Small Boat

by Vincent Delecroix

The distinction to be made was not between one man who’s drowning and another man who’s drowning, but between the reasons, how they came to be in this situation. The distinction to be made is why people leave, why thirty people might set out in a little nut shell and not all alone in their First 24.

That way they won’t have to worry about life belts. It’s not that I don’t know what to think about the Migrant Drama, the Migrant Tragedy, the Shipwreck of Europe, the Graveyard of the Mediterranean or the Channel – to employ all those received journalistic expressions that simply disgust me – it’s not that I don’t know what to think, it’s that I don’t have any thoughts about them at all.

Their sinking didn’t start in the Channel; it started the moment they left their homes. Maybe they even started to sink the day they got the idea in their heads that everything would be better elsewhere, when they started to want supermarkets and child support, when they heard about Social Security or when a cousin living in London told them you could become a billionaire doing the washing up in a Tamil pop-up. You could say, I repeated, that all their problems stem from their inability to stay sitting quietly in a room.

I’m accused of lacking a soul, but my soul is precisely what I leave in the cloakroom when I get to work, it simply can’t fit into my uniform. I pick it up again intact from my locker when I leave.

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.

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.

But I loved the sea. I mean obviously I was aware that it’s dangerous, since it’s the one thing we haven’t managed to tame in thirty thousand years. It’s never true, that you can take possession of it, that we’ve conquered the seas, as they say, because it’s not like a land or a field; it’s the opposite, its negation. Every sailor fears the sea – unless they’re total idiots, in which case they’re no sailor. And you can’t really love the sea, strictly speaking, if loving means trusting, not fearing, if it means believing that what you love will be good for you, or at least, let’s say, wishes you well. So maybe I shouldn’t say I loved the sea, because it isn’t something you can love.

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.

And I’m not just referring to Julien, behind me, complacently thinking about Pascal and the misery of mankind, who no longer believes in God because God mass-produces migrants, then drowns them in the sea like kittens, so he can fall into noble despair.

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

Hey, jerk, 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?

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.

And if, listening to the recording, the investigator turns her gaze away, unable look at me, with that sad, devastated look in her eyes, it’s because it’s not me she’ll hear, but herself and everyone along with her, saying: I will not save you, while she wanted to hear me say the opposite – wanted it for herself, for everyone, so humanity could be reassured about itself, so humanity need not doubt its humanity, and so she would not have to fear what she’d become, that is to say, a woman like me, like the one I’ve become. But I didn’t say it, I didn’t say: You will not die, I will save you. Basically I said the opposite.