Foe (17 page)

'And
are they real?'

'As
real, or as little real, as the memories themselves.'

'I
read in an old Italian author of a man who visited, or dreamed he
visited, Hell,' said Foe. 'There he met the souls of the dead. One of
the souls was weeping. "Do not suppose, mortal," said this
soul, addressing him, "that because I am not substantial these
tears you behold are not the tears of a true grief."'

'True
grief, certainly, but whose?' said I -'The ghost's or the Italian's?'
I reached out and took Foe's hand between mine. 'Mr Foe, do you truly
know who I am? I came to you in the rain one day, when you were in a
hurry to be off, and detained you with a story of an island which you
could not have wished to hear.' ('You are quite wrong, my dear,' said
Foe, embracing me.) 'You counselled me to write it down,' I went on,
'hoping perhaps to read of bloody doings on the high seas or the
licentiousness of the Brazilians.' ('Not true, not true!' said Foe,
laughing and hugging me -'you roused my curiosity from the first, I
was most eager to hear whatever you might relate!') 'But no, I pursue
you with my own dull story, visiting it upon you now in your
uttermost refuge. And I bring these women trailing after me, ghosts
haunting a ghost, like fleas upon a flea. That is how it appears to
you, does it not?' 'And why should you be, as you put it, haunting
me, Susan?' 'For your blood. Is that not why ghosts return: to drink
the blood of the living? Is that not the true reason why the shades
made your Italian welcome?'

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.

When
I opened my eyes it was broad daylight and Foe was at his desk, with
his back to me, writing. I dressed and crept over to the alcove.
Friday lay on his mat swathed in his scarlet robes. 'Come, Friday,' I
whispered -'Mr Foe is at his labours, we must leave him.'

But
before we reached the door, Foe recalled us. 'Have you not forgotten
the writing, Susan?' he said. 'Have you not forgotten you are to
teach Friday his letters?' He held out a child's slate and pencil.
'Come back at noon and let Friday demonstrate what he has learned.
Take this for your breakfast.' And he gave me sixpence, which, though
no great payment for a visit from the Muse, I accepted.

So
we breakfasted well on new bread and milk, and then found a sunny
seat in a churchyard. 'Do your best to follow, Friday,' I
said-'Nature did not intend me for a teacher, I lack patience.' On
the slate I drew a house with a door and windows and a chimney, and
beneath it wrote the letters h-o-u-s. 'This is the picture,' I said,
pointing to the picture, 'and this the word.' I made the sounds of
the word
house
one by one, pointing to the letters as I made them, and then took
Friday's finger and guided it over the letters as I spoke the word;
and finally gave the pencil into his hand and guided him to write
h-o-u-s beneath the h-o-u-s I had written. Then I wiped the slate
clean, so that there was no picture left save the picture in Friday's
mind, and guided his hand in forming the word a third and a fourth
time, till the slate was covered in letters. I wiped it clean again.
'Now do it alone, Friday,' I said; and Friday wrote the four letters
h-o-u-s, or four shapes passably like them: whether they were truly
the four letters, and stood truly for the word
house
,
and the picture I had drawn, and the thing itself, only he knew.

I
drew a ship in full sail, and made him write
ship
,
and then began to teach him
Africa
.
Africa I represented as a row of palm trees with a lion roaming among
them. Was my Africa the Africa whose memory Friday bore within him? I
doubted it. Nevertheless, I wrote A-f-r-i-c-a and guided him in
forming the letters. So at the least he knew now that all words were
not four letters long. Then I taught him m-o-th-e-r (a woman with a
babe in arms), and, wiping the slate clean, commenced the task of
rehearsing our four words. 'Ship,' I said, and motioned him to write.
hs-h-s-h-s he wrote, on and on, or perhaps h-f; and would have filled
the whole slate had I not removed the pencil from his hand.