‘Friday and his dancing: I may bemoan the tedium of life in your house, but there is never a lack of things to write of. It is as though animalcules of words lie dissolved in your ink-well, ready to be dipped up and flow from the pen and take form on the paper. F ram downstairs to upstairs, from house to island, from the girl to Friday: it seems necessary only to establish the poles, the here and the there, the now and the then after that the words of themselves do the journeying. I had not guessed it was so easy to be an author.
‘You will find the house very bare on your return. First the bailiffs plundered it (I cannot use a kinder term), and now I too have been taking odds and ends (I keep an inventory, you have only to ask and I will send it). Unhappily I am forced to sell in the quarters where thieves sell, and to accept the prices· thieves receive. On my excursions I wear a black dress and bonnet I found upstairs in the trunk with the initials M.J. on the lid (who is M.J.?). In this garb I become older than my years: as I picture myself, a widow of forty in straitened circumstances. Yet despite my precautions I lie awake at night picturing how I might be seized by some rapacious shopkeeper and held for the constables, till I am forced to give away your candlesticks as a bribe for my freedom.
‘Last week I sold the one mirror not taken by the bailiffs, the little mirror with the gilt frame that stood on your cabinet. Dare I confess I am happy it is gone? How I have aged! In Bahia the sallow Portuguese . women would not believe I had a grown daughter. But life with Cruso put lines on my brow, and the house of Foe has only deepened them. Is your house a eyes in one reign and wake in another with long white beards? Brazil seems as far away as the age of Arthur. Is it possible I have a daughter there, growing farther from me every day, as I from her? Do the clocks of Brazil run at the same pace as ours? While I grow old, does she remain forever young? And how has it come about that in the day of the twopenny post I share a house with a man from the darkest times of barbarism? So many questions!’
‘Dear Mr Foe,
‘I am growing to understand why you wanted Cruso to have a musket and be besieged by cannibals. I thought it was a sign you had no regard for the truth. 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 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 dosing in pleasure as they chew the tasty fat of their neighbours. I shiver. For surely eating human flesh is like falling into sin: having fallen once you discover in yourself a taste for it, and fall all the more readily thereafter. I shiver as I watch Friday dancing in the kitchen, with his robes whirling about him and the wig flapping on his head, and his eyes shut and his thoughts far away, not on the island, you may be sure, not on the pleasures of digging and carrying, but on the time before, when he was a savage among savages. Is it not only a matter of time before the new Friday whom Cruso created is sloughed off and the old Friday of the cannibal forests returns? Have I misjudged Cruso all this time: was it to punish him for his sins that he cut out Friday’s tongue? Better had he drawn his teeth instead!’
‘Searching through a chest of drawers some days ago for items to take to market, I came across a case of recorders you must once have played: perhaps you played the big bass recorder while your sons and daughters played the smaller ones. (What has happened to your sons and daughters? Could they not be trusted to shelter you from the law?) I took out the smallest of these, the soprano, and set it aside where Friday would find it. The next morning I heard him toying with it; soon he had so far mastered it as to play the tune of six notes I will forever associate with the island and Cruso’s first sickness. This he played over and over all morning. When I came to remonstrate, I found him spinning slowly around with the flute to his lips and his eyes shut; he paid no heed to me, perhaps not even hearing my words. How like a savage to master a strange instrument — to the extent that he is able without a tongue — and then be content forever to play one tune upon it! It is a form of incuriosity, is it not, a form of sloth. But I digress.
‘While I was polishing the bass flute, and idly blowing a few notes upon it, it occurred to me that if there were any language accessible to Friday, it would be the language of music. So I closed the door and practised the blowing and the fingering as I had seen people do, till I could play Friday’s little tune tolerably well, and one or two others, to my ear more melodious. All the while I was playing, which I did in the dark, to spare the candle, Friday lay awake downstairs in his own dark listening to the deeper tones of my flute, the like of which he could never have heard before.
‘When Friday commenced his dancing and fluteplaying this morning, I was ready: I sat upstairs on my bed, my legs crossed, and played Friday’s tune, first in unison with him, then in the intervals when he was not playing; and went on playing as long as he did, till my hands ached and my head reeled. The music we made was not pleasing: there was a subtle discord all the time, though we seemed to be playing the same notes. Yet our instruments were made to play together, else why were they in the same case?
‘When Friday fell silent awhile, I came downstairs to the kitchen. “So, Friday,” I said, and smiled — “we are become musicians together.” And I raised my flute and blew his tune again, till a kind of contentment came over me. I thought: It is true, I am not conversing with Friday, but is this not as good? Is conversation not simply a species of music in which first the one takes up the refrain and then the other? Does it matter what the refrain of our conversation is any more than it matters what tune it is we play? And I asked myself further: Are not both music and conversation like love? Who would venture to say that what passes between lovers is of substance (I refer to their lovemaking, not their talk), yet is it not true that something is passed between them, back and forth, and they come away refreshed and healed for a while of their loneliness? As long as I have music in common with Friday, perhaps he and I will need no language. And if there had been music on our island, if Friday and I had filled the evening with melody, perchance who can say? — Cruso might at last have relented, and picked up the third pipe, and learned to finger it, if his fingers had not by then been too stiff, and the three of us might have become a consort (from which you may conclude, Mr Foe, that what we needed from the wreck was not a chest of tools but a case of flutes).
‘For that hour in your kitchen I believe I was at ease with the life that has befallen me.
‘But alas, just as we cannot exchange forever the same utterances — “Good day, sir” — “Good day” — and believe we are conversing, or perform forever the same motion and call it lovemaking, so it is with music: we cannot forever play the same tune and be content. Or so at least it is with civilized people. Thus at last I could not restrain myself from varying the tune, first making one note into two half-notes, then changing two of the notes entirely, turning it into a new tune and a pretty one too, so fresh to my ear that I was sure Friday would follow me. But no, Friday persisted in the old tune, and the two tunes played together formed no pleasing counterpoint, but on the contrary jangled and jarred. Did Friday in truth so much as hear me. I began to wonder? I ceased playing. and his eyes (which were always closed when he did his flute-playing and spinning) did not open; I blew long blasts and the lids did not so much as flutter. So now I knew that all the time I had stood there playing to Friday’s dancing. thinking he and I made a consort, he had been insensible of me. And indeed. when I stepped forward in some pique and grasped at him to halt the infernal spinning. he seemed to feel my touch no more than if it had been a fly’s; from which “I concluded that he was in a trance of possession. and his soul more in Africa than in Newington. Tears came to my eyes, I am ashamed to say; all the elation of my discovery that through the medium of music I might at last converse with Friday was dashed. and bitterly I began to recognize that it might not be mere dullness that kept him shut up in himself. nor the accident of the loss of his tongue, nor even an incapacity to distinguish speech from babbling. but a disdain for intercourse with me. Watching him whirling in his dance. I had to hold back an urge to strike him and tear the wig and robes away and thus rudely teach him he was not alone on this earth.
‘Had I struck Friday. I now ask myself. would he have borne the blow meekly? Cruso never chastised him that I saw. Had the cutting out of his tongue taught him eternal obedience. or at least the outward form of obedience. as gelding takes the fire out of a stallion?’
‘Dear Mr Foe,
‘I have written a deed granting Friday his freedom and signed it in Cruso’s name. This I have sewn into a little bag and hung on a cord around Friday’s neck.
‘If Friday is not mine to set free, whose is he? No man can be the slave of a dead hand. If Cruso had a widow, I am she; if there are two widows, I am the first. What life do I live but that of Cruso’s widow? On Cruso’s island I was washed ashore; from that all else has flowed. I am the woman washed ashore.
