by Annie Ernaux
Listening to Chirac, we had to make an effort to grasp that he was the president and lose the habit of Mitterrand. The series of years that had passed imperceptibly with him as a backdrop to an era now coagulated into a single block. We counted fourteen years. We didn’t want to have aged that much. Young people didn’t do the calculation, and had no feeling about it. Mitterrand was their de Gaulle. They’d grown up with him, and fourteen years was quite enough.
One Sunday in the middle of the 1990s, at the table where we’d managed to assemble the children, now approaching their thirties, and their friends and partners—not the same as those of the year before, passengers in a family circle from which they departed having only just arrived—around a leg of lamb—or any other dish that for lack of time, money, or skill, we knew they would not eat anywhere but at our home—and a Saint-Julien or Chassagne-Montrachet to educate the palate of these drinkers of Coke and beer, the past was of no consequence. Male voices dominated the conversation, whose subject was computers. They compared PCs and Macs, “memories” and “programs.” We waited good-naturedly for them to abandon their off-putting lingo, which we had no desire for them to translate, and return to subjects of common exchange. They mentioned the latest cover of Charlie Hebdo and the most recent episodes of The X-Files, cited American and Japanese films, and advised us to see Man Bites Dog and Reservoir Dogs, whose opening scene they described with relish. They laughed affectionately at our musical tastes—total crap—and offered to lend us the latest Arthur H. They commented on the news with the derision of Les Guignols, their daily information source along with Libération, and refused to commiserate with individual misfortune, saying “to each his own shit.” Their stance was one of ironic distancing of the world. Their lively repartee and verbal agility dazzled and mortified us. We were afraid of coming across as slow and ungainly. They renewed our supply of words commonly used by the young, astutely imparted so we too could inject “Wicked!” and “How twisted is that!” into our exchanges.
With the satisfaction of the part-time nurturer, we watched them eat and take extra helpings of everything. Later over champagne came the memories of TV shows, household products, ads and fashions from their childhood and adolescence: balaclavas, iron-on knee patches, the SaniCrush electric toilet macerator, Three Kittens brand jam biscuits, Hot Wheels, Kiri the clown, Laurel & Hardy collector stamps, etc. As the objects of their common past resurfaced, they competed with each other to produce the best quote, a vast and futile remembering that made them seem like little boys again.
The afternoon light had shifted. The waves of excitement came at longer intervals. The suggestion of a game of Scrabble, which always made them argue, was sensibly dismissed. Immersed in the aroma of coffee and cigarettes (by tacit agreement, no cannabis was brought out), we savored the sweetness of a ritual that had weighed so heavily upon us once that we’d wanted to flee it for good. Beyond marital breakdown, the death of grandparents, and a general growing apart, we’d ensured its continuity with a white tablecloth, silverware, and a joint of meat, on this Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1995. And as we watched and listened to these grown children, we wondered what bound us to each other. It wasn’t blood or genes, only a present comprised of thousands of days spent together, words and gestures, meals, car trips, a great deal of shared experience that left no conscious trace.
They kissed us four times on the cheeks and left. In the evening we recalled their pleasure in eating at our home with their friends. We were happy to continue providing for their oldest and most basic need, food. In our boundless concern for them, reinforced by the belief that we’d been stronger at their age, we perceived them as fragile beings in a shapeless future.
In the heat of late July we learned that a bomb had exploded in the Saint-Michel Métro station. Naturally, the attacks would return with Chirac. We recovered the reflex of calling the people close to us, convinced until we heard their voices that of all the places they might have been, fate had put them on that train and in that car on the RER B, at that very moment. There were dead and wounded. Someone had had their legs blown off. But the big August holiday was coming, and we had no desire to become anxious. We walked through the Métro corridors followed by a voice that enjoined us to report abandoned parcels, putting our fate at the mercy of the safety measures.
A few weeks later, after we had forgotten about Saint-Michel, came other bombings involving a curious mixture of pressure cookers, nails, and gas cylinders. As if watching a film we followed the hunt for “the mysterious Kelkal,” a young man from the suburbs of Lyon, and saw him die, shot down by police before he could utter a word. It was the first year that daylight saving time was prolonged until the end of October, an autumn of heat and light. Other than the families of the victims and survivors, who remembered the dead of Saint-Michel Métro? Their names appeared nowhere, probably so as not to frighten Métro patrons, already so unnerved by delays due to “technical incidents” or “serious accidents involving a passenger.” These deaths were more quickly forgotten than those of rue de Rennes, though the latter had occurred nine years earlier, and those of rue des Rosiers, even more distant. The facts slipped away before one even got around to telling the story.
Dispassion grew.
The world of commodities and commercials and that of political speeches coexisted on television but did not coincide. One was ruled by ease and the call to pleasure, the other by sacrifice and constraint, with phrases that grew increasingly ominous: “the globalization of trade,” “necessary modernization.” It had taken us a while to translate the Juppé Plan into images of daily life and to understand we were being screwed. But we were tired of that haughty and condescending way of reproaching us for not being “pragmatic.” Retirement and social security were the State’s last show of concern, a kind of anchor point amidst all the things being swept away.
Railway and postal employees stopped working, as did teachers and all public employees. Paris and other large cities were riddled with inescapable traffic jams. People bought bicycles to get around and walked in hurried columns through the December night. It was a winter strike, an adult strike, somber and unruffled, with neither violence nor exaltation. We rediscovered the disjointed temporality of major strikes. Delay was the order of the day, along with resourcefulness and provisional organization. There was myth in people’s bodies and gestures. The indefatigable walking through the streets of a Paris devoid of subways and buses was an act of memory. The voice of Pierre Bourdieu at the Gare de Lyon united ’68 to ’95. We believed again. Calmly we were galvanized by new phrases like “another world,” and “creating a social Europe.” People kept remarking that they hadn’t spoken to each other in this way for years. We marveled. The strike was more word than action. Juppé withdrew his plan. Christmas was on its way. We had to return to ourselves, to gifts and patience. Those December days drew to a close and told no story. All that remained was the image of a crowd trudging through darkness. We didn’t know if it was the last major strike of the century or a new awakening. For us, something was beginning. Éluard came to our minds: There were only a few of them / In all the earth / Each one thought he was alone / . . . They were suddenly a crowd.
Between what is yet to come and what is, consciousness is empty for a moment. We gazed uncomprehending at the huge front-page headline in Le Monde, FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND IS DEAD. As in December, crowds gathered in darkness at Place de la Bastille. We continued to need to be together and what we felt was solitude. We recalled that on the evening of May 10, 1981, in the town hall of Château-Chinon, Mitterrand, learning he had been elected president of the Republic, had murmured “How about that!”
Our emotions were raw. Waves of fear, indignation, and joy ruffled the even surface of days that otherwise lacked surprise. We no longer ate beef because of “mad cow disease,” which would cause the death of thousands in the coming decade. We were shocked by the image of an ax smashing down on the door of a church
where a group of sans papiers had taken refuge. A sudden sense of inequity, a blaze of feeling or conscience drove hordes of people into the streets. One hundred thousand joyously marched in protest of the Debré bill, which facilitated the expulsion of foreigners. They pinned a button on their backpacks, the image of a black suitcase and the slogan Who’s next? They tucked it in a drawer at home as a memento. They signed petitions and forgot the cause, forgot they’d even signed them—who was Abu-Jamal, again? Then, overnight, their energy flagged. Effusion alternated with anomie, protest with consent. The word “struggle” was discredited as a throwback to Marxism, become an object of ridicule. As for “defending rights,” the first that came to mind were those of the consumer.
Some sentiments fell out of use, ones we no longer felt and found absurd, such as patriotism and honor, reserved for inferior times and abused populations. Shame, invoked at every turn, was a shadow of its former self—a passing aggravation, a short-lived wound to the ego. “Respect,” first and foremost, was the demand of that same ego for the recognition of others. One no longer heard the words “goodness” or “good people.” Pride in what one did was substituted for pride in what one was—female, gay, provincial, Jewish, Arab, etc.
The feeling most encouraged was a confused sense of dangerousness associated with the pixelated face of the “Romanian”—the “savage” of the banlieue, purse snatcher, rapist, pedophile, swarthy terrorist—and with Métro corridors, the Gare du Nord, the neighborhood of Seine-Saint-Denis. Reinforced by programs on TF1 and M6, and by public-address announcements (“Beware of pickpockets in this station,” “Report all unattended packages”), it was the feeling of being unsafe.
There was no specific word for the feeling one had of simultaneous stagnation and mutation. In the general failure to grasp what was happening, a word began making the rounds, “values” (no one specified which), for example, the sweeping condemnation of youth, education, pornography, the PACS bill,27 cannabis, and the deterioration of spelling. Others jeered at this “new moral order,” the “politically correct” and “prefab thinking.” They commended transgression and applauded the cynicism of Michel Houellebecq. On television, languages collided without fracas.
We were inundated with explanations of self, tirelessly supplied by Mireille Dumas, Delarue, women’s magazines, and Psychologies. They didn’t teach us much of anything but gave us permission to hold our parents to account, and the consolation of merging our experience with that of others.
Thanks to Chirac’s entertaining whim of dissolving the Assembly, the Left won the elections and Jospin became prime minister. It made up for the evening of disappointment in May 1995, reinstated the lesser evil along with measures that had a tang of freedom, equality, and generosity. This was compatible with our desire to be entitled, one and all, to the good things in life: universal health insurance and time to ourselves with the thirty-five-hour workweek, even if the rest remained unchanged. And we would not spend the year 2000 under the Right.
The order of the market closed in and imposed its breakneck pace. Goods marked with bar codes slipped more quickly than ever from conveyor belt to shopping cart. A discreet beep conjured away the transaction’s cost in an instant. Back-to-school supplies filled the shelves before children had started their summer holidays, Christmas toys appeared on the shelves the day after All Saints’ Day, swimsuits in February. The timing of things pulled us into its vortex and forced us to live two months ahead of ourselves. People flocked to “special openings” on Sundays or evenings until eleven. The first day of sales was a media event. “Getting a deal,” and “saving big” were part of an undisputed principle, an obligation. The shopping center, with its hypermarket and arcades, became our chief habitat, a place for the tireless contemplation of objects and quiet pleasures, violence-free, protected by security guards with bulging muscles. Grandparents took the kids to see the goats and chickens in odor-free litter under artificial lighting, replaced the next day by specialties from Brittany or mass-produced necklaces and statues, marketed as African art, all that remained of colonial history. Teenagers, especially those who could rely on no other means of social distinction, acquired personal value through brands, L’Oréal—because I’m worth it. And we, high and mighty despisers of consumer society, yielded to the yearning for a pair of boots which, like the long-ago sunglasses, miniskirt, and bell-bottoms, created a brief illusion of renewal. More than a sense of possession it was this feeling people sought on the shelves of Zara and H&M, instantly granted upon acquiring a thing, a little shot of extra being.
And we did not age. The things around us didn’t last long enough to grow old, replaced and rehabilitated at lightning speed. Our memory didn’t have time to associate them with moments of existence.
Of all the new objects the “mobile phone” was the most miraculous and disturbing. Never had we imagined being able one day to walk down the street with a phone in our pocket and call anyone, anywhere, at any time. It was strange to see people talking to themselves on the street, a phone pressed to one ear. The first time we heard the ringing in our purse on the RER, or at the checkout, we gave a start and feverishly searched the OK button with a kind of shame, of malaise. Our body suddenly drew attention to itself as we said hello, yes, and words not intended for the ears of strangers. Conversely, when a voice piped up beside us to answer a call, we were irritated, captives of a life that obviously held ours to be nonexistent and thrust its insipid dailiness upon us, the banality of worries and desires which until then had been consigned to phone booths or apartments.
The real test of technological courage was to use the computer. Those who were able enjoyed superior access to modernity and a new and different form of intelligence. It was a domineering object that required quick reflexes and exceptionally precise movements of the hands. In unfathomable English, it continually suggested “options,” which had to be obeyed without a moment’s delay. Pitiless and evil, it concealed in its inmost depths the letter we’d just composed. It cast us into constant ruin and humiliation, drove us to revolt, “what’s it done to me now!” Our dismay forgotten, we bought a modem so we could have Internet access and an email address, dazzled by our “navigation” of the entire world on AltaVista.
There was something about these new objects that was hard on body and mind, but it quickly disappeared with use. They grew light. (As usual children and teenagers used the computer with ease and without questions.)
The typewriter, with its rattle and accessories, the eraser, stencil, and carbon paper seemed to us to belong to a distant, unthinkable time. Yet when we pictured ourselves, a few years earlier, calling X from a pay phone in a café restroom, or typing a letter to P at night on an Olivetti, it was obvious that the absence of a mobile phone and email had no place in either the joys or sufferings of life.
On a background of pale blue sky and a near-deserted sand beach with furrows like a plowed field, two women and two men stand in a tight little group. The four faces are pressed close to each other, each divided into zones of darkness and light by the sun, which slants down from the left. The two men are in the middle. They look alike—thirtyish, same height and build, same three- or four-day stubble. One has a receding hairline; the other’s baldness is more advanced. The man on the right has his hands on the shoulders of a petite young woman with black hair framing her eyes and round cheeks. The other woman, on the far left, is of indeterminate middle age, with lines on her forehead, touched by the light, pink blush on her cheekbones and a softening facial contour. Her hair is cut in a bob. She wears pearl earrings, a beige sweater with a loosely knotted scarf, and carries a shoulder bag. All suggest a well-off city woman on a weekend visit to the Normandy coast.
She has the gentle distant smile of parents or teachers accustomed to having their picture taken with young people (a way of showing that one is quite aware of the generation gap).
All four stand facing the camera. Their bodies and faces are lo
cked in a position that hails from the dawn of photography, attesting that they were together in the same place on the same day, with minds similarly vacant except for a sense of well-being. On the back of the photo, Trouville, March 1999.
She is the woman wearing blush. The men in their thirties are her sons. The young black-haired woman is the girlfriend of the older boy. The younger son’s girlfriend is taking the picture. For some years the woman has enjoyed the comfortable income of a teacher with seniority and has treated them all to this weekend at the seaside. She continues to contribute to her children’s material welfare to compensate for any pain they may endure in their lives, for which she feels responsible, having brought them into the world. She has decided they should enjoy life in spite of the short-term contracts for which they are overqualified, unemployment insurance or freelance work, depending on the month. Their lives are a pure present of music, American TV series, and video games, as if they continued to live as students, or impecunious artists in an old-style bohemian existence, so far removed from the settled life that had been hers at their age. (She does not know if their social nonchalance is real or feigned.)
