J. Coetzee: Foe

‘“Let me tell you my story,” said I; “for I am sure you are wondering who I am and how I come to be here.

‘“My name is Susan Barton, and I am a woman alone. My father was a Frenchman who fled to England to escape the persecutions in Flanders. His name was properly Berton, but, as happens, it became corrupted in the mouths of strangers. My mother was an Englishwoman.

‘“Two years ago my only daughter was abducted and conveyed to the New World by an Englishman, a factor and agent in the carrying trade. I followed in search of her. Arriving in Bahia, I was met with denials and, when I persisted, with rudeness and threats. The officers of the Crown afforded me no aid, saying it was a matter between the English. I lived in lodgings, and took in sewing, and searched, and waited, but saw no trace of my child. So, despairing at last, and my means giving out, I embarked for Lisbon on a merchantman.

‘“Ten days out from port, as if my misfortunes were not great enough, the crew mutinied. Bursting into their captain’s cabin, they slew him heartlessly even while he pleaded for his life. Those of their fellows who were not with them they clapped in irons. They put me in a boat with the captain’s corpse beside me, and set us adrift. Why they chose to cast me away I do not know. But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate, and wish never to lay eyes on again. The heart of man is a dark forest — that is one of the sayings they have in Brazil.

‘“As chance would have it — or perhaps the mutiny had been so ordered — I was set adrift in sight of this island. ‘ Remos !’ shouted the seaman from the deck, meaning I should take up the oars and row. But l was shaking with terror. So while they laughed and jeered I drifted hither and thither on the waves, till the wind came up.

‘“All morning, while the ship drew away (I believe the mutineers were of a mind to become pirates off Hispaniola), I rowed with the dead captain at my feet. My palms were soon blistered — see! — but I dared not rest, fearing that the current would draw me past your island. Worse by far than the pain of rowing was the prospect of being adrift at night in the vast emptiness of the sea, when, as I have heard, the monsters of the deep ascend in quest of prey.

‘“Then at last I could row no further. My hands were raw, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard and began to swim towards your island. The waves took me and bore me on to the beach. The rest you know.”

‘With these words I presented myself to Robinson Cruso, in the days when he still ruled over his island, and became his second subject, the first being his manservant Friday.

‘I would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various, and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, and he no longer knew for sure what was truth, what fancy. Thus one day he would say his father had been a wealthy merchant whose counting-house he had quit in search of adventure. But the next day he would tell me he had been a poor lad of no family who had shipped as a cabin-boy and been captured by the Moors (he bore a scar on his arm which was, he said, the mark of the branding iron) and escaped and made his way to the New World. Sometimes he would say he had dwelt on his island the past fifteen years, he and Friday, none but they having been spared when their ship went down. “Was Friday then a child, when the ship went down?” I asked. “Aye, a child, a mere child, a little slaveboy,” replied Cruso. Yet at other times, as for instance when he was in the grip of the fever (and should we not believe that in fever as in drunkenness the truth speaks itself willy-nilly?) he would tell stories of cannibals, of how Friday was a cannibal whom he had saved from being roasted and devoured by fellow cannibals. “Might the cannibals not return to reclaim Friday?” I would ask, and he would nod. “Is that why you are forever looking out to sea: to be warned of the return of the cannibals?” I would pursue; and he would nod again. So in the end I did not know what was truth, what was lies, and what was mere rambling.

‘But let me return to my relation.

‘Tired to the bone, I asked to lie down, and fell at once into a deep sleep. The sun was sinking when I awoke, and Friday was preparing our supper. Though it was no more than fish roasted over coals and served with lettuce, I ate with gusto. Grateful to have my belly full and my feet on solid earth again, I expressed my thanks to this singular saviour of mine. I would have told him more about myself too, about my quest for my stolen daughter, about the mutiny. But he asked nothing, gazing out instead into the setting sun, nodding to himself as though a voice spoke privately · inside him that he was listening to.

‘“May I ask, sir,” said I, after a while: “Why in all these years have you not built a boat and made your escape from this island?”

‘“And where should I escape to?” he replied, smiling to himself as though no answer were possible.

‘“Why, you might sail to the coast of Brazil, or meet a ship and be saved.”

‘“Brazil is hundreds of miles distant, and full of cannibals,” said he. “As for sailing-ships, we shall see sailing-ships as well and better by staying at home.”

‘“I beg to disagree,” said I. “I spent two long years in Brazil and met no cannibals there.”

‘“You were in Bahia,” said he. “Bahia is naught but an island on the rim of the Brazilian forests.”

‘So I early began to see it was a waste of breath to urge Cruso to save himself. Growing old on his island kingdom with no one to say him nay had so narrowed his horizon — when the horizon all around us was so vast and so majestic! — that he had come to be persuaded he knew all there was to know about the world. Besides, as I later found, the desire to escape had dwindled within him. His heart was set on remaining not fear of pirates or cannibals that held him from making bonfires or dancing about on the hilltop waving his hat, but indifference to salvation, and habit, and the stubbornness of old age.

‘It was time to retire. Cruso offered to give up his bed, but I would not accept, preferring to have Friday spread me a bed of grass on the floor. There I laid myself down, an arm’s-length from Cruso (for the hut was small). Last night I had been bound for home; tonight I was a castaway. Long hours I lay awake, unable to believe the change in my fortunes, troubled too by the pain of my blistered hands. Then I fell asleep. I awoke once in the night. The wind had dropped; I could hear the singing of crickets and, far away, the roar of the waves. “I am safe, I am on an island, all will be well,” I whispered to myself, and hugged myself tight, and slept again.

‘I was woken by the drumming of rain on the roof. It was morning; Friday was crouched before the stove (I have not yet told you of Cruso’s stove, which was built very neatly of stone), feeding the fire, blowing it into life. At first I was ashamed that he should see me abed, but then I reminded myself of how free the ladies of Bahia were before their servants, and so felt better. Cruso came in, and we breakfasted well on birds’ eggs, while the rain dripped here and there through the roof and hissed on the hot stones. In time the rain ceased and the sun came out, drawing wisps of steam from the earth, and the wind resumed and blew without respite till the next lull and the next rain. Wind, rain, wind, rain: such was the pattern of the days in that place, and had been, for all I knew, since the beginning of time. If one circumstance above all determined me to escape, whatever the cost, it was not the loneliness nor the rudeness of the life, nor the monotony of the diet, but the wind that day after day whistled in my ears and tugged at my hair and blew sand into my eyes, till sometimes I would kneel in a corner of the hut with my head in my arms and moan to myself, on and on, to hear some other sound than the beating of the wind; or later, when I had taken to bathing in the sea, would hold my breath and dip my head under the water merely to know what it was to have silence. Very likely you will say to yourself: In Patagonia the wind blows all year without let, and the Patagonians do not hide their heads, so why does she? But the Patagonians, knowing no home but Patagonia, have no reason to doubt that the wind blows at all seasons without let in all quarters of the globe; whereas I know better.