Foe (18 page)

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 Sin bad 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
,
Honour
,
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.

'Is
Friday learning to write?' asked Foe.

'He
is writing, after a fashion,' I said. 'He is writing the letter
o
.'

'It
is a beginning,' said Foe. 'Tomorrow you must teach him
a
.'

IV

T
he
staircase is dark and mean. On the landing I stumble over a body. It
does not stir, it makes no sound. By the light of a match I make out
a woman or a girl, her feet drawn up inside a long grey dress, her
hands folded under her armpits; or is it that her limbs are
unnaturally short, the stunted limbs of a cripple? Her face is
wrapped in a grey woollen scarf. I begin to unwrap it, but the scarf
is endless. Her head lolls. She weighs no more than a sack of straw.

The
door is not locked. Through a solitary window moonlight floods the
room. There is a quick scurrying across the floor, a mouse or a rat.

They
lie side by side in bed, not touching. The skin, dry as paper, is
stretched tight over their bones. Their lips have receded, uncovering
their teeth, so that they seem to be smiling. Their eyes are closed.

I
draw the covers back, holding my breath, expecting disturbance, dust,
decay; but they are quietly composed, he in a nightshirt, she in her
shift. There is even a faint smell of lilac.

At
the first tug the curtain across the alcove tears. The corner is in
pitch darkness, and in the air of this room my matches will not
strike. Kneeling, groping, I find the man Friday stretched at full
length on his back. I touch his feet, which are hard as wood, then
feel my way up the soft, heavy stuff in which his body is wrapped, to
his face.