and a season of empty waiting? Was I wrong to choose Mr Foe? And who is this child he sends us, this mad child? Does he send her as a sign? What is she a sign of?

‘“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 l 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.