A Frozen Woman

by Annie Ernaux

  That senior year at the lycée, I don’t pay much attention to boys; I have more important things to worry about than being sweet and landing a “beau,” as the Mont-Saint-Aignan girls in their navy blue blazers put it. My comfy routine at school will soon be over—the class bells, the friendly teachers and the martinets, an institutional setting, but reassuring—and I haven’t really decided what I want to do. The other girls aren’t worried: I’ll see after the bac, probably law school ‘cause it’s all just memorization, propaedeutics, languages—university, in any case. Some girls already know: the ever-popular hypokhâgne, that terrifying Greek word for the first-year class preparing to take the entrance exam for the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Medicine—well of course, her father’s a surgeon. Poli Sci, where does that take you? Everywhere, didn’t you know? They couldn’t care less about the profession itself, it’s the courses that interest them. Me, I run around collecting forms and documents, how to become a professor, teacher, social worker, how many years of study, how many openings will there be. And I could weep with perplexity in front of all those possibilities. Hilda hasn’t got a care in the world, sitting on the terrace of the Cáfe Métropole late in June. A chubby doll with candid eyes, one of those girls who is always chumming up to others, tagging along when you go to buy a record or a scarf. We’ve been sort-of friends now for a few weeks. She smiles saucily at everyone, her china blue eyes twinkling; she’s excited about her coming vacation on the Côte d’Azur, thrilled at having done well on the bac, looking cuter than ever with her waif haircut à la Jean Seberg. “I can’t believe how lucky I was,” she burbles. “I never thought I’d pass the second part!” She agrees with me, choosing a career is very important, but all the while she’s busy craning her neck and thrusting out her bosom, trying to attract attention. It dawns on me that scholarly and professional achievements come second with her, second to the happiness of being Hilda, a spoiled, pert little thing, and that she would gladly give up that success to make a love match, for example. She’s thinking of college as a way to gain time. What separates me the most at that moment from Hilda and her joyous indolence: our different mothers, or social backgrounds? Both. My mother, says Hilda, irons like an angel. A homemaker in ecstasy before her daughter, her living doll. A house in the suburbs of Rouen, the easy life. My whirlwind of a mother, her words, you must find something useful to do, and the small business that I grew up with, and money so tight at the end of the month, not to mention my aunties with their verdi-grised eyeglasses, one of the discreet charms of working in a vinegar factory. We have nothing in common.

  A wretched summer of indecision. Not medicine, that temptation, too long, therefore too expensive, and where would I get the money to set up a practice? Law, where does that get you, and I have no connections. Toward mid-July I get all excited about a career in social work, teaching maladjusted children. It’s time I did something for others, individualism is full of shit—I’m carried away by all my reading over the past year. I see myself dashing from hovel to prefab, singing and dancing with a dozen children, “All around the cobbler’s bench . . .” In my cubicle at the hostel, surrounded by the slamming of suitcase lids, I soar to heights of self-sacrifice. Then my enthusiasm wanes: I have no vocation. A disconcerting discovery. In Nouvelles Galeries, buying myself a gingham skirt like Brigitte Bardot’s, I look at the salesgirls in their pink smocks, carefree, laughing nonchalantly, handing me skirts; they probably never had to choose a future. Like Hilda, but at the bottom of the ladder. If only I had a true vocation, any one at all; I trudge back up rue Jeanne-d’Arc, so tired. I don’t realize it, but my fatigue is really depression.

  In October, Hilda registers at the Faculty of Arts. So do I. Statistically, a typical female decision, and on top of that, solidly middle-class. There they are again, of course, the well-bred young ladies of Mont-Saint-Aignan, twittering in front of the lecture halls, still sure of themselves, and sure to be shocked by the crude language and behavior of the male students, a vulgarity that is my secret ally against these girls, under the circumstances. But I haven’t decided to study literature just for the hell of it, to while away the time with a little culture and not much trouble. For Hilda, it’s an obvious choice, in the nature of things, whereas for me it’s a calculated risk. Standing in front of the not-yet­opened door of the lecture hall, I casually swing the baggy purse containing my loose-leaf binder, hiding that little proletarian shiver, the fear of having more ambition than brains. Even though, once I get going, I make for the only profession I know by heart, teaching, I still have to make it to the end. Prof, the word that ploofs like a pebble into a puddle, victorious women, queens of the classroom, loved or loathed, never insignificant. I haven’t yet wondered which one I’ll be like. Sitting on a bench halfway up the banks of seats, I thrill above all to my new life. This adventure, my chance at freedom. Don’t blow it.

  Finally, they’re sitting next to us. The boys, taking notes on the same lecture on Racine’s Phèdre. Not better than we are, or any smarter. More unruly, some of them, but only before the lecture begins, to cause a stir; they’d never shout to the lecturer’s face that he’s a piece of shit. Always ready to raise fucking hell—as they put it—in the cafeteria, in the student union, outside the lecture halls, but good little boys once inside, to my astonishment. I’ve certainly seen champion loudmouths in our café, and I’ve known meek guys who acted tough riding around on their motor scooters, but I hadn’t thought to find them here. Silly me. In a philosophy class, the blond assistant professor looks sternly out at his audience before launching into a lecture on Time and Consciousness; the guys around me sit quietly, pens poised, their concentration so thick you could cut it, not one question. Same silence in history, where not a single male voice, of those shouting in the corridor a moment ago, interrupts the triumphant soliloquy of Professeur Froinu. Evidently, it doesn’t bother them any more than it does the girls to be treated as retards by the professor. Unless they’re afraid of drawing attention to themselves anytime before the exam. As far as conformity and passivity are concerned, there is perfect equality of the sexes at the university level. But I discover that there are women’s studies and men’s studies. “Literature, languages, that stuff’s for broads.” I hear that word for the first time as well. “A man’s better off going into the sciences,” a girl assures me. I don’t see why; still the same stubborn refusal to go along with differences I don’t accept. I hear the most amazing things: “Literary creation is like an ejaculation,” says the prof in a course on the poet Charles Péguy. “All critics are impotent”—this from an assistant in the philosophy department. Writing reduced a hundred times to the activity of the penis, but I don’t take this seriously, I translate, or rather, it reaches me already in translation: literary creation is orgastic without any distinction between male and female, and when I read the poetry of Paul Eluard, “Myself I go toward life, my appearance is that of man,” it’s myself I think of. That men call us broads or dogs is humiliating, but then I’m not all that gracious in my vocabulary either: I often divide boys into morons, show-offs, and pricks, which I don’t realize—along with Hilda—has an obscene meaning. I have to admit that the prick is the male counterpart of the dog, a dull sort with no flirting value. Companions in the lecture halls, pals in the student restaurants, train passengers staring into space, I’m never dependent on any of them for more than three weeks. They come and go in the landscape of my boredom.

  Four years. The period just before. Before the supermarket cart, the what’ll-we-have-for-dinner­tonight, the saving up to buy a sofa for ourselves, a hi-fi system, an apartment. Before the diapers, the little pail and shovel on the beach, the men I don’t see anymore, the consumer magazines so we don’t get swindled, the leg of lamb he loves more than anything else, and the mutual calculation of lost freedoms. A period when we might have a yogurt for dinner, pack in a half hour for an impromptu weekend, talk all night long. Spend Sunday in bed reading. Hang out lazily in a café, watchi
ng the other customers, feeling ourselves float among these anonymous lives. Pout shamelessly when depressed. A period when the conversations of settled couples seem rooted in a futile, almost ridiculous universe—we could care less about traffic jams, the holiday death toll on the highways, the weather, and the price of beef. No one’s toddling at your heels yet. All girls go through this period, the length and intensity of which may vary, but they’re not allowed to remember it with nostalgia. Shame! How dare you look back with longing on these selfish, suspect, childish days, when you weren’t responsible for anyone but yourself. No one mourns a young woman’s life; no folklore or songs celebrate it. It doesn’t exist. A useless time.

  For me, four years when I am hungry for everything, for words, books, learning, people. To be a student, even on a scholarship, is a dream of freedom and egoism. A room far from the family, a loose schedule of classes, eating or not eating regularly, tucking your feet under a table in the restau universitaire or tucking yourself into bed to read Kafka with a cup of tea. The luxury of patching things up with a mother whose loud, unfeminine ways don’t matter to me anymore. A closer look has shown me that the gentle mothers like Hilda’s, who cries if you look at her cross-eyed, are a pain in the neck, because you’ve got to be careful all the time not to worry or upset them. Mine questions me eagerly and naïvely about my new life, and conspiratorially slips me twenty francs, in case you need something, books, going to cafés . . . No other needs, of course. Buying, owning, not in my vocabulary at the time. On the rue Bouquet, I look up at the tall private houses with their old curtains. Order and stability, but to me it’s just a stage setting, doesn’t concern me and never will. I’m off to livelier, bustling places where you can meet people, classrooms, station cafés, the library, movie theaters, and I return to the absolute silence of my room. A marvelous alter nation. In the morning, I see women shaking out dustcloths, making endless signals on their windowpanes, dragging in garbage cans. Their actions don’t interest me, they’re part of a ritual that has no place in my life. What do I feel for her, that woman pushing a stroller whom I pass on my leisurely way to class, laughing and arguing with my friends? Indifference, pity, as I automatically step aside to let her go by on the sidewalk. The world they live in, these women with husbands and kids, is dead to me. Sometimes at noon I buy a half-liter of milk, two yogurts, and a baguette at the grocery store behind the train station. I’m timid and ill at ease; firsthand experience in my mother’s store has taught me that they could very well do without customers like me, who bring in so little. Clutching my purchases between my coat and notebook, I quickly get out of the way of the housewives and mothers with their serious shopping lists, and I breathe the air outside in the street with pleasure. Ready to swear that the most common of feminine fates will never be mine.

  Pick and choose as I might among these images of freedom and discovery from that earlier time, they all look like a film shot outdoors, in streets, parks, seascapes—or in bedrooms. No kitchens, no dining rooms. I’m lying on a bed. Book: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Same scene, different book: Crime and Punishment. June, finished with exams. I’m walking along the rue Jeanne-d’Arc, breathing in the evocative smell of the cafés in summertime, or talking with Hilda in the little park of square Verdrel, where the desultory cruisers belong to the season and the happiness of knowing classes are over. Or I get off a bus out in a pleasant suburb of Rouen to conduct a survey on housing conditions, knocking on doors answered by women who remove their aprons and usher me into neat living rooms as they shoo away the children. Do you find the number of rooms sufficient? Do you use the loggia? I alertly write down the answers to questions the importance of which has hitherto escaped me, practical, impractical, they hesitate, formulating their replies as they slowly stroke the polished surface of the table. I feel a shiver of desolation—how can they live like this? And then oof, another fifty francs in the bag. No regrets. With the money from your opinion on loggias and kitchen facilities, madame, I travel through Spain with a girlfriend, do Rome on my own. At the Escorial, German girls kiss the tomb of Don Juan. In a little street nearby, I meet him, he has blue eyes. The next evening in Madrid, in the buen retiro at the end of a corridor in a no-stars hotel, I climb up on the toilet, the way I did in the girls’ hostel in Rouen. A little square of sky between the black walls of an interior courtyard and the hum of the city, but this noise doesn’t distress me anymore, so good-bye Juan, maybe next year at the Escorial. In Rome, each morning I leap the last three steps of the staircase; the concierge is sitting under the arch near the door, enjoying a bit of fresh air with her little girl—buon giorno, and I’m off to the Trevi fountain, the piazza Navona. She’s from the other side, I’m not sure of what, exactly, condemned to answer buon giorno to girls who clatter down stairs and out into the street.

  Poetize, poetize, go on and make your idyllic movie about freedoms long gone. It’s true that I love this life, that I think of the future without despair. And I’m not bored. I really do make all sorts of disillusioned pronouncements about marriage to my student girlfriends when we talk in my room in the evenings; sheer idiocy, a living death, just look at the mugs on those married couples in the restau, they sit facing each other, eating away without a word, mummified. When Hélène (licence in philosophy) concludes that it’s a necessary evil, after all, in order to have children, I think her ideas and arguments are preposterous. Personally, I cannot imagine motherhood with or without marriage. It also irritates me when almost all of them boast of knowing how to sew properly, iron without making sloppy creases; they’re happy to be something more than intellectuals, and since my pleasure at creating a successful chocolate mousse had disappeared at about the same time as Brigitte did, their pride exasperates me no end. Yes, I am living just like a boy my own age, getting by on a state scholarship, some modest parental support, baby-sitting and the odd survey job, a student going to movies, dancing, reading, and studying hard for exams, someone who thinks the idea of marriage is hilarious. Things aren’t exactly the same, though. I’m well aware that I was never the kind of strong young woman who deftly makes her own way in life. I was still inept with men. Being pals, clear-eyed, honest friendship, forget it. Sometimes it takes almost nothing (a few chats with a man, a swift glance from across the table in the library) to turn the figure-in-the-landscape into a marvelous and desirable being. Get it into your head, be pleasant, you’re always overdoing it, you have to “lead them on, by the nose,” like Hilda, so seductive and never at a loss, but the Machiavellianism demanded is unbelievable. And fearsome perseverance: cultivating the feminine mystique seems to me like an exhausting enterprise that can’t leave much time for thinking about other things. I must certainly be too “easy,” but then I suddenly turn difficult. Calmly, confidently, Guillaume the med student explains to me, in his room with Modigliani women plastered all over the walls, that there are two kinds of girls, the relaxed, and the uptight: the former screw, the latter don’t. It’s entirely within my power to transform myself from uptight to relaxed, to stop being “repressed,” we all know virginity is unhealthy, so come already, shit! I could care less about whether or not I keep this membrane that prevents me from using Tampax, but that language . . . Word of mouth has it that there’s something more reliable than the Japanese calendar: the diaphragm. Fine, but you should hear this law student cackling in the cafeteria, my chick pops in her rubber cap at night and washes it in the fountain the next morning. Sexual freedom: what a thrill. Not much difference between the guys at the traffic circle on their motor scooters and these college students. So you have to change them frequently, regretfully, because it’s just not “nice” behavior for a girl, better to find the “right” one, but how, where is he, etc. I can’t figure it out, and I’m not the only one. The women’s dorms at the cité universitaire are worse than the lonely-hearts column in Nous Deux. Hélène, so fluent in philosophical jargon, careens from one heartbreak to another. Isabelle, absolutely mad about a guy who never looks a
t her, she cries in the street and won’t even be able to take her exams. All of them entangled in irrational melodramas nourished by the pop songs of Jacques Brel, Ferré, but Aznavour as well, and even Jean­Claude Pascal, since everything’s grist for the Romance mill. A complete con, and we’re suckers for all of it. He told me I was “the real thing,” how nice. And jealous of one another into the bargain, distrustful, we won’t invite her, she’s too . . . pretty, obviously, what else could it be? The grinds and bookworms, those girls are out, wet blankets; being good company means the same thing in college as elsewhere: being attractive. The ingenue is also still going strong—look at this neat thing I bought to curl my eyelashes—and even the girlish act, chewing gum in class, swinging your purse nonchalantly, teasing the boys, collecting little stuffed animals and Peynet dolls. Studying the causes of the French Revolution, Time and Consciousness, fine, you want to be a teacher, okay, but keep your femininity, so tell me how does my hair look, I’m a fright without hair spray, lend me your long-sleeved blouse for the crêpe party. We have the feeling of slacking off, of playing a role that is intellectually too small for us. It’s that or solitude: always the same problem. You don’t talk about the crumminess of real life, you keep your female humiliations to yourself, as though you were at fault, deserved them, were responsible for everything, for botched deflowerings, inconclusive lays (you call this screwing?), for their crudeness. At most, shameful, veiled allusions, “If you only knew what he asked me to do . . .” Sometimes we get wind of horror stories: Michelle, the redhead who was always with that guy, killed herself with barbiturates, and Jeannette, a whole pail of blood, she did it with soapy water—we can’t get enough of the whispered details—and it would have been twins. Fate. The man? Free, indifferent, the bastard does as he pleases, we all agree on that.