The Years

by Annie Ernaux

  In the separation process, the inventory of furniture and appliances marked the probable point of no return. A list was made of objects accumulated over fifteen years:

  —rugs 300 F

  —stereo 10,000

  —aquarium 1,000

  —mirror from Morocco 200

  —bed 2,000

  —Emmanuelle armchairs 1000

  —medicine cabinet 50, etc.

  We fought over them, weighed the market value (“It’s not worth anything now”) against use value (“I need the car more than you do”). Everything we’d desired together and had been content to acquire when we’d first settled down, things that had vanished into the décor or daily use, recovered their initial and forgotten status of objects with a price. As the list of things to buy, from pots and pans to bedsheets, had once anchored our union in the long term, the list of things to be divided now made the breakup real. It drew a line through shared desire and curiosity, the catalog orders filled out in the evening after supper, the hesitations at Darty Appliance over two models of stove, an armchair’s perilous voyage on the car roof, after a garage sale, one summer afternoon. The inventory ratified the death of us as a couple. The next step was to hire a lawyer and translate shared history into legal language, which in one fell swoop purged the breakup of its passion, prodding it toward a banal and anonymous “dissolution of marital community.” One wished to flee and leave things as they were, but sensed there was no turning back. One was ready to endure the heartbreak of divorce, the threats, insults, pettiness, and living with half the money, ready for anything that would help us recover the desire for a future.

  The color photo of a woman, a boy of about twelve, and a man. They stand apart from each other in triangle formation, their shadows beside them, on a sandy esplanade, white with sun. Behind them is a building that might be a museum. On the right the man, who wears a black Mao-style suit, his back to the camera, arms raised, films the building. From the background, at the tip of the triangle, the younger boy stands looking at the camera. He wears shorts and a T-shirt with an illegible inscription, holding a black object that is probably the camera case. On the left, in the foreground and in semi-profile is the woman. She wears a tight green dress loose at the waist, a style between all-purpose and hippie chic. She holds a thick book that must be the Blue Guide. Her hair is pulled back severely, exposing a rounded face blurred by light. Under the ill-defined dress her lower body appears heavy. Both woman and child seem to have been captured as they were walking, turning at the last moment to smile, alerted by the photographer. The back of the photo is marked Spain, July ’80.

  She is the wife and mother of this little family group, whose fourth member, the teenage son, took the photo. The raked-back hair, drooping shoulders, and shapeless dress, in spite of her smile, indicate fatigue and the absence of a desire to please.

  Here in full sunlight, at this unidentifiable place on a sightseeing walk, she probably hasn’t a thought for anything outside of the family bubble, a kind of vacuum chamber they walk inside from parador to tapas bar and historic sites marked with three stars in the guide. They take it for rides in the Peugeot 305, whose tires they are afraid to find punctured by the ETA. Inside the bubble, she is momentarily free of the manifold concerns whose elliptical traces can be found in her engagement book—change sheets, order roast, staff meeting (etc.)—and has surrendered to a state of heightened awareness. Since they left the Paris region in the pouring rain, she has tried and failed to shake off her marital pain, a lump of helplessness, resentment, and abandonment. A pain that filters her relations with the outside world. She pays only remote attention to the landscape, simply noting, as they pass the industrial zones on the outskirts of cities, the shadowy hulk of Mammouth on the plain, the disappearance of the little donkeys, and that Spain has changed since the death of Franco. In sidewalk cafés, all she sees is women whom she guesses to be between thirty-five and fifty. She searches their faces for signs of happiness or unhappiness and wonders how do they do it? But at other times, from the back of a bar, she watches her children play electronic games with their father, and is devastated by the thought of bringing suffering, through divorce, to such a quiet little world.

  From this trip to Spain, the following moments will remain:

  —on the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, as they were having a drink in the shade, she could not take her eyes off a woman in her forties, who could have been taken for an ordinary mother and housewife (flowery blouse, knee-length skirt, a little purse), turning tricks under the arcades

  —at the Hotel Escurial in Toledo, wakened by the sound of moaning, she rushed next door to check on the children, who were quietly sleeping. Returning to bed, she and her husband realized it was a woman in the throes of an interminable orgasm, her cries rebounding off the patio walls into all the rooms with open windows. Once her husband had fallen back to sleep, she could not keep from masturbating

  —in Pamplona, where they spent three days during the Sanfermines, she napped alone in the afternoon and felt as she had at eighteen in her cubicle at the residence, same body, same solitude, same lack of volition. Lying in bed, she listened to the music meandering through the town, never stopping, with the parade of Giants and Big-Heads.17 It was the same old feeling of being outside of the fête.

  During that summer of 1980, her youth seems to her an endless light-filled space whose every corner she occupies. She embraces it whole with the eyes of the present and discerns nothing specific. That this world is now behind her is a shock. This year, for the first time, she seized the terrible meaning of the phrase I have only one life. Perhaps she already sees herself as the old woman in Cría cuervos, the film that shattered her one earlier summer, already so remote, surreal with heat, the summer of the “drought.” Paralyzed and mute, her face covered in tears, the woman gazes at photos on the wall while the same songs play over and over again. The films she wants to see and the ones she’s recently seen form story lines inside her and she seeks her own life therein—Wanda, A Simple Story. She asks them to draw her a future.

  She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.

  We had emerged from our lethargy without noticing.

  We viewed society and politics with the joyful derision of Coluche. Children knew all his forbidden sketches and everyone repeated, “It’s new, it just came out!” His vision of a France “bent double with laughter” tallied with ours. We were delighted that he wanted to run for president, even if we didn’t think we’d go all the way in a kind of sacrilege against universal suffrage by voting for him. We were overjoyed to learn that the disdainful Giscard d’Estaing had received diamonds from an African potentate suspected of keeping his enemies’ corpses in his deep freezer. Through a reversal of undetermined origins, it was no longer Giscard who embodied truth, progress, and youth, but Mitterrand, who supported free radio, State-reimbursed abortions, retirement at sixty, the thirty-nine-hour workweek, the abolishment of the death penalty, etc. His new aura of sovereignty was enhanced by his portrait with a village and church steeple in the background, an image of irrefutable fact firmly rooted in old memories.

  Out of superstition, we held our tongues. We felt it would bring bad luck to admit our firm belief that the Left would come to power. Elections are for suckers was a slogan from another time.

  Even as the strange image of Mitterrand formed on the screen from a fragmented pattern of dots, we didn’t believe it. Then we realized that we’d spent our whole adult life under governments we didn’t care about. Twenty-three years (with the exception of one month of May) that now appeared a hopeless downward slide, devoid of happiness from anything to do with politics. It filled us with resentment, as if something of our youth had been stolen. After all this time, one misty Sunday night in May that erased the failure of ’68, we reentered History with a troop of young people, women, workers and teachers,
artists and gays, nurses and mail deliverers, and longed to do it all over again. It was 1936, our parents’ Front Populaire, the Liberation, a successful ’68. We craved lyricism and emotion, the Rose and the Pantheon, Jean Jaurès and Jean Moulin, Le temps des cerises and Les corons by Pierre Bachelet, stirring words that seemed sincere because we hadn’t heard them for so long. We had to reoccupy the past, storm the Bastille anew, become drunk on symbols and nostalgia before confronting the future. Mendès France’s tears of happiness at Mitterrand’s embrace were our tears too. We laughed at the terror of the wealthy who hightailed it to Switzerland to stash their money, and condescendingly reassured the secretaries who were convinced their apartments would be seized for nationalized housing. The attack against John Paul II, shot by a Turk, came at a bad time. We’d forget all about it.

  Everything seemed possible. Everything was novel. We observed the four Communist ministers with curiosity, as we would an exotic species, amazed that they didn’t look Soviet or speak with the accents of Marchais and Lajoinie. We were moved to see members of the National Assembly sporting pipes and goatees, like students from the sixties. The air seemed lighter, life more youthful. Certain words and turns of phrase were coming back, like “bourgeoisie” and “social class.” Language ran riot. On vacation highways, we listened at full volume to cassettes of Iron Maiden, the adventures of David Grossexe on Radio Carbone 14, and felt as if a new time were opening up before us.

  Never within memory had so many things been granted in so few months (a fact that we would immediately forget, never imagining a return to the previous situation). The death penalty was abolished, the cost of abortions reimbursed, the situation of undocumented immigrants regularized, homosexuality legitimized, vacations lengthened by a week, the workweek reduced by an hour. But the peace didn’t last. The government asked to borrow our money. Currency was devalued, controls imposed on rates of exchange, and francs prevented from leaving the country. The atmosphere grew tense, official discourse smacked of punishment (“rigor,” “austerity”), as if having more time, money, and rights were somehow illegitimate and we should return to a natural order dictated by economists. Mitterrand no longer spoke of “the people of the Left.” We still did not resent him, much. He wasn’t Thatcher, who let Bobby Sands die and sent soldiers to be killed in the Falklands. But May 10 became an embarrassing, almost ridiculous memory. Nationalizations, salary hikes, the reduction of work time, all the things we believed to be the achievement of justice and the advent of a new society, now seemed to have been a vast commemoration ceremony for the Front Populaire, a worship of vanished ideals in which even the celebrants might not believe. The event had not happened. The State was moving away from us again.

  It moved closer to the media. Politicians appeared in stage-

  directed TV shows, made solemn and even tragic with music. They pretended to submit to interrogation and tell the truth. To hear them quote so many figures without hesitation, never in the least surprised, we suspected they’d known the questions in advance; as with school essays, the object was to convince. From week to week, they appeared one after another: Good evening Madame Georgina Dufoix, Good evening Monsieur Pasqua, Good evening Monsieur Brice Lalonde. Nothing was retained but a “little phrase” to which we’d have paid no attention if hawk-eyed journalists had not triumphantly put it into circulation.

  The facts and reality, material and immaterial, were presented in numbers and percentages, of unemployed, of car and book sales, probabilities of cancer and death, “favorable” and “unfavorable” opinions. Fifty-five percent of French citizens think there are too many Arabs, thirty percent own a VCR, two million are unemployed. The figures added up to nothing but fate and determinism.

  We could not have said exactly when that obscure and formless entity, the Crisis, became the origin and explanation of the world, the certainty of absolute evil for all. But that is what it was on the day when Yves Montand in a three-piece suit, backed by Libération (which had clearly ceased to be Sartre’s newspaper), explained that the miracle cure for the Crisis was the Free Market, whose eschatological beauty would later be embodied by the image and voice of Catherine Deneuve for the Bank of Suez, praising its opening to private capital, while the tall sumptuous doors of Money slowly swung open, unlike the ones in Kafka’s Trial, which they would call to mind.

  The Free Market was natural law, modernity, intelligence; it would save the world. (Then, we didn’t understand why factories were laying off and closing.) We could expect nothing more from “ideologies” and their “doublespeak.” “Class struggle,” “political commitment,” the opposition of “capital and labor” elicited smiles of commiseration. Some words seemed to have completely lost their meaning through want of use. Others came along and became essential to the evaluation of individuals and actions, “performance,” “challenge,” “profit.” “Success” attained the status of a transcendent value, defined “the France of winners,” from Paul-Loup Sulitzer to Philippe de Villiers, and glorified a guy “who started out with nothing,” Bernard Tapie. It was the age of the silver-tongued.

  We did not believe them. Across from the platform of the Nanterre RER station, near the university, the oversized letters ANPE18 on the side of a gray concrete building made our blood run cold. There were so many men, and now women, who panhandled that we concluded it was a new profession. With the credit/debit card, money became invisible.

  In the absence of hope, we were given the prescription to “unchain our hearts” with protest buttons, marches, concerts, and CDs to fight hunger, racism, poverty, and to support world peace, Solidarność, the Restaurants du Cœur,19 the release of Mandela and Jean-Paul Kaufmann.

  The banlieue20 loomed large in the popular imagination in the shadowy form of concrete blocks and muddy vacant lots at the northern end of the bus routes and RER lines. Urine-soaked stairwells, shattered windows, broken-down elevators, and syringes in the cellars. Banlieue youth were in a separate category from other young people, uncivilized and somehow frightening, barely French, even when they were born in France. Admirable teachers, cops, and firefighters ventured forth to face them down on their own turf. The “intercultural dialogue” boiled down to an appropriation of their way of speaking, an aping of their accent, reversing letters and syllables as they did, saying meuf for femme and tarpé for pétard (joint). They had been given a collective name, les Beurs, which referred all at once to their origins, skin color, and way of speaking, to which, in derision, an episode of Je-parle-France had been devoted. There were a lot of them. We didn’t know them.

  A figure from the extreme Right, Jean-Marie Le Pen, made a comeback. We recalled seeing him years ago with a black band over one eye, like Moshe Dayan.

  On the outskirts of cities, covered markets and gigantic warehouses, open on Sundays, flogged shoes, tools, and home furnishings by the thousands. Hypermarkets expanded, shopping carts were replaced by others so big that one could scarcely touch the bottom, short of leaning all the way over. We changed television sets so that we could acquire a SCART connector and a VCR. People were soothed by the arrival of the new. The certainty of continuous progress removed the desire to imagine it. New objects were no longer met with wonder or anxiety, but welcomed as additions to individual freedom and pleasure. CDs removed the need to get up every fifteen minutes to flip a record over, and thanks to the remote control one did not have to leave the couch all evening. Videotapes made the great home-cinema dream come true. On the Minitel, we checked phone listings and train schedules, horoscopes and porn sites. Now we were free at last to do everything at home—no need to ask anyone for anything. Genitals and sperm could be viewed in close-up without shame. The sense of surprise was fading. People forgot there’d been a time when they never thought they’d see the like. But there it was. One saw. And then, nothing. Only the satisfaction of having access, with complete impunity, to once-forbidden pleasures.

  With the Walkman, for the first time m
usic entered the body. We could live inside music, walled off from the world.

  The young were sensible. For the essentials, they shared our way of thinking. They didn’t heckle us at the lycée, challenge the curriculum, the rules, or authority, and accepted the boredom of classes. Outside of school they came to life. They spent hours at a time on Playstations or Atari consoles, and playing role-playing games. They raved about home computers and begged us to buy the first model, Oric-1. They watched Les enfants du rock, Les Nuls,21 nonstop music videos on Bonsoir les clips, read Stephen King and to make us happy, leafed through the Phosphore, the lycée students’ magazine. They listened to funk and hard rock, or rockabilly. Between LPs and Walkmans, they lived inside music. They “partied hard” at teufs and probably smoked tarpés. Studied. Were close-mouthed about their futures. Opened the fridge and cupboards at all hours to eat Danette pudding cups, Bolino instant noodles, and Nutella. Slept with their girlfriends at our apartment. They didn’t have time for everything, sports, painting, film club and school trips. They didn’t resent us for anything. Journalists referred to them as the whatever generation.

  Schooled together since kindergarten, girls and boys grew up quietly in what seemed to us a kind of innocence and equality. They all spoke the same crude, ill-mannered language. They called each other assholes and told each other to fuck off. We found them “very much themselves” and “natural” in relation to all that had tormented us at their age, sex, teachers, parents. We questioned them with circumspection, afraid they’d say we were a pain in the ass and got up their noses. We allowed them a freedom we’d have loved to have had ourselves, but discreetly watched over their behavior and silences, as our mothers had done with us. We looked upon their autonomy and independence with surprise and satisfaction, as something that had been won over several generations.