J. Coetzee: Foe

‘So I returned in a contrite spirit and went to Cruso and asked his pardon for taking the skins, and gratefully accepted the food Friday had set aside. When I lay down to sleep that night I seemed to feel the earth sway beneath me. I told myself it was a memory of the rocking of the ship coming back unbidden. But it was not so: it was the rocking of the island itself as it floated on the sea. I thought: It is a sign, a sign I am becoming an island-dweller. I am forgetting what it is to live on the mainland. I stretched out my arms and laid my palms on the earth, and, yes, the rocking persisted, the rocking of the island as it sailed through the sea and the night bearing into the future its freight of gulls and sparrows and fleas and apes and castaways, all unconscious now, save me. I fell asleep smiling. I believe it was the first time I smiled since I embarked for the New World.

‘They say Britain is an island too, a great island. But that is a mere geographer’s notion. The earth under our feet is firm in Britain, as it never was on Cruso’s island.

‘Now·that I had shoes, I took to walking the shoreline every day, as far in either direction as I could. I told myself I was keeping watch for a sail. But too often my eyes would settle on the horizon in a kind of fixity till, lulled by the beating of the wind and the roar of the waves and the crunch of the sand under my feet, I would fall into a waking slumber. I found a hollow in the rocks where I could lie sheltered from the wind and gaze out to sea. In time I grew to think of this as my private retreat, the one place reserved for me on an island owned by another; though in truth the island no more belonged to Cruso than to the King of Portugal or indeed to Friday or the cannibals of Africa.

‘There is more, much more, I could tell you about the life we lived: how we kept the fire smouldering day and night; how we made salt; how, lacking soap, we cleaned ourselves with ash. Once I asked Cruso whether he knew no way of fashioning a lamp or a candle so that we should not have to retire when darkness fell, like brutes. Cruso responded in the following words: “Which is easier: to learn to see in the dark, or to kill a whale and seethe it down for the sake of a candle?” There were many tart retorts I might have made; but, remembering my vow, I held my tongue. The simple truth was, Cruso would brook no change on his island.

‘I had been there about a month when one morning Cruso came home from the terraces complaining he was unwell. Seeing he was shivering, I put him to bed and covered him warmly. “It is the old fever that came with me,” he said. “There is no cure, it must run its course.”

‘For twelve days and nights I nursed him, sometimes holding him down when fits of raving overtook him, when he sobbed or beat with his fists and shouted · in Portuguese at figures he saw in the shadows. One night, indeed, when for hours he had been moaning and shivering, his hands and feet cold as ice, I lay down beside him, holding him in my arms to warm him, fearing he would die otherwise. In my embrace he at last fell asleep, and I slept too, though uneasily.

‘All this time Friday made no effort to help .me, but on the contrary shunned the hut as though we two had the plague. At daybreak he would set off with his fishing-spear; returning, he would put his catch down beside the stove, gutted and scaled, and then retire to a far corner of the garden, where he would sleep curled on his side like a cat, or else play over and over again on his little reed flute a tune of six notes, always the same. This tune, of which he seemed never to tire, grew so to annoy me that one day I marched over and dashed the flute from his hands and would have scolded him too, whether or not he understood, had I not feared to wake Cruso. Friday sprang to his feet, his eyes wide with surprise, for I had never lost patience with him before, or indeed paid him much heed.

‘Then Cruso began to mend. The wild glitter in his eye abated, the lines of his face softened, his bouts of raving ended, he slept peacefully. His appetite came back. Soon he was walking from hut to garden unaided, and giving Friday orders.

‘I greeted his return to health with gladness. In Brazil I had seen younger men carried off by the fever; there had been a night and a day, indeed, when I was sure Cruso was dying, and looked forward with dismay to being left alone with Friday. It was the vigorous life he lived, I believe, that saved Cruso — the vigorous life and the simple diet, not any skill of mine.

‘Shortly hereafter we had a great storm, the wind howling and rain falling in torrents. In one of the gusts part of the roof of the hut was tom off and the fire we guarded so jealously drowned. We moved the bed to the last dry corner; even there the floor soon turned to mud.

‘I had thought Friday would be terrified by the clamour of the elements (I had never known such a storm, and pitied the poor mariners at sea). But no, Friday sat under the eaves with his head on his knees and slept like a baby.

‘After two nights and a day the rain abated and we came out to stretch our limbs. We found the garden near washed away, and where the path had led down the hillside a gully as deep as my waist had been cut by the waters. The beach was covered in seaweed tossed up by the waves. Then it began to rain again, and for a third night we retired to our miserable shelter, hungry, cold, unable to make fire.

‘That night Cruso, who had seemed quite mended, complained of being hot, and tossed off his clothes and lay panting. Then he began to rave and throw himself from side to side as if unable to breathe, till I thought the bed would break. I gripped him by the shoulders and tried to soothe him, but he beat me away. Great tremors ran through him; he grew stiff as a board and began to bellow about Masa or Massa , a word with no meaning I can discover. Woken by the din, Friday took out his flute and began to play his damnable tune, till what with the rain and the wind and Cruso’s shouting and Friday’s music, I could have believed myself in a madhouse. But I continued to hold Cruso and soothe him, and at last he grew still, and Friday ceased his noise, and even the rain grew softer. I stretched myself out against Cruso to warm his body with mine; in time the trembling gave out and both he and I slept.

‘I came to myself in daylight, in an unfamiliar silence, the storm having at last blown itself out. A hand was exploring my body. So befuddled was I that I thought myself still aboard the ship, in the Portuguese captain’s bed. But then I turned and saw Cruso’s wild hair and the great beard he never cut and his yellow eyes, and I knew it was all true, I was indeed cast away on an island with a man named Cruso, who though an Englishman was as strange to me as a Laplander. I pushed his hand away and made to rise, but he held me. No doubt I might have freed myself, for I was stronger than he. But I thought, He has not known a woman for fifteen years, why should he not have his desire? So I resisted no more but let him do as he wished. When I left the hut Friday was nowhere in sight, for which I was glad. I walked some distance, then sat down to collect myself. Around· me in the bushes settled a flock of sparrows, cocking their heads curiously, quite unafraid, having known no harm from man since the beginning of time. Was I to regret what had passed between Cruso and me? Would it have been better had we continued to live as brother and sister, or host and guest, or master and servant, or whatever it was we had been? Chance had cast me on his island, chance had thrown me in his arms. In a world of chance, is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger’s embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them? The questions echoed in my head without answer.