The Years

by Annie Ernaux

  The girls in the front row sit on tube chairs, hands folded in their laps, legs straight and pressed together or tucked under the chair. Only one has her legs crossed. The girls in the second row, who stand on the ground, and the ones in the third row, who stand on a bench, are visible from the hips up. Only six have their hands in their pockets, a sign of poor upbringing at the time, which suggests that the lycée is mainly attended by daughters of the bourgeoisie. All but four gaze at the lens, faintly smiling. What the four are looking at—the photographer, a wall, other students?—is lost to history.

  She is in the second row, third from the left. It is difficult to see in her the girl with the provocative pose from the previous photo, taken scarcely two years earlier. She wears glasses again, and a ponytail from which a lock of hair escapes at the neck. Frizzy bangs do nothing to soften her serious demeanor. Her face bears no sign of the events of the summer before, the boy’s invasion of her being, her semi-defloration evinced by the bloodstained underwear hidden between some books in her cupboard. No sign, either, of her actions and movements after the event: walking the streets after school in hopes of seeing him; returning to the young ladies’ residence and weeping. Spending hours on an essay topic and understanding nothing. Playing Only You over and over when she returns to her parents’ home on Saturdays, stuffing herself with bread, biscuits, and chocolate.

  No sign of the heaviness of existence she must tear herself away from to master the language of philosophy, serve the injunction of essence and the categorical imperative, subjugate the body, repress the desire for food and the obsession with the monthly blood that no longer flows. Reflect on the real so it will cease to be real, become an abstract thing—intangible, a product of intelligence. A few weeks later, she will stop eating, buy Néo-Antigrès fat-burning pills, and be reduced to pure consciousness. After class, when she walks up boulevard du Marne, past the funfair booths, the howl of the music follows her like calamity.

  Not all of the twenty-six students in the photo talk to each other. Each girl speaks to only ten or twelve others, ignores the rest and is ignored by them. All know by instinct what to do when they pass each other on the street near the lycée: whether to wait, or smile but nothing more, or simply not see each other. But from metaphysics hour to gym class, all the voices that answer “present” in the roll call, all the physical features and clothing are inscribed in each girl’s consciousness. Every student has inside her a sample of each of the other twenty-five. In this class, a total of twenty-six viewpoints are in constant circulation, freighted with judgments and feelings. No more than any of her classmates can the girl say how others see her. More than anything she wants not to be seen. She wants to be one of the ignored, good students, without luster or repartee. She is unwilling to say her parents run a café-épicerie, ashamed that she is haunted by food, that her period has stopped, that she doesn’t know the meaning of hypokhâgne,10 and wears a jacket of imitation suede instead of real. She feels very lonely. She reads Dusty Answer by

  Rosamond Lehmann and everything she can in the Modern Poets series, Supervielle, Milosz, Apollinaire, Do I know, my love, if you still love me?

  Of all the ways in which self-knowledge may be fostered, perhaps one of the greatest is a person’s ability to discern how they view the past, at every time of life and every age; if that is so, what kind of memory can be ascribed to this girl in the second row? Maybe she has no memory except that of the previous summer, almost bereft of images—the incorporation of a missing body, a man’s. Two future goals coexist inside her: (1) to be thin and blonde, (2) to be free, autonomous, and useful to the world. She dreams of herself as Mylène Demongeot and Simone de Beauvoir.

  Though reserve soldiers continued to leave for Algeria, it was a time of hope and striving, of grand designs for land, sea, and sky; a time of great words and great losses, too, those of Gérard Philipe and Camus. There would be the SS France, the Caravelle jetliner, and the Concorde, school until sixteen, centers of arts and culture, the Common Market, and, sooner or later, peace in Algeria. There were new francs, scoubidou bracelets, flavored yogurt, milk in pyramid-shaped cartons, transistor radios. For the first time one could listen to music anywhere, whether one was lying on the beach with the radio next to one’s head, or walking down the street. The joy of the transistor was of an unknown species. One could be alone but not alone, and have at one’s command the noise and diversity of the world.

  And the young continued to arrive in ever-increasing numbers, and teachers were in short supply. One needed only be eighteen and have passed the bac to be sent to a preparatory class and guide it through Rémi and Colette. We were provided with sources of diversion, the Hula-Hoop and wholesome reading for young adults, but were not allowed to do anything that mattered, neither vote nor make love, or even state an opinion. To have the right to be heard, one first had to prove one’s ability to blend in with the dominant social model, “go into” teaching, join La Poste or SNCF rail, Michelin, or Gillette, enter the insurance sector, “earn a living.” The future was a series of experiences to carry forward, military service for twenty-four months, work, marriage, and children. We were expected to perpetuate tradition as a matter of course. In the face of this compulsory future, we vaguely yearned to stay young for a long, long time. Discourse and institutions had not caught up to our desires, but for us the gulf between society’s “sayable” and our unsayable seemed normal and irremediable. It was something we couldn’t think but only feel, deep inside, alone watching Breathless.

  People had had more than enough of Algeria, OAS bombs on Paris windowsills, the Petit-Clamart attack. Enough of waking up to the news of a coup by unknown generals that disrupted the march toward peace and “self-determination.” They had got used to the ideas of independence and the legitimacy of the FLN, learned the names of its leaders, Ben Bella and Ferhat Abbas. Their desire for happiness and tranquillity tallied with the introduction of a principle of justice: decolonization, previously unthinkable. However, they still exhibited as much fear as ever, or at best indifference, in relation to “the Arabs,” whom they avoided and ignored. They could not be reconciled to sharing streets with individuals whose brothers had murdered Frenchmen across the Mediterranean. And the immigrant worker, when he passed a French man or woman on the street, knew more quickly and clearly than they that he wore the face of the enemy. That “Arabs” lived in slums, labored on assembly lines or at the bottom of pits, their October demonstration outlawed, then suppressed with the most extreme violence, and maybe even (that is, had we been aware of it) that a hundred had been thrown into the Seine, seemed to be in the nature of things. (Later, when we learned what had happened on October 17, 1961, we were unable to say what we had known at the time, recalling nothing except balmy weather and the imminent return to university. We felt the unease of not having known, though the State and the press had done everything to keep us in the dark, as if there were no making up for past ignorance and silence. And try as we might, we would see no resemblance between October’s heinous attack on Algerians by Gaullist police and the attack on anti-OAS militants the following February. The nine dead crushed against the railings of the Charonne Métro station bore no comparison with the uncounted dead of the Seine.)

  Nobody asked whether the Évian Accords were a victory or a defeat. They brought relief and the beginning of forgetting. We did not concern ourselves with what would happen next for the Pieds-Noirs and the Harkis in Algeria, or the Algerians in France. We hoped to go to Spain the following summer—a real bargain, according to everyone who’d been there.

  People were accustomed to violence and separation in the world. East/West, Khrushchev the muzhik/Kennedy the leading man, Peppone/Don Camillo, JEC/UEC, L’Humanité/L’Aurore, Franco/Tito, Cathos/Commies. Under cover from the Cold War, they felt calm. Outside of union speeches with their codified violence, they did not complain, having made up their minds to be kept by the State, listen to Jean Nocher moralize on th
e radio each night, and not see the strikes amount to anything. When they voted yes in the October referendum, it was less from a desire to elect the president of the Republic through universal suffrage than from a secret wish to keep de Gaulle president for life, if not until the end of time.

  Meanwhile, we studied for our second bac while listening to the transistor. We went to see Cléo from 5 to 7, Last Year at Marienbad, Bergman, Buñuel and Italian films. We loved Léo Ferré, Barbara, Jean Ferrat, Leny Escudero, and Claude Nougaro. We read Hara-Kiri. We felt nothing in common with the yé-yés, who said Hitler, never heard of him, and their idols, who were even younger than we: girls with pigtails and songs for the schoolyard; a boy who bellowed and writhed on the floor of the stage. We had the feeling they’d never catch up to us. Next to them, we were old. Perhaps we too would die under de Gaulle.

  But we were not adults. Sexual life remained clandestine and rudimentary, haunted by the specter of “an accident.” No one was supposed to have a sex life before marriage. Boys believed their lewd innuendos displayed advanced erotic science, but all they knew how to do was ejaculate on an area of the girl’s body to which she directed him, for the sake of caution. No one knew for sure whether or not they were still virgins. Sexuality was a poorly resolved matter on which girls held forth for hours in residence rooms no boy was allowed to enter. They did their reading, pored through Kinsey to convince themselves of the legitimacy of pleasure. They had inherited their mothers’ shame about sex. There were still men’s words and women’s words. Girls did not say “come” or “cock,” or anything at all. They recoiled from naming the organs except to say “vagina” or “penis” in a special toneless voice. The boldest of them stole out to see a counselor at Family Planning, an underground organization, and were prescribed rubber diaphragms that they struggled to insert.

  They had no idea that the boys they attended lectures with were frightened of their bodies, that if they answered their most innocent questions with monosyllables, it was not from contempt but from fear of the inherent complications of their snap-jaw bellies. All things considered, they preferred to quietly beat off at night.

  Having failed to panic in time, somewhere in a pinewood or on the sands of Costa Brava, one saw Time stand still before a pair of underpants whose crotch had remained spotless for days. “It” had to be got rid of, one way or another. Rich girls went to Switzerland, others to the kitchen of an unspecialized, unknown woman with a probe boiled in a stewpot. The fact of having read Simone de Beauvoir was of no use except to confirm the misfortune of having a womb. So, like sick people, three weeks out of four girls took their temperatures to calculate the risks, and lived in two different times. One was everybody’s time, with class presentations and holidays; the other, fickle and treacherous, liable to stop at any moment, was the deadly time ruled by their blood.

  In lecture halls, professors in neckties explained writers’ works by way of their biographies. They said “Monsieur” André Malraux and “Madame” Yourcenar, out of respect for the living persons, and had us study dead authors only. We didn’t dare quote Freud, fearing sarcasm and bad marks. We barely even mentioned Bachelard and Studies in Human Time by Georges Poulet, believed we showed great independence of mind by declaring at the start of a presentation “labels must be rejected” or “Sentimental Education was the first modern novel.” Friends gave each other

  books as gifts and wrote dedications on the flyleafs. It was the time of Kafka, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, and Lawrence Durrell. We discovered the nouveau roman of Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, and Sarraute, which we wanted to like, but it didn’t offer us enough help with our lives.

  We preferred texts with words and sentences that summarized existence, our own and those of deliverymen and cleaning ladies in housing projects, from whom we set ourselves apart because, unlike them, we “asked ourselves questions.” We needed words that contained explanations of the world and self, dictated morality: “alienation” and its satellites “bad faith” and “bad conscience,” “immanence” and “transcendence.” We measured everything in terms of “authenticity.” Were it not for fear of quarreling with our parents, who heaped opprobrium in equal measure on divorcés and Communists, we would have joined the Party. In a café one night, as one sat amidst the noise and smoke, the entire setting abruptly lost its meaning. One felt an outsider, without past or future: “a useless passion.”

  In March the days grew long and our winter clothes too warm. It wasn’t only summer that was on its way but life itself, without shape or design. We walked to classes repeating to ourselves: time is out of joint, life is a tale told by

  an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. With friends we discussed our preferred method of suicide: with sleeping pills, in a sleeping bag, in the Sierra de Guadalajara.

  On Sundays in the mid-1960s, our parents took advantage of the student’s presence—home for the weekend with laundry—to invite friends and family to a meal. The table talk revolved around the arrival of a supermarket, the building of a public pool, the Renault 4L and the Citroën Ami 6. Those who had televisions held forth on the physical attributes of ministers and talk show hostesses, discussing celebrities as if they lived next door. The fact of having watched Raymond Oliver prepare pepper steak flambé, a medical program with Dr. Igor

  Barrère, and 36 chandelles appeared to grant them a superior right to speak. Before the stiffness and indifference of those who did not have televisions and knew nothing about Zitrone, Anne-Marie Peysson, or the baby doll put through a meat grinder by Jean-Christophe Averty, the others returned to subjects of common interest: the best way to prime rabbit, the benefits of civil servants, and which local butcher shop served the customer best. They spoke of the year 2000, calculated the age they would be and their chances of being alive. They took pleasure in imagining life at the end of the century, with meals replaced by pills, robots doing all the work, and houses on the moon. They did not talk for long, for no one cared how life would be in forty years, see if we’re alive, for starters!

  With a sense of necessary sacrifice—for the guests, who raved about our studies, and our parents, who gave us pocket money and washed and ironed our clothes—of hours one could have spent reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf or Stoetzel’s Sociology and Social Psychology, awkwardly and with good grace, we joined the conversation. We could not help but notice their way of mopping gravy off a plate until it was clean, shaking a cup to dissolve the sugar, uttering the words “a high-ranking person” with a hush of respect, and suddenly we saw the family milieu from the outside as a closed world that was no longer ours. The ideas that possessed us were alien to illness and factory layoffs, vegetables to be planted with the waxing moon, and all the other subjects discussed at the table. Hence our decision not to talk about ourselves and our studies, careful not to contradict them on any subject. To declare we were unsure of getting a good job or teaching later might demolish their beliefs, insult them and make them doubt our abilities.

  The company was no longer enraged by memories of the Occupation and the bombing. No one revived the emotions of yesteryear. When at the end of the meal someone said, “There’s another one the Boches won’t get,” they were simply quoting.

  For us too, the great postwar Sundays, Fleur de Paris and Le petit vin blanc belonged to another time, to childhood, which we had no desire to hear anything about. If an uncle tried to bring it up, “Remember when I taught you how to ride a bike?” we found him old. Immersed in the voices, the words and expressions we’d heard since birth but which no longer came to us spontaneously, we felt ourselves drift on hazy images of other Sundays, back to the times-before whose tales were told when we returned to the table for dessert, out of breath from too much play, and listened to the yarns no one bothered to tell today.

  In this black-and-white photo, in the foreground, lie three girls and a boy, on their stomachs; only their

  upper bodies are visible. Behind them
are two other boys. One stands, leaning over, silhouetted against the sky. The other, kneeling, appears to annoy one of the girls with his arm, which is extended. In the background is a valley, submerged in a kind of mist. On the back of the photo: University Campus. Mont-Saint-Aignan. June ’63. Brigitte, Alain, Annie, Gérald, Annie, Ferrid.

  She is the girl in the middle, the most “womanly.” Her hair is combed George Sand style in flat bands on either side of a center part. Her broad shoulders are bare, and her clenched fists emerge oddly from beneath her torso. No glasses. The photo was taken during the interval between the sitting of exams and the announcement of their results. It was a time of sleepless nights, long discussions in bars, rented rooms in town, caresses on naked skin, on the point of reckless, and the strains of La Javanaise. A time of deep sleeps in the afternoons, from which she emerged with the guilty feeling of having removed herself from the world, as on the day when she awakened to learn the Tour de France and Jacques Anquetil had passed hours before. She joined the party and was bored. The girls on either side of her in the photo belong to the bourgeoisie. She doesn’t feel like one of them. She is stronger and more alone. By spending too much time with them, accompanying them to surboums, she feels she demeans herself. Nor does she think she has anything in common, not any longer, with the working-class world of her childhood and her parents’ small business. She has gone over to the other side but she cannot say

  of what. The life behind her is made up of disjointed images. She feels she is nowhere, “inside” nothing except knowledge and literature.