become your fate? Where are you to meet a woman of your own people? We are not a nation rich in slaves. I think of a watch-dog, raised with kindness but kept from birth behind a locked gate. When at last such a dog escapes, the gate having been left open, let us say, the world appears to it so vast, so strange, so full of troubling sights and smells, that it snarls at the first creature to approach, and leaps at its throat, after which it is marked down as vicious, and chained to a post for the rest of its days. I do not say that you are vicious, Friday, I do not say that you will ever be chained, that is not the import of my story. Rather I wish to point to how· unnatural a lot it is for a dog or any other creature to be kept from its kind; also to how the impulse of love, which urges us toward our own kind, perishes during confinement, or loses its way. Alas, my stories seem always to have more applications than I intend, so that I must go back and laboriously extract the right application and apologize for the wrong ones and efface them. Some people are born storytellers; I, it would seem, am not.
‘“And can we be sure that Mr Foe, whose house this is, whom you have never met, to whom I entrusted the story of the island, did not weeks ago pass away in a hiding-hole in Shoreditch? If so, we shall be forever obscure. His house will be sold under our feet to pay the creditors. There will be no more garden. You will never see Africa. The chill of winter will return, and you will have to wear shoes. Where in England will we find a last broad enough for your feet?
‘“Or else I must assume the burden of our story. But what shall I write? You know how dull our life was, in truth. We faced no perils, no ravenous beasts, not even serpents. Food was plentiful, the sun was mild. No pirates landed on our shores, no freebooters, no cannibals save yourself, if you can be called a cannibal. Did Cruso truly believe, I wonder, that you were once a cannibal child? Was it his dark fear that the craving for human flesh would come back to you, that you would one night slit his throat and roast his liver and eat it? Was his talk of cannibals rowing from island to island in search of meat a warning, a masked warning, against you and your appetites? When you showed your fine white teeth, did Cruso’s heart quail? How I wish you could answer!
‘“Yet, all in all, I think the answer must be No. Surely Cruso must have felt the tedium of life on the island as keenly in his way as I did in mine, and perhaps you in yours, and therefore have made up the roving cannibals to spur himself to vigilance. For the danger of island life, the danger of which Cruso said never a word, was the danger of abiding sleep. How easy it would have been to prolong our slumbers farther and farther into the hours of daylight till at last, locked tight in sleep’s embrace, we starved to death (I allude to Cruso and myself, but is the sleeping sickness not also one of the scourges of Africa?).! Does it not speak volumes that the first and only piece of furniture your master fashioned was a bed? How different would it not have been had he built a table and stool, and extended his ingenuity to the manufacture of ink and writing-tablets, and then sat down to keep an authentic journal of his exile day by day, which we might have brought back to England with us, and sold to a bookseller, and so saved ourselves this embroilment with Mr Foe!
‘“Alas, we will never make our fortunes, Friday, by being merely what we are, or were. Think of the spectacle we offer: your master and you on the terraces, I on the cliffs watching for a sail. Who would wish to read that there were once two dull fellows on a rock in the sea who filled their time by digging up stones? As for me and my yearnings for salvation, one is as soon sated with yearning as one is with sugar. We begin to understand why Mr Foe pricked up his ears when he heard the word
‘“But it grows late and there is much to do before nightfall. Are we the only folk in England, I wonder, without lamp or candle? Surely this is an extraordinary existence we lead! For let me assure you, Friday, this is not how Englishmen live. They do not eat carrots morning, noon and night, and live indoors like moles, and go to sleep when the sun sets. Let us only grow rich and I will show you how different living in England can be from living on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Tomorrow, Friday, tomorrow I must settle down to my writing, before the bailiffs come back to expel us, and we have neither carrots to eat nor beds to sleep in.
‘“Yet despite what I say, the story of the island was not all tedium and waiting. There were touches of mystery too, were there not?
‘“First, the terraces. How many stones did you and your master move? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? On an island without seed, would you and he not have been as fruitfully occupied in watering the stones where they lay and waiting for them to sprout? If your master had truly wished to be a colonist and leave behind a colony, would he not have been better advised (dare I say this?) to plant his seed in the only womb there was? The farther I journey from his terraces, the less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like tombs: those tombs the emperors of Egypt erected for themselves in the desert, in the building of which so many slaves lost their lives. Has that likeness ever occurred to you, Friday; or did news of the emperors of Egypt not reach your part of Africa?
‘“Second (I continue to name the mysteries): how did you come to lose your tongue? Your master says the slavers cut it out; but I have never heard of such a practice, nor did I ever meet a slave in Brazil who was dumb. Is the truth that your master cut it out himself and blamed the slavers? If so it was truly an unnatural crime, like chancing upon a stranger and slaying him for no other cause than to keep him from telling the world who slew him. And how would your master have accomplished it? Surely no slave is so slavish as to offer up his parts to the knife. Did Cruso bind you hand and foot and force a block of wood between your teeth and then hack out your tongue? Is that how the act was done? A knife, let us remember, was the sole tool Cruso saved from the wreck. But where did he find the rope with which to bind you? Did he commit the crime while you slept, thrusting his fist into your mouth and cutting out your tongue while you were still befuddled? Or was there some berry native to the island whose juice, smuggled into your food, sent you into a deathlike sleep? Did Cruso cut out your tongue while you were insensible? But how did he staunch the bleeding stump? Why did you not choke on your blood?
‘“Unless your tongue was not cut off but merely
.split, with a cut as neat as a surgeon’s, that drew little blood yet made speech ever afterward impossible. Or let us say the sinews that move the tongue were cut and not the tongue itself, the sinews at the base of the tongue. I guess merely, I have not looked into your mouth. When your master asked me to look, I would not. An aversion came over me that we feel for all the mutilated. Why is that so, do you think? Because they put us in mind of what we would rather forget: how easily, at the stroke of a sword or a knife, wholeness and beauty are forever undone? Perhaps. But toward you I felt a deeper revulsion. I could not put out of mind the softness of the tongue, its softness and wetness, and the fact that it does not live in the light; also how helpless it is before the knife, once the barrier of the teeth has been passed. The tongue is like the heart, in that way, is it not? Save that we do not die when a knife pierces the tongue. To that degree we may say the tongue belongs to the world of play, whereas the heart belongs to the world of earnest.
‘“Yet it is not the heart but the members of play that elevate us above the beasts: the fingers with which we touch the clavichord or the flute, the tongue with which we jest and lie and seduce. Lacking members of play, what is there left for beasts to do when they are bored but sleep?
‘“And then there is the mystery of your submission. Why, during all those years alone with Cruso, did you submit to his rule, when you might easily have slain him, or blinded him and made him into your slave in turn? Is there something in the condition of slavehood that invades the heart and makes a slave a slave for life, a:s the whiff of ink clings forever to a schoolmaster?
‘“Then, if I may be plain — and why may I not be plain, since talking to you is like talking to the walls? — why did you not desire me, neither you nor your master? A woman is cast ashore on your island, a tall woman with black hair and dark eyes, till a few hours past the companion of a sea-captain besotted with love of her. Surely desires kept banked for many years must have flamed up within you. Why did I not catch you stealing glances from behind a rock while I bathed? Do tall women who rise up out of the sea dismay you? Do they seem like exiled queens come to reclaim the islands men have stolen from them? But perhaps I am unjust, perhaps that is a question for Cruso alone; for what have you ever stolen in your life, you who are yourself stolen? Nevertheless, did Cruso in his way and do you in your way believe I came to claim dominion over you, and is that why you were wary of me?
‘“I ask these questions because they are the questions any reader of our story will ask. I had no thought, when I was washed ashore, of becoming a castaway’s wife. But the reader is bound to ask why it was that, in all the nights I shared your master’s hut, he and I did not come together more than once as man and woman do. Is the answer that our island was not a garden of desire, like that in which our first parents went naked, and coupled as innocently as beasts? I believe your master would have had it be a garden of labour; but, lacking a worthy object for his labours, descended to carrying stones, as ants carry grains of sand to and fro for want of better occupation.
