J. Coetzee - Foe

‘Our lodging is together five shillings a week. Whatever you send I shall be grateful for.

‘I have set down the history of our time on the island as well as I can, and enclose it herewith. It is a sorry, limping affair (the history, not the time itself) — “the next day,” its refrain goes, “the next day ... the next day” — but you will know how to set it right.

‘You will wonder how I came to choose you, given that a week ago I did not so much as know your name. I admit, when I first laid eyes on you I thought you were a lawyer or a man from the Exchange. But then one of my fellow-servants told me you were Mr Foe the author who had heard many confessions and were reputed a very secret man. It was raining (do you remember?); you paused on the step to fasten your cloak, and I came out too and shut the door behind me. “If I may be so bold, sir,” I said (those were the words, bold words). You looked me up and down but did not reply, and I thought to myself: What art is there to hearing confessions? — the spider has as much art, that watches and waits. “If I may have a moment of your time: I am seeking a new situation.” “So are we all seeking a new situation,” you replied. “But I have a man to care for, a Negro man who can never find a situation, since he has lost his tongue,” I said “I hoped that you might have place for me, and for him too, in your establishment.” My hair was wet by now, I had not even a shawl. Rain dripped from the brim of your hat. “I am in employ here, but am used to better things,” I pursued — “You have not heard a story before like mine. I am new-returned from far-off parts. I have been a castaway on a desert island. And there I was the companion of a singular man.” I smiled, not at you but at what I was about to say. “I am a figure of fortune, Mr Foe. I am the good fortune we are always hoping for.”

‘Was it effrontery to say that? Was it effrontery to smile? Was it the effrontery that aroused your interest?’

’April 20th

‘Thank you for the three guineas. I have bought Friday a drayer’s woollen jerkin, also woollen hose. If there is underlinen you can spare, I should welcome it. He wears clothes without murmur, though he will not yet wear shoes.

‘Can you not take us into your house? Why do you keep me apart? Can you not take me in as your close servant, and Friday as your gardener?

‘I climb the staircase (it is a tall house, tall and airy, with many flights of stairs) and tap at the door. You are sitting at a table with your back to me, a rug over your knees, your feet in pantoufles, gazing out over the fields, thinking, stroking your chin with your pen, waiting for me to set down the tray and withdraw. On the tray are a glassful of hot water into which I have squeezed a citron, and two slices of buttered toast. You call it your first breakfast.

‘The room is barely furnished. The truth is, it is not a room but a part of the attic to which you remove yourself for the sake of silence. The table and chair stand on a platform of boards before the window. From the door of the attic to this platform, boards are laid to form a narrow walk-way. Otherwise there are only the ceiling-boards, on which one treads at one’s peril, and the rafters, and overhead the grey rooftiles. Dust lies thick on the floor; when the wind gusts under the eaves there are flurries in the dust, and from the corners moaning noises. There are mice too. Before you go downstairs you must shut your papers away to preserve them from the mice. In the mornings you brush mousedroppings from the table.

‘There is a ripple in the window-pane. Moving your head, you can make the ripple travel over the cows grazing in the pasture, over the ploughed land beyond, over the line of poplars, and up into the sky.

‘I think of you as a steersman steering the great hulk of the house through the nights and days, peering ahead for signs of storm.

‘Your papers are kept in a chest beside the table. The story of Cruso’s island will go there page by page as you write it, to lie with a heap of other papers: a census of the beggars of London, bills of mortality from the time of the great plague, accounts of travels in the border country, reports of strange and surprising apparitions, records of the wool trade, a memorial of the life and opinions of Dickory Cronke (who is he?); also books of voyages to the New World, memoirs of captivity among the Moors, chronicles of the wars in the Low Countries, confessions of notorious lawbreakers, and a multitude of castaway narratives, most of them, I would guess, riddled with lies.

‘When I was on the island I longed only to be elsewhere, or, in the word I then used, to be saved. But now a longing stirs in me I never thought I would feel. I close my eyes and my soul takes leave of me, flying over the houses and streets, the woods and pastures, back to our old home, Cruso’s and mine. You will not understand this longing, after all I have said of the tedium of our life there. Perhaps I should have written more about the pleasure I took in walking barefoot in the cool sand of the compound, more about the birds, the little birds of many varieties whose names I never knew, whom I called sparrows for want of a better name. Who but Cruso, who is no more, could truly tell you Cruso’s story? I should have said less about him, more about myself. How, to begin with, did my daughter come to be lost, and how, following her, did I reach Bahia? How did I survive among strangers those two long years? Did I live only in a rooming-house, as I have said? Was Bahia an island in the ocean of the Brazilian forest, and my room a lonely island in Bahia? Who was the captain whose fate it became to drift forever in the southemmost seas, clothed in ice? I brought back not a feather, not a thimbleful of sand, from Cruso’s island. All I have is my sandals. When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers? Yet I was as much a body as Cruso. I ate and drank, I woke and slept, I longed. The island was Cruso’s (yet by what right? by the law of islands? is there such a law?), but I lived there too, I was no bird of passage, no gannet or albatross, to circle the island once and dip a wing and then fly on over the boundless ocean. Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty. For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth (I see that clearly, we need not pretend it is otherwise). To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and ·a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades. I have none of these, while you have all.

‘April 21st

‘In my letter yesterday I may have seemed to mock the art of writing. I ask your pardon, I was unjust. Believe me, there are times when, as I think of you labouring in your attic to bring life to your thieves and courtesans and grenadiers, my heart aches with pity and I long only to be of .service. I think of you (forgive me the figure) as a beast of burden, and your house as a great wagon you are condemned to haul, a wagon full of tables and chairs and wardrobes, and on top of these a wife (I do not even know whether you have a wife!) and ungrateful children and idle servants and cats and dogs, all eating your victuals, burning your coal, yawning and laughing, careless of your toil. In the early mornings, lying in my warm bed, I seem to hear the shuffle of your footsteps as, draped in a rug, you climb the stairs to your attic. You seat yourself, your breathing is heavy, you light the lamp, you pinch your eyes shut and begin to grope your way back to where you were last night~ through the dark and cold, through the rain, over fields where sheep lie huddled together, over forests, over the seas, to Flanders or wherever it is that your captains and grenadiers must now too begin to stir and set about the next day in their lives, while from the corners of the attic the mice stare at you, twitching their whiskers. Even on Sundays the work proceeds, as though whole regiments of foot would sink into everlasting sleep were they not roused daily and sent into action. In the throes of a chill you plod on, wrapped in scarves, blowing your nose, hawking, spitting. Sometimes you are so weary that the candlelight swims before your eyes. You lay your head on your arms and in a moment are asleep, a black stripe across the paper where the pen slips from your grasp. Your mouth sags open, you snore softly, you smell (forgive me a second time) like an old man. How I wish it were in my power to help you, Mr Foe! Closing my eyes, I gather my strength and send out a vision of the island to hang before you like a substantial body, with birds and fleas and fish of all hues and lizards basking in the sun, flicking out their black tongues, and rocks covered in barnacles, and rain drumming on the roof fronds, and wind, unceasing wind: so that it will be there for you to draw on whenever you have need.’