Foe (10 page)

There
are no stories of such quests because they do not occur. They are not
part of life."

"'You
are mistaken," says she. "You are my mother, I have found
you, and now I will not leave you."

'"I
will admit I have indeed lost a daughter. But I did not give her
away, she was taken from me, and you are not she. I am leaving the
door unlocked. Depart when you are ready."

'This
morning when I come downstairs she is still there, sprawled in the
armchair, bundled in her cloak, asleep. Bending over her I see that
one eye is half open and the eyeball rolled back. I shake her. "It
is time to go," I say. "No," says she. Nevertheless,
from the kitchen I hear the door close and the latch click behind
her.

'"Who
brought you up after I abandoned you?" I asked. "The
gipsies," she replied. "The gipsiesl" I mocked-"It
is only in books that children are stolen by gipsiesl You must think
of a better story!"

'And
now, as if my troubles are not enough, Friday has fallen into one of
his mopes. Mopes are what Cruso called them, when without reason
Friday would lay down his tools and disappear to some sequestered
corner of the island, and then a day later come back and resume his
chores as if nothing had intervened. Now he mopes about the
passageways or stands at the door, longing to escape, afraid to
venture out; or else lies abed and pretends not to hear when I call
him. "Friday, Friday," I say, seating myself at his
bedside, shaking my head, drifting despite myself into another of the
long, issueless colloquies I conduct with him, "how could I have
foreseen, when I was carried by the waves on to your island and
beheld you with a spear in your hand and the sun shining like a halo
behind your head, that our path would take us to a gloomy house in
England and a season of empty waiting? Was I wrong to choose Mr Foe?
And who is this child he sends us, this mad child? Does he send her
as a sign? What is she a sign of?

'"Oh,
Friday, how can I make you understand the cravings felt by those of
us who live in a world of speech to have our questions answered! It
is like our desire, when we kiss someone, to feel the lips we kiss
respond to us. Otherwise would we not be content to bestow our kisses
on statues, the cold statues of kings and queens and gods and
goddesses? Why do you think we do not kiss statues, and sleep with
statues in our beds, men with the statues of women and women with the
statues of men, statues carved in postures of desire? Do you think it
is only because marble is cold? Lie long enough with a statue in your
bed, with warm covers over the two of you, and the marble will grow
warm. No, it is not because the statue is cold but because it is
dead, or rather, because it has never lived and never will.

"'Be
assured, Friday, by sitting at your bedside and talking of desire and
kisses I do not mean to court you. This is no game in which each word
has a second meaning,. in which the words say 'Statues are cold' and
mean 'Bodies are warm,' or say 'I crave an answer' and mean 'I crave
an embrace.' Nor is the denial l now make a false denial of the kind
demanded, at least in England (I am ignorant of the customs of your
country), by modesty. If I were courting I would court directly, you
may be sure. But I am not courting. I am trying to bring it home to
you, who have never, for all I know, spoken a word in your life, and
certainly never will, what it is to speak into a void, day after day,
without answer. And I use a similitude: I say that the desire for
answering speech is like the desire for the embrace of, the embrace
by, another being. Do I make my meaning clear? You are very likely a
virgin, Friday. Perhaps you are even unacquainted with the parts of
generation. Yet surely you feel, however obscurely, something within
you that draws you toward a woman of your own kind, and not toward an
ape or a fish. And what you want to achieve with that woman, though
you might puzzle forever over the means were she not to assist you,
is what I too want to achieve, and compared in my similitude to an
answering kiss.

'"How
dismal a fate it would be to go through life unkissed! Yet if you
remain in England, Friday, will that not become your fate? Where are
you to meet a woman of your own people? We are not a nation rich in
slaves. I think of a watch-dog, raised with kindness but kept from
birth behind a locked gate. When at last such a dog escapes, the gate
having been left open, let us say, the world appears to it so vast,
so strange, so full of troubling sights and smells, that it snarls at
the first creature to approach, and leaps at its throat, after which
it is marked down as vicious, and chained to a post for the rest of
its days. I do not say that you are vicious, Friday, I do not say
that you will ever be chained, that is not the import of my story.
Rather I wish to point to how· unnatural a lot it is for a dog
or any other creature to be kept from its kind; also to how the
impulse of love, which urges us toward our own kind, perishes during
confinement, or loses its way. Alas, my stories seem always to have
more applications than I intend, so that I must go back and
laboriously extract the right application and apologize for the wrong
ones and efface them. Some people are born storytellers; I, it would
seem, am not.

'"And
can we be sure that Mr Foe, whose house this is, whom you have never
met, to whom I entrusted the story of the island, did not weeks ago
pass away in a hiding-hole in Shoreditch? If so, we shall be forever
obscure. His house will be sold under our feet to pay the creditors.
There will be no more garden. You will never see Africa. The chill of
winter will return, and you will have to wear shoes. Where in England
will we find a last broad enough for your feet?

'"Or
else I must assume the burden of our story. But what shall I write?
You know how dull our life was, in truth. We faced no perils, no
ravenous beasts, not even serpents. Food was plentiful, the sun was
mild. No pirates landed on our shores, no freebooters, no cannibals
save yourself, if you can be called a cannibal. Did Cruso truly
believe, I wonder, that you were once a cannibal child? Was it his
dark fear that the craving for human flesh would come back to you,
that you would one night slit his throat and roast his liver and eat
it? Was his talk of cannibals rowing from island to island in search
of meat a warning, a masked warning, against you and your appetites?
When you showed your fine white teeth, did Cruso's heart quail? How I
wish you could answer!

•
"Yet,
all in all, I think the answer must be No. Surely Cruso must have
felt the tedium of life on the island as keenly in his way as I did
in mine, and perhaps you in yours, and therefore have made up the
roving cannibals to spur himself to vigilance. For the danger of
island life, the danger of which Cruso said never a word, was the
danger of abiding sleep. How easy it would have been to prolong our
slumbers farther and farther into the hours of daylight till at last,
locked tight in sleep's embrace, we starved to death (I allude to
Cruso and myself, but is the sleeping sickness not also one of the
scourges of Africa?).! Does it not speak volumes that the first and
only piece of furniture your master fashioned was a bed? How
different would it not have been had he built a table and stool, and
extended his ingenuity to the manufacture of ink and writing-tablets,
and then sat down to keep an authentic journal of his exile day by
day, which we might have brought back to England with us, and sold to
a bookseller, and so saved ourselves this embroilment with Mr Foe!

"'Alas,
we will never make our fortunes, Friday, by being merely what we are,
or were. Think of the spectacle we offer: your master and you on the
terraces, I on the cliffs watching for a sail. Who would wish to read
that there were once two dull fellows on a rock in the sea who filled
their time by digging up stones? As for me and my yearnings for
salvation, one is as soon sated with yearning as one is with sugar.
We begin to understand why Mr Foe pricked up his ears when he heard
the word
Cannibal
,
why he longed for Cruso to have a musket and a carpenter's chest. No
doubt he would have preferred Cruso to be younger too, and his
sentiments towards me more passionate.

'"But
it grows late and there is much to do before nightfall. Are we the
only folk in England, I wonder, without lamp or candle? Surely this
is an extraordinary existence we lead! For let me assure you, Friday,
this is not how Englishmen live. They do not eat carrots morning,
noon and night, and live indoors like moles, and go to sleep when the
sun sets. Let us only grow rich and I will show you how different
living in England can be from living on a rock in the middle of the
ocean. Tomorrow, Friday, tomorrow I must settle down to my writing,
before the bailiffs come back to expel us, and we have neither
carrots to eat nor beds to sleep in.

'"Yet
despite what I say, the story of the island was not all tedium and
waiting. There were touches of mystery too, were there not?

'"First,
the terraces. How many stones did you and your master move? Ten
thousand? A hundred thousand? On an island without seed, would you
and he not have been as fruitfully occupied in watering the stones
where they lay and waiting for them to sprout? If your master had
truly wished to be a colonist and leave behind a colony, would he not
have been better advised (dare I say this?) to plant his seed in the
only womb there was? The farther I journey from his terraces, the
less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like
tombs: those tombs the emperors of Egypt erected for themselves in
the desert, in the building of which so many slaves lost their lives.
Has that likeness ever occurred to you, Friday; or did news of the
emperors of Egypt not reach your part of Africa?

'"Second
(I continue to name the mysteries): how did you come to lose your
tongue? Your master says the slavers cut it out; but I have never
heard of such a practice, nor did I ever meet a slave in Brazil who
was dumb. Is the truth that your master cut it out himself and blamed
the slavers? If so it was truly an unnatural crime, like chancing
upon a stranger and slaying him for no other cause than to keep him
from telling the world who slew him. And how would your master have
accomplished it? Surely no slave is so slavish as to offer up his
parts to the knife. Did Cruso bind you hand and foot and force a
block of wood between your teeth and then hack out your tongue? Is
that how the act was done? A knife, let us remember, was the sole
tool Cruso saved from the wreck. But where did he find the rope with
which to bind you? Did he commit the crime while you slept, thrusting
his fist into your mouth and cutting out your tongue while you were
still befuddled? Or was there some berry native to the island whose
juice, smuggled into your food, sent you into a deathlike sleep? Did
Cruso cut out your tongue while you were insensible? But how did he
staunch the bleeding stump? Why did you not choke on your blood?

'"Unless
your tongue was not cut off but merely

.split,
with a cut as neat as a surgeon's, that drew little blood yet made
speech ever afterward impossible. Or let us say the sinews that move
the tongue were cut and not the tongue itself, the sinews at the base
of the tongue. I guess merely, I have not looked into your mouth.
When your master asked me to look, I would not. An aversion came over
me that we feel for all the mutilated. Why is that so, do you think?
Because they put us in mind of what we would rather forget: how
easily, at the stroke of a sword or a knife, wholeness and beauty are
forever undone? Perhaps. But toward you I felt a deeper revulsion. I
could not put out of mind the softness of the tongue, its softness
and wetness, and the fact that it does not live in the light; also
how helpless it is before the knife, once the barrier of the teeth
has been passed. The tongue is like the heart, in that way, is it
not? Save that we do not die when a knife pierces the tongue. To that
degree we may say the tongue belongs to the world of play, whereas
the heart belongs to the world of earnest.

'"Yet
it is not the heart but the members of play that elevate us above the
beasts: the fingers with which we touch the clavichord or the flute,
the tongue with which we jest and lie and seduce. Lacking members of
play, what is there left for beasts to do when they are bored but
sleep?

'"And
then there is the mystery of your submission. Why, during all those
years alone with Cruso, did you submit to his rule, when you might
easily have slain him, or blinded him and made him into your slave in
turn? Is there something in the condition of slavehood that invades
the heart and makes a slave a slave for life, a:s the whiff of ink
clings forever to a schoolmaster?

'"Then,
if I may be plain -and why may I not be plain, since talking to you
is like talking to the walls? -why did you not desire me, neither you
nor your master? A woman is cast ashore on your island, a tall woman
with black hair and dark eyes, till a few hours past the companion of
a sea-captain besotted with love of her. Surely desires kept banked
for many years must have flamed up within you. Why did I not catch
you stealing glances from behind a rock while I bathed? Do tall women
who rise up out of the sea dismay you? Do they seem like exiled
queens come to reclaim the islands men have stolen from them? But
perhaps I am unjust, perhaps that is a question for Cruso alone; for
what have you ever stolen in your life, you who are yourself stolen?
Nevertheless, did Cruso in his way and do you in your way believe I
came to claim dominion over you, and is that why you were wary of me?