J. Coetzee: Foe

‘Before setting out to perform his island duties, Cruso gave me his knife and warned me not to venture from his castle; for the apes, he said, would not be as wary of a woman as they were of him and Friday. I wondered at this: was a woman, to an ape, a different species from a man? Nevertheless, I prudently obeyed, and stayed at home, and rested.

‘Save for the knife, all tools on the island were of wood or stone. The spade with which Cruso levelled his terraces (I shall have more to say of the terraces later) was a narrow wooden thing with a crooked handle, carved all of a piece and hardened in the fire. His mattock was a sharp stone lashed to a stick. The bowls we ate and drank from were crude blocks of wood hollowed out by scraping and burning. For there was no clay on the island to mould and bake, and such trees as there were were puny, stunted by the wind, their twisted stems seldom broader than my hand. It seemed a great pity that from the wreck Cruso should have brought away no more than a knife. For had he rescued even the simplest of carpenter’s tools, and some spikes and bars and suchlike, he might have fashioned better tools, and with better tools contrived a less laborious life, or even built a boat and escaped to civilization.

‘In the hut there was nothing but the bed, which was made of poles bound together with thongs, crude in workmanship yet sturdy, and in a corner a pile of cured apeskins, that made the hut smell like a tanner’s storehouse (in time I grew used to the smell, and missed it after I had put the island behind me; even today when I smell new leather I grow drowsy), and the stove, in which the embers of the last fire were always left banked, for making new fire was tedious work.

‘What I chiefly hoped to find was not there. Cruso kept no journal, perhaps because he lacked paper and ink, but more likely, I now believe, because he lacked the inclination to keep one, or, if he ever possessed the inclination, had lost it. I searched the poles that supported the roof, and the legs of the bed, but found no carvings, not even notches to indicate that he counted the years of his banishment or the cycles of the moon.

‘Later, when I had grown freer with him, I told him of my surprise. “Suppose,” said I, “that one day we are saved. Would you not regret it that you could not bring back with you some record of your years of shipwreck, so that what you have passed through shall not die from memory? And if we are never saved, but perish one by one, as may happen, would you not wish for a memorial to be left behind, so that the next voyagers to make landfall here, whoever they may be, may read and learn about us, and perhaps shed a tear? For surely, with every day that passes, our memories grow less certain, as even a statue in marble is worn away by rain, till at last we can no longer tell what shape the sculptor’s hand gave it. What memories do you even now preserve of the fatal storm, the prayers of your companions, your terror when the waves engulfed you, your gratitude as you were cast up on the shore, your first stumbling explorations, your fear of savage beasts, the discomforts of those first nights (did you not tell me you slept in a tree?)? Is it not possible to manufacture paper and ink and set down what traces remain of these memories, so that they will outlive you; or, failing paper and ink, to bum the story upon wood, or engrave it upon rock? We may lack many things on this island, but certainly time is not one of them.”

‘I spoke fervently, I believe, but Cruso was unmoved. “Nothing is forgotten,” said he; and then: “Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering.”

‘“You are mistaken!” I cried. “I do not wish to dispute, but you have forgotten much, and with every day that passes you forget more! There is no shame in forgetting: it is our nature to forget as it is our nature to grow old and pass away. But seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beasts he has slain. The truth that makes your story yours alone,. that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea-monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance, such as: When you made your needle (the needle you store in your belt), by what means did you pierce the eye? When you sewed your hat, what did you use for thread? Touches like these will one day persuade your countrymen that it is all true, every word, there was indeed once an island in the middle of the ocean where the wind blew and the gulls cried from the cliffs and a man named Cruso paced about in his apeskin clothes, scanning the horizon for a sail.”

‘Cruso’s great head of tawny hair and his beard that was never cut glowed in the dying light. He opened and closed his hands, sinewy, rough-skinned hands, toil-hardened.

‘“There is the bile of seabirds,” I urged. “There are cuttlefish bones. There are gulls’ quills.”

‘Cruso raised his head and cast me a look full of defiance. “I will leave behind my terraces and walls,” he said. “They will be enough. They will be more than enough.” And he fell silent again. As for myself, I wondered who would cross the ocean to see terraces and walls, of which we surely had an abundance at home; but I held my peace.

‘We continued to sleep in the hut together, he and I, he on his bed, I on the bed of grass Friday laid for me and changed every third day, very thick and comfortable. When the nights grew cold I would draw a cover of skins over me, for all this time I had no more clothes than the petticoat I had come ashore in ; but I preferred not to have the skins upon me, for to my nostrils their smell was still very strong.

‘Sometimes Cruso kept me awake with the sounds he made in his sleep, chiefly the grinding of his teeth. For so far had his teeth decayed that it had grown a habit with him to grind them together constantly, those that were left, to still the ache. Indeed, it was no pretty sight to see him take his food in his unwashed hands and gnaw at it on the left side, where it hurt him less. But Bahia, and the life I had lived there, had taught me not to be dainty.

‘I dreamed of the murdered ship’s-master. In my dream I saw him floating southward in his puny boat with the oars crossed on his breast and the ugly spike sticking out of his eye. The sea was tossed with huge waves, the wind howled, the rain beat down; yet the boat did not sink, but drifted slowly on toward the province of the iceberg, and would drift there, it seemed to me, caked in ice, till the day of our resurrection. He was a kindly man — let me say so now, lest I forget — who deserved a better end.

‘Cruso’s warning against the apes made me chary of leaving the encampment. Nevertheless, on the third day of my marooning, after Cruso and Friday had gone off to their labours, I ventured out and searched the descent till I found the path up which Friday had where I trod, for I still had no shoes. I roamed along the beach awhile, keeping an eye out to sea, though it seemed early yet for rescue to come. I waded in the water, amused by the gay-coloured little fish that stopped to nibble my toes and taste what kind of creature I was. Cruso’s island is no bad place to be cast away, I thought, if one must be cast away. Then about noon I climbed the slope and set about collecting firewood, as I had undertaken to do, mightily pleased with my excursion.

‘When Cruso returned he knew at once I had been exploring, and burst out in a passion. “While you live under my roof you will do as I instruct!” he cried, striking his spade into the earth, not even waiting till Friday was out of earshot. But if he thought by angry looks to inspire me to fear and slavish obedience, he soon found he was mistaken. “I am on your island, Mr Cruso, not by choice but by ill luck,” I replied, standing up (and I was nearly as tall as he). “I am a castaway, not a prisoner. If I had shoes, or if you would give me the means to make shoes, I would not need to steal about like a thief.”