‘“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.
‘“And then there is the final mystery: What were you about when you paddled out to sea upon your log and scattered petals on the water? I will tell you what I have concluded: that you scattered the petals over the place where your ship went down, and scattered them in memory of some person who perished in the wreck, perhaps a father or a mother or a sister or a brother, or perhaps a whole family, or perhaps a dear friend. On the sorrows of Friday, I once thought to tell Mr Foe, but did not, a story entire of itself might be built; whereas from the indifference of Cruso there is little to be squeezed.
“‘I must go, Friday. You thought that carrying stones was the hardest of labours. But when you see me at Mr Foe’s desk making marks with the quill, think of each mark as a stone, and think of the paper as the island, and imagine that I must disperse the stones over the face of the island, and when that is done and the taskmaster is not satisfied (was Cruso ever satisfied with your labours?) must pick them up again (which, in the figure, is scoring out the marks) and dispose them according to another scheme, and so forth, day after day; all of this because Mr Foe has run away from his debts. Sometimes I believe it is I who have become the slave. No doubt you would smile, if you could understand.”’
‘Days pass. Nothing changes. We hear no word from you, and the townsfolk pay us no more heed than if we were ghosts. I have been once to Dalston market, taking a tablecloth and a case of spoons, which I sold
to buy necessaries. Otherwise we exist by the produce of your garden. ‘The girl has resumed her station at the gate. I try to ignore her.
‘Writing proves a slow business. After the flurry of the mutiny and the death of the Portuguese captain, after I have met Cruso and come to know somewhat of the life he leads, what is there to say? There was too little desire in Cruso and Friday: too little desire to escape, too little desire for a new life. Without desire how is it possible to make a story? It was an island of sloth, despite the terracing. I ask myself what past historians of the castaway state have done — whether in despair they have not begun to make up lies.
‘Yet I persevere. A painter engaged to paint a dull scene — let us say two men digging in a field — has means at hand to lend allure to his subject. He can set the golden hues of the first man’s skin against the sooty hues of the second’s, creating a play of light against dark. By artfully representing their attitudes he can indicate which is master, which slave. And to render his composition more lively he is at liberty to bring into it what may not be there on the day he paints but may be there on other days, such as a pair of gulls wheeling overhead, the beak of one parted in a cry, and in one corner, upon a faraway crag, a band of apes.
‘Thus we see the painter selecting and composing and rendering particulars in order to body forth a pleasing fullness in his scene. The storyteller, by contrast (forgive me, I would not lecture you on storytelling if you were here in the flesh!), must divine which episodes of his history hold promise of fullness, and tease from them their hidden meanings, braiding these together as one braids a rope.
‘Teasing and braiding can, like any craft, be learned. But as to determining which episodes hold promise (as oysters hold pearls), it is not without justice that this art is called divining. Here the writer can of himself effect nothing: he must wait on the grace of illumination. Had I known, on the island, that it would one day fall to me to be our storyteller, I would have been more zealous to interrogate Cruso. “Cast your thoughts back, Cruso,” I would have said, as I lay beside him in the dark — “Can you recall no moment at which the purpose of our life here has been all at once illuminated? As you have walked on the hillsides or clambered on the cliffs in quest of eggs, have you never been struck of a sudden by the living, breathing quality of this island, as if it were some great beast from before the Flood that has slept through the centuries insensible of the insects scurrying on its back, scratching an existence for themselves? Are we insects, Cruso, in the greater view? Are we no better than the ants?” Or when he lay dying on the Hobart I might have said: “Cruso, you are leaving us behind, you are going where we cannot follow you. Is there no last word you wish to speak, from the vantage of one departing? Is there not something you wish to confess?”’