The Years

by Annie Ernaux

  They searched for models of existence in space and time, in the exotic or the peasantry, India or the Cévennes. There was an aspiration to purity.

  Short of leaving everything, jobs and apartments, to live in the country (a plan constantly postponed but sure to be realized one day), the ones most hungry for rebirth sought remote villages on harsh terrains for holidays. They disdained the beaches where you tan stupid, and the home provinces, flat and “disfigured” by industrialization. On the other hand, they credited with authenticity poor farmers in arid lands unchanged for centuries. Those who wanted to make History admired nothing so much as its erasure through the return of seasons and immutability of gestures, and from these same farmers bought an old hut for a song.

  Or they spent their holidays in an Eastern bloc country. In the gray streets with shattered sidewalks, among the State stores with their penurious no-name stock, wrapped in coarse gray paper, under naked bulbs dangling from the ceilings of apartments lit only at night, they felt they were back in the slow and graceless postwar world of consummate lack. It was a sweet and inexpressible feeling. Yet they would never have wanted to live there. They brought back embroidered blouses and raki. They wanted the world to always have countries devoid of progress to take them back in time this way.

  In the early 1970s, on summer evenings when the air was heady with the aromas of dry earth, thyme, brochettes, and ratatouille (one couldn’t forget the vegetarians), strangers gathered around a big farm table bought from a bric-a-brac trader for barely a thousand francs. The Parisians revamping the house next door, backpackers, hiking enthusiasts, and painters-on-silk, couples with and without children, shaggy men, feral teenage girls, mature women in Indian dresses, reticent at first despite the familiar tu (used as a matter of course), struck up conversations on color additives and hormones in food, sexology and body work, anti-gymnastics, the Mezières technique, the Rogers method, yoga, Leboyer’s birth without violence, homeopathy and soybeans, self-management, Lip, and René Dumont. They wondered if it was preferable to send children to school or to school them at home, and if Ajax scouring powder was toxic, yoga and group therapy useful, a two-hour workday utopian, and if women should demand equality with men, or equality within difference. They reviewed the best ways to eat,

  be born, raise children, treat illness, teach, live in harmony with self, the Other, and nature, escape society, and express oneself, comparing pottery, weaving, guitar, jewelry, theater, and writing. A vague and immense desire to create was in the air. Everyone claimed to be devoted to an artistic activity, or planned to be. All activities were equal, they agreed, and instead of painting or playing the flute, one could always create oneself through psychoanalysis.

  All the children were put to bed in the same room and ordered for the sake of form “not to turn the place into a pigsty.” They wreaked havoc with unbridled joy, while the adults drank the moonshine brought by the farmer next door—he’d been invited for the apéro only—and talk moved toward brooding sexual questions, were we straight or gay, the first orgasm, confessions. The feral girl declared “I love to shit.” Together on that summer evening, these unrelated individuals, cut adrift from family meals and their loathsome rituals, had the exhilarating sense of opening to the world in all its diversity, as if they were teenagers again.

  No one thought of bringing up war, or Auschwitz and the camps, or the troubles in Algeria (“case closed”); only Hiroshima, and the nuclear future. Between centuries of peasant life, whose presence one sensed in the fragrant breeze of the garrigue, and that night in August 1973, nothing had transpired.

  Someone started playing the guitar, singing Maxime

  Le Forestier’s Comme un arbre dans la ville, the Quilapayúns’ Duerme negrito. The others listened, eyes lowered. They would bed down, hit-or-miss, on cots in the former silkworm house, unsure of whether to make love with the neighbor to the right or the one to the left. Before deciding, they were overcome with sleep, euphoric and reassured as to the value of the lifestyle they’d paraded for each other all evening, so far removed from that of the “Joe Six-Packs” crammed into the campsites down at Merlin-Plage.

  Now society had a name, “consumer society.” This was a certainty, an irrefutable fact whether we liked it or not. An increase in the price of fuel brought things to a halt, briefly. Spending was in the air. There was a resolute appropriation of leisure goods: two-door fridges, gleaming R5s bought on impulse, a week at the Hôtel Club in Flaine, a studio in La Grande-Motte. Television sets were turned in for newer models. The world looked more appealing on the color display, interiors more enviable. Gone was the chilly distance of black-and-white, that severe, almost tragic negative of daily life.

  Advertising provided models for how to live, behave, and furnish the home. It was society’s cultural monitor. Kids requested fruit-flavored Évian water (“fortified”), Cadbury cookies, Nutella, a slot-load portable record player for listening to songs from the Aristocats, remote-controlled cars and Barbie dolls. Parents hoped that all the things they gave their kids would deter them from smoking hash when they were older. And we who were undeceived, who seriously examined the dangers of advertising with our students; we who assigned the topic “Does the possession of material goods lead to happiness?,” bought a stereo, a Grundig radio-cassette player, and a Bell & Howell Super-8 camera, with a sense of using modernity to intelligent ends. For us and by us, consumption was purified.

  The ideals of May ’68 were being transformed into objects and entertainment.

  It was disconcerting to see ourselves for the first time on the pull-down screen in the living room. We walked, our lips moved, we silently laughed while the projector sizzled away in the background. We were amazed by ourselves, by our gestures and movements. It was a new sensation, perhaps similar to what people in the seventeenth century felt on seeing themselves in a mirror, or the great-great-grandparents on viewing their first photo-portrait. We did not let on how greatly it disturbed us, and preferred to watch others on screen, relatives and friends, who more resembled what they already looked like to us. It was even worse to hear one’s voice on the tape recorder. After that, one could never forget the voice that others heard. We gained self-knowledge and lost spontaneity.

  In our clothing (bell-bottoms, tank tops, and clogs), our reading (Le Nouvel Observateur), our outrage (at nuclear energy and detergents in the sea), our acceptance (flower children), we felt we were hip to our times and therefore sure of being right in every circumstance. Our parents and the middle-aged were from another time, not the least in their very insistence on trying to understand the young. We took in their opinions and advice as pure information. And we would not grow old.

  The film’s first image is that of a door standing ajar (it is night). It closes and reopens as a little boy comes hurtling out. He stops short, undecided, blinking. He wears an orange jacket and a hat with earflaps. Then a smaller boy appears in a blue hooded anorak with white fur trim. The older child moves restlessly while the other stands frozen, transfixed, as if the film had stopped. A woman enters, wearing a long brown fitted coat, her face hidden by the hood. She carries two cardboard boxes stacked one on top of the other. Grocery items protrude at the top. She pushes the door closed with her shoulder. Disappears from the frame, reappears without the boxes and removes her coat, which she hangs on a “parrot” coatrack. She turns toward the camera with a quick smile, and then looks down, dazzled by the brightness of the magnesium lamp. She is verging on skinny, wears little makeup, brown Karting trousers—close-fitting, no fly—and a brown-and-yellow-striped sweater. Her light brown shoulder-length hair is pulled back with a barrette. There is something ascetic and sad, or disenchanted, in her expression. The smile comes too late to be spontaneous. Her gestures reflect an abruptness of manner and/or nervousness. The children have returned, and stand in front of her. None of the three knows what to do. They move their arms and legs in a group facing the camera, which they gaze a
t, their eyes now accustomed to the violent light. No one talks. One might almost say they’re posing for a photo that will not stop being taken. The bigger boy raises his arm in a grotesque military salute, mouth in a grimace, eyes closed. The camera jumps to elements of the décor that display aesthetic and market value, reveal bourgeois taste: a chest, a hanging lamp made of opaline glass.

  Her husband filmed these images when she returned from buying groceries with the children, whom she’d collected after school. The label on the reel reads Family Life ’72–’73. It is always he who does the filming.

  According to the criteria of women’s magazines, on the outside she belongs to a growing category of active women in their thirties who juggle work and motherhood, and wish to remain feminine and stylish. A list of the places she goes over the course of a day (the lycée, Carrefour supermarket, the butcher shop, dry cleaner’s, etc.), her trips in the Austin Mini between the pediatrician, the older boy’s judo club, the little one’s pottery class, the post office, and a calculation of time allotted to each occupation—classes and corrections, making breakfast, choosing the children’s clothes, laundry, lunch, grocery shopping except for the bread, which he brings home after work—reveals:

  —a seemingly unequal division between work inside and work outside the home, paid (two-thirds) and domestic, including child rearing (one-third)

  —a wide range of tasks

  —a significant frequency of visits to commercial establishments

  —an almost total absence of unscheduled time

  She doesn’t do these calculations—she derives a sort of pride from the quick accomplishment of things that require no invention or transformation—and in any case, they would fail to explain her new state of mind.

  She experiences her job as continuous imperfection, a sham. She writes in her diary “Being a teacher tears me apart.” Her energy and desire to learn and try new things is boundless. She remembers writing at twenty-two, “If by twenty-five I haven’t fulfilled my promise of writing a novel, I’ll commit suicide.” Would she be happier with another kind of life? The question obsesses her. She wonders to what degree it is a product of May ’68, which she feels she missed, having been—already—too settled at the time.

  She has started to imagine herself outside of conjugal and family life.

  Her student years are no longer an object of nostalgic desire. She sees them as a time of intellectual gentrification, of breaking with her origins. Her memory goes from romantic to critical. Scenes from her childhood often return, her mother shouting later you’ll spit in our faces, boys wheeling around on Vespas after Mass, herself with the curly perm (as in the photo taken in the school garden), or with her homework spread out on the greasy oilcloth-covered table, where her father liked to “rustle up a snack” (words return too, like a forgotten language), and the things she read (Confidences, romances by Delly), the songs of Mariano, memories of academic excellence and social inferiority (the part of the photos that cannot be seen), all the things she has buried as shameful and which are now worthy of retrieval, unfolding, in the light of intelligence. As her memory is gradually freed of humiliation, the future again becomes a field of action. Fighting for women’s rights to abortion, against social injustice, and understanding how she has become the woman she is today, are all part of the same endeavor.

  Among her memories of the years that have just gone by, she finds none she considers to be an image of happiness:

  —the winter of 1969–70, black and white because of the livid sky, and the abundant snow that clung to the sidewalks in gray patches until April; she hunted them down on purpose and smashed them with her boots to help destroy that endless winter, which she associates with the fire at the Saint-Laurent-du-Pont dance hall in Isère, only partly consumed that year and burned to the ground the following winter

  —in the square of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Yves Montand playing pétanque in a pink shirt, with a bit of a potbelly, pacing around after every shot, pleased and smug, and eyeing the tourists herded behind barriers, at a safe distance; it was the summer that Gabrielle Russier was thrown in prison and killed herself on returning to her apartment

  —the thermal park of Saint-Honoré-les-Bains, the pool where the children sailed toy boats; the Hôtel du Parc, where she lived with them for three weeks, and later confused with the boardinghouse in Robert Pinget’s book Someone.

  In the unbearable part of memory, the image of her father dying, of his corpse in the suit he’d worn only once, to her wedding, carried down from the bedroom in a plastic dustcover because the stairs were too narrow for a coffin.

  Political events remain as details only: on TV, during the presidential campaign, the pairing of Mendès France and Defferre, an appalling spectacle, and she’d thought “But why didn’t Mendès France run for election alone”; Alain Poher scratching his nose during his last speech before the second round, when she felt that because of that gesture, for everyone to see, he’d be defeated by Pompidou.

  She does not feel any particular age, though certainly feels a young woman’s arrogance vis-à-vis older women, a condescension toward the postmenopausal. It is unlikely she will ever be one of them herself. She is unperturbed when someone predicts that she will die at fifty-two. It seems to her an acceptable age at which to die.

  There were rumors of agitation; things were going to heat up the following spring and in the autumn too. But they never did.

  There were committees of high school students, autonomists, environmentalists, antinuclear activists, conscientious objectors, feminists, gays, all the causes blazed but never merged. Maybe there were too many convulsions in the rest of the world, from Czechoslovakia and the interminable Vietnam to the bombing of the Munich Olympics, and one junta after another in Greece. The authorities and Marcellin quietly repressed “Leftist activity.” Pompidou suddenly died, and here we’d thought that all he had was hemorrhoids. Union posters in the staff room again announced that the strike of such-and-such a day to protest the “deterioration of our working conditions” would “force the State to retreat.” The way we imagined the future was limited to drawing boxes around the days of vacation in our date books, starting from the beginning of September.

  Reading Charlie Hebdo and Libération sustained our belief in belonging to a community of revolutionary pleasure and working, in spite of everything, towards a new May ’68.

  The “Gulag” brought to light by Solzhenitsyn, and hailed as a great revelation, spawned confusion and tarnished the revolutionary horizon. All over the city, a fellow with an atrocious smile looked out of a poster into the eyes of passersby and said Your money interests me. In the end we left things up to the Union of the Left and its joint program, which, after all, we’d never seen until now. Between September 11, 1973, when we marched in the anti-Pinochet demonstrations after the assassination of Allende, while the Right gloated to see the end of “the unfortunate Chilean business,” and the spring of 1974, when we watched the televised debate between Mitterrand and Giscard, presented as a great event, we’d ceased to believe there would ever be another May ’68. In the following springs, because of balmy rain in March or April, emerging one evening from a parent-student-teacher meeting, we’d have the sense that something could happen, and just as soon feel that it was just an illusion. Nothing happened in the spring anymore, either in Paris or in Prague.

  Under Giscard d’Estaing we would live in an “advanced liberal society.” Nothing was political or social anymore. It was simply modern or not. Everything had to do with modernity. People confused “liberal” with “free,” and believed that a society so named would be the one to grant them the greatest possible number of rights and objects.

  We were not especially bored. Even we, who had turned off the TV on election night when Giscard uttered his “I send my cordial congratulations to my unlucky competitor,” like so many farts from a mouth tight-pursed as a hen’s rear end, were sh
aken by the new voting age of eighteen, divorce by mutual consent, and debate on the abortion law. We nearly wept with rage to see Simone Veil defend herself alone in the Assemblée against raging men of her own camp, and placed her in our personal Pantheon, next to the other Simone, de Beauvoir, though were distressed by her first appearance on television, in an interview, sporting a turban and scarlet fingernails, fortune-teller style (it was too late, she shouldn’t have done it), and ceased to be annoyed when students confused Veil with a woman philosopher we occasionally quoted in class. But we broke for good with the elegant president when he refused to pardon Ranucci, sentenced to death at the height of a summer without a drop of rain—a scorcher, the first in a long time.

  Lightness, nods, and winks were in, moral indignation out. We amused ourselves reading the movie billboards for Suck Divas and Little Wet Panties, and never missed a chance to see Jean-Louis Bory in the role of token “queen.” It seemed inconceivable that The Nun had once been banned. Still, it was hard to admit how shaken we were by the scene in Going Places when a woman’s breast is suckled by Patrick Dewaere instead of her baby.