J. Coetzee: Foe

Instead of answering, Foe kissed me again, and in kissing gave such a sharp bite to my lip that I cried out and drew away. But he held me close and I felt him suck the wound. ‘This is my manner of preying on the living,’ he murmured.

Then he was upon me, and I might have thought myself in Cruso’s arms again; for they were men of the same time of life, and heavy in the lower body, though neither was stout; and their way with a woman too was much the same. I closed my eyes, trying to find my way back to the island, to the wind and waveroar; but no, the island was lost, cut off from me by a thousand leagues of watery waste.

I calmed Foe. ‘Permit me,’ I whispered — ‘there is a privilege that comes with the first night, that I claim as mine.’ So I coaxed him till he lay beneath me. Then I drew off my shift and straddled him (which he did not seem easy with, in a woman). ‘This is the manner of the Muse when she visits her poets,’ I whispered, and felt some of the listlessness go out of my limbs.

‘A bracing ride,’ said Foe afterwards — ‘My very bones are jolted, I must catch my breath before we resume.’ ‘It is always a hard ride when the Muse pays her visits, I replied — ‘She must do whatever lies in her power to father her offspring.’

Foe lay still so long I thought he had gone to sleep. But just as I myself began to grow drowsy, he spoke: ‘You wrote of your man Friday paddling his boat into the seaweed. Those great beds of seaweed are the home of a beast called by mariners the kraken — have you heard of it?-which has arms as thick as a mail’s thigh and many yards long, and a beak like an eagle’s. I picture the kraken lying on the floor of the sea, staring up through tangled fronds of weeds ~t the sky, its many arms furled about it, waiting. It is into that terrible orbit that Friday steers his fragile craft.’

What led Foe to talk of sea-monsters at such a time I could not guess, but I held my peace.

‘If a great arm had appeared and wrapped itself about Friday and without a sound drawn him beneath the waves, never to rise again, would it have surprised you?’ he asked.

‘A monstrous arm rising from the deep — yes, I would have been surprised. Surprised and unbelieving.’

‘But surprised to see Friday disappear from the face of the waters, from the face of the earth?’ Foe mused. Again he seemed to fall into a slumber. ‘You say,’ he said — and I woke up with a start — ‘you say he was guiding his boat to the place where the ship went down, which we may surmise to have been a slaveship, not a merchantman, as Cruso claimed. Well, then: picture the hundreds of his fellow-slaves — or their skeletons — still chained in the wreck, the gay little fish (that you spoke of) flitting through their eyesockets and the hollow cases that had held their hearts. Picture Friday above, staring down upon them, casting buds and petals that float a brief while, then sink to settle among the bones of the dead.

‘Does it not strike you, in these two accounts, how Friday is beckoned from the deep — beckoned or menaced, as the case may be? Yet Friday does not die. In his puny boat he floats upon the very skin of death and is safe.’

‘It was not a boat but a log of wood,’ said I.

‘In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story. I ask: Why was Friday drawn into such deadly peril, given that life on the island was without peril, and then saved?’

The question seemed fantastical. I had no answer.

· ‘I said the heart of the story,’ resumed Foe, ‘but I should have said the eye, the eye of the story. Friday rows his log of wood across the dark pupil — or the dead socket — of an eye staring up at him from the floor of the sea. He rows across it and is safe. To us he leaves the task of descending into that eye. Otherwise, like him, we sail across the surface and come ashore none the wiser, and resume our old lives, and sleep without dreaming, like babes.’

‘Or like a mouth,’ said I. ‘Friday sailed all unwitting across a great mouth, or beak as you called it, that stood open to devour him. It is for us to descend into the mouth (since we speak in figures). It is for us to open Friday’s mouth and hear what it holds: silence, perhaps, or a roar, like the roar of a seashell held to the ear.’

‘That too,’ said Foe. ‘I intended something else; but that too. We must make Friday’s silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday.’

‘But who will do it?’ I asked. ‘It is easy enough to lie in bed and say what must be done, but who will dive into the wreck? On the island I told Cruso ·it should be Friday, with a rope about his middle for safety. But if Friday cannot tell us what he sees, is Friday in my story any more than a figuring (or prefiguring) of another diver?’

Foe made no reply.

‘All my efforts to bring Friday to speech, or to bring speech to Friday, have failed,’ I said. ‘He utters himself only in music and dancing, which are to speech as cries and shouts are to words. There are times when I ask myself whether in his earlier life he had the slightest mastery of language, whether he knows what kind of thing language is.’

‘Have you shown him writing?’ said Foe.

‘How can he write if he cannot speak? Letters are the mirror of words. Even when we seem to write in silence, our writing is the manifest of a speech spoken within ourselves or to ourselves.’

‘Nevertheless, Friday has fingers. If he has fingers he can form letters. Writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech. Be attentive to yourself as you write and you will mark there are times when the words form themselves on the paper de novo , as the Romans used to say, out of the deepest of inner silences. We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?’

‘Whether writing is able to form itself out of nothing I am not competent to say,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps it will do so for authors; it will not for me. As to Friday, I ask nevertheless: How can he be taught to write if there are no words within him, in his heart, for writing to reflect, but on the contrary only a turmoil of feelings and urges? As to God’s writing, my opinion is: If he writes, he employs a secret writing, which it is not given to us, who are part of that writing, to read.’

‘We cannot read it, I agree, that was part of my meaning, since we are that which he writes. We, or some of us: it is possible that some of us are not written, but merely are; or else (I think principally of Friday) are written by another and darker author. Nevertheless, God’s writing stands as an instance of a writing without speech. Speech is but a means through which the word may be uttered, it is not the word itself. Friday has no speech, but he has fingers, and those fingers shall be his means. Even if he had no fingers, even if the slavers had lopped them all off, he can hold a stick of charcoal between his toes, or between his teeth, like the beggars on the Strand. The waterskater, that is an insect and dumb, traces the name of God on the surfaces of ponds, or so the Arabians say. None is so deprived that he cannot write.’

Finding it as thankless to argue with Foe as it had been with Cruso, I held my tongue, and soon he fell asleep.

Whether the cause was the unfamiliar surroundings or Foe’s body pressed against mine in the narrow bed I do not know; but, weary though I was, I could not sleep. Every hour I heard the watchman rapping on the doors below; I heard, or thought I heard, the patter of mouse-paws on the bare floorboards. Foe began to snore. I endured the noise as long as I could; then I slipped out of bed an~ put on my shift and stood at the window staring over the starlit rooftops, wondering how long it was yet to the dawn. I crossed the room to Friday’s alcove and drew aside the curtain. In the pitch blackness of that space was he asleep, or did he lie awake staring up at me? Again it struck me how lightly he breathed. One would have said he vanished when darkness fell, but for the smell of him, which I had once thought was the smell of woodsmoke, but now knew to be his own smell, drowsy and comfortable. A pang of longing went through me for the island. With a sigh I let the curtain drop and returned to bed. Foe’s body seemed to grow as he slumbered: there was barely a handsbreadth of space left me. Let day come soon, I prayed; and in that instant fell asleep.