The old man closes his eyes and breathes with difficulty. What is he trying to tell him? Could he have remembered the prophecy on his deathbed? “Now I want to tell you . . .” The dying man opens his eyes wide, opens his mouth wide, and stiffens. His son sobs. He leaves the bedroom and looks for the doctor. The doctor certifies that he is dead. He lowers the eyelids with tweezers. The son leaves the bedroom. Other relatives in the dining room stop him and embrace him. One scene of grief follows another. He receives condolences, hugs shoulders, shakes hands, and wipes away his and other people’s tears. Throughout his life, the family had rarely talked about his father’s status as a prophet, and at that moment the son intuits a vague glint of curiosity in the occasional look, an interest in whether his father had remembered any of his revelations in the last seconds of his life. Someone had made coffee in the kitchen. The son pours himself a cup. He takes small sips because it’s burning hot. His relatives keep hugging him. He looks for a place where he can be alone. He decides to hide in the lobby. Nobody will see him in the darkness there, and he can be by himself for a few moments. As he heads that way, a cousin sees him from afar, walks over, gives him a hug, and inquires after his mental state. When the cousin goes back inside, the son opens the door on to the landing, walks out, and shuts it behind him, trying not to make any noise that might alert the others. He walks down the stairs and out into the street.
– 2 –
He finds work in another city. It’s a good idea to move and live in another city. They sell his father’s house, and he leaves. He establishes his own business a few months later with two work colleagues. He has a reasonable standard of living, is relatively happy, and plays cards with friends on Friday nights.
He wakes up one cold winter’s morning with a vision of a city in flames, its buildings in ruins, its roads full of deep fissures and people fleeing, panic-stricken. The images speed by at an unlikely rate and are accompanied by trumpet blasts. It is a very short, intense vision, and he strives to remember what’s written in white on a green and blue sign: PLACE LACHAMBAUDIE. The sign is the size and color of a Parisian street-sign. If he had a guide, he would check whether a square called Lachambaudie existed in Paris.
The next day he goes to a bookshop and buys a street guide to Paris: Guide general de Paris. Répertoire des rues. Éditions L’Indispensable. As he’s taking the guide out of the bag in the shop doorway and looking for Lachambaudie on the alphabetical list of squares, he hears the word “earthquake” on the lips of one of the girls walking into the shop at that moment. He turns around, goes over to them, apologizes for intruding, and asks which earthquake they are talking about. One of them says the earthquake that hit Paris two hours ago. The prophet’s son breaks into a run. He stops in front of an electronics shop and sees a Paris that has fallen victim to an earthquake, that not even the detectors had foreseen, on a dozen televisions.
He feels guilty that he said nothing. He watches them pulling corpses out of the rubble a thousand kilometers away and thinks he made a big mistake not telling any of the powers-that-be and wasting a regrettable amount of time looking for a street guide to check whether a square by the name of Lachambaudie existed in Paris. He only calms down when he realizes that if he had, nobody would have believed him and all those people would have died anyway.
A year and a half later, also in the early morning, he sees (for tenths of a second, also with trumpets blasting) a terrible epidemic that in a matter of weeks ravages a country he can’t identify (he thinks it’s in Asia). He immediately speaks to the health authorities, so as not to repeat his negligence over his vision of the Paris earthquake. He tells them about the precedent of his father, how he foresaw the Paris earthquake, and how that tragedy took place because he’d said nothing. They say thank you very much and take notes, but he knows they’re only humoring him; basically they don’t believe a word.
A week later, the newspapers are filled with nothing else but reports of mortality rates in Laos and Cambodia. Ninety-eight percent of the population of Laos and twenty per cent of Cambodia’s have already died. Months later, by the time the epidemic is under control, Laos, Cambodia, and half of Thailand have been devastated.
A year after, he wakes up one morning and (the same few tenths of a second and usual trumpet blasts) sees a school bus tumbling off of a cliff. He knows which school it is because the name’s written in large spindly letters across the top of the windshield. He rushes off to talk to the school’s headmaster. He describes his vision: the bus, the road, and the bend with the ravine. The headmaster is impressed; the bus always drives along the road he saw in his dream, and around the bend with the drop into a ravine. He calls the driver in and tells him. When the prophet’s son sees him (a prophet now, indeed, on his own merits), he whistles. It’s the man who is driving the bus when it tumbles into the ravine. The headmaster is really impressed yet again, and very grateful. But on which day did it happen? The prophet can’t say for sure. The headmaster takes a decision: the bus will follow an alternative route for a time, and a new driver will replace the usual one.
Two months later, as the predicted calamity hasn’t happened, the usual driver returns, but as a precaution, he will follow the alternative route. After six months, given it is impossible to continue taking the much longer, costlier route, he returns to the traditional one. When he is close to the bend by the ravine, the driver takes even more care than usual. Weeks and months pass without any problems. At the very beginning of June, the bus hurtles into the ravine.
People look at him maliciously, as if he were in some way guilty. One evening, the police had to stop the relatives of the dead children from lynching him. The prophet tells them time and again that they are confusing prophesying an event with causing it. The headmaster agrees. And he too feels vaguely, unjustifiably guilty. What should he have done? Change the route for all time? Fire the driver without good reason? Nothing tangible indicated that the accident was inevitable.
The prophet reproaches himself. Months later, one morning when the trumpets and dazzling lights reveal to him that the British Air-ways flight 5397 from Barcelona to Birmingham will crash, he decides to say nothing. However much they try to stop it, the accident is bound to take place. If he predicts it, people will think he is in good measure responsible. But he finds it difficult to have that knowledge and keep it to himself. Besides, in this case, the solution seems simple enough. If the Barcelona-Birmingham flight that is going to crash is the 5397, all they have to do is change the number 5397 and give the flight a number than nobody uses (for example, 7612): numbers can’t be in short supply. However, is it possible to short-circuit a prediction? He can’t sleep knowing deaths could be avoided by taking such a simple step as changing the flight number. If the company would listen to him, the problem would be solved. He informs the company, tells them his record of prophecies and the vision he has had about flight 5397. The directors of the company give him a pleasant welcome and tell him that if they paid attention to everyone who claimed they had a presentiment that such and such a flight will be involved in an accident, they wouldn’t be able to fly anywhere. Years ago they took the decision to ignore them systematically.