‘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 slave-ship, 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 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.
‘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 and 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, h-s-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.
Long and hard I stared at him, till he lowered his eyelids and shut his eyes. Was it possible for anyone, however benighted by a lifetime of dumb servitude, to be as stupid as Friday seemed? Could it be that somewhere within him he was laughing at my efforts to bring him nearer to a state of speech? I reached out and took him by the chin and turned his face toward me. His eyelids opened. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of those black pupils was there a spark of mockery? I could not see it. But if it were there, would it not be an African spark, dark to my English eye? I sighed. ‘Come, Friday,’ I said, ‘let us return to our master and show him how we have fared in our studies.’
It was midday. Foe was fresh-shaven and in good spirits.
‘Friday will not learn,’ I said. ‘If there is a portal to his faculties, it is closed, or I cannot find it.’
‘Do not be downcast,’ said Foe. ‘If you have planted a seed, that is progress enough, for the time being. Let us persevere: Friday may yet surprise us.’
‘Writing does not grow within us like a cabbage while our thoughts are elsewhere,’ I replied, not a little testily. ‘It is a craft won by long practice, as you should know.’
Foe pursed his lips. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But as there are many kinds of men, so there are many kinds of writing. Do not judge your pupil too hastily. He too may yet be visited by the Muse.’
While Foe and I spoke, Friday had settled himself on his mat with the slate. Glancing over his shoulder, I saw he was filling it with a design of, as it seemed, leaves and flowers. But when I came closer I saw the leaves were eyes, open eyes, each set upon a human foot: row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes.
I reached out to take the slate, to show it to Foe, but Friday held tight to it. ‘Give! Give me the slate, Friday!’ I commanded. Whereupon, instead of obeying me, Friday put three fingers into his mouth and wet them with spittle and rubbed the slate clean.
I drew back in disgust. ‘Mr Foe, I must have my freedom!’ I cried. ‘It is becoming more than I can bear! It is worse than the island! He is like the old man of the river!’
Foe tried to soothe me. ‘The old man of the river,’ he murmured – ‘I believe I do not know whom you mean.’
‘It is a story, nothing but a story,’ I replied. ‘There was once a fellow who took pity on an old man waiting at the riverside, and offered to carry him across. Having borne him safely through the flood, he knelt to set him down on the other side. But the old man would not leave his shoulders: no, he tightened his knees about his deliverer’s neck and beat him on his flanks and, to be short, turned him into a beast of burden. He took the very food from his mouth, and would have ridden him to his death had he not saved himself by a ruse.’
‘I recognize the story now. It was one of the adventures of Sinbad of Persia.’
‘So be it: I am Sinbad of Persia and Friday is the tyrant riding on my shoulders. I walk with him, I eat with him, he watches me while I sleep. If I cannot be free of him I will stifle!’
‘Sweet Susan, do not fly into a passion. Though you say you are the ass and Friday the rider, you may be sure that if Friday had his tongue back he would claim the contrary. We deplore the barbarism of whoever maimed him, yet have we, his later masters, not reason to be secretly grateful? For as long as he is dumb we can tell ourselves his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him as we wish.’
‘Friday’s desires are not dark to me. He desires to be liberated, as I do too. Our desires are plain, his and mine. But how is Friday to recover his freedom, who has been a slave all his life? That is the true question. Should I liberate him into a world of wolves and expect to be commended for it? What liberation is it to be packed off to Jamaica, or turned out of doors into the night with a shilling in your hand? Even in his native Africa, dumb and friendless, would he know freedom? There is an urging that we feel, all of us, in our hearts, to be free; yet which of us can say what freedom truly is? When I am rid of Friday, will I then know freedom? Was Cruso free, that was despot of an island all his own? If so, it brought no joy to him that I could discover. As to Friday, how can Friday know what freedom means when he barely knows his name?’
‘There is not need for us to know what freedom means, Susan. Freedom is a word like any word. It is a puff of air, seven letters on a slate. It is but the name we give to the desire you speak of, the desire to be free. What concerns us is the desire, not the name. Because we cannot say in words what an apple is, it is not forbidden us to eat the apple. It is enough that we know the names of our needs and are able to use these names to satisfy them, as we use coins to buy food when we are hungry. It is no great task to teach Friday such language as will serve his needs. We are not asked to turn Friday into a philosopher.’
‘You speak as Cruso used to speak, Mr Foe, when he taught Friday Fetch and Dig. But as there are not two kinds of man, Englishman and savage, so the urgings of Friday’s heart will not be answered by Fetch or Dig or Apple, or even by Ship and Africa. There will always be a voice in him to whisper doubts, whether in words or nameless sounds or tunes or tones.’
‘If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, H onour, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain. They are words without a home, wanderers like the planets, and that is an end of it. But you must ask yourself, Susan: as it was a slaver’s stratagem to rob Friday of his tongue, may it not be a slaver’s stratagem 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?’
‘I am no slave-owner, Mr Foe. And before you think to yourself: Spoken like a true slave-owner!, should you not beware? As long as you close your ears to me, mistrusting every word I say as a word of slavery, poisoned, do you serve me any better than the slavers served Friday when they robbed him of his tongue?’
‘I would not rob you of your tongue for anything, Susan. Leave Friday here for the afternoon. Go for a stroll. Take the air. See the sights. I am sadly enclosed. Be my spy. Come back and report to me how the world does.’
So I went for a stroll, and in the bustle of the streets began to recover my humour. I was wrong, I knew, to blame my state on Friday. If he was not a slave, was he nevertheless not the helpless captive of my desire to have our story told? How did he differ from one of the wild Indians whom explorers bring back with them, in a cargo of parakeets and golden idols and indigo and skins of panthers, to show they have truly been to the Americas? And might not Foe be a kind of captive too? I had thought him dilatory. But might the truth not be instead that he had laboured all these months to move a rock so heavy no man alive could budge it; that the pages I saw issuing from his pen were not idle tales of courtesans and grenadiers, as I supposed, but the same story over and over, in version after version, stillborn every time: the story of the island, as lifeless from his hand as from mine?
‘Mr Foe,’ I said, ‘I have come to a resolution.’
But the man seated at the table was not Foe. It was Friday, with Foe’s robes on his back and Foe’s wig, filthy as a bird?
??s nest, on his head. In his hand, poised over Foe’s papers, he held a quill with a drop of black ink glistening at its tip. I gave a cry and sprang forward to snatch it away. But at that moment Foe spoke from the bed where he lay. ‘Let him be, Susan,’ he said in a tired voice: ‘he is accustoming himself to his tools, it is part of learning to write.’ ‘He will foul your papers,’ I cried. ‘My papers are foul enough, he can make them no worse,’ he replied – ‘Come and sit with me.’
So I sat down beside Foe. In the cruel light of day I could not but mark the grubby sheets on which he lay, his long dirty fingernails, the heavy bags under his eyes.
‘An old whore,’ said Foe, as if reading my thoughts – ‘An old whore who should ply her trade only in the dark.’
‘Do not say that,’ I protested. ‘It is not whoring to entertain other people’s stories and return them to the world better dressed. If there were not authors to perform such an office, the world would be all the poorer. Am I to damn you as a whore for welcoming me and embracing me and receiving my story? You gave me a home when I had none. I think of you as a mistress, or even, if I dare speak the word, as a wife.’
‘Before you declare yourself too freely, Susan, wait to see what fruit I bear. But since we speak of childbearing, has the time not come to tell me the truth about your own child, the daughter lost in 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, the girl who calls herself by my name – is she substantial?’
‘You touch her; you embrace her; you kiss her. Would you dare to say she is not substantial?’
‘No, she is substantial, as my daughter is substantial and I am substantial; and you too 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.’
I turned back to Friday, still busy at his writing. The paper before him was heavily smudged, as by a child unused to the pen, but there was writing on it, writing of a kind, rows and rows of the letter o tightly packed together. A second page lay at his elbow, fully written over, and it was the same.