by Annie Ernaux
They walked to Roches Noires and the staircase named after Marguerite Duras, then back again. In the vague, contemplative slowness of a group stroll, the disorderly and choppy adjustment of steps, perhaps she felt a kind of disbelief, gazing at the backs and legs of her sons, who walked ahead with their partners, and listening to their deep voices. How could these men be her children? That she had carried them in her womb did not seem to her enough of an explanation. Hadn’t she obscurely sought to recreate her parents’ twofold existence, to have ahead of her what she had behind, enjoy the same kind of anchoring in the world? And on this beach, she may have recalled the way her mother always exclaimed “Such big lads!” as she watched her approach between her teenage sons; exclaimed with admiration and amazement, as if it defied belief that her daughter could be the mother of two strapping boys, already a head taller than she, and almost improper that two males instead of two girls had grown in the body of the one who was and would always be her little girl.
Certainly, as at other times with her sons, when she takes on the mothering role she assumes only occasionally, she feels the limitations of the maternal bond, her need to have a lover, a kind of intimacy that only the sex act can provide, which also consoles her in times of passing conflict with her sons. The young man she sees on other weekends often bores her. He gets on her nerves by watching Téléfoot on Sunday mornings. But if she gave him up, she would cease to communicate the insignificant acts and incidents of her day. She would no longer put daily life into words. She would stop waiting. She’d gaze at the lace stockings and thongs in the chest of drawers and tell herself she’d never wear them again. And when she heard Sea, Sex and Sun, she’d feel cast out of an entire world of caresses, desire, and fatigue, bereft of a future. At that moment, just to imagine it, the sense of deprivation violently attaches her to the boy as to a “last love.”
She knows the main element of their relationship is not sexual, not as far as she’s concerned. Through the boy she can relive something she thought she would never experience again. When he takes her to eat at Jumbo, or greets her with The Doors and they make love on a mattress on the floor of his icy studio flat, she feels she is replaying scenes from her student life, reproducing moments that have already occurred. Not living them for real now, and yet the repetition gives reality to her youth, to the first experiences, “first times” which due to their sudden irruption into her life and her own state of stupor, made no sense then. They don’t make sense now either, but repetition fills the void and creates the illusion of completion. In her diary she writes: “He wrenches me away from my generation. But I am not part of his. I’m nowhere in time. He’s the angel who brings the past back to life, who immortalizes.”
Often as she lies against him in the half-sleep that follows love on Sunday afternoons, she lapses into a state that is like no other. She no longer knows what city or town the noises are coming from—the sounds of cars, footsteps, and words from the outside world. All at once she’s in her cubicle at the girls’ dormitory, and in hotel rooms (Spain in 1980, Lille with P in the winter), and in bed as a child, nestled against her sleeping mother. She feels herself in several different moments of her life that float on top of each other. Time of an unknown nature takes hold of her consciousness and her body too. It is a time in which past and present overlap, without bleeding into each other, and where, it seems, she flickers in and out of all the shapes of being she has been. It is a sensation she’s had before, from time to time. Perhaps drugs could bring it on, but she has never taken any, for she values pleasure and lucidity above all else. Now, in a state of expansion and deceleration, she takes hold of the sensation. She has given it a name, “the palimpsest sensation,” though the word is not quite accurate if she relies on the dictionary meaning, “a manuscript on which the original writing has been scratched out to make room for later writing.” She sees it as a potential instrument of knowledge that is not only for herself, but general, almost scientific, though a knowledge of what, she doesn’t know. In her writing project about a woman who has lived between 1940 and today, which grips her ever more tightly with sorrow and even guilt for not committing it to paper, she would like to begin with this sensation, no doubt influenced by Proust, out of a need to base her undertaking on a real experience.
It is a sensation that pulls her inexorably and by degrees away from words and all language, back to her first years, bereft of memory, the rosy warmth of the cradle, through a series of abymes—those of Birthday, the painting by Dorothea Tanning—that eliminate all her actions, all events, everything that she has learned, thought, and desired, and which has brought her over the years to be here, in this bed, with this young man. It is a sensation that cancels out her history, whereas in her book she would like to save everything that has continually been around her. She wants to save her circumstance. And is the sensation itself not a product of history, of such great changes in the lives of women and men that one can feel it at the age of nearly fifty-eight, lying beside a man of twenty-nine, with no sense of wrongdoing, or indeed of pride? She is not sure the “palimpsest sensation” has a more heuristic power than another sensation, also frequent, whereby her “selves” are characters in books and films and she is the woman in Sue Lost in Manhattan and Claire Dolan, which she saw not long ago, or Jane Eyre, Molly Bloom—or Dalida.
Next year she will retire. She is already deleting files and notes on books, getting rid of reference works she once used to write her courses. She peels away the former “packaging” of her life, as if to clear the boards for her writing project, which she no longer has any excuse to postpone. While going through her papers she happens on a phrase from the beginning of The Life of Henry Brulard: “I am going to be fifty years old. It is more than time for me to know myself.” When she copied it down, she’d been thirty-seven. Now she has caught up to and surpassed the age of Stendhal.
The year 2000 was on the horizon. We could not believe our luck in being there to see it arrive. What a shame, we thought, when someone died in the weeks before. We couldn’t imagine that it could proceed without a hitch. There were rumors of a Y2K computer bug, a planetary malfunction, some kind of black hole portending the end of the world and a return to the savagery of instinct. The twentieth century closed behind us in a pitiless succession of end-of-millennium reviews. Everything was listed, classified, and assessed, from works of art and literature to wars and ideologies, as if the twenty-first century could only be entered with our memories wiped clean. It was a solemn and accusatory time (we had everything to answer for). It hung darkly overhead and removed personal memories of what for us had never been an entity called “the century” but only a slipping-by of years that stood out (or didn’t) depending on the changes they had brought to our lives. In the coming century, parents, grandparents, and people we’d known in childhood who had died would be dead for good.
The 1990s just past held no particular meaning for us. They’d been years of disillusionment. We had witnessed the events in Iraq—which the United States was starving out and threatening with airstrikes, where children were dying for lack of medicine—and in Gaza, the West Bank, Chechnya, Kosovo, Algeria, etc. We preferred not to remember the handshake between Arafat and Clinton at Camp David, the “new world order” that had been foretold, or Yeltsin on his tank. We preferred not to remember much of anything at all, except perhaps the foggy distant evenings of December of ’95, probably the last general strike of the century. And perhaps the beautiful unhappy princess, killed in a speeding car under the Pont de l’Alma, and Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress stained with Bill Clinton’s semen. But we did want to remember the World Cup. It was said that people would have willingly relived the weeks of waiting around TV sets in the silent cities where pizza Mobylettes buzzed back and forth; the weeks that led match by match to that Sunday and that moment when, amidst the clamor and ecstasy we knew that, having won, we could all die happy, die together (except that it was the exact opposite of death),
rediscover the great surrender to one sole desire, one image, one story. Those were dazzling days, whose derisory remains fluttered for months from the walls of the Métro: posters of Zidane for Eau d’Évian and Leader Price budget grocery.
Nothing lay ahead.
The last summer arrived—and now everything was “the last.” People gathered once more. They sped away to the cliffs above the Channel, or flocked to public gardens in Paris to see the moon blot out the sun at noon. A chill descended, a kind of dusk. We were anxious for the sun’s return but also yearned to linger in that peculiar darkness, the sensation of living through the extinction of humanity in fast-forward. Millions of cosmic years passed before our eyes, shrouded in dark glasses. Blind faces raised to the sky seemed to await the coming of a god or the pale rider of the Apocalypse. The sun reappeared and people clapped. There wouldn’t be another solar eclipse until 2081, and we would be long gone.
And then it arrived, 2000. Apart from fireworks and a predictable urban euphoria, nothing had transpired of note. We were disappointed: the computer bug was all a scam. Then six days after the change of millennium “the big storm,” as it was soon called, blew up out of nowhere. In a matter of hours that night it leveled thousands of pylons, razed forests, and tore away roofs as it gusted north to south, and west to east, having the decency to kill only a dozen or so people in the wrong place at the wrong time. The morning sun calmly rose above a savaged landscape with a beauty peculiar to ruin. So began the third millennium. (The idea of a mysterious act of revenge on the part of Nature did not fail to cross our minds.)
Nothing changed except the unfamiliar 2 instead of the 1 that continued to slide off our pen when we dated a check. With another mild and rainy winter, like the ones of the years before, the reminder of Brussels’ “European directives,” and the “start-up boom,” a kind of melancholy prevailed instead of the expected enthusiasm. The Socialists governed in a nondescript way. There were fewer demonstrations and we no longer went to the ones in support of the sans papiers.
A few months after the turn of the century, the plane of the rich, which no one we knew ever took, crashed in Gonesse and swiftly vanished from memory, joining the era of de Gaulle. An icy little man of fathomless ambition, with a name that for once was easy to pronounce, Putin, had replaced the drunken Yeltsin and swore to hunt down Chechens and “bump them off, even on the crapper.” Now Russia evoked neither hope nor fear, only perpetual desolation. It had withdrawn from our imaginations, which in spite of ourselves were occupied by the United States, a gigantic tree spreading its branches over the face of the earth. We were increasingly irritated by the Americans’ moral discourse, their shareholders, retirement funds, pollution of the planet, and loathing for our cheeses. To signify the fundamental poverty of their superiority, based on weapons and the economy, the word typically used to define them was “arrogance.” They were conquerors with no ideals other than oil and the almighty dollar. Their values and principles—don’t rely on anyone but yourself—gave hope to no one but them, while we dreamed of “another world.”
At first sight, it defied belief, as a film clip would later show: George W. Bush displaying no reaction, like a lost child, as the news was whispered in his ear. It could not be thought or felt but only watched, over and over, on the television screen, the Twin Towers collapsing, one after the other, that September afternoon, which was morning in New York but would always be afternoon for us. As if viewing and reviewing the images would make it real. In a state of inert horror that we were unable to shake, we watched by mobile phone, with as many people as possible.
Speeches and analyses poured in. The raw event dissipated. We bridled at Le Monde’s proclamation, “We are all Americans.” Our image of the world was turned on its head. Some fanatical individuals from obscurantist countries, armed only with box cutters, had razed the symbols of American power in a matter of two hours. The ingenuity astounded. We berated ourselves for having believed the U.S. invincible. Revenge had been taken on an illusion. We recalled another September 11 and the assassination of Allende. Something was being paid for. Later, it would be time to exercise compassion and think of the consequences, but now all that mattered was to say when, how, and from what or whom we’d learned about the attack on the Twin Towers. The very few people who hadn’t known the same day were dogged by a feeling of having missed a rendezvous with the whole world.
And everyone racked their brains for what they’d been doing at the exact moment when the first plane hit the World Trade Center and couples hurled themselves from windows hand-in-hand. There was no connection but the fact of being alive at the same moment as the three thousand human beings who were going to die, but hadn’t known it fifteen minutes earlier. As we recalled “I was at the dentist, driving, at home reading,” stunned by this contemporaneity, we grapsed the separation between people on earth and our bonding in a common uncertainty. As we gazed at a Van Gogh painting at the Musée d’Orsay, our ignorance of what was happening at the same second in Manhattan was identical to that of the moment when we ourselves would die. However, in the meaningless flow of days, the hour that contained the shattered towers of the World Trade Center and a dentist appointment or a car inspection was saved.
September 11 suppressed all the dates that had stayed with us until then. As they had once said “after Auschwitz,” people said “after September 11,” a unique day. There began we didn’t know what. Time too was becoming globalized.
Later, when we think of events that, after a moment’s hesitation, we’ll place in 2001—a storm in Paris on the August 15 weekend, a massacre at the Cergy-Pontoise Savings Bank, Loft Story, the publication of The Sexual Life of Catherine M—we will be surprised to realize they occurred before September 11 and that nothing distinguished them from ones that happened after, in October or November. Events, facts returned to floating in the past, unmoored from an event which, we now had to admit, we hadn’t actually experienced.
Before we had time to think, fear took hold of us. A dark force had infiltrated the world, prepared to commit the most atrocious acts in every corner of the planet. Envelopes filled with white powder killed their recipients. A headline in Le Monde referred to “the coming war.” The president of the United States, George W. Bush, insipid son of the one before, ludicrously elected after endless vote recounts, proclaimed the clash of civilizations, Good against Evil. Terrorism had a name, Al Qaeda; a religion, Islam; a country, Afghanistan. The time for sleep was past. We had to be on the alert until the end of time. We were obliged to shoulder American fear, which cooled our solidarity and compassion. We poked fun at their failure to catch bin Laden and Mullah Omar, who had ridden away on a motorcycle and vanished into thin air.
Our image of the Muslim world did an about-face. This complex web of robed men, women veiled like holy virgins, camel drivers, belly dancers, minarets and muezzins, was transformed from the state of distant object, variegated, picturesque and backward, to that of a modern power. People struggled to make the connection between modernity and the pilgrimage to Mecca, a young woman wearing a chador and doing a PhD at the University of Tehran. The Muslims could no longer be forgotten. One billion two hundred million.
(The one billion three hundred million Chinese, who believed in nothing but in the economy, and churned out low-end products to sell to the West, were only a distant silence.)
Religion was making a comeback but it wasn’t our religion, the one in which we no longer believed and hadn’t wanted to impart, though it basically remained the only legitimate faith—the best, if one had to give it a rank. The one whose decade of the Rosary, canticles, and fish on Friday loomed large in the museum of childhood, I am a Christian, that is my glory.
The distinction between “dyed-in-the-wool French” and “those of immigrant background” never wavered. When in speeches the president of the Republic evoked “the people of France,” he referred (it went without saying) to a generous entity, beyond al
l suspicion of xenophobia, of which Victor Hugo was part and parcel, along with the storming of the Bastille, country folk, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, and priests, Abbé Pierre and de Gaulle, Bernard Pivot, Asterix, Mother Denis and Coluche, the Maries and Patricks. It didn’t include Fatima, Ali, and Boubacar, the people who shopped in the halal section of hypermarkets and observed Ramadan. Even less did it include the youth from the “sensitive” neighborhoods, with hoodies that flopped down over their faces, and an apathetic gait, sure signs of cunning and laziness, of being “up to no good.” In some obscure way, they were the natives of an inner colony we no longer controlled.
Language steadfastly built a partition between us and them. It confined them to “communities” in the “’hoods,” “lawless enclaves” given over to drug trafficking and gang rape, and turned them into savages. The French are worried, journalists asserted. According to opinion polls, which dictated public emotion, lack of safety was what worried people the most. This form of menace—not that anyone said so—had the swarthy face of a shadow population, a horde quick to relieve honest people of their mobile phones.
The switch to the euro was a brief distraction. The novelty of checking the new coins’ country of issue faded within a week. It was a cold currency, with clean little banknotes devoid of image or metaphor. A euro was a euro and nothing else, a barely real, weightless, and misleading currency that shrank prices, created an impression of universal economy in stores and one of increasing poverty on pay slips. It was so strange to imagine Spain without pesetas next to the tapas and sangria, or Italy without a hundred thousand lire per night for a hotel room. There was no time for the melancholy of passing things. Pierre Bourdieu, the little-known intellectual and critic, had died and we hadn’t even known that he was ill. He’d given us no time to foresee his absence. A strange, quiet grief afflicted those who had felt liberated by reading his books. We were afraid that his words within us would be erased, like those of Sartre so long ago. Afraid of letting the world of opinions get the better of us.
