Foe (14 page)

'It
is not as I imagined it,' I said. 'I expected dust thick on the
floor, and gloom. But life is never as we expect it to be. I recall
an author reflecting that after death we may find ourselves not among
choirs of angels but in some quite ordinary place, as for instance a
bath-house on a hot afternoon, with spiders dozing in the corners; at
the time it will seem like any Sunday in the country; only later will
it come home to us that we are in eternity.'

'It
is an author I have not read.'

'The
idea has remained with me from my childhood. But I have come to ask
about another story. The history of ourselves and the island -how
does it progress? Is it written?'

'It
progresses, but progresses slowly, Susan. It is a slow story, a slow
history. How did you find your way to me?'

'By
good fortune entirely. I met your old housekeeper Mrs Thrush in
Covent Garden after Friday and I came back from Bristol (I wrote you
letters on the Bristol road, I have them with me, I will give them to
you). Mrs Thrush directed us to the boy who runs errands for you,
with a token that we were to be trusted, and he led us to this
house.'

'It
is excellent that you have come, for there is more I must know about
Bahia, that only you can tell me.'

'Bahia
is not part of my story,' I replied, 'but let me tell you whatever I
can. Bahia is a city built on hills. To convey cargoes from the
harbour to their warehouses, the merchants have therefore spanned a
great cable, with pulleys and windlasses. From the streets you see
bales of cargo sail overhead on the cable all day. The streets are
a-bustle with people going about their business, slave and free,
Portuguese and Negro and Indian and half-breed. But the Portuguese
women are seldom to be seen abroad. For the Portuguese are a very
jealous race. They have a saying: In her life a woman has but three
occasions to leave the house for her baptism, her wedding, and her
burial. A woman who goes abroad freely is thought a whore. I was
thought a whore. But there are so many whores there, or, as I prefer
to call them, free women, that I was not daunted. In the cool of the
evening the free women of Bahia don their finest clothes, put hoops
of gold about their necks and golden bracelets on their arms and
ornaments of gold in their hair, and walk the streets; for gold is
cheap there. The most handsome are the women of colour, or
mulatas
as they are called. The Crown has failed to halt the private traffic
in gold, which is mined in the interior and sold by the miners to the
goldsmiths. Alas, I have nothing to show you of the craft of these
excellent smiths, not even a pin. All I had was taken from me by the
mutineers. I came ashore on the island with nothing but the clothes I
wore, red as a beetroot from the sun, my hands raw and blistered. It
is no wonder I failed to charm Cruso.'

'And
Friday?' 'Friday?' 'Did Friday ever grow enamoured of you?' 'How are
we ever to know what goes on in the heart of Friday? But I think
not.' I turned to Friday, who had been squatting all the while by the
door with his head on his knees. 'Do you love me, Friday?' I called
softly. Friday did not so much as raise his head. 'We have lived too
close for love, Mr Foe. Friday has grown to be my shadow. Do our
shadows love us, for all that they are never patted from us?'

Foe
smiled. 'Tell me more of Bahia,' he said.

'There
is much to be said of Bahia. Bahia is a world in itself. But why?
Bahia is not the island. Bahia was but a stepping stone on my way.' ·

'That
may not be so,' replied Foe cautiously. 'Rehearse your story and you
will see. The story begins in London. Your daughter is abducted or
elopes, I do not know which, it does not matter. In quest of her you
sail to Bahia, for you have intelligence that she is there. In Bahia
you spend no less than two years, two fruitless years. How do you
live all this time? How do you clothe yourself? Where do you sleep?
How do you pass the days? Who are your friends? These are questions
that are asked, which we must answer, And what has been the fate of
your daughter? Even in the great spaces of Brazil a daughter does not
vanish like smoke. Is it possible that while you are seeking her she
is seeking you? But enough of questions. At last you despair. You
abandon your quest and depart. Shortly thereafter your daughter
arrives in Bahia, from the backlands, in search of you. She hears
talk of a tall Englishwoman who has taken ship for Lisbon, and
follows. She haunts the docks of Lisbon and Oporto. Rough sailors
think her a blessed simpleton and treat her with kindness. But no one
has heard of a tall Englishwoman off a ship from Bahia. Are you on
the Azores, gazing out to sea, mourning, like Ariadne? We do not
know. Time passes. Your daughter despairs. Then chance brings to her
ears the story of a woman rescued from an island where she has been
marooned with an old man and his black slave. Is this woman by some
chance her mother? She follows a trail of rumour from Bristol to
London, to the house where the woman had briefly taken service (this
is the house on Kensington Row). There she learns the woman's name.
It is the same as hers.

'We
therefore have five parts in all: the loss of the daughter; the quest
for the daughter in Brazil; abandonment of the quest, and the
adventure of the island; assumption of the quest by the daughter; and
reunion of the daughter with her mother. It is thus that we make up a
book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then
end. As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode -which is
properly the second part of the middle -and by the reversal in which
the daughter takes up the quest abandoned by her mother.'

All
the joy I had felt in finding my way to Foe fled me. I sat
heavy-limbed.

'The
island is not a story in itself,' said Foe gently, laying a hand on
my knee. 'We can bring it to life only by setting it within a larger
story. By itself it is no better than a waterlogged boat drifting day
after day in an empty ocean till one day, humbly and without
commotion, it sinks. The island lacks light and shade. It is too much
the same throughout. It is like a loaf of bread. It will keep us
alive, certainly, if we are starved of reading; but who will prefer
it when there are tastier confections and pastries to be had?'

'In
the letters you did not read,' I said, 'I told you of my conviction
that, if the story seems stupid, that is only because it so doggedly
holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the
loss of Friday's tongue.'

Foe
made no reply, and I went on. 'The story of Friday's tongue is a
story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me. That is to say,
many stories can be told of Friday's tongue, but the true story is
buried within Friday, who is mute. The true story will not be heard
till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday.

'Mr
Foe,' I proceeded, speaking with gathering difficulty, 'when I lived
in your house I would sometimes lie awake upstairs listening to the
pulse of blood in my ears and to the silence from Friday below, a
silence that rose up the stairway like smoke, like a welling of black
smoke. Before long I could not breathe, I would feel I was stifling
in my bed. My lungs, my heart, my head were full of black smoke. I
had to spring up and open the curtains and put my head outside and
breathe fresh air and see for myself that there were stars still in
the sky.

'In
my letters I have told you the story of Friday's dancing. But I have
not told you the whole story.

'After
Friday discovered your robes and wig and took them as his livery, he
would spend entire days spinning and dancing and singing, after his
fashion. What I did not tell you was that for his dancing he would
wear nothing but the robes and wig. When he stood still he was
covered to the ankles; but when he spun, the robes would stand out
stiffly about him, so much so that one might have supposed the
purpose of his dancing was to show forth the nakedness underneath.

'Now
when Cruso told me that the slavers were in the habit of cutting out
the tongues of their prisoners to make them more tractable, I confess
I wondered whether he might not be employing a figure, for the sake
of delicacy: whether the lost tongue might stand not only for itself
but for a more atrocious mutilation; whether by a dumb slave I was to
understand a slave unmanned.

'When
I heard the humming that first morning and came to the door and was
met with the spectacle of Friday at his dancing with his robes flying
about him, I was so confounded that I gaped without shame at what had
hitherto been veiled from me. For though I had seen Friday naked
before, it had been only from a distance: on our island we had
observed the decencies as far as we could, Friday not least of us.

'I
have told you of the abhorrence I felt when Cruso opened Friday's
mouth to show me he had no tongue. What Cruso wanted me to see, what
I averted my eyes from seeing, was the thick stub at the back of the
mouth, which ever afterwards I pictured to myself wagging and
straining under the sway of emotion as Friday tried to utter himself,
like a worm cut in half contorting itself in death-throes. From that
night on I had continually to fear that evidence of a yet more
hideous mutilation might be thrust upon my sight.

'In
the dance nothing was still and yet everything was still. The
whirling robe was a scarlet bell settled upon Friday's shoulders and
enclosing him; Friday was the dark pillar at its centre. What had
been hidden from me was revealed. I saw; or, I should say, my eyes
were open to what was present to them.

'I
saw and believed I had seen, though afterwards I remembered Thomas,
who also saw, but could not be brought to believe till he had put his
hand in the wound.

'I
do not know how these matters can be written of in a book unless they
are covered up again in figures. When I first heard of you I was told
you were a very secret man, a clergyman of sorts, who in the course
of your work heard the darkest of confessions from the most desperate
of penitents. I will not kneel before him like one of his
gallows-birds, I vowed, with a mouth full of unspeakable confidences:
I will say in plain terms what can be said and leave unsaid what
cannot. Yet here I am pouring out my darkest secrets to you! You are
like one of those notorious libertines whom women arm themselves
against, but against whom they are at last powerless, his very
notoriety being the seducer's shrewdest weapon.'

'You
have not told me all I need to know of Bahia,' said Foe.

'I
told myself (have I not confessed this before?): He is like the
patient spider who sits at the heart of his web waiting for his prey
to come to him. And when we struggle in his grasp, and he opens his
jaws to devour us, and with our last breath we cry out, he smiles a
thin smile and says: "I did not ask you to come visiting, you
came of your own will.'' '

A
long pause fell between us. 'Tossed on shores I never thought to
visit' -the words came to me unbidden. What was their meaning? From
the street below came the noise of a woman scolding. On and on went
her tirade. I smiled -I could not help myself -and Foe smiled too.

'As
for Bahia,' I resumed, 'it is by choice that I say so little of it.
The story I desire to be known by is the story of the island. You
call it an episode, but I call it a story in its own right. It
commences with my being cast away there and concludes with the death
of Cruso and the return of Friday and myself to England, full of new
hope. Within this larger story are inset the stories of how I came to
be marooned (told by myself to Cruso) and of Cruso's shipwreck and
early years on the island (told by Cruso to myself), as well as the
story of Friday, which is properly not a story but a puzzle or hole
in the narrative (I picture it as a buttonhole, ·carefully
cross-stitched around, but empty, waiting for the button). Taken in
all, it is a narrative with a beginning and an end, and with pleasing
digressions too, lacking only a substantial and varied middle, in the
place where Cruso spent too much time "tilling the terraces and
I too much time tramping the shores. Once you proposed to supply a
middle by inventing cannibals and pirates. These I would not accept
because they were not the truth. Now you propose to reduce the island
to an episode in the history of a woman in search of a lost daughter.
This too I reject.

'You
err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and
the silences of a being such as Friday. Friday has no command of
words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in
conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he
becomes ia cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a
laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? You 'will respond: he is
neither cannibal nor laundryman, these are mere names, they do not
touch his essence, he is a substantial body, he is himself, Friday is
Friday. But that is not so. No matter what he is to himself (is he
anything to himself? -how can he tell us?), what he is to the world
is what