Foe

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: of 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…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.

I tell myself I talked to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will. At such times I understand why Cruso preferred not to disturb his muteness. I understand, that is to say, why a man will choose to be a slave owner. Do you think less of me for this confession?

It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau. The window overlooks not woods and pastures but your garden. There is no ripple in the glass. The chest is not a true chest but a dispatch box. Nevertheless, it is all close enough. Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds?

You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we lead on Cruso’s island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day.

I must go, Friday. You thought that carrying stones was the hardest of labours. But when you see me at Mr. Foe’s desk making marks with the quill, think of each mark as a stone, and think of the paper as the island, and imagine that I must disperse the stones over the face of the island, and when that is done and the taskmaster is not satisfied (was Cruso ever satisfied with your labours?) must pick them up again (which, in the figure, is scoring out the marks and disposed them according to another scheme), and so forth, day after day; all of this because Mr. Foe has run away from his debts. Sometimes I believe it is I who have become the slave. No doubt you would smile, if you could understand.

A painter engaged to paint a dull scene—let us say two men digging in a field—has means at hand to lend alert to his subject. He can set the golden hues of the first man’s skin against the sturdy hues of the seconds, creating a play of light against dark. By artfully representing their attitudes he can indicate which is master, which slave. And to render his composition more lively he is at liberty to bring into it what may not be there on the day he paints but may be there on other days, such as a pair of gulls wheeling overhead, the beak of one parted in a cry, and in one corner, upon a faraway crag, a band of apes. Thus we see the painter selecting and composing and rendering particulars in order to body forth a pleasing fullness in his scene. The storyteller, by contrast (forgive me, I would not lecture you on storytelling if you were here in the flesh!), must divine which episodes of his history hold promise of fullness, and tease from them they’re hidden meanings, writing these together as one braids a rope.

“You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”

“Father-born,” [the girl] says—”It is a word I have never heard before.”

I forgot you are a writer who knows above all how many words can be sucked from a cannibal feast, how few from a woman cowering from the wind. It is all a matter of words and the number of words, is it not? Friday sits at his table in his wig and robes and eats pease pudding. I ask myself: did human flesh once pass those lips - truly, cannibals are terrible; but most terrible of all is to think of the little cannibal children, their eyes closing in pleasure as they chew the tasty fat of their neighbors. I shiver. For surely eating human flesh is like falling into sin: having fallen once you discover in yourself a taste for it, you fall all the more readily thereafter. I shiver as I watch Friday dancing in the kitchen.

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 defense against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a 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 I make of him…Whereas the silence I keep regarding Bahia and other matters is chosen and purposeful: it is my own silence.

To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force. I mean the executioner and his assistants, both great and small. If I were the Irish woman, I should rest most uneasy in my grave knowing to what interpreter the story of my last hours has been consigned.

I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.

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 I 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.”

“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 slave ship, not a merchant man, 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 eye sockets 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… in every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Until we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.

“If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain. They are words without a home, wanders like the planets, and that is an end of it. But you must ask yourself, Susan; as it was a slaver’s strategem to rob Friday of his tongue, may it not be a slaver’s strategem to hold him in subjection while we cavil over words in a dispute we know to be endless?”

“Friday is no more in subjection than my shadow is for following me around. He is not free, but he is not in subjection. He is his own master, in law, and has been since Cruso’s death.”

“Nevertheless, Friday follows you: you do not follow Friday. The words you have written and hung around his neck say he is set free; but who, looking at Friday, will believe them?”

“But since we speak of childbearing, has the time not come to tell me the truth about your own child, the lost daughter and Bahia? Did you truly give birth to her? Is she substantial or is she a story too?”

“I will answer, but not before you have told me: the girl you send who calls herself by my name, is she substantial? You touch her; you embrace her; you kiss her. Would you dare to say she’s not substantial? No, she is substantial, as my daughter is substantial and I am substantial; and you two are substantial, no less and no more than any of us. We are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world.”

“You have omitted Friday.”