J. Coetzee - Foe

‘While I was polishing the bass flute, and idly blowing a few notes upon it, it occurred to me that if there were any language accessible to Friday, it would be the language of music. So I closed the door and practised the blowing and the fingering as I had seen people do, till I could play Friday’s little tune tolerably well, and one or two others, to my ear more melodious. All the while I was playing, which I did in the dark, to spare the candle, Friday lay awake downstairs in his own dark listening to the deeper tones of my flute, the like of which he could never have heard before.

‘When Friday commenced his dancing and fluteplaying this morning, I was ready: I sat upstairs on my bed, my legs crossed, and played Friday’s tune, first in unison with him, then in the intervals when he was not playing; and went on playing as long as he did, till my hands ached and my head reeled. The music we made was not pleasing: there was a subtle discord all the time, though we seemed to be playing the same notes. Yet our instruments were made to play together, else why were they in the same case?

‘When Friday fell silent awhile, I came downstairs to the kitchen. “So, Friday,” I said, and smiled — “we are become musicians together.” And I raised my flute and blew his tune again, till a kind of contentment came over me. I thought: It is true, I am not conversing with Friday, but is this not as good? Is conversation not simply a species of music in which first the one takes up the refrain and then the other? Does it matter what the refrain of our conversation is any more than it matters what tune it is we play? And I asked myself further: Are not both music and conversation like love? Who would venture to say that what passes between lovers is of substance (I refer to their lovemaking, not their talk), yet is it not true that something is passed between them, back and forth, and they come away refreshed and healed for a while of their loneliness? As long as I have music in common with Friday, perhaps he and I will need no language. And if there had been music on our island, if Friday and I had filled the evening with melody, perchance who can say? — Cruso might at last have relented, and picked up the third pipe, and learned to finger it, if his fingers had not by then been too stiff, and the three of us might have become a consort (from which you may conclude, Mr Foe, that what we needed from the wreck was not a chest of tools but a case of flutes).

‘For that hour in your kitchen I believe I was at ease with the life that has befallen me.

‘But alas, just as we cannot exchange forever the same utterances — “Good day, sir” — “Good day” — and believe we are conversing, or perform forever the same motion and call it lovemaking, so it is with music: we cannot forever play the same tune and be content. Or so at least it is with civilized people. Thus at last I could not restrain myself from varying the tune, first making one note into two half-notes, then changing two of the notes entirely, turning it into a new tune and a pretty one too, so fresh to my ear that I was sure Friday would follow me. But no, Friday persisted in the old tune, and the two tunes played together formed no pleasing counterpoint, but on the contrary jangled and jarred. Did Friday in truth so much as hear me. I began to wonder? I ceased playing. and his eyes (which were always closed when he did his flute-playing and spinning) did not open; I blew long blasts and the lids did not so much as flutter. So now I knew that all the time I had stood there playing to Friday’s dancing. thinking he and I made a consort, he had been insensible of me. And indeed. when I stepped forward in some pique and grasped at him to halt the infernal spinning. he seemed to feel my touch no more than if it had been a fly’s; from which “I concluded that he was in a trance of possession. and his soul more in Africa than in Newington. Tears came to my eyes, I am ashamed to say; all the elation of my discovery that through the medium of music I might at last converse with Friday was dashed. and bitterly I began to recognize that it might not be mere dullness that kept him shut up in himself. nor the accident of the loss of his tongue, nor even an incapacity to distinguish speech from babbling. but a disdain for intercourse with me. Watching him whirling in his dance. I had to hold back an urge to strike him and tear the wig and robes away and thus rudely teach him he was not alone on this earth.

‘Had I struck Friday. I now ask myself. would he have borne the blow meekly? Cruso never chastised him that I saw. Had the cutting out of his tongue taught him eternal obedience. or at least the outward form of obedience. as gelding takes the fire out of a stallion?’

‘Dear Mr Foe,

‘I have written a deed granting Friday his freedom and signed it in Cruso’s name. This I have sewn into a little bag and hung on a cord around Friday’s neck.

‘If Friday is not mine to set free, whose is he? No man can be the slave of a dead hand. If Cruso had a widow, I am she; if there are two widows, I am the first. What life do I live but that of Cruso’s widow? On Cruso’s island I was washed ashore; from that all else has flowed. I am the woman washed ashore.

‘I write from on the road. We are on the road to Bristol. The sun is shining. I walk ahead, Friday follows carrying the pack which contains our provisions as well as some few items from the house, and the wig, from which he will not be parted. The robes he wears, instead of a coat.

‘No doubt we make a strange sight, the barefoot woman in breeches and her black slave (my shoes pinch, the old apeskin sandals are fallen apart). When passers-by stop to question us, I say that I am on my way to my brother in Slough, that my footman and I were robbed of our horses and clothes and valuables by highwaymen. This story earns me curious looks. Why? Are there no more highwaymen on the roads? Were all the highwaymen hanged while I was in Bahia? Do I seem an unlikely owner of horses and valuables? Or is my air too blithe to befit one stripped bare mere hours before?

‘In Ealing we passed a cobbler’s. I took out one of the books from the pack, a volume of sermons handsomely bound in calf, and offered to exchange it for new shoes. The cobbler pointed to your name on the flyleaf. “Mr Foe of Stoke Newington,” I said, “lately deceased.” “Have you no other books?” asked he. I offered him the Pilgrimages of Purchas, the first volume, and for that he gave me a pair of shoes, stoutly made and well-fitting. You will protest that he gained by the exchange. But a time comes when there are more important things than books. “Who is the blackfellow?” the cobbler asked. “He is a slave who is now free, that I am taking to Bristol to find him a passage back to his own people.” “It is a long road to Bristol,” said the cobbler — “Does he speak English?” “He understands some things but he does not speak,” I replied. A hundred miles and more to Bristol: how many more questioners, how many more questions?

What a boon to be stricken speechless too!

‘To you, Mr Foe, a journey to Bristol may call to mind hearty meals at roadside inns and diverting encounters with strangers from all walks of life. But remember, a woman alone must travel like a hare, one ear forever cocked for the hounds. If it happens we are set upon by footpads, what protection will Friday afford me? He never had call to protect Cruso; indeed, his upbringing has taught him to not so much as raise a hand in self-defence. Why should he regard an assault on me as of concern to him? He does not understand that I am leading him to freedom. He does not know what freedom is. Freedom is a word, less than a word, a noise, one of the multitude of noises I make when I open my mouth. His master is dead, now he has a mistress — that is all he knows. Having never wished for a master, why should he guard his mistress? How can he guess that there is any goal to our rambling, that without me he is lost? “Bristol is a great port,” I tell him. “Bristol is where we landed when the ship brought us back from the island. Bristol is where you saw the great chimney belching smoke, that so amazed you. From Bristol ships sail to all corners of the globe, principally to the Americas, but also to Africa, which was once your home. In Bristol we will seek out a ship to take you back to the land of your birth, or else to Brazil and the life of a freeman there.”’