J. Coetzee - Foe

‘May we come in?’ I said.

He made way and we entered his refuge. The room was lit by a single window, through which poured the afternoon sun. The view was to the north, over the roofs of Whitechapel. For furniture there was a table and chair, and a bed, slovenly made; one corner of the room was curtained off.

‘It is not as I imagined it,’ I said. ‘I expected dust thick on the floor, and gloom. But life is never as we expect it to be. I recall an author reflecting that after death we may find ourselves not among choirs of angels but in some quite ordinary place, as for instance a bath-house on a hot afternoon, with spiders dozing in the corners; at the time it will seem like any Sunday in the country; only later will it come home to us that we are in eternity.’

‘It is an author I have not read.’

‘The idea has remained with me from my childhood. But I have come to ask about another story. The history of ourselves and the island — how does it progress? Is it written?’

‘It progresses, but progresses slowly, Susan. It is a slow story, a slow history. How did you find your way to me?’

‘By good fortune entirely. I met your old housekeeper Mrs Thrush in Covent Garden after Friday and I came back from Bristol (I wrote you letters on the Bristol road, I have them with me, I will give them to you). Mrs Thrush directed us to the boy who runs errands for you, with a token that we were to be trusted, and he led us to this house.’

‘It is excellent that you have come, for there is more I must know about Bahia, that only you can tell me.’

‘Bahia is not part of my story,’ I replied, ‘but let me tell you whatever I can. Bahia is a city built on hills. To convey cargoes from the harbour to their warehouses, the merchants have therefore spanned a great cable, with pulleys and windlasses. From the streets you see bales of cargo sail overhead on the cable all day. The streets are a-bustle with people going about their business, slave and free, Portuguese and Negro and Indian and half-breed. But the Portuguese women are seldom to be seen abroad. For the Portuguese are a very jealous race. They have a saying: In her life a woman has but three occasions to leave the house for her baptism, her wedding, and her burial. A woman who goes abroad freely is thought a whore. I was thought a whore. But there are so many whores there, or, as I prefer to call them, free women, that I was not daunted. In the cool of the evening the free women of Bahia don their finest clothes, put hoops of gold about their necks and golden bracelets on their arms and ornaments of gold in their hair, and walk the streets; for gold is cheap there. The most handsome are the women of colour, or mulatas as they are called. The Crown has failed to halt the private traffic in gold, which is mined in the interior and sold by the miners to the goldsmiths. Alas, I have nothing to show you of the craft of these excellent smiths, not even a pin. All I had was taken from me by the mutineers. I came ashore on the island with nothing but the clothes I wore, red as a beetroot from the sun, my hands raw and blistered. It is no wonder I failed to charm Cruso.’

‘And Friday?’ ‘Friday?’ ‘Did Friday ever grow enamoured of you?’ ‘How are we ever to know what goes on in the heart of Friday? But I think not.’ I turned to Friday, who had been squatting all the while by the door with his head on his knees. ‘Do you love me, Friday?’ I called softly. Friday did not so much as raise his head. ‘We have lived too close for love, Mr Foe. Friday has grown to be my shadow. Do our shadows love us, for all that they are never patted from us?’

Foe smiled. ‘Tell me more of Bahia,’ he said.

‘There is much to be said of Bahia. Bahia is a world in itself. But why? Bahia is not the island. Bahia was but a stepping stone on my way.’ ·

‘That may not be so,’ replied Foe cautiously. ‘Rehearse your story and you will see. The story begins in London. Your daughter is abducted or elopes, I do not know which, it does not matter. In quest of her you sail to Bahia, for you have intelligence that she is there. In Bahia you spend no less than two years, two fruitless years. How do you live all this time? How do you clothe yourself? Where do you sleep? How do you pass the days? Who are your friends? These are questions that are asked, which we must answer, And what has been the fate of your daughter? Even in the great spaces of Brazil a daughter does not vanish like smoke. Is it possible that while you are seeking her she is seeking you? But enough of questions. At last you despair. You abandon your quest and depart. Shortly thereafter your daughter arrives in Bahia, from the backlands, in search of you. She hears talk of a tall Englishwoman who has taken ship for Lisbon, and follows. She haunts the docks of Lisbon and Oporto. Rough sailors think her a blessed simpleton and treat her with kindness. But no one has heard of a tall Englishwoman off a ship from Bahia. Are you on the Azores, gazing out to sea, mourning, like Ariadne? We do not know. Time passes. Your daughter despairs. Then chance brings to her ears the story of a woman rescued from an island where she has been marooned with an old man and his black slave. Is this woman by some chance her mother? She follows a trail of rumour from Bristol to London, to the house where the woman had briefly taken service (this is the house on Kensington Row). There she learns the woman’s name. It is the same as hers.

‘We therefore have five parts in all: the loss of the daughter; the quest for the daughter in Brazil; abandonment of the quest, and the adventure of the island; assumption of the quest by the daughter; and reunion of the daughter with her mother. It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end. As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode — which is properly the second part of the middle — and by the reversal in which the daughter takes up the quest abandoned by her mother.’

All the joy I had felt in finding my way to Foe fled me. I sat heavy-limbed.

‘The island is not a story in itself,’ said Foe gently, laying a hand on my knee. ‘We can bring it to life only by setting it within a larger story. By itself it is no better than a waterlogged boat drifting day after day in an empty ocean till one day, humbly and without commotion, it sinks. The island lacks light and shade. It is too much the same throughout. It is like a loaf of bread. It will keep us alive, certainly, if we are starved of reading; but who will prefer it when there are tastier confections and pastries to be had?’

‘In the letters you did not read,’ I said, ‘I told you of my conviction that, if the story seems stupid, that is only because it so doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday’s tongue.’

Foe made no reply, and I went on. ‘The story of Friday’s tongue is a story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me. That is to say, many stories can be told of Friday’s tongue, but the true story is buried within Friday, who is mute. The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday.

‘Mr Foe,’ I proceeded, speaking with gathering difficulty, ‘when I lived in your house I would sometimes lie awake upstairs listening to the pulse of blood in my ears and to the silence from Friday below, a silence that rose up the stairway like smoke, like a welling of black smoke. Before long I could not breathe, I would feel I was stifling in my bed. My lungs, my heart, my head were full of black smoke. I had to spring up and open the curtains and put my head outside and breathe fresh air and see for myself that there were stars still in the sky.

‘In my letters I have told you the story of Friday’s dancing. But I have not told you the whole story.