‘Can you not take us into your house? Why do you keep me apart? Can you not take me in as your close servant, and Friday as your gardener?
‘I climb the staircase (it is a tall house, tall and airy, with many flights of stairs) and tap at the door. You are sitting at a table with your back to me, a rug over your knees, your feet in pantoufles, gazing out over the fields, thinking, stroking your chin with your pen, waiting for me to set down the tray and withdraw. On the tray are a glassful of hot water into which I have squeezed a citron, and two slices of buttered toast. You call it your first breakfast.
‘The room is barely furnished. The truth is, it is not a room but a part of the attic to which you remove yourself for the sake of silence. The table and chair stand on a platform of boards before the window. From the door of the attic to this platform, boards are laid to form a narrow walk-way. Otherwise there are only the ceiling-boards, on which one treads at one’s peril, and the rafters, and overhead the grey rooftiles. Dust lies thick on the floor; when the wind gusts under the eaves there are flurries in the dust, and from the corners moaning noises. There are mice too. Before you go downstairs you must shut your papers away to preserve them from the mice. In the mornings you brush mousedroppings from the table.
‘There is a ripple in the window-pane. Moving your head, you can make the ripple travel over the cows grazing in the pasture, over the ploughed land beyond, over the line of poplars, and up into the sky.
‘I think of you as a steersman steering the great hulk of the house through the nights and days, peering ahead for signs of storm.
‘Your papers are kept in a chest beside the table. The story of Cruso’s island will go there page by page as you write it, to lie with a heap of other papers: a census of the beggars of London, bills of mortality from the time of the great plague, accounts of travels in the border country, reports of strange and surprising apparitions, records of the wool trade, a memorial of the life and opinions of Dickory Cronke (who is he?); also books of voyages to the New World, memoirs of captivity among the Moors, chronicles of the wars in the Low Countries, confessions of notorious lawbreakers, and a multitude of castaway narratives, most of them, I would guess, riddled with lies.
‘When I was on the island I longed only to be elsewhere, or, in the word I then used, to be saved. But now a longing stirs in me I never thought I would feel. I close my eyes and my soul takes leave of me, flying over the houses and streets, the woods and pastures, back to our old home, Cruso’s and mine. You will not understand this longing, after all I have said of the tedium of our life there. Perhaps I should have written more about the pleasure I took in walking barefoot in the cool sand of the compound, more about the birds, the little birds of many varieties whose names I never knew, whom I called sparrows for want of a better name. Who but Cruso, who is no more, could truly tell you Cruso’s story? I should have said less about him, more about myself. How, to begin with, did my daughter come to be lost, and how, following her, did I reach Bahia? How did I survive among strangers those two long years? Did I live only in a rooming-house, as I have said? Was Bahia an island in the ocean of the Brazilian forest, and my room a lonely island in Bahia? Who was the captain whose fate it became to drift forever in the southemmost seas, clothed in ice? I brought back not a feather, not a thimbleful of sand, from Cruso’s island. All I have is my sandals. 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: a 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, I longed. The island was Cruso’s (yet by what right? by the law of islands? is there such a law?), but I lived there too, I was no bird of passage, no gannet or albatross, to circle the island once and dip a wing and then fly on over the boundless ocean. 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.
‘In my letter yesterday I may have seemed to mock the art of writing. I ask your pardon, I was unjust. Believe me, there are times when, as I think of you labouring in your attic to bring life to your thieves and courtesans and grenadiers, my heart aches with pity and I long only to be of .service. I think of you (forgive me the figure) as a beast of burden, and your house as a great wagon you are condemned to haul, a wagon full of tables and chairs and wardrobes, and on top of these a wife (I do not even know whether you have a wife!) and ungrateful children and idle servants and cats and dogs, all eating your victuals, burning your coal, yawning and laughing, careless of your toil. In the early mornings, lying in my warm bed, I seem to hear the shuffle of your footsteps as, draped in a rug, you climb the stairs to your attic. You seat yourself, your breathing is heavy, you light the lamp, you pinch your eyes shut and begin to grope your way back to where you were last night~ through the dark and cold, through the rain, over fields where sheep lie huddled together, over forests, over the seas, to Flanders or wherever it is that your captains and grenadiers must now too begin to stir and set about the next day in their lives, while from the corners of the attic the mice stare at you, twitching their whiskers. Even on Sundays the work proceeds, as though whole regiments of foot would sink into everlasting sleep were they not roused daily and sent into action. In the throes of a chill you plod on, wrapped in scarves, blowing your nose, hawking, spitting. Sometimes you are so weary that the candlelight swims before your eyes. You lay your head on your arms and in a moment are asleep, a black stripe across the paper where the pen slips from your grasp. Your mouth sags open, you snore softly, you smell (forgive me a second time) like an old man. How I wish it were in my power to help you, Mr Foe! Closing my eyes, I gather my strength and send out a vision of the island to hang before you like a substantial body, with birds and fleas and fish of all hues and lizards basking in the sun, flicking out their black tongues, and rocks covered in barnacles, and rain drumming on the roof fronds, and wind, unceasing wind: so that it will be there for you to draw on whenever you have need.’
‘You asked how it was that Cruso did not save a single musket from the wreck; why a man so fearful of cannibals should have neglected to arm himself.
‘Cruso never showed me where the wreck lay, but it is my conviction that it lay, and lies still, in the deep water below the cliffs in the north of the island. At the height of the storm Cruso leapt overboard with the youthful Friday at his side, and other shipmates too, it may be; but they two alone were saved, by a great wave that caught them up and bore them ashore. Now I ask: Who can keep powder dry in the belly of a wave? Furthermore: Why should a man endeavour to save a musket when he barely hopes to save his own life? As for cannibals, I am not persuaded, despite Cruso’s fears, that there are cannibals in those oceans. You may with right reply that, as we do not expect to see sharks dancing in the waves, so we should not expect to see cannibals dancing on the strand; that cannibals belong to the night as sharks belong to the depths. All I say is: What I saw, I wrote. I saw no cannibals; and if they came after nightfall and fled before the dawn, they left no footprint behind.
‘I dreamed last night of Cruso’s death, and woke with tears coursing down my cheeks. So I lay a long while, the grief not lifting from my heart. Then I went downstairs to our little courtyard off Clock Lane. It was not yet light; the sky was clear. Under these same tranquil stars, I thought, floats the island where we lived; and on that island is a hut, and in that hut a bed of soft grass which perhaps still bears the imprint, fainter every day, of my body. Day by day the wind picks at the roof and the weeds creep across the terraces. In a year, in ten years, there will be nothing left standing but a circle of sticks to mark the place where the hut stood, and of the terraces only the walls. And of the walls they will say, These arc cannibal walls, the ruins of a cannibal city, from the golden age of the cannibals. For who will belie.ve they were built by one man and a slave, in the hope that one day a seafarer would come with a sack of corn for them to sow?
‘You remarked it would have been better had Cruso rescued not only musket and powder and ball, but a carpenter’s chest as well, and built himself a boat. I do not wish to be captious, but we lived on an island so buffeted by the wind that there was not a tree did not grow twisted and bent. We might have built a raft, a crooked kind of raft, but never a boat.
‘You asked also after Cruso’s apeskin clothes. Alas, these were taken from our cabin and tossed overboard by ignorant sailors. If you so desire, I will make sketches of us as we were on the island, wearing the clothes we wore.
‘The sailor’s blouse and pantaloons I wore on board ship I have given to Friday. Moreover he has his jerkin and his watch-coat. His cellar gives on to the yard, so he is free to wander as he pleases. But he rarely goes abroad, being too fearful. How he fills his time I do not know, for the cellar is bare save for his cot and the coal-bin
