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.

it might then have become clear that what happened to them was simply, in the end, the outcome of a long process or a long story that had nothing to do with me.

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.

Even if you saved all of them, there would always be one left, one you didn’t even know existed.

And to the blind man, spitting on me as he finishes his copious lunch with colleagues and goes back to his little office, I’ll say: 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.

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.