by Annie Ernaux
They had a thing or two to teach us about tolerance, anti-racism, pacifism, and ecology. They weren’t interested in politics but adopted all the generous watchwords and the slogan created just for them, Touche pas à mon pote!22 They bought the CD for hunger relief in Ethiopia, followed the march of the Beurs. They proved to be exacting about the “right to be different.” They had a moral worldview. We liked them.
At holiday lunches, references to the past were few and far between. For the younger people there seemed no point in exhuming the grand narrative of our entry into the world, and we loathed wars and hatred as much as they did. We didn’t bring up Algeria, Chile, Vietnam, May ’68, or the fight for free abortion. Our children were our only contemporaries.
The time-before vanished from family tables, and fled the bodies and voices of its witnesses. It appeared on television in documentary archives with commentary by voices that came from nowhere. The “duty of remembrance” was a civic obligation, the sign of a just conscience, a new patriotism. For forty years we’d consented to indifference about the genocide of the Jews—one could not say that Night and Fog had drawn crowds, nor the books of Primo Levi and Robert Antelme—and thought we felt shame, but it was delayed shame. Only in watching Shoah did conscience contemplate in horror the extent of its own potential for inhumanity.
Genealogy was all the rage. People went to the town halls in their native regions and collected birth and death certificates. They were fascinated, and then disappointed by mute archives where nothing appeared but names, dates, and professions: Jacques-Napoléon Thuillier, born July 3, 1807, day laborer; Florestine-Pélagie Chevalier, weaver. We clung to photos and family objects, amazed to think of how many we’d lost in the seventies without regret, whereas we missed them so much today. We needed to “re-source” ourselves. The “roots” imperative prevailed.
Identity, which until then had meant nothing but a card in one’s wallet with a photo glued onto it, became an overriding concern. No one knew exactly what it entailed. Whatever the case, it was something you needed to have, rediscover, assume, assert, express—a supreme and precious commodity.
There were women in the world who were veiled from head to toe.
The body, whose “fitness” was maintained through jogging, Gymtonic, and aerobics, its inner purity with Évian water and yogurt, pursued its voyage toward Assumption. The body did our thinking. Sexuality had to be “fulfilled.” We read Dr. Leleu’s Treaty on Caresses to perfect our skills. Women wore stockings, garter belts, and corsets again, and claimed it was “mainly for themselves.” The injunction to “pamper oneself” came from every quarter.
Couples in their forties watched X-rated films on Canal+. Faced with indefatigable cocks and shaved vulvas in close-up, they were seized by a kind of technical desire, a distant spark compared to the conflagration that propelled them together ten or twenty years before, when they didn’t even have time to remove their shoes. At the moment of climax they said “I’m coming” like the actors on Canal+. They fell asleep with the satisfied feeling of being normal.
Hopes and expectations moved away from things toward the preservation of the body, unalterable youth. Health was a right, and illness an injustice to be remedied as swiftly as possible.
Children no longer had worms and hardly ever died. Test-tube babies were common and the worn-out hearts and kidneys of the living were replaced by those of the dead.
Shit and death had to be invisible.
We preferred not to talk about the “new” diseases that had no cures. The one with the Germanic name, Alzheimer, which made the old look crazed and forget names and faces. The other was contracted through sodomy and syringes, a punishment for homosexuals and drug addicts, or in rare cases, dumb bad luck for recipients of blood transfusions.
The Catholic religion had unceremoniously vanished from our lives. Families no longer imparted its teachings or its practices. With the exception of certain rites, it was no longer required as a sign of respectability, as if it had been overused, worn out by billions of prayers, masses, and processions over two millennia. Venial and mortal sins, the commandments of God and the Church, grace and theological virtues belonged to an unintelligible vocabulary, an obsolete mind-set. Sexual freedom had made lust as sin passé, along with naughty stories about nuns and the raunchy ballads of the Curé de Camaret. The Church no longer terrorized the teenage imagination or ruled over sexual exchange. Women’s bodies were freed from its clutches. By losing sex, its main field of endeavor, the Church had lost everything. Outside of philosophy courses, the idea of God was neither indisputably valid nor a serious matter for debate. A student had carved in a table at the high school, God exists I stepped
in him.
The celebrity of the new Polish pope changed nothing. He was a political hero of Western freedom, a world-class Lech Walesa. His Eastern European accent and white robe, his way of saying “Do not be afraid” and kissing the earth when he got off the plane, were all part of the show, like the throwing of panties at Madonna concerts.
(Convent school parents had marched together one hot Sunday in March, but everyone knew that it had nothing to do with God. It was a matter of faith, but secular rather than religious. It had to do with certainty about a product that guaranteed their children’s success.)
It is a thirty-minute videotape, recorded in a tenth-grade class at a lycée in Vitry-sur-Seine, in February 1985. She is the woman who sits the table, the kind of table one saw in all the schools as of the 1960s. Students sit across from her on chairs in haphazard groupings. Most are girls. Several are African, North African, and West Indian. Some wear makeup, low-cut sweaters, gypsy earrings. In a slightly high-pitched voice, she talks about writing, life, and the status of women, with hesitations, cuts and retakes, especially when a question is asked. She seems overwhelmed by the need to take everything on board, as if assailed by a whole that she alone perceives, and then suddenly utters a sentence of no particular originality. She moves her hands, which are large, often raking them through her mass of red hair, but there is none of the nervousness and jerky movements seen in the Super-8 home movie of thirteen years before. Compared to the photos from Spain, the cheekbones are less prominent while the jawline and oval of the face are more sharply defined. She laughs. It’s a light little laugh that just slips out—shyness, or the vestige of a giggly, working-class adolescence, the attitude of a young girl who acknowledges her lack of importance—and contrasts with the calm and gravity of her face in repose. She wears little makeup, no powder (her skin is shiny), a red scarf slipped into the opening of a tightly buttoned bright green shirt. Her lower body cannot be seen because of the table. No jewelry. One of the students asks:
When you were our age, how did you imagine your life? What did you hope for?
The answer (slowly): I’d have to think about it . . . to go back to being sixteen, to be sure . . . would take at least an hour. (The voice is suddenly high-pitched, edgy.) You live in 1985, women can choose to have children if they want, when they want, outside of marriage. Twenty years ago that was impossible!
No doubt she feels discouraged by this “communication situation” as she measures her inability to impart through some other means than stereotypes and commonplace words the full reach of a woman’s experience between the ages of sixteen and forty-four. (She would have to immerse herself in photos from the tenth grade, find songs and notebooks, reread diaries.)
At this point in her life she is divorced, lives with her two sons, and has a lover. Of necessity, she has sold the house and the furniture bought nine years earlier, with an indifference that surprised her. She’s in a state of material dispossession and freedom. As if the marriage had only been an interlude, she feels she’s picked up the thread of her adolescence where she’d left it off, returning to the same kind of expectancy, the same breathless way of running to appointments in high heels, and sensitivity to love songs. It is a return to the same
desires, too, but now she is not ashamed to satisfy them to perfection, capable of saying I want to fuck. The reversal of values from before ’68 is already remote; now it is in her body’s imperious acquiescence that the “sexual revolution” unfolds, and in her own awareness of the fragile splendor of her age. She’s afraid of getting old. She’s already afraid of missing the scent of the blood that one day will cease to flow. Recently, an official letter had informed her that her current position was effective until the year 2000. It had left her transfixed. Up until now, that date has had no reality.
Her children are not usually present in her thoughts, no more than her parents were when she was a child and a teen. They are a part of her. Because she’s no longer a wife, she’s not the same mother, more a combination of sister, friend, counselor, and organizer of a daily life that has grown lighter since the separation. Everyone eats when they want to, from a tray balanced on their knees in front of the TV. She often looks at them in amazement. So all the waiting for them to grow up, the grain-and-honey Pablum, the first day of first grade and later of middle school, have produced these big boys, whom she suspects she knows very little about. Without them she would be unable to locate herself in time. When she sees small children playing in a sandbox, she’s amazed to find that she already looks back on her own sons’ childhoods, which seem very far in the past.
The important moments of her current existence are the meetings with her lover in the afternoon at a hotel on rue Danielle-Casanova, and the visits to her mother at the hospital in long-term care. For her, these meetings and visits are so very intertwined they sometimes seem to revolve around a single being. As if caressing the skin and hair of her lost mother were the same kind of touch as the erotic gestures of her afternoons with her lover. After love, she nestles into his massive body; there is traffic noise in the background, and she recalls other times she has curled up this way in the daytime: on Sundays in Yvetot as a child, as she read against her mother’s back, in England as an au pair girl, wrapped in a blanket next to an electrical heater, and in the Maisonnave hotel in Pamplona. Each time, she’d had to leave this gentle state of torpor, get up, do homework, go down to the street, socially exist. At these moments she thinks that her life could be drawn as two intersecting lines: one horizontal, which charts everything that has happened to her, everything she’s seen or heard at every instant, and the other vertical, with only a few images clinging to it, spiraling down into darkness.
Because in her refound solitude she discovers thoughts and feelings that married life had thrown into shadow, the idea has come to her to write “a kind of woman’s destiny,” set between 1940 and 1985. It would be something like Maupassant’s A Life and convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself, in History, a “total novel” that would end with her dispossession of people and things: parents and husband, children who leave home, furniture that is sold. She is afraid of losing herself in the profusion of objects that are part of reality and must be grasped. And how would she organize the accumulated memory of events, and news items, and the thousands of days that have conveyed her to the present?
Already, at this distance, all that remains of May 10, 1981, is the image of a middle-aged woman slowly walking her dog in the empty street, whereas exactly two minutes later, all the television and radio stations would announce the name of the next president of the Republic, and Rocard would pop up on the screen like a Cartesian diver, Everyone to the Bastille!
And from the recent past:
—the death of Michel Foucault from septicemia, according to Le Monde, at the end of June, before or after the massive cultural event at the convent school, a sea of pleated skirts and white blouses; two years earlier, the death of Romy Schneider, whom she saw for the first time in Sissi the Young Empress, but only in snippets, the screen blocked by the head of the boy who was kissing her in the back row of the theater, traditionally allotted to this purpose
—the truckers who blocked the roads on the eve of the February vacation
—the steelworkers—whom she associated with the workers from Lip—who burned tires on the train tracks, and she read The Order of Things in her seat on the immobilized TGV
People sensed that nothing could prevent the return of the Right in the next elections, that the fate of the opinion polls had to be fulfilled, and the unknown situation of “cohabitation” inexorably occur, like an unspoken desire the media loved to inflame. The government of the Left seemed to keep doing the wrong thing every time, the TUC jobs for youth,23 the elegant Fabius snubbed by Chirac on TV, Jaruzelski in mafioso sunglasses received at the Élysée, the sabotage of the Rainbow Warrior. Even the hostage taking in Lebanon, a new chapter in a conflict no one understood, came at the wrong time. We were irked by the nightly behest not to forget that Jean-Paul Kaufmann, Marcel Carton, and Marcel Fontaine were still being held hostage—what were we supposed to do about it? Depending on which side they were on, people were distressed or up in arms. Even the colder than usual winter—snow in Paris, thirteen degrees Fahrenheit in the Nièvre—bode no good. The hush of AIDS deaths and its ravaged survivors was all around us. We were in a state of mourning. Every evening when Pierre Desproges closed his Chronique de la haine ordinaire with “As for the month of March, and I say this with no political bias, I’ll be surprised if it lasts the winter,” we understood it was the Left that would not survive the winter.
The Right came back and resolutely undid all that had been done. It denationalized, abolished the official permission requirement for dismissal, and the wealth tax, none of which were making enough people happy. We liked Mitterrand again.
Simone de Beauvoir died, and Jean Genet, no, we definitely did not like that April, moreover snow continued to fall in Île-de-France. We didn’t like May either, though were not unduly disturbed by the nuclear power plant explosion in the USSR. A catastrophe the Russians had failed to hide, surely the result of their incompetence, and inhumanity commensurate with the Gulag (though Gorbachev seemed a nice enough fellow), but it didn’t affect us. One sultry afternoon in June, students emerged from their bac exams to learn that Coluche had been killed riding his motorcycle down a quiet road.
The wars in the world followed their due course. Our interest in them was inversely proportional to their duration and the distance from where we lived. It especially depended on whether Westerners were involved. We couldn’t have said how many years the Iranians and Iraqis had been killing each other, or the Russians trying to subdue the Afghans, let alone the reasons why, firmly convinced that they didn’t know either. We halfheartedly signed petitions related to conflicts whose causes we’d already forgotten. We confused the warring factions in Lebanon: Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians as well. That people could murder each other over religion was beyond our comprehension. It seemed to prove that these populations had remained at an earlier stage of evolution. We were through with the idea of war. We no longer saw boys in uniform in the street, and military service was a burden that everyone tried to escape. Anti-militarism had lost its reason for being. Boris Vian’s Le déserteur alluded to another era. We would have been happy to see blue berets everywhere so peace would reign eternal. We were civilized, increasingly concerned with hygiene and personal grooming, users of products that rid our bodies and homes of nasty odors. We joked, “God is dead, Marx is dead, and I don’t feel so good either.” We had a sense of play.
Isolated acts of terrorism, whose perpetrators disappeared and roamed the earth, like Carlos, scarcely moved us. We may not have remembered the first attacks of September, just after school began, if other bombs had not gone off in public places at a few days’ interval, leaving us no time to emerge from stupor and television no time to exhaust one attack before the next one occurred. Later we will wonder when exactly we started to think that an invisible enemy had declared war on us, and will recall rue de Rennes on that Wednesday afternoon, so hot. We’ll remember the immediate calls to family and friends to rea
ssure ourselves they hadn’t been among the people killed by the bomb hurled from a passing BMW at a Tati store. People continued to take public transport, but the air in the Métro and RER cars silently thickened. As we took our seat, we eyed the sports bags at the feet of “suspicious” passengers, especially those who could be said to belong to the group that was implicitly designated as guilty of the attacks, i.e., Arabs. Suddenly, with the awareness of imminent death, we felt our bodies and present time with violent intensity.
We expected further bloodshed, convinced that the government could not prevent it. Nothing happened. As days went by, we ceased to be afraid and to check under seats. The explosions had suddenly stopped and we didn’t know why, any more than we knew why they had started, and in any case were so relieved that we gave it no more thought. The attacks of what had become “the week of blood” did not constitute an event, and had not changed the lives of the greater number, except in the way we felt out in the streets and public places, a sense of anxiety and fatality that disappeared as soon as the danger had subsided. We did not know the names of the dead and wounded, who formed an anonymous category with the name “the victims of the September attacks,” with a subcategory, “the victims of rue de Rennes,” more specific because more had died and it is even more dreadful to die in a street one was only passing through. (Obviously we would be more familiar with the names of Georges Besse, the CEO of Renault, and General Audran, mowed down by a splinter group called Action Direct, whom we felt had got their decades mixed up and followed the lead of the Red Brigades and Baader-Meinhof.)
