Tonight the storm has come down over Lyon, and the rain falls upon the rooftops the way it once fell upon the wings of my Caudron when I crossed the Pyrenees by night. Twenty-three degrees, and the thunder walks the valley of the Rhône as though searching for something it has lost. I sit at the window of the city where I was born and I think of the men who fell from the sky today, and I find that I cannot stop thinking of them.
Near Nancy, in the green northeast of this same country, a small aeroplane rose into the Sunday morning carrying eleven souls. Five of them had never jumped before. Imagine it: the buckled harness, the unfamiliar weight upon the shoulders, the half-frightened laughter of those who are about to trust their bodies to the air for the first time. They had come to taste the one thing the pilot knows by heart – that instant when the earth releases you and you belong, for a few seconds, to the wind alone. The machine did not climb. It fell into a field, and all eleven were lost. The instructors and their students, the pilot at the controls, the whole small fellowship of the morning, gone in the time it takes to draw a breath.
I knew that morning fellowship. When I flew the mail across the Sahara and over the Andes, I came to understand that an aircraft is not a machine for travelling but a machine for seeing. From two thousand metres a man sees what he cannot see from his doorstep: that the lights of the farms are scattered like stars fallen into the grass, that each one shelters a consciousness, a quarrel, a sleeping child, a love. The pilot is bound to those lights by a thread he can never name. And when he goes down – as my friend Guillaumet nearly went down in the Cordillera, as Mermoz went down at last into the South Atlantic – he does not die alone. A part of every man who waited for him dies also.
So I read the dispatches today not as a newspaperman reads them, counting the dead and moving on, but as a comrade reads the loss of comrades. Fourteen men gone in a helicopter near the Saudi refineries, swallowed by the very industry that lifts the oil out of the desert. A pilot in Beijing who flew his small craft into the tallest tower of the city and did not come down again, wounding thirteen others in the fall. The sky, which I have loved more than any woman or any country, has been cruel today. It has been a day of falling.
But the cruelty did not stay in the air. It came also from the sun. They tell me that across Europe the heat has killed thirteen hundred people, that in Germany the thermometer reached forty-one degrees and seven – a number that means nothing until you understand that it is the number of an old woman dying alone in a room with the shutters closed, of a labourer falling in a field, of a body the heat reaches before any friend can. The chief of the great health council warns that we were not ready. Of course we were not ready. We are never ready for the things that come slowly, the way the desert comes for a man who has run out of water. I lay once in the dunes of Libya, my aeroplane broken behind me, and I learned that the sky can kill you without a sound, by simple radiance, by the patient withdrawal of all moisture from the flesh. The men of Europe are learning now what I learned then.
And the earth – the earth was no kinder. In Venezuela the ground itself opened four days ago, and tonight near fifteen hundred are confirmed dead, and seventy thousand are unaccounted for by those who love them. Seventy thousand absences. Seventy thousand telephones that ring in empty rooms. The politicians quarrel over who shall be photographed beside the rubble, and the foreign aid arrives late and confused, and the mortuary of Caracas overflows. This is the noise that men make over a tragedy. But under all that noise, there was today a single sound that redeemed the whole black week: from beneath a collapsed building, after four days in the dark, they drew out a father and his son, alive.
That is the thing I would have you carry away from this storm-lit night. Not the falling, but the hand that reaches into the rubble. For four days that father held his boy in the darkness, and I do not need the report to tell me what he said to him. He told him the things that fathers tell – be patient, hold on, they are coming for us, I am here. He made of the dark a small inhabited country, the way the man dying of thirst makes of his last canteen a whole religion. To be a man, I once wrote, is precisely to be responsible. It is to feel, when one lays one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world. That father in the Venezuelan dark was building the world with nothing but his voice.
We waste ourselves, we men, on the wrong catastrophes. While the earth devours the families of the Caribbean, the Americans and the Iranians trade their blows across the Strait of Hormuz, breaking the very ceasefire they signed, and they call it strategy. They will meet again to talk on the thirtieth, and perhaps they will sign once more the paper that they have already torn. From altitude one cannot see the borders they are fighting for. I have flown over them. They are not there. The frontier between two nations is a fiction agreed upon by men who have never seen the country whole, who have never watched the dawn run westward across a sleeping continent and understood that it belongs to no one and to everyone.
There was one piece of joy, and I will not pretend it is small, for joy is never small. In a stadium across the ocean, a Canadian team won a match in the final breathless minute of play, the first such victory in their history, and a whole nation that had no reason to hope leapt up out of its chairs. A goal in stoppage time. A father lifting a son from the rubble in stoppage time. The two are not so different. Both are the refusal of the human spirit to accept that the clock has run out.
The thunder is moving off down the valley now. The rain has gentled. Somewhere above this cloud the stars are turning as they always turn, indifferent and magnificent, and somewhere a pilot I never met is being mourned by a wife who does not yet believe it. What is essential is invisible to the eye. I wrote that once for children, but I meant it for the men who fall from the sky, and for the man in the dark who would not let go of his son's hand. They are the same prayer. They are the only prayer.
