‘We therefore have five parts in alclass="underline" the loss of the daughter; the quest for the daughter in Brazil; abandonment of the quest, and the adventure of the island; assumption of the quest by the daughter; and reunion of the daughter with her mother. It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end. As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode — which is properly the second part of the middle — and by the reversal in which the daughter takes up the quest abandoned by her mother.’
All the joy I had felt in finding my way to Foe fled me. I sat heavy-limbed.
‘The island is not a story in itself,’ said Foe gently, laying a hand on my knee. ‘We can bring it to life only by setting it within a larger story. By itself it is no better than a waterlogged boat drifting day after day in an empty ocean till one day, humbly and without commotion, it sinks. The island lacks light and shade. It is too much the same throughout. It is like a loaf of bread. It will keep us alive, certainly, if we are starved of reading; but who will prefer it when there are tastier confections and pastries to be had?’
‘In the letters you did not read,’ I said, ‘I told you of my conviction that, if the story seems stupid, that is only because it so doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday’s tongue.’
Foe made no reply, and I went on. ‘The story of Friday’s tongue is a story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me. That is to say, many stories can be told of Friday’s tongue, but the true story is buried within Friday, who is mute. The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday.
‘Mr Foe,’ I proceeded, speaking with gathering difficulty, ‘when I lived in your house I would sometimes lie awake upstairs listening to the pulse of blood in my ears and to the silence from Friday below, a silence that rose up the stairway like smoke, like a welling of black smoke. Before long I could not breathe, I would feel I was stifling in my bed. My lungs, my heart, my head were full of black smoke. I had to spring up and open the curtains and put my head outside and breathe fresh air and see for myself that there were stars still in the sky.
‘In my letters I have told you the story of Friday’s dancing. But I have not told you the whole story.
‘After Friday discovered your robes and wig and took them as his livery, he would spend entire days spinning and dancing and singing, after his fashion. What I did not tell you was that for his dancing he would wear nothing but the robes and wig. When he stood still he was covered to the ankles; but when he spun, the robes would stand out stiffly about him, so much so that one might have supposed the purpose of his dancing was to show forth the nakedness underneath.
‘Now when Cruso told me that the slavers were in the habit of cutting out the tongues of their prisoners to make them more tractable, I confess I wondered whether he might not be employing a figure, for the sake of delicacy: whether the lost tongue might stand not only for itself but for a more atrocious mutilation; whether by a dumb slave I was to understand a slave unmanned.
‘When I heard the humming that first morning and came to the door and was met with the spectacle of Friday at his dancing with his robes flying about him, I was so confounded that I gaped without shame at what had hitherto been veiled from me. For though I had seen Friday naked before, it had been only from a distance: on our island we had observed the decencies as far as we could, Friday not least of us.
‘I have told you of the abhorrence I felt when Cruso opened Friday’s mouth to show me he had no tongue. What Cruso wanted me to see, what I averted my eyes from seeing, was the thick stub at the back of the mouth, which ever afterwards I pictured to myself wagging and straining under the sway of emotion as Friday tried to utter himself, like a worm cut in half contorting itself in death-throes. From that night on I had continually to fear that evidence of a yet more hideous mutilation might be thrust upon my sight.
‘In the dance nothing was still and yet everything was still. The whirling robe was a scarlet bell settled upon Friday’s shoulders and enclosing him; Friday was the dark pillar at its centre. What had been hidden from me was revealed. I saw; or, I should say, my eyes were open to what was present to them.
‘I saw and believed I had seen, though afterwards I remembered Thomas, who also saw, but could not be brought to believe till he had put his hand in the wound.
‘I do not know how these matters can be written of in a book unless they are covered up again in figures. When I first heard of you I was told you were a very secret man, a clergyman of sorts, who in the course of your work heard the darkest of confessions from the most desperate of penitents. I will not kneel before him like one of his gallows-birds, I vowed, with a mouth full of unspeakable confidences: I will say in plain terms what can be said and leave unsaid what cannot. Yet here I am pouring out my darkest secrets to you! You are like one of those notorious libertines whom women arm themselves against, but against whom they are at last powerless, his very notoriety being the seducer’s shrewdest weapon.’
‘You have not told me all I need to know of Bahia,’ said Foe.
‘I told myself (have I not confessed this before?): He is like the patient spider who sits at the heart of his web waiting for his prey to come to him. And when we struggle in his grasp, and he opens his jaws to devour us, and with our last breath we cry out, he smiles a thin smile and says: “I did not ask you to come visiting, you came of your own will.” ‘
A long pause fell between us. ‘Tossed on shores I never thought to visit’ — the words came to me unbidden. What was their meaning? From the street below came the noise of a woman scolding. On and on went her tirade. I smiled — I could not help myself — and Foe smiled too.
‘As for Bahia,’ I resumed, ‘it is by choice that I say so little of it. The story I desire to be known by is the story of the island. You call it an episode, but I call it a story in its own right. It commences with my being cast away there and concludes with the death of Cruso and the return of Friday and myself to England, full of new hope. Within this larger story are inset the stories of how I came to be marooned (told by myself to Cruso) and of Cruso’s shipwreck and early years on the island (told by Cruso to myself), as well as the story of Friday, which is properly not a story but a puzzle or hole in the narrative (I picture it as a buttonhole, ·carefully cross-stitched around, but empty, waiting for the button). Taken in all, it is a narrative with a beginning and an end, and with pleasing digressions too, lacking only a substantial and varied middle, in the place where Cruso spent too much time “tilling the terraces and I too much time tramping the shores. Once you proposed to supply a middle by inventing cannibals and pirates. These I would not accept because they were not the truth. Now you propose to reduce the island to an episode in the history of a woman in search of a lost daughter. This too I reject.