Small Boat

by Vincent Delecroix

Dead just the same, by the time the rescuers got there, as happened half the time. Unless it was dead perhaps, in which case between dead perhaps and dead for sure there was an irreducible gap that from now on would always stand between me and innocence.

So I was meant to understand that in fact the distance between doing wrong and wrong-doing was actually not that great, just as it is only one small step from unwillingness to ill-will.

Empathy, I said to the police inspector, is an idiotic luxury indulged in by people who do nothing, and who are moved by the spectacle of suffering.

At the start, I had too much imagination and if you have too much imagination you’re done for. All the misery of the world can come crashing down on you, it keeps you awake at night.

But the people watching from a distance demand that you tear up, as though you’ll see the trajectories more clearly with eyes full of tears, to give proof of humanity, and also, I guess because I’m a woman as well, I’m meant to display a higher degree of sensitivity, humanity

you need to be asking yourself some questions: it doesn’t take much imagination to be a moral person.

They are dead because they put themselves in mortal danger, and they put themselves in mortal danger because instead of sitting in their rooms they left, and it wasn’t me that asked them to leave.

migrants don’t belong to anyone and that’s the whole problem, and particularly theirs.

but to try and get a picture of what kind of monster was capable of doing or saying those things – an ordinary monster, born of ordinary life. And why not clear up a few edifying riddles while she was about it, like how could someone love and cherish their small daughter and be totally unconcerned about the fate of drowning people, or how could they claim to be doing their job in a professional manner while completely losing sight of the most elementary human values.

while she was hoping perhaps to identify the primary cause of all that, the origin of the monster of banality,

Was I really alone in being occasionally subject to such absentmindedness, the kind that might not actually lead us to be indifferent to other people’s lives and deaths, but possibly, if I can put it this way, to a failure to accord them due weight, which is simply the weight of reality? What she called absentmindedness seemed to me so unremarkable, so common, and so universal – indeed the basis of everyday life – that one could only conclude that all of us are monsters, that is to say, none of us is.

Sometimes I was a small cog in a machine that had malfunctioned – maybe myself even a victim of a machine that ends up erasing the human aspect

That was the only hope they had left, the light of day, as though everything could still change; night could recede without having devoured them, beating a weary retreat and surrendering them to life.

As if this little moment of inattention, if I must really admit to it, had put me beyond the pale of humanity for all time. As if, even more than an unforgivable act of culpability, that was the thing I couldn’t undo, that moment of inattention, that absence, because I had lost my humanity, because I’d taken my eye off the ball for a moment and would never be able to recover it, when in reality it only lasted a few hours at the worst, and probably only a few minutes in total, a kind of moral sleepwalking for at most a quarter of an hour, leading to a failure on my part to assess the situation and its implications.

In other words, I kind of lost sight of what a human life is, with these shedloads of migrants getting dumped in the sea every day. But it’s okay. After those few minutes, I completely recovered my humanity. I am not a monster.

I have no problem listening to the recordings of that night and hearing my own voice, because it’s not the voice of a monster or a criminal on the tape – it’s the voice of all of us.

who came to my aid, who tried to save me? No one.

Who is here on the shore? Who is watching this shipwreck from the mainland? Is it really just me, no one else? That would suit everyone, but don’t you believe it: I am not here alone on the shore; I’m not alone watching this unending ‘drama at sea’ from a safe distance, night after night.

While I’m standing here on dry land, there are all the others at my back, so many of them, thousands, millions of people. The entire world is there, the entire actual world at my back, on the shore.

But when it comes to protesting and calling other people monsters, then everyone has enough breath.

There is no shipwreck without spectators. Even when there’s no one, when it’s far out at sea, at night, without witnesses, even when there’s no living soul in sight for thousands of nautical miles, only waves and the viscous night, covering everything, swallowing everything; when there are no more eyes to see than there are arms to reach out, there are still spectators and the shore from which they are watching is never far away, even if, at the same time, it is infinitely distant.

see that guy sleeping in a cardboard box at the foot of your building? He’s rowing across the tarmac, he’s sinking too. But he’s not dozens of kilometres out at sea, at dead of night, he is quite easy to geolocate, he’s just in front of your feet. So are you going to send him help or is that my job again?

Who sleeps in that dead of night, and who keeps awake as the disaster unfolds? Who hears? Who stands at my side while I keep watch and listen out?

That was what the investigator was waiting for anxiously, for everyone to hear, to hear their own voice in mine in these recordings. The voice of each of us saying I will save you. Each one in my place. The voice of the whole of humanity reassured to hear itself saying, uttering the words: I will save you; you will not die – not actually saving, no one cares about that, not acting, not even helping. But at least saying it, because to fail to say those words is to be less than human.

In the end, whether they drowned or not didn’t matter; what mattered were my words. What mattered was not that they were saved; it was that I should be saved, and the whole world with me, through these words. Saved by my own words, not condemned by them. But I said: You will not be saved.

I could hear nothing, wanted to hear nothing, because I had heard without hearing. I said or he said to me: You’re not hearing me, you will not be saved.