Foe by J.M. Coetzee

makes a humming noise in his
throat, deeper than his usual voice; sometimes he seems to be
singing.
    'For
myself I do not care how much he sings and dances so long as he
carries out his few duties. For I will not delve while he spins. Last
night I decided I would take the robe away from him, to bring him to
his senses. However, when I stole into his room he was awake, his
hands already gripping the robe, which was spread over the bed, as
though he read my thoughts. So I retreated.
    '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