by Annie Ernaux
In that moment, as she gazes softly at the lens—it is undoubtedly a man taking the photo—she sees herself as a woman who, three years before, was consumed by a violent passion for a Russian. Her state of desire and pain has disappeared, though she still feels its shape. The man’s face grows increasingly distant and aggrieved. She would like to recall the way in which she thought about him after he left France, the torrent of images that washed over her and sealed his presence inside her, as if inside a tabernacle.
When it comes to her mother, she remembers the eyes, the hands, the silhouette; the voice, only in the abstract, without texture. The real voice is lost; she has no concrete remnant of it. But phrases often rise to her lips spontaneously, the same ones her mother used in the same contexts, expressions she didn’t remember ever using herself, “The weather is sluggish,” “He talked my ear off,” “You have to wait your turn, like at confession,” etc. It was if her mother were speaking through her mouth, and with her an entire lineage. Other phrases come into her head sometimes, the ones her mother used after she got Alzheimer’s. Their incongruity revealed her mother’s altered mental state, “You can bring me some rags to wipe my bottom with.” In a flash, her mother’s body and presence are returned to her. Unlike the former sentences, repeatedly used, the latter are unique, forever the preserve of one sole being in the world, her mother.
Her husband she hardly ever thinks about, though inside she bears the imprint of their life together and the tastes he imparted, for Bach and sacred music, the morning orange juice. When images of that life cross her mind—like one of an afternoon in Annecy, when she frantically searched the shops of the old quarter for the makings of Christmas Eve dinner, she was twenty-five and it was their first Christmas with the child—she asks, “Would I like to be there now?” She wants to say no, but she knows the question is meaningless, that no question related to things of the past has meaning.
As she waits at the hypermarket checkout, she occasionally thinks of all the times she’s stood in line with a cart heaped with food. She sees the vague silhouettes of women, alone or with children circling their cart. They are faceless, distinguished only by hairstyle—a low chignon, hair cut short, in a bob, or loose and medium-long—and clothing—the seventies maxi-coat, the black midi-coat from the eighties. She sees them as images of herself, taken apart and separated like matryochka dolls. She pictures herself here in ten or fifteen years with a cart filled with sweets and toys for grandchildren not yet born. But she sees that woman as improbable, just as the girl of twenty-five saw the woman of forty, whom she has since become and already ceased to be.
When she can’t sleep at night, she tries to remember the details of all the rooms where she has slept: the one she shared with her parents until the age of thirteen, the ones at the university residence and the Annecy apartment facing the cemetery. She starts at the door and makes her way around the walls. The objects that appear are always linked to gestures and singular facts: in her room at the summer camp where she’d worked as a counselor, the mirror over the sink where some boy counselors had written, in her red Diamond Enamel toothpaste, “Long live whores”; the blue lamp in her room in Rome that gave her an electrical shock each time she turned it on. In those rooms, she never sees herself with the clarity of photos, but blurred as in a film on an encrypted TV channel. Or she sees a silhouette, a hairstyle, movements—leaning out of a window, washing her hair—and positions—sitting at a desk or lying on a bed. Sometimes she manages to feel she is back inside her former body, not the way one is in dreams, but more as if she were inside the “glorious body” of the Catholic religion, which was supposed to resurrect after death with no sensation of pain or pleasure, heat, cold, or the urge to urinate. She doesn’t know what she wants from these inventories, except maybe through the accumulation of memories of objects, to again become the person she was at such and such a time.
She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas, and manners, and the private life of this woman? How to make the fresco of forty-five years coincide with the search for a self outside of History, the self of suspended moments transformed into the poems she wrote at twenty (“Solitude,” etc.)? Her main concern is the choice between “I” and “she.” There is something too permanent about “I,” something shrunken and stifling, whereas “she” is too exterior and remote. The image she has of her book in its nonexistent form, of the impression it should leave, is the one she retained from Gone with the Wind, read at the age of twelve, and later from Remembrance of Things Past, and more recently from Life and Fate: an image of light and shadow streaming over faces. But she hasn’t yet discovered how to do this. She awaits if not a revelation then a sign, a happenstance, as the madeleine dipped in tea was for Marcel Proust.
Even more than this book, the future is the next man who will make her dream, buy new clothes, and wait: for a letter, a phone call, a message on the answering machine.
The excitement of world events receded. The unexpected was tiring. Something intangible was sweeping us away. The space of experience lost its familiar contours. As the years accumulated, our landmarks, 1968 and 1981, were erased. The new break in time was the fall of the Wall, no need to specify the date. It didn’t mark the end of History, just the end of the history that we could tell. Countries in Central and Eastern Europe—until now absent from our geographical imagination—seemed to multiply and endlessly divide into “ethnic groups,” a term which distinguished them from us and other serious populations. It suggested backwardness, the proof of which was the return of religions and intolerance.
Yugoslavia was in a state of bloody mayhem. Bullets whistled back and forth across the streets from the weapons of invisible shooters, snipers. But as the shells vied to wipe out passersby, reduce thousand-year-old bridges to dust, and the formerly “new” philosophers vied to shame us, going out of their way to repeat, “Sarajevo is only two hours from Paris,” we kept to ourselves, overcome with fatigue. We’d exerted too much emotion during the Gulf War, for no good reason. Conscience retracted. We were angry with the Croats, the Kosovars, etc., for killing each other like savages instead of copying us. We did not feel we belonged to the same Europe as them.
Algeria was a bloodbath. Under the masked faces of the members of GIA25 we saw those of the FLN. The Algerians too had made poor use of their freedom, but a long time ago. It was as if from the time of Independence, we’d determined to stop thinking about it for once and for all. We wanted even less to concern ourselves with the events in Rwanda. We failed to distinguish between Hutus and Tutsis, couldn’t remember who the good guys were and who the bad. The thought of Africa had always filled us with torpor. It was tacitly acknowledged that Africa lived in an earlier period of history, with barbarian customs and potentates who owned châteaux in France, and its sufferings never seemed to end. It was the discouraging continent.
Voting for or against Maastricht was an abstract gesture that we almost forgot to perform, despite the injunctions of a pressure group called les personnalités whose view of the issue was supposed to be shrewder than ours, though we couldn’t see how. It had become a matter of course for celebrities to dictate what we should do and think. The Right, of course, would beat the Left in the legislative elections in March, and again cohabit with Mitterrand. He was an exhausted old man with sunken, too-bright eyes and a toneless voice, a skin-and-bones wreck of a head of state, whose admissions about his cancer and his secret daughter sealed his abandonment of politics, and obliged us to see nothing in him except, beyond his wiles and compromises, the terrible specter of the “time he had left.” He found the strength to call th
e journalists “dogs” when his former prime minister, Bérégovoy, put a bullet in his head on the banks of the Loire. But it was well known that the little Russian hadn’t killed himself over an apartment, but because he had betrayed his origins and ideals in the gilded halls of the Republic, where he had slavishly endured all manner of humiliations in order to remain.
Anomie was catching. Language was depleted of reality, its progressive abstraction considered a sign of intellectual distinction. Competitiveness, job insecurity, employability and flexibility were all the rage. We lived within sanitized discourse that we barely listened to, remote control having curtailed the running time of boredom.
The representation of society was fragmented into “subjects,” primarily sexual: swingers, transsexuals, incest, pedophilia, bare breasts on beaches, for or against? People were confronted by facts and behaviors of which they generally had no personal experience but assumed to be widespread, even the norm, whether or not they approved. Confidences left the realm of anonymous readers’ letters, the nighttime voices of Allô Macha. They entered bodies and faces, presented in close-ups we couldn’t tear our eyes away from, amazed that so many dared to tell their intimate stories to thousands of viewers, and happy to learn so much about other people’s lives. The dull murmur of social reality was drowned out by the euphoria of advertising, opinion polls, and stock market prices. “The economy is back on track again!”
They arrived of necessity from the Third World and the former Eastern bloc, lumped under the ominous appellation of clandestins,26 herded into the Hôtel Arcade at Charles de Gaulle Airport, or turned back whenever possible by decree of the Pasqua laws. We had forgotten about Touche pas à mon pote! and “immigration, the wealth of France.” Now we had to “fight unregulated immigration” and “preserve national identity.” Michel Rocard’s “France cannot take on all the misery of the world” was making the rounds, presented as a blindingly obvious fact whose unspeakable subtext was understood by most, i.e., there were already quite enough immigrants in France.
One of the ideas people rejected was that France had become a country of immigrants. For years they had continued to believe that the families from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb, who lived crowded together at the city limits, were just passing through and would return whence they came, along with their progeny, leaving a backwash of exoticism and regret, as in the lost colonies. But now it was understood that they were here to stay. The “third generation” resembled a new wave of immigration, this time from within. It swelled and encircled the cities, flooded suburban high schools, the National Employment Agency, the northern line of the RER, and the Champs-Élysées on December 31. It was a dangerous population, always ignored and always under surveillance, right down to its imagination, which annoyed us insofar as it was focused elsewhere, on Algeria and Palestine. They were officially called “youth from immigrant backgrounds,” or in daily life, Arabs and Africans, or to employ a more virtuous phrasing, les Beurs and les Blacks. They were IT professionals, secretaries, and security guards. That they called themselves French we privately found absurd, a usurped claim to glory to which they were not yet entitled.
Retail spaces multiplied and expanded into open countryside, concrete rectangles bristling with plaques easily read from the highway, venues for diehard consumption where the act of buying was performed in an ambience of stark minimalism. Each Soviet-style block contained every object that existed in a given range of goods, shoes, clothing, home repair supplies, all in monstrous quantities, a McDonald’s thrown in as a reward for the kids. Next door, the hypermarket unfurled its two thousand square meters of food and other merchandise, each category subdivided into a dozen brands. Shopping involved more time and complications, especially for those who only earned the minimum wage. The profusion of Western wealth was there to behold and handle in parallel aisles of goods, which stretched from the top of the center aisle as far as the eye could see. But we rarely looked up.
It was a place of swift and unparalleled shifts of emotion, curiosity, surprise, bewilderment, envy, loathing—of rapid-fire battles between impulse and reason. During the week, it was a choice destination for an afternoon walk, for retired couples an excuse for an outing and the slow filling of a cart. On Saturdays, whole families streamed in, and casually reveled in the nearness of so many objects of desire.
With pleasure or annoyance, lightness of heart or deep despondency, depending on the day, more and more, the acquisition of things (which we later said we couldn’t do without), was life’s magnetic north. When we listened to the latest song by Alain Souchon, Foule sentimentale, it was as if we’d jumped a hundred years ahead and were observing ourselves as people of the future would do. We had the melancholy feeling of being unable to change anything about whatever it was that was sweeping us away.
However, we got cold feet when it came to buying a new appliance (“I’ve gotten along fine so far without it”), whose instructions we’d have to read with the usual annoyance, whose handling we’d have to learn, finally caving in under the pressure of others who sang its praises, “you’ll see, it’ll change your life.” It was the price to pay for going the way of greater freedom and happiness. The first use was daunting. Unfamiliar sensations arose and disappeared just as soon. With practice they vanished completely: the initial difficulty in hearing the voices on the answering machine, which (we learned) could be stored like objects and listened to ten times over; our bedazzled joy on seeing fresh-written words of love scroll up on a white fax page; the strange presence of absent beings, so vivid it produced a sense of delinquency when we didn’t pick up the receiver and instead let the machine talk, frozen by fear of being heard if we made a noise.
People said: “In time, everyone will use the computer.” But we did not intend to have one. It was the first object to which we’d ever felt inferior. We left its mastery to others, and envied them for it.
The fear of AIDS was the most powerful fear on record. The emaciated and transfigured faces of the famous dying, Hervé Guibert, Freddie Mercury (in his final video, so much more handsome than before, with his rabbit teeth), demonstrated the supernatural character of the “scourge”—the first sign of an end-of-millennium curse, a final judgment. We kept our distance from the HIV-positive, three million on the planet, whom the State, in moralistic television spots, strove to convince us not to view as lepers. The shame of AIDS replaced another, now forgotten, that of unwed pregnant girls. Even to be suspected of having AIDS was equal to condemnation, does Isabelle Adjani have AIDS? Just getting tested was suspect, an avowal of unspeakable misconduct. One had it done at the hospital, secretly, with a number, avoiding eye contact in the waiting room. Only those contaminated through transfusion ten years earlier were entitled to compassion. People found relief from the fear of others’ blood by applauding the appearance in High Court of government ministers and a doctor charged with “poisoning.” But on the whole, we adapted. We made a habit of carrying a condom in our purse. We didn’t take it out. To use it seemed both futile and insulting to our partner. Immediately regretful, we went for the test and awaited the outcome, certain that we were dying. When we learned that we were not, simply to exist, to walk down the street, was an experience of indescribable beauty and richness. But one had to choose between fidelity and the condom. Just when pleasure in every possible form was mandatory, sexual freedom again became impracticable.
Teenagers listened to Doc et Difool on Fun Radio, lived immersed in sex and kept their secrets to themselves.
The unemployed population of France was equal in number to the seropositive population of the entire earth. In churches, petitions were laid at the foot of statues, “please Lord, may my dad find work.” Everyone demanded an end to unemployment, that other “scourge,” but no one believed it possible. It had become an irrational hope, an ideal that would never again be fulfilled in this world. The signs of “strength” (peace, economic recovery, a decrease in the number of job
applicants), staged with handshakes—that of Arafat and Ehud Barak—abounded. Real or not, we were no longer interested. Nothing equaled the bliss at the end of the day, after elbowing one’s way with the first passengers into the crowded RER, and inching as close as possible to the center aisle seats, and standing for three stations, of finally sitting down and closing one’s eyes, or doing a crossword.
To the great relief of all, a useless occupation was found for the homeless, selling The Streetlamp and The Street, newspapers whose content was as shabby and stale as the vendors’ clothing, and which one threw away without a second look. It was a sham activity that allowed one to distinguish between the good homeless, willing to work, and the others, sprawled and sleeping off an endless drunk on benches in the Métro, or outside next to their dog. In summer they migrated south. The mayors forbade them to lie down in pedestrian thoroughfares, dedicated to the orderly functioning of commerce. Several died of cold each winter and of heat each summer.
The presidential elections were approaching. We didn’t expect our lives (collective or otherwise) to be disrupted. Mitterrand had exhausted all hope. The only candidate we might have liked was Jacques Delors, had he not stepped down after keeping us in suspense. It was no longer an event but an entertaining interlude, a show whose lead actors were three fairly average guys, two of them sad—strutting Balladur, balking Jospin—and a crazy agitated Chirac, as if the solemnity and seriousness of elections had gone out with Mitterrand. Later we would not so much recall the candidates and their speeches as we would their puppet twins, whom we watched each night on Canal+: Jospin a harmless yo-yo driving a little car along the winding roads of an enchanted kingdom, Chirac as Abbé Pierre in a monk’s habit, Sarkozy a treacherous weasel obsequiously deep-bowing before a goitered Balladur, Robert Hue with his seventies shoulder bag, labeled a buffoon by the young, and we’d hear a hit song that made the puppets run amok in another Guignols sketch, The Rhythm of the Night. We believed in nothing, but when we guessed from the journalists’ glowing faces that Chirac had been elected, and saw dapper youths and ladies from the chic districts scream for joy, we understood that the fun was over. The weather was as warm as in the middle of summer. Families lingered on the café terraces, the next day was a holiday, and one could have sworn the election had never happened.
