You’ve sent me no answers, you’ve given no signs. And how could you? It’s been too short a time: if I were to ask the doctor for confirmation of your existence he’d only smile. But I’ve decided for you: you will be born. I did so after seeing you in a photograph, a photograph of a three-week-old embryo, published in a magazine along with an article on the development of life. And while I was looking at it my fear went away as quickly as it had come. You looked like a mysterious flower, a transparent orchid. At the top one could make out a kind of head with the two protuberances that will become the brain. Lower down, a kind of cavity that will become the mouth. At three weeks you’re almost invisible, the captions explain—about an eighth of an inch. Still, you’re growing a suggestion of eyes, something resembling a spinal column, a nervous system, a stomach, a liver, intestines, lungs. Your heart is already present, and it’s big: in proportion, nine times bigger than mine. It pumps blood and beats regularly from the eighteenth day on: how could I throw you away? What do I care if you only started out by chance or mistake? Didn’t the world where we find ourselves also begin by chance and perhaps by mistake? Some people maintain that in the beginning there was nothing except a great calm, a great motionless silence; then came a spark, a split, and what had not been there before now was. The split was soon followed by others: unforeseen, insensate, forever unmindful of the consequences. And among the consequences bloomed a cell, it too by chance and perhaps by mistake, that was immediately multiplied by millions, by billions, until trees and fish and men were born. Do you think someone considered the dilemma before the spark? Do you think someone wondered whether that cell would like it or not? Do you think someone wondered about its hunger, its cold, its unhappiness? I doubt it. Even if that someone had existed—a God perhaps comparable to the beginning of the beginning, beyond time and space—he wouldn’t have been concerned with good and evil. It all happened because it could happen, therefore had to happen, in accordance with the only arrogance that is legitimate. And the same thing goes for you. I take the responsibility of choice.
I take it without egoism,Child. I swear it gives me no pleasure to bring you into the world. I don’t see myself walking in the street with a swollen belly, I don’t see myself nursing you and bathing you and teaching you to talk. I’m a working woman and I have many other tasks and interests: I’ve already told you I don’t need you. But I’ll carry on with you, whether you like it or not. I’ll impose upon you the same arrogance that was imposed on me, and on my mother, my grandmother, my grandmother’s mother:all the way back to the first human born of another human being, whether he liked it or not. Probably, if he or she had been allowed to choose, he would have been frightened and answered: No, I don’t want to be born. But no one asked their opinion, and so they were born and lived and died after giving birth to another human being who was not asked to choose, and that one did likewise, for millions of years, right down to us. And each time it was an arrogance without which we would not exist. Courage, Child. Don’t you think the seed of a tree needs courage to break through the surface of the soil and sprout? A puff of wind is enough to break it, a rat’spaw to crush it. Still it sprouts and stands firm and grows to scatter other seeds. And becomes part of a forest. If some day you cry, “Why did you bring me into the world, why?” I’ll answer: “I did what the trees do and have done, for millions and millions of years before me. I thought it was the right thing.”
I must not change my mind by remembering that human beings are not tress, that the suffering of a human being, since he’s conscious, is a thousand times greater than that of a tree, that it does none of us any good to become a forest, that not all a tree’s seeds generate new trees: the great majority are lost. Such an about-face is possible, Child: our logic is full of contradictions. The minute you state something, you see its opposite. And you even realize that the opposite is just as valid as what you’d stated. My reasoning today could be turned around with a snap of the fingers. In truth, I am already confused, disoriented. Maybe it’s because I can’t confide in anyonebut you. I’m a woman who has chosen to live alone. Your father isn’t with me. And I’m not sorry, even though my eyes so often stare at the door where he went out, with his determined step, without my trying to stop him, almost as though we had nothing to say to each other any more.
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