Foe (6 page)

'We
were used with great civility throughout the voyage. The ship's
surgeon visited Cruso twice a day, and by letting blood afforded him
much relief. But to me he would privately shake his head. "Your
husband is sinking," he would say-"I fear we came too
late."

'(I
should tell you that Captain Smith had proposed that I call Cruso my
husband and declare we had been shipwrecked together, to make my path
easier both on board and when we should come ashore in England. If
the story of Bahia and the mutineers got about, he said, it would not
easily be understood what kind of woman I was. I laughed when he said
this -what kind of woman was I, in truth? -but took his advice, and
so was known as Mrs Cruso to all on board.

'One
night at dinner -I ate all this time at the captain's table -he
whispered in my ear that he would be honoured if I would consent to
pay him a visit in his cabin afterwards, for a glass of cordial. I
pretended to take his offer as mere gallantry, and did not go. He
pressed me no further, but continued to behave as courteously as
before. In all I found him a true gentleman, though a mere
ship's-master and the son of a pedlar, as he told me.)

'I
brought Cruso his food in bed and coaxed him to eat as if he were a
child. Sometimes he seemed to know where he was, at other times not.
One night, hearing him rise, I lit a candle, and saw him standing at
the cabin door, pressing against it, not understanding that it opened
inwards. I came over to him and touched him, and found his face wet
with tears. "Come, my Cruso," I whispered, and guided him
back to his bunk, and soothed him till he slept again.

'On
the island I believe Cruso might yet have shaken off the fever, as he
had done so often before. For though not a young man, he was
vigorous. But now he was dying of woe, the extremest woe. With every
passing day he was conveyed farther from the kingdom he pined for, to
which he would never find his way again. He was a prisoner, and I,
despite myself, his gaoler.

'Sometimes
in his sleep he would mutter in Portuguese, as he seemed always to do
when the bygone past came back to him. Then I would take his hand, or
lie beside him and talk to him. "Do you remember, my Cruso,"
I would say, "how after the great storm had taken away our roof
we would lie at night and watch the shooting stars, and wake in the
glare of the moon, thinking it was day? In England we will have a
roof over our heads that no wind can tear off. But did it not seem to
you that the moon of our island was larger than the moon of England,
as you remember it, and the stars more numerous? Perhaps we were
nearer the moon there, as we were certainly nearer the sun.

"Yet,"
I would pursue, "if we were nearer the heavens there, why was it
that so little of the island could be called extraordinary? Why were
there no strange fruits, no serpents, no lions? Why did the cannibals
never come? What will we tell folk in England when they ask us to
divert them?"

'"Cruso,"
I say (it is not the same night, it is a different night, we are
ploughing through the waves, the rock of England looms closer and
closer), ''is there not someone you have forgotten in Brazil? Is
there not a sister awaiting your return on your Brazilian estates,
and a faithful steward keeping the accounts? Can we not go back to
your sister in Brazil, and sleep in hammocks side by side under the
great Brazilian sky full of stars?" I lie against Cruso; with
the tip of my tongue I follow the hairy whorl of his ear. I rub my
cheeks against his harsh whiskers, I spread myself over him, I stroke
his body with my thighs. "I am swimming in you, my Cruso,"
I whisper, and swim. He is a tall man, I a tall woman. This is our
coupling: this swimming, this clambering, this whispering.

'Or
I speak of the island. "We will visit a corn factor, I promise,
my Cruso," I say. "We will buy a sack of corn, the best
there is. We will take ship again for the Americas, and be driven
from our course by a storm, and be cast up on your island. We will
plant the terraces and make them bloom. We will do all this."

'It
is not the words, it is the fervour with which I speak them: Cruso
takes my hand between his huge bony hands and brings it to his lips,
and weeps.

'We
were yet three days from port when Cruso died. I was sleeping beside
him in the narrow bunk, and in the night heard him give a long sigh;
then afterwards I felt his legs begin to grow cold, and lit the
candle and began to chafe his temples and wrists; but by then he was
gone. So I went out and spoke to Friday. "Your master is dead,
Friday," I whispered.

'Friday
lay in his little recess wrapped in the old watch-coat the surgeon
had found for him. His eyes glinted in the candlelight but he did not
stir. Did he know the meaning of death? No man had died on his island
since the beginning of time. Did he know we were subject to death,
like the beasts? I held out a hand but he would not take it. So I
knew he knew something; though what he knew I did not know.

'Cruso
was buried the next day. The crew stood bare-headed, the captain said
a prayer, two sailors tilted the bier, and Cruso's remains, sewn in a
canvas shroud, with the last stitch through his nose (I saw this
done, as did Friday), wrapped about with a great chain, slid into the
waves. Throughout the ceremony I felt the curious eyes of the sailors
on me (I had seldom been on deck). No doubt I made a strange sight in
a dark coat, borrowed from the captain, over sailor's pantaloons and
apeskin sandals. Did they truly think of me as Cruso's wife, or had
tales already reached them -sailors' haunts are full of gossip -of
the Englishwoman from Bahia marooned in the Atlantic by Portuguese
mutineers? Do you think of me, Mr Foe, as Mrs Cruso or as a bold
adventuress? Think what you may, it was I who shared Cruso's bed and
closed Cruso's eyes, as it is I who have disposal of all that Cruso
leaves behind, which is the story of his island.'

II

'April 15th

'
W
e
are now settled in lodgings in Clock Lane off Long Acre. I go by
the name Mrs Cruso, which you should bear in mind. I have a room on
the second floor. Friday has a bed in the cellar, where I bring him
his meals. By no means could I have abandoned him on the island.
Nevertheless, a great city is no place for him. His confusion and
distress when I conducted him through the streets this last Saturday
wrenched my heartstrings.

'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.