J. Coetzee: Foe

There was a knock. Foe opened the door. The light fell on the girl I had left in Epping Forest; behind her in the shadows was another woman. While I yet stood dumbstruck the girl crossed the room and put her arms about me and kissed me on the cheek. A coldness went through me and I thought I would fall to the floor. ‘And here is Amy,’ said the girl — ‘Amy, from Deptford, my nurse when I was little. There was a pounding in my ears, but I made myself face Amy. I saw a slender, pleasant-faced woman of my age, with fair curls showing under her cap. ‘I am happy to make your acquaintance,’ I murmured; ‘but I am sure I have never set eyes on you before in my life.

Someone touched my arm. It was Foe: he led me to the chair and made me sit and gave me a glass of water. ‘It is a passing dizziness,’ I said. He nodded.

‘So we are all together,’ said Foe. ‘Please be seated, Susan, Amy.’ He indicated the bed. The boy Jack stood at Foe’s side staring curiously at me. Foe lit a second lamp and set it on the mantel. ‘In a moment Jack will fetch coals and make a fire for us, will you not, Jack?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jack.

I spoke. ‘It is growing late, Friday and I will not be staying,’ I said.

‘You must not think of departing,’ said Foe. ‘You have nowhere to go; besides, when were you last in such company?’

‘Never,’ I replied. ‘I was never before in such company in my life. I thought this was a lodginghouse, but now I see it is a gathering-place for actors. It would be a waste of breath, Mr Foe, for me to say that these women are strangers to me, for you will only reply that I have forgotten, and then you will prompt them and they will embark on long stories of a past in which they will claim I was an actor too.

‘What can I do but protest it is not true? I am as familiar as you with the many, many ways in which we can deceive ourselves. But how can we live if we do not believe we know who we are, and who we have been? If I were as obliging as you wish me to be — if I were ready to concede that, though I believe my daughter to have been swallowed up by the grasslands of Brazil, it is equally possible that she has spent the past year in England, and is here in this room now, in a form in which I fail to recognize her — for the daughter I remember is tall and dark-haired and has a name of her own — if I were like a bottle bobbing on the waves with a scrap of writing inside, that could as well be a message from an idle child fishing in the canal as from a mariner adrift on the high seas — if I were a mere receptacle ready to accommodate whatever story is stuffed in me, surely you would dismiss me, surely you would say to yourself, “This is no woman but a house of words, hollow. without substance”?

‘I am not a story. Mr Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.

Here I paused, breathless. Both a girl and the woman Amy were watching me intently. I saw. and moreover with what seemed friendliness in their manner. Foe nodded as if to encourage me. The boy stood motionless with the coal-scuttle in his hand. Even Friday had his eyes on me.

I crossed the room. At my approach the girl, I observed, did not waver. What other test is left to me? I thought; and took her in my arms and kissed her on the lips, and felt her yield and kiss me in return, almost as one returns a lover’s kiss. Had I expected her to dissolve when I touched her, her flesh crumbling and floating away like paper-ash? I gripped her tight and pressed my fingers into her shoulders. Was this truly my daughter’s flesh? Opening my eyes, I saw Amy’s face hovering only inches from mine, her lips parted too as if for a kiss. ‘She is unlike me in every way,’ I murmured. Amy shook her head. ‘She is a true child of your womb,’ she replied — ‘She is like you in secret ways.’ I drew back. ‘I am not speaking of secret ways,’ I said — ‘I am speaking of blue eyes and brown hair’; and I might have made mention too of the soft and helpless little mouth, had I wished ·to be hurtful. ‘She is her father’s child as well as her mother’s,’ said Amy. To which I was about to reply that if the girl were her father’s child then her father must be my opposite, and we do not marry our opposites, we marry men who are like us in subtle ways, when it struck me that I would likely be wasting my breath, for the light in Amy’s eye was not so much friendly as foolish.

‘Mr Foe,’ I said, turning to him — and now I believe there was truly despair in my looks, and he saw it — ‘I no longer know into what kind of household I have tumbled. I ·say to myself that this child, who calls herself by my name, is a ghost, a substantial ghost, if such beings exist, who haunts me for reasons I cannot understand, and brings other ghosts in tow. She stands for the daughter I lost in Bahia, I· tell myself, and is sent by you to console me; but, lacking skill in summoning ghosts, you call up one who resembles my daughter in no respect whatever. Or you privately think my daughter is dead, and summon her ghost, and are allotted a ghost who by chance bears my name, with an attendant. Those are my surmises. As for the boy, I cannot tell whether he is a ghost or not, nor does it matter.

‘But if these women are creatures of yours, visiting me at your instruction, speaking words you have prepared for them, then who am I and who indeed are you? I presented myself to you in words I knew to be my own-I slipped overboard, I began to swim, my hair floated about me, and so forth, you will remember the words — and for a long time afterwards, when I was writing those letters that were never read by you, and were later not sent, and at last not even written down, I continued to trust in my own authorship.

‘Yet, in the same room as yourself at last, where I need surely not relate to you my every action — you have me under your eyes, you are not blind — I continue to describe and explain. Listen! I describe the dark staircase, the bare room, the curtained alcove, particulars a thousand times more familiar to you than to me; I tell of your looks and my looks, I relate your words and mine. Why do I speak, to whom do I speak, when there is no need to speak?

‘In the beginning I thought I would tell you the story of the island and, being done with that, return to my former life. But now all my life grows to be story and there is nothing of my own left to me. I thought I was myself and this girl a creature from another order speaking words you made up for her. But now I am full of doubt. Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you?’

Through all this talk Foe had stood stock still by the fireplace. I expected an answer, for never before had he failed for words. But instead, without preliminaries, he approached me and took me in his arms and kissed me; and, as the girl had responded before, I felt my lips answer his kiss (but to whom do I confess this?) as a woman’s answer her lover’s.

Was this his reply — that he and I were man and woman, that man and woman are beyond words? If so it was a paltry reply, demonstration more than reply, one that would satisfy no philosopher. Amy and the girl and Jack were smiling even broader than before. Breathless, I tugged myself free.