J. M. Coetzee

The secret and sacred word that binds him to the farm is 'belong'. Out in the veld by himself he can breathe the word aloud: I belong on the farm. What he really believes but does not utter, what he keeps to himself for fear that the spell will end, is a different form of the word: I belong to the farm. He tells no one because the word is misunderstood so easily, turned so easily to its inverse: The farm belongs to me. The farm will never belong to him, he will never be more than a visitor: he accepts that.

He knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.

But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies have their own signs. It is the home of Friday.

Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering.

Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe. That is my entreaty.

Would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, he no longer knew for sure what truth, what fancy.

Seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beast he has slain.

To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force. I mean the executioner and his assistants, both great and small. If I were the Irish woman, I should rest most uneasy in my grave knowing to what interpreter the story of my last hours has been consigned.

This is the place where bodies are their own signs.

I would rather be the author of my story than have lies told about me.

Perhaps they wanted to prevent him from ever telling his story, who he was, where his home lay, how it came about that he was taken.

The stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of).