The Years

by Annie Ernaux

  Paris was beauty and power, a mysterious, frightening entity whose every street name that appeared in a newspaper or an ad—Boulevard Barbès, rue Gazan, Jean Mineur, 116 avenue des Champs-Élysées—inflamed the imagination. People who had lived or even just visited there and seen the Eiffel Tower took on an aura of superiority. On summer evenings, after the long and dusty days of vacation, we went to the station to meet the express trains and watch the people who’d been someplace else. We saw them disembark with suitcases and Printemps shopping bags, pilgrims returning from Lourdes. Songs about unknown places, the South, the Pyrenées—Fandangos du pays basque, Montagnes d’Italie, Mexico—made us yearn. In the pink-rimmed clouds of sunset, we saw maharajahs and Indian palaces. We complained to our parents, “We never go anywhere!” and they replied, astonished, “Where do you want to go, you’ve got all you need right here!”

  Everything inside the houses had been bought before the war. The saucepans were blackened and missing their handles, the bowls’ enamel worn away. Holes in jugs were plugged with metal pellets. Coats were revamped, shirt collars turned inside out, and Sunday clothes extended to everyday. That we never stopped growing made our mothers despair, forced to lengthen dresses with strips of cloth. Shoes bought a size up were too small the following year. Everything had to be put to use, the pen case, the Lefranc paint box, the packaging from LU Petit Beurre biscuits. Nothing was thrown away. The contents of night buckets were used for garden fertilizer, the dung of passing horses collected for potted plants. Newspaper was used for wrapping vegetables, drying shoes, wiping one’s bottom in the lavatory.

  We lived in a scarcity of everything, of objects, images, diversions, explanations of self and the world, whose sources were confined to the catechism, Father Riquet’s sermon for Lent, the Latest News from Tomorrow, read in the booming voice of Geneviève Tabouis, and women’s stories about their lives and those of their neighbors, exchanged over glasses of coffee in the afternoon. For the longest time, children believed in Santa Claus and babies found in roses or heads of cabbage.

  People traveled by foot or bicycle in a smooth, regular motion. Men rode with their knees splayed and trouser cuffs cinched with clips, women with their bottoms encased in taut skirts, drawing fluid lines in the tranquillity of the streets. The background was silence and the bicycle measured the speed of life.

  We lived in close proximity to shit. It made us laugh.

  There were dead children in every family, carried off by sudden incurable diseases: diarrhea, convulsions, diphtheria. All that remained of their brief time on earth were tombstones shaped like baby cribs and inscribed “an angel in heaven.” There were photos that people showed while furtively wiping their eyes, and hushed, almost serene conversations that frightened surviving children, who believed they were living on borrowed time. They would not be safe until the age of twelve or fifteen, having made it through whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, mumps, ear infections, and bronchitis every winter, escaped tuberculosis and meningitis, at which time people would say they’d “filled out.” In the meantime, “war children,” peaky and anemic with white-spotted nails, had to swallow cod-liver oil and Lune deworming syrup, chew Jessel tablets, step on the chemist’s scale, bundle themselves in mufflers to avoid chills, eat soup for growth, and stand up straight under threat of wearing an iron corset. The babies who were starting to be born in every direction were vaccinated, monitored, and presented each month at the town hall’s infant weigh-in. Newspaper headlines proclaimed that five thousand of them still died each year.

  Idiocy from birth frightened no one. Madness was feared because it happened suddenly, mysteriously, to normal people.

  The blurred and damaged photo of a little girl standing on a bridge in front of a guardrail. She has short hair, slender thighs, and knobby knees. She holds her hand over her eyes to block the sun. She is laughing. Written on the back of the photo, Ginette 1937. On her tombstone: died at the age of six on Holy Thursday, 1938. She is the older sister of the little girl on the beach at Sotteville-sur-Mer.

  Boys and girls were kept apart in every situation. Boys were noisy creatures who never cried and were always ready to throw something—pebbles, chestnuts, firecrackers, tight-packed snowballs. They said bad words, read Tarzan and Bibi Fricotin. The girls, who feared them, were enjoined not to follow their example and to prefer quiet games like Pass the Ring, hopscotch, and dancing in the round. On Thursdays in winter, they taught school to old buttons or cutout figures from L’Écho de la Mode laid out on the kitchen table. The mothers and the school encouraged them to snitch. Their favorite threat was, “I’m telling on you!” They called out to each other Hey, whatsyername, listened to rude stories and repeated them in whispers, hands cupped over their mouths. They laughed up their sleeves at the story of Maria Goretti, who had preferred to die rather than do with a boy what they all longed to do. They frightened themselves with their lechery, which adults would never have dreamed possible. They longed to have breasts and body hair, a bloodstained towel between their legs. In the meantime, they read albums from the Bécassine series and Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates by P.-J. Stahl, and Nobody’s Boy by Hector Malot. They went to the cinema with the school to see Monsieur Vincent, Le grand cirque, and The Battle of the Rails, which elevated the soul, boosted moral courage, and drove away wicked thoughts. As for reality and the future, those were to be found (they knew) in the films of Martine Carol and the photo-romance magazines, whose titles—Nous Deux, Confidences, and Intimité—foretold the alluring, illicit immorality that lay ahead.

  The buildings of the reconstruction rose from the earth amidst the intermittent screech of pivot cranes. The days of restrictions were at an end, and new products appeared at long-enough intervals to be greeted with joyous surprise. Their utility was assessed and debated in daily conversation.

  They materialized suddenly, as in fairy tales, unprecedented, impossible to foresee. There was something for everyone, Bic pens, shampoo in pyramid-shaped cartons, Bulgomme bubble gum, Gerflex, Tampax, and creams to remove unwanted hair, Gilac plastics, Dacron, neon tubes, hazelnut milk chocolate, the Solex motorbike, chlorophyll toothpaste. We were continually amazed by the amount of time we saved with instant powdered soup, Presto pressure cookers, and mayonnaise in tubes. Canned was preferred to fresh, peas from tins instead of garden-picked. It was considered more chic to serve pears in syrup than ripe from the tree. Food’s “digestibility,” vitamins, and “calorie count” had started to matter. We marveled at inventions that erased centuries of gestures and effort. Soon would come a time, so it was said, when there’d be nothing left for us to do. Inventions were denigrated. The washing machine was accused of wearing out clothes, television of ruining the eyes and inciting people to stay up all hours. Still, we observed and envied our neighbors for possessing these signs of progress and social superiority. In the city, older boys on Vespas wheeled around the girls. Straight and proud in the saddle, they’d carry one off, a scarf tied under her chin, her arms twined around his back. We immediately wanted to be three years older, watching them ride off in a series of backfires.

  Advertising touted the virtues of objects with commanding enthusiasm. Furniture by Lévitan—guaranteed to last! Chantelle, the girdle that never rides up! You’ll always prefer oil by Lesieur! It sang them out with unbridled joy: Dop dop dop, adopt Dop shampoo, Izarra la la li la li la, Apo po apopo Apollinaris, or dreamily, There’s happiness in the home when Elle is there. It crooned with the voice of Luis Mariano, The brassiere by Lou, for the woman of bon goût. While we did our homework at the kitchen table, the ads on Radio Luxembourg, like the songs, brought certainty of future joy, and all around us we felt the presence of absent things we’d be allowed to buy later. Meanwhile, as we waited to be old enough to wear Rouge Baiser lipstick and perfume by Bourjois with a j as in joy, we collected plastic animals hidden in bags of coffee, and from Menier chocolate wrappers, Fables of La Fontaine stamps that we swapped with fri
ends at recess.

  We had time to desire things, plastic pencil cases, crepe-soled shoes, gold watches. Their possession did not disappoint. We held them up to the admiration of others. They contained a mystery and magic that survived their contemplation and handling. Turning them this way and that, we continued to expect we-didn’t-quite-know-what.

  Progress was the bright horizon of every existence. It signified well-being, healthy children, glowing houses, well-lighted streets, and knowledge—everything that shunned the darkness of country life and the war. It was in plastics and Formica, antibiotics and social security benefits, running water and sewer lines, summer camps, ongoing education, and the atom. You have to keep up with the times, people liked to repeat, as proof of their intelligence and open minds. Eighth-grade composition topics invited students to write about “the benefits of electricity” or compose a reply to “someone who denigrates the modern world in your presence.” The young will know far more about it than us, parents asserted.

  In reality, cramped housing forced children and parents, brothers and sisters to sleep in the same room. People used jugs and basins to wash, did their business in outhouses. Sanitary napkins were made of toweling and left to disgorge their blood in buckets of icy water. Children’s colds and bronchitis were treated with mustard poultices. Parents treated their own flu with Aspro and grog. Men pissed along the walls in broad daylight. Education aroused suspicion, a fear that through some obscure sanction, a punitive reversal that awaited those who tried to rise too high, learning made you lose your marbles. Teeth were missing from every mouth. The times, people said, are not the same for everyone.

  The days passed unchanged, punctuated by the same old distractions, which could not keep pace with the abundance and novelty of things. Spring brought the return of First Communions, Youth Day, the church bazaar, and the Pinder Circus parade, when all at once the elephants blocked the street with their gray immensity. July was the Tour de France, which we followed on the radio, cutting photos from the papers—Geminiani, Darrigade, and Coppi—and pasting them in albums. Autumn brought the fair with midway rides and concessions. We rode the bumper cars enough to last us a year, amidst the clatter of metal rods, volleys of sparks, and a voice that boomed, “Here we go, boys and girls—three, two, one!” Year after year, on the lottery stage, the same boy with a red-painted nose imitated Bourvil, and a woman hawker, cleavage bared to the cold, reeled off her sales pitch for “Folies Bergère from midnight till two,” a torrid show restricted to those sixteen and over. We searched for clues in the faces of people who had dared go behind the curtain and came out grinning. In the odor of stagnant water and animal fat, we sensed unbridled lust.

  Later, we would be old enough to lift the tent flap. Behind it, three women in bikinis danced without music on a wooden stage. The lights went off and on again. The women stood bare-breasted and motionless in front of a sparse audience standing on the asphalt in front of the town hall. Outside, a loudspeaker bellowed a song by Dario Moreno, Hey mambo, mambo italiano.

  Religion provided the official framework of life and governed Time. The newspapers published menus for Lent, whose stages from Septuagesima to Easter were marked on the calendar from La Poste. We didn’t eat meat on Fridays. Sunday Mass remained an opportunity to change clothes, wear a garment for the first time, put on a hat and gloves, carry a purse, see and be seen, gaze at the altar boys. It was, for everyone, an outward sign of morality and the promise of a destiny, written in a special language, Latin. To read the same prayers each week, endure the same ritual boredom during the sermons, granted us probationary purification from pleasures such as eating chicken and bakeshop cakes, or going to a movie later. That schoolteachers and educated people, of irreproachable conduct, believed in nothing seemed an anomaly. Religion was the sole font of morality. It bestowed human dignity, without which our lives would resemble those of dogs. Church Law outweighed all others; it alone gave legitimacy to the great moments of existence. “People who don’t marry in the Church are not really married,” the catechism proclaimed. By “Church” they meant the Catholic Church, of course. All other religions were ridiculous or simply wrong. In the playground we bawled, Mohammed was a prophet of the great Allah, / He sold peanuts at the market of Biskra. / Cotton candy would’ve been dandy / But he sells peanuts, that’s all! / Allah (three times).

  We couldn’t wait to do our Solemn Communion, the glorious precursor of everything important that would happen to us: periods, the certificate of education, entry into twelfth grade. Boys and girls sat separately in pews on either side of the aisle. The boys wore dark suits with armbands, the girls long white dresses and veils. We already looked like the husbands and wives we’d be in ten years’ time, gliding two by two. Having thundered in a single voice at vespers I renounce Satan and I cling to Jesus forever, we could now dispense with religious practices. As ordained Christians, we possessed the necessary baggage for membership in the dominant community and the certitude that there has to be something after death.

  Everyone knew how to distinguish between what was and was not done, between Good and Evil. Values could be read in others’ eyes upon us. By their clothing, we could distinguish little girls from young girls, young girls from young ladies, young women from women, mothers from grandmothers, laborers from tradesmen and bureaucrats. Wealthy people said of shopgirls and typists who were too well dressed, “They wear their entire fortune on their backs.”

  Public or private, school was a place where immutable knowledge was imparted in silence and order, with respect for hierarchy and absolute submission, that is, to wear a smock, line up at the sound of the bell, stand when the headmistress or Mother Superior (but not a monitor) entered the room, acquire regulation notebooks, pens, and pencils, refrain from talking back when observations were made and from wearing trousers in the winter without a skirt over top. Only teachers were allowed to ask questions. If we did not understand a word or explanation, the fault was ours. We were proud, as of a privilege, to be bound by strict rules and confinement. The uniform required by private institutions was visible proof of their perfection.

  The curriculum never changed, Le médecin malgré lui in the sixth grade, Les fourberies de Scapin, Racine’s Plaideurs, and Victor Hugo’s Les pauvres gens in the seventh, Le Cid in the eighth, etc. Nor did our textbooks, Malet-Isaac for history, Demangeon for geography, and Carpentier-Fialip for English. This body of knowledge was transferred to a minority whose intelligence and superiority was confirmed year after year, through rosa rosam and Rome the only object of my resentment, the Chasles relation and trigonometry while the majority continued doing mental arithmetic or problems involving trains, and singing La Marseillaise for the oral certificate. To pass the latter, or the brevet, was considered an event. The newspapers published the names of the students who had passed. Those who failed knew the weight of indignity at an early age. They were not capable. The speeches that praised education concealed its meager distribution.

  If we met a former schoolmate who had enrolled in a commercial school or been sent to apprentice, it wouldn’t occur to us to speak to her, although she’d shared our desk all the way to middle school. Nor would a lawyer’s daughter with her fading ski-tan, proof of her superior social rank, so much as glance at us outside of school.

  Work, effort, and willingness were the measures of behavior. On awards day, we were presented with books that extolled the heroism of aviation pioneers, generals, and colonizers—Mermoz, Leclerc de Lattre de Tassigny, Lyautey. Everyday courage was not forgotten either. One had to admire the father, “the adventurer of the modern world” (Péguy), “a humble life with boring and easy chores” (Verlaine), comment in writing on sayings by Georges Duhamel and Saint-Exupéry, and “the lesson in energy the heroes of Corneille teach us.” We were asked to demonstrate how “love of family leads to love of country” and how “work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need” (Voltaire). We read Vaillant and mes
vaillantes.2

  To fortify youth in these ideals, toughen them physically, keep them safe from laziness and enfeebling pastimes (reading and films), make them into “decent young fellows” and “fine upstanding young ladies,” families were advised to send their children to the Wolf Cubs, Pioneers, Girl Guides and Brownies, Crusaders and Francas. They would sit around a campfire in the evening, or march down a trail at dawn, wave a banner with martial fervor to the strains of “Akela’s Trail,” and attain an enchanted union of nature, order, and morality. Radiant faces looked to the future from the covers of La Vie Catholique and L’Humanité. This wholesome youth, sons and daughters of France, followed in the footsteps of their Résistant elders, as President René Coty had proclaimed in a stirring speech of July 1954 at Place de la Gare, before a crowd of pupils grouped according to school, while white clouds scudded above in the storm-filled sky of a summer when the rain never stopped.

  Somewhere below the ideal and the clear-eyed gazes, we knew, lay a shapeless oozing plain, riddled with other words, objects, images, and behaviors. Unwed mothers, the white slave trade, the movie posters from Dear Caroline, “rubbers,” mysterious advertisements for “intimate hygiene, discretion guaranteed,” the covers of Health magazine (“women are fertile only three days a month”), “love children,” indecent assault, Janet Marshall strangled with her bra in the woods by the adulterer Robert Avril, the words “lesbian,” “homosexual,” “lust,” and sins so abominable they couldn’t even be brought to confession, miscarriage, nasty pastimes, books on the Index, Tout ça parce qu’au bois de Chaville,3 free love, ad infinitum, a volume of unspeakable things only adults were supposed to know, the sum and substance of which were the genitals and their use. Sex was the root of all society’s suspicions. People saw it everywhere, in everything: low necklines, tight skirts, red nail polish, black underwear, bikinis, the fraternizing of the sexes, the darkness of movie houses, public toilets, the muscles of Tarzan, women who smoked and crossed their legs, a girl’s gesture of touching her hair in class, etc. It divided girls into a “right” and “wrong” kind. The moral rating posted on the church door for the weekly films was based on sex and sex alone.