II
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1
When my mother was born, her mother was only 17 years old. It’s unlikely that the young man with whom my grandmother had committed her “transgression” was any older. Her father kicked her out when he realized she was pregnant. “You and your bastard can get lost. To hell with the both of you!” he yelled at her. So she left. Soon thereafter she opened her own door to her own mother. (I’m not sure why, but I imagine it’s because her mother wasn’t willing to give up seeing her daughter, so instead she left her husband.) The lover of this very young woman didn’t put up with the new situation for long. Their apartment must have been tiny. So he told her, “It’s either me or your mother. You choose.” She chose her mother. He left and she never heard from him again. He was thus only involved in raising his child for a couple months, after which he disappeared from my mother’s life, my mother the “bâtarde,” at a time when she was still too young to have any memories of him. Soon after, my grandmother met and set up house with another man with whom she would have three other children. My mother lived with them until the war broke out. The war would change her life forever. In later years she would beg her mother to tell her the name of the man she had never known, asking if she knew what had happened to him. The only response she ever received was, “It’s no use stirring up the past.” All that she knows about her father is that he was very good looking and that he was a construction worker—and that he was Spanish. “Andalusian,” she claimed to me recently. She likes to think that he was a gypsy, as if writing herself into a family romance of that kind could help make bearable all the pain that figures among the devastating consequences of being a girl with no father. (She can still easily recall the wound—one that still smarts—inflicted on her by a schoolteacher when, as a very young child, she had responded in class to a routine question about her parents by saying she didn’t have a father: “Everyone has a father,” the woman objected with a snicker. But in point of fact she didn’t have one.) And really, it’s not at all impossible that this gypsy fable could be true. Seeing photos of myself at the age of 15 or 16 with my dark complexion and long, curly, black hair, it has occurred to me that I might have inherited some of these genetic traits from such a relative. A few years ago, while on one of those trips organized by the worker’s organization at my father’s factory, my mother and father were touring Andalusia. As the bus approached Grenada, my mother felt a shiver of emotion. As she told me later, “It was bizarre, the way I shivered. I have no idea what was happening, but I’m sure it was because it was my country. And then one day we were having lunch in a restaurant and there were some gypsies playing the guitar. One of them came and sat next to me and said, ‘You are one of us.’ ”
While I have never subscribed to this kind of mystical feeling about one’s origins—I don’t really understand what phantasm regarding biological origins or what psychology of deep family bonds it arises from—I certainly understand that my mother has always, up to and including today, had difficulty dealing with the fact that she never knew her father, and that deep inside herself she invented out of various bits of reality her own version of Spain, as a ray of sunshine that could rescue her from the northern fog and from the gloomy reality of her own life. Her dreams in life were not of becoming rich, but rather of light and of freedom. Perhaps more education would have allowed her to pursue that dream of freedom. “I would have liked to be a school teacher,” she says today, because “in those days, that’s a thing a woman could do after finishing school.” Her ambitions were small ones, and yet even so, they proved unrealistic. Just at the moment when she would have entered high school (this was already something that was unheard of for someone from her background, but she had always been a good student and had even been authorized to skip a grade when she was 10 years old), her family had to leave town: people were encouraged to evacuate in the face of the invasion of the German army. Buses carried residents south. Only looters remained behind, or those determined to prevent looters from stealing their belongings. (Such is my mother’s version of this grim episode.) This journey led them to Burgundy, where they were lodged on a farm.
During the time they spent there, my grandmother worked in the fields from dawn to dusk. The children passed the time however they could, playing in the yard or helping with household tasks. Once the armistice was signed, everyone went back home. My grandmother found a job in a metal factory. Then when a call was made for volunteers to go work in Germany, she applied. She left her partner and put her four children in the care of a foster family. After a few months, she stopped sending money, and the foster family sent the two boys and the two girls to a public home for orphans and abandoned children. That put an end to any chance my mother might have had of attending high school. She did attempt and obtain her general education certificate, and was (and still is) very proud of this accomplishment. Shortly thereafter a place was found for her as a maid. For the policy at this public orphanage was to find work for children in its care as soon as they turned fourteen. For boys it would be on a farm (as happened to her older brother), and for girls it was housework.
My mother’s first job was working for a couple of teachers. They were good people, and they took a liking to her. She still remembers them with gratitude, because while she worked for them, they paid for her to take courses in stenography, with the idea that she might become a secretary some day. She excelled at her lessons, and would have liked to keep going. A single year wasn’t long enough to become professionally qualified. However a year was the maximum length of time the state organization would keep young girls in a single “place.” After that, they had to change employers. So once more, my mother had to give up her dreams. A cleaning woman she was, and a cleaning woman she would remain.
As occupations go, it wasn’t an easy one. Sexual harassment was a constant feature of this kind of work. Several times, the husband of the woman who had hired her would try to set up a discreet meeting. When she didn’t show up, the result was that she would be fired the next day, after the husband told his wife that my mother had been making advances. There was even one time where the father of the woman employing her came up behind her and grabbed her breasts. She freed herself brusquely, but made no complaint since that would only have meant losing her job and having to find another: “Who would have believed me? Who would have taken the word of a silly little maid against that of one of the town’s rich factory owners?” she confided to me once she had agreed to tell me the story of her past. When she spoke of this part of her past, she couldn’t help falling back, sixty years later, into a state of cold, but also saddened, anger. Then she added, “these things happened all the time, but people kept their mouths shut. Back then it wasn’t like today. Women had no rights …. Men made all the rules.” Already at the age of 16 or 17, she understood what men were like and so, when she did marry, she did so without any illusions about men in general or about the particular man she was marrying.
On returning to France after her time in Germany, my grandmother moved back in with the man she had been with before the war, and took back the three children she had had with him. But she didn’t take back her eldest; she didn’t even make an effort to find out where she was or what she was doing. And yet back before the war had started, my mother, who now lived with her employers, had been living with her mother and stepfather alongside her two half-brothers and her half-sister. Her fervent wish had been to think of her step-father as her father. He was a coalman, and would pass through the streets with a horse-drawn cart crying “Coalman! Coalman!” Those who wanted to buy sacks of coal would call to him from their windows. He continued in the same occupation after the war, although the horse-drawn cart had been replaced by a small van. When my grandmother married him, in 1946, she didn’t bother to invite her daughter to the wedding. My mother would learn about it from her brother, with whom she had stayed in contact. A little while later, despite everything, feeling quite lonely and unhappy, she made
up her mind to visit the woman who had treated her so atrociously. (“She was still my mother, and when it came right down to it I didn’t have anyone else.”) But my grandmother had left town. She had headed in the direction of Paris, where her sister lived, taking her other children with her. In Paris, or in the town on the outskirts of Paris where she settled, it seems she indulged in frequent amorous or sexual dalliances. “She was the kind of woman who broke up homes,” is what a person said of her to my mother one day. Yet in the end she would come back to Reims and move back in with her husband. And my mother moved in with them again. It was when she was 18 that she made an effort to go back to her mother, and her mother agreed. She agreed to “take her back in,” as my mother put it. My mother forgave her everything. She was happy simply to belong to a family again, even though she never completely forgot the heedlessness her mother had shown towards her. The turmoil of wartime was not a sufficient excuse. Yet, despite all that, when, fifty years later, my grandmother—who was having more and more difficulty taking care of herself—had to move out of the modest apartment that she lived in, located in a rundown street in the Barbès neighborhood in the heart of the most working class part of Paris’s 18th district, it was my mother who found her a studio in Reims and took care of her. A bit later, her physical deterioration having advanced to the point where she could barely move around on her own, she insisted on moving back to Paris for the final days of her life, and my mother found her an old people’s home there. Her own resources were insufficient to pay the bills for this establishment, so until she died it was my mother and I who paid the bulk of the costs that social security wouldn’t cover.
For many years I knew nothing, or next to nothing, about the story of my mother’s life during and immediately after the war. During my childhood and my adolescence, in the 60s and 70s, I was very fond of my grandmother. She lived in Paris in those years. (In fact for me she had always lived in Paris, a city she loved. She had been intent on going to live there in the mid-1950s, and had left her husband in Reims in order to do so.) She worked managing an apartment building, first in the 13th district (rue Pascal), then in one of the narrow streets around les Halles (the rue Tiquetonne, which these days has been utterly transformed). Later she would manage a building in a more middle-class neighborhood in the 12th district (on the rue Taine) before finally retiring and moving into her apartment in Barbès. She lived with a different man, whom I always called “grandpa”—one’s real family and one’s biological family (not to mention one’s legal family) coincide much less frequently than is commonly assumed, and versions of what in the 1990s came regularly to be called “blended families” existed long before then. In this working-class world, marital and familial structures had for a very long time—both for better and for worse—been marked by complexity, multiplicity, by break-ups, serial partnerships, reorganizations, etc. (There were couples who were simply “shacked up,” there were children of different marriages mixed together, there were married men and women living together without having divorced their previous spouses.) My grandmother and her newest companion never got married. And my grandmother never divorced the man she married in 1946, who only died in the 1970s or 80s, without her having seen him in many years. During my teenage years (and indeed much later), I felt embarrassed by this somewhat “irregular” familial situation. The result was that I would lie about the ages of my grandmother and my mother so that people couldn’t figure out that my grandmother was only 17 when my mother was born. I would also speak as if the man I called my grandfather was in fact the second husband of my grandmother. The social order puts pressure on all of us. All those people who want things to be “regular,” or “meaningful,” or to correspond to “stable points of reference” know they can count on the way adherence to the norm is inculcated into the deepest levels of our consciousness from our earliest years. This happens by way of our ongoing experience of the social world and by way of the discomfort—the shame—we come to feel when the part of the world in which we live fails to follow those tidily organized political and legal rules. The surrounding culture offers us those rules both as the only way life can be lived and as an ideal we must strive for. This is the case even if any such version of a normative family or familial norm in fact corresponds to nothing we ever encounter in real life. Surely the disgust I feel these days for all those people who wish to impose their definition of a couple, or a family, on us, or who would accord social and legal legitimacy to some among us and refuse it to others—such people regularly aim to achieve their ends by invoking models that have never existed except within the confines of their conservative and authoritarian imaginations—surely my disgust owes much of its intensity to my past, in which anyone inhabiting these alternative family forms was required to live in them and to experience them as somehow deviant or abnormal, and thus inferior and shameful. But this same past surely also explains my distrust of the opposite kind of injunction, an injunction to be abnormal, one that is directed at us by the advocates—in the end, just as profoundly normative in their own way—of non-normativity as a kind of prescribed “subversion.” All my life, I have been well positioned to notice to what an extent normality and abnormality are realities that are not only relative, but also relational, mobile, contextual, the one always imbricated in the other, always partial in some way, and so on. I also cannot help having noticed to what an extent social illegitimacy can cause psychic damage to those whose lives are caught up in it, full of worry and pain, and how it can thus engender a deeply rooted aspiration to gain access to the space of what is legitimate and what is “normal.” (The power of certain institutions resides precisely in this kind of desirability.)1
The grandfather I knew in the 1960s (and I’m not putting any quotation marks around the word grandfather, because he really was my grandfather, to the extent that a family, whether or not it conforms legally to the decrees of the guardians of the social order, is always the result of an exercise of will and of decisions people have made, as well as, in every case, of the actual practice of the people concerned) was a window washer. He got around on a moped with his ladder and bucket, and would head out and wash the windows of cafés and businesses often located quite far from where he lived. One day as I was walking in central Paris and he was passing by, he saw me and stopped at the curb, delighted by this fortuitous meeting. I, on the other hand, was acutely embarrassed, terrified that someone I knew might see me with him, perched on top of his strange contraption. What would I have said if someone had asked me, “Who was that fellow you were chatting with?” Over the course of the next few days, I wrestled unsuccessfully with a terribly guilty conscience. “Why,” I kept asking myself, “can’t you just be who you are? What is it about the time spent in a bourgeois or petty bourgeois world that has led you to the point where you would be willing to deny your family or feel so ashamed of it? Why have you interiorized to such an extent all the hierarchies of the social world that, intellectually and politically, you claim to be opposed to?” But at the same time part of me would be cursing my family for being what it was: “What bad luck to have been born into those circumstances,” I kept repeating to myself. I would alternate back and forth between these two positions, first blaming myself, then blaming them. (But whose fault was it, really? And what was their fault?) I was torn, ill at ease with myself. My political convictions didn’t mesh with my attempt to fit in to the bourgeois world; the critical position I claimed to hold vis-à-vis the social world conflicted with certain values that were being imposed on me—and I can’t even say it was despite myself, since I was under no obligation to assume these values. No obligation, that is, except for my voluntary submission to the perceptions and judgments of the dominant class. Politically, I was on the side of the workers, yet I detested being tied to their world. Doubtless I would have suffered fewer inner torments and less of a moral crisis in claiming allegiance to the “people,” if those people hadn’t been my family, which is to say my past, and therefore, whe
ther I liked it or not, my present.
Returning to Reims Page 5
