Foe (7 page)

'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.'

'April 21th

'You
asked how it was that Cruso did not save a single musket from the
wreck; why a man so fearful of cannibals should have neglected to arm
himself.

'Cruso
never showed me where the wreck lay, but it is my conviction that it
lay, and lies still, in the deep water below the cliffs in the north
of the island. At the height of the storm Cruso leapt overboard with
the youthful Friday at his side, and other shipmates too, it may be;
but they two alone were saved, by a great wave that caught them up
and bore them ashore. Now I ask: Who can keep powder dry in the belly
of a wave? Furthermore: Why should a man endeavour to save a musket
when he barely hopes to save his own life? As for cannibals, I am not
persuaded, despite Cruso's fears, that there are cannibals in those
oceans. You may with right reply that, as we do not expect to see
sharks dancing in the waves, so we should not expect to see cannibals
dancing on the strand; that cannibals belong to the night as sharks
belong to the depths. All I say is: What I saw, I wrote. I saw no
cannibals; and if they came after nightfall and fled before the
dawn, they left no footprint behind.

'I
dreamed last night of Cruso's death, and woke with tears coursing
down my cheeks. So I lay a long while, the grief not lifting from my
heart. Then I went downstairs to our little courtyard off Clock Lane.
It was not yet light; the sky was clear. Under these same tranquil
stars, I thought, floats the island where we lived; and on that
island is a hut, and in that hut a bed of soft grass which perhaps
still bears the imprint, fainter every day, of my body. Day by day
the wind picks at the roof and the weeds creep across the terraces.
In a year, in ten years, there will be nothing left standing but a
circle of sticks to mark the place where the hut stood, and of the
terraces only the walls. And of the walls they will say, These arc
cannibal walls, the ruins of a cannibal city, from the golden age of
the cannibals. For who will belie.ve they were built by one man and a
slave, in the hope that one day a seafarer would come with a sack of
corn for them to sow?

'You
remarked it would have been better had Cruso rescued not only musket
and powder and ball, but a carpenter's chest as well, and built
himself a boat. I do not wish to be captious, but we lived on an
island so buffeted by the wind that there was not a tree did not grow
twisted and bent. We might have built a raft, a crooked kind of raft,
but never a boat.

'You
asked also after Cruso's apeskin clothes. Alas, these were taken from
our cabin and tossed overboard by ignorant sailors. If you so desire,
I will make sketches of us as we were on the island, wearing the
clothes we wore.

'The
sailor's blouse and pantaloons I wore on board ship I have given to
Friday. Moreover he has his jerkin and his watch-coat. His cellar
gives on to the yard, so he is free to wander as he pleases. But he
rarely goes abroad, being too fearful. How he fills his time I do not
know, for the cellar is bare save for his cot and the coal-bin and
some broken sticks of furniture.

'Yet
the story that there is a cannibal in Clock Lane has plainly got
about, for yesterday I found three boys at the cellar door peering in
on Friday. I chased them off, after which they took up their stand at
the end of the lane, chanting the words: "Cannibal Friday, have
you ate your mam today?"

'Friday
grows old before his time, like a dog locked up all its life. I too,
from living with an old man and sleeping in his bed, have grown old.
There are times when I think of myself as a widow. If there was
a wife left behind in Brazil, she and I would be sisters now. of a
kind.

'I
have the use of the scullery two mornings of the week, and am turning
Friday into a laundryman; for otherwise idleness will destroy him. I
set him before the sink dressed in his sailor clothes, his feet bare
as ever on the cold floor (he will not wear shoes). "Watch me,
Friday!, I say, and begin to soap a petticoat (soap must be
introduced to him, there was no soap in his life before, on the
island we used ash or sand). and tub it on the washing-board. "Now
do
,
Friday!, I say, and stand aside.
Watch
and
Do
:
those are my two principal words for Friday, and with them I
accomplish much. It is a terrible fall, I know, from the freedom of
the island where he could roam all day, and hunt birds• eggs,
and spear fish, when the terraces did not call. But surely it is
better to learn useful tasks than to lie alone in a cellar all day.
thinking I know not what thoughts?

'Cruso
would not teach him because, he said, Friday had no need of words.
But Cruso erred. Life on the island, before my coming, would have
been less tedious had he taught Friday to understand his meanings,
and devised ways by which Friday could express his own meanings, as
for example by gesturing with his hands or by setting out pebbles in
shapes standing for words. Then Cruso might have spoken to Friday
after his manner, and Friday responded after his, and many an empty
hour been whiled away. For I cannot believe that the life Friday led
before he fell into Cruso's hands was bereft of interest, though he
was but a child. I would give mu.ch to hear the truth of how he was
captured by the slave-traders and lost his tongue.

'He
is become a great lover of oatmeal, gobbling down as much porridge in
a day as would feed a dozen Scotsmen. From eating too much and lying
abed he is growing stupid. Seeing him with his belly tight as a drum
and his thin shanks and his listless air, you would not believe he
was the same man who ·brief months ago stood poised on the
rocks, the seaspray dancing about him, the sunlight glancing on his
limbs, his spear raised, ready in an instant to strike a fish.

'While
he works I teach him the names of things. I hold up a spoon and say
"Spoon, Friday!" and give the spoon into his hand. Then I
say "Spoon!" and hold out my hand to receive the spoon;
hoping thus that in time the word 
Spoon
 will
echo in his mind willy-nilly whenever his eye falls on a spoon.

'What
I fear most is that after years of speechlessness the very notion of
speech may be lost to him. When I take the spoon from his hand (but
is it truly a spoon to him, or a mere thing?-I do not know), and
say 
Spoon
,
how can I be sure he does not think I am chattering to myself as a
magpie or an ape does, for the pleasure of hearing the noise I make,
and feeling the play of my tongue, as he himself used to find
pleasure in playing his flute? And whereas one may take a dull child
and twist his arm or pinch his ear till at last he repeats after us,
Spoon
,
what can I do with Friday? "Spoon, Friday!" I say; "Fork!
Knife!" I think of the root of his tongue closed behind those
heavy lips like a toad in eternal winter, and I shiver.
"Broom, Friday!" I say, and make motions of sweeping,
and press the broom into his hand.

'Or
I bring a book to the scullery. "This is a book, Friday," I
say. "In it is a story written by the renowned Mr Foe. You do
not know the gentleman, but at this very moment he is engaged in
writing another story, which is your story, and your master's, and
mine. Mr Foe has not met you, but he knows of you, from what I have
told him, using words. That is part of the magic of words. Through
the medium of words I have given Mr Foe the particulars of you and Mr
Cruso and of my year on the island and the years you and Mr Cruso
spent there alone, as far as I can supply them; and all these
particulars Mr Foe is weaving into a story which will make us famous
throughout the land, and rich. too. There will be no more need for
you to live in a cellar. You will have money with which to buy your
way to Africa or Brazil, as the desire moves you, bearing fine gifts,
and be reunited with your parents, if they remember you, and marry at
last and have children, sons and daughters. And I will give you your
own copy of our book, bound in leather, to take with you. I will show
you how to trace your name in it, page after page, so that your
children may see that their father is known in all parts of the world
where books are read. Is writing not a fine thing, Friday? Are you
not filled with joy to know that you will live forever, after a
manner?"

'Having
introduced you thus, I open your book and read from it to Friday.
"This is the story of Mrs Veal, another humble person whom Mr
Foe has made famous in the course of his writing," I say. "Alas,
we shall never meet Mrs Veal, for she has passed away; and as to
her friend Mrs Barfield, she lives in Canterbury, a city some
distance to the south of us on this island where we find ourselves,
named Britain; I doubt we shall ever go there."

'Through
all my chatter Friday labours away at the washing-board. I expect no
sign that he has understood. It is enough to hope that if I make the
air around him thick with words, memories will be reborn in him which
died under Cruso's rule, and with them the recognition that to live
in silence is to live like the whales, great castles of flesh
floating leagues apart one from another, or like the spiders, sitting
each alone at the heart of his web, which to him is the entire world.
Friday may have lost his tongue but he has not lost his ears -that is
what I say to myself. Through his ears Friday may yet take in the
wealth stored in stories and so learn that the world is.not, as the
island seemed to teach him, a barren and a silent place (is that the
secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing-place of
memories?).

'I
watch his toes curl on the floorboards or the cobblestones and know
that he craves the softness of earth under his feet. How I wish there
were a garden I could take him to! Could he and I not visit your
garden in Stoke Newington? We should be as quiet as ghosts. "Spade,
Friday!" I should whisper, offering the spade to his hand; and
then: "Dig!" -which is a word his master taught him -"Turn
over the soil, pile up the weeds for burning. Feel the spade. Is it
not a fine, sharp tool? It is an English spade, made in an English
smithy."

'So,
watching his hand grip the spade, watching his eyes, I seek the first
sign that he comprehends what I am attempting: not to have the beds
cleared (I am sure you have your own gardener), not even to save him
from idleness, or for the sake of his health to bring him out of the
dankness of his cellar, but to build a bridge of words over which,
when one day it is grown sturdy enough, he may cross to the time
before Cruso, the time before he lost his tongue, when he lived
immersed in the prattle of words as unthinking as a fish in water;
from where he may by steps return, as far as he is able, to the world
of words in which you, Mr Foe, and I, and other people live.