Foe by J.M Coetzee
Author:J.M Coetzee
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780241975442
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-05-11T00:00:00+00:00
III
The staircase was dark and mean. My knock echoed as if on emptiness. But I knocked a second time, and heard a shuffling, and from behind the door a voice, his voice, low and cautious. âIt is I, Susan Barton,â I announced â âI am alone, with Friday.â Whereupon the door opened and he stood before me, the same Foe I had first set eyes on in Kensington Row, but leaner and quicker, as though vigilance and a spare diet agreed with him.
âMay we come in?â I said.
He made way and we entered his refuge. The room was lit by a single window, through which poured the afternoon sun. The view was to the north, over the roofs of Whitechapel. For furniture there was a table and chair, and a bed, slovenly made; one corner of the room was curtained off.
âIt is not as I imagined it,â I said. âI expected dust thick on the floor, and gloom. But life is never as we expect it to be. I recall an author reflecting that after death we may find ourselves not among choirs of angels but in some quite ordinary place, as for instance a bath-house on a hot afternoon, with spiders dozing in the corners; at the time it will seem like any Sunday in the country; only later will it come home to us that we are in eternity.â
âIt is an author I have not read.â
âThe idea has remained with me from my childhood. But I have come to ask about another story. The history of ourselves and the island â how does it progress? Is it written?â
âIt progresses, but progresses slowly, Susan. It is a slow story, a slow history. How did you find your way to me?â
âBy good fortune entirely. I met your old housekeeper Mrs Thrush in Covent Garden after Friday and I came back from Bristol (I wrote you letters on the Bristol road, I have them with me, I will give them to you). Mrs Thrush directed us to the boy who runs errands for you, with a token that we were to be trusted, and he led us to this house.â
âIt is excellent that you have come, for there is more I must know about Bahia, that only you can tell me.â
âBahia is not part of my story,â I replied, âbut let me tell you whatever I can. Bahia is a city built on hills. To convey cargoes from the harbour to their warehouses, the merchants have therefore spanned a great cable, with pulleys and windlasses. From the streets you see bales of cargo sail overhead on the cable all day. The streets are a-bustle with people going about their business, slave and free, Portuguese and Negro and Indian and half-breed. But the Portuguese women are seldom to be seen abroad. For the Portuguese are a very jealous race. They have a saying: In her life a woman has but three occasions to leave the house â for her baptism, her wedding, and her burial.
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