Shame

by Annie Ernaux

  (I found these stories more realistic than Dickens’ novels because they painted the picture of a likely future—love­marriage-children. Can the real therefore be defined as a mere sum of potentialities?

  When I was reading Brigitte Jeune fille and Esclave ou reine by Delly, and going to see the movie Passi bête starring Bourvil, at the same time other people were buying Saint Genet by Sartre, Requiem des innocents by Calaferte and going to see Ionesco’s The Chairs on stage. For me these two categories will always remain distinct.)

  My father will only read the local newspaper; he never mentions religion except to bark at my mother—“you spend all day in church,” “I can’t think what you find to say, chattering to the priest all day’’—or to crack jokes about the celibacy of clergymen, which she never acknowledges, conveying that such obscenities are beneath her. He attends half the

  Sunday service, standing at the back of the church to slip away more easily, and waits until Low Sunday—the last limit before transgressing Church rules and committing a mortal sin—to grudgingly make his Easter duty (making confession and taking Holy Communion). My mother expects nothing more from him than this bare minimum, which will ensure the salvation of his spirit. In the evening he doesn’t join in our prayers, pretending to be already asleep. Because he shows none of the signs of genuine religious faith and therefore the ambition to better himself, my father is not the one to lay down the law.

  Yet for him, like for my mother, private education is the supreme reference: “What would they say at school, if they could see you now, if they could hear the way you talk,” and so on.

  And especially, you mustn’t get a bad name at school.

  This is done by using our right hand to touch our forehead, our chest, our left shoulder and our right shoulder, preferably with the rosary cross, which we raise to our lips at the end of the ritual.

  By the year 2050 magazines like Cosmopolitan and Elle and the many novels in which society offers a moral code of conduct will of course seem as strange as Brigitte does today.

  I have brought to light the codes and conventions of the

  circles in which I lived. I have listed the different languages that enveloped me, forging the vision I had of myself and the outside world. Nowhere could I fit in that Sunday in June.

  What happened that day could not be put into words, in either of the worlds that was mine.

  We stopped being decent people, the sort who don’t drink or fight and who dress properly to go into town. Despite a brand-new smock to start the term, my beautiful missal, my top grades and my daily prayers, I would never be like the other girls again. I had seen the unseeable. I knew something that the Catholic school and its sheltered environment should have guarded me against, something that implicitly bracketed me with those whose violent, alcoholic nature and mental illness gave rise to stories ending in “really, it’s disgrace to see that.”

  I became unworthy of private education, its standards of excellence and perfection. I began living in shame.

  The worst thing about shame is that we imagine we are the only ones to experience it.

  I was still in a state of shock when I took the entrance examination organized by our diocese, receiving a 70% pass, to the surprise and disappointment of Mademoiselle L. It was on the following Wednesday—June 18.

  The Sunday after that, on June 22, I attended the gathering organized in Rouen by the Christian Youth Movement, like I had done the year before. The pupils were driven back by bus late at night. Mademoiselle L was in charge of seeing the girls back home in an area that included my neighborhood. It was around one o’ clock in the morning. I knocked on the shutters pinned over the grocery door. After some time, the lights went on in the store and my mother appeared in the glare of the doorway, disheveled, silent and sleepy-eyed, in a nightgown that was both creased and soiled (we would use the garment to wipe ourselves after peeing). Mademoiselle L and the girls, two or three of them, immediately stopped talking. My mother mumbled good evening, to which no one replied. I rushed into the store to stop it all. It was the first time I saw my mother through the eyes of the private school. In my memory, this scene, although barely comparable to the one in which my father tried to kill my mother, is seen as its sequel. As if the sight of my mother’s loose, unsupported flesh and suspect nightgown had exposed the way we lived and who we truly were.

  (Naturally, it never occurred to me that if my mother had owned a bathrobe and had slipped it on over her nightgown, the girls and the teacher from my private school would not have been seized with dismay and I would have no recollection of that particular evening. In our world bathrobes and dressing gowns were considered luxuries; women who dressed for work as soon as they got up had no use for such incongruous, absurd garments. In my system of thinking, which ruled out the existence of bathrobes, it was impossible to escape shame.)

  I feel that all the events of that summer served only to confirm our state of disgrace: “no one except us” behaves this way.

  My grandmother succumbed to a pulmonary embolism at the beginning of July. I wasn’t affected by her death. About ten days later, in the Corderie neighborhood, a violent dispute broke out between one of my cousins, recently married, and his aunt, my mother’s sister, the one who lived in my grandmother’s house. In the middle of the street, in full view of the neighbors, egged on by his father my uncle Joseph, who was sitting on the embankment, my cousin proceeded to beat his aunt black and blue. Bruised all over and covered in blood, she rushed into the store. My mother accompanied her to the police station and took her to see the doctor. (The incident was tried in court a few months later.)

  I contracted a cold and a bad cough which stayed with me all month. Then quite suddenly my right ear got blocked. It wasn’t customary to have the doctor come round for a cold in summer. I couldn’t hear my own voice and other people’s voices sounded muffled. I avoided speaking. I thought I would have to live like this for the rest of my life. Another incident, also in July, shortly before or after the argument in the rue de la Corderie. One evening, after the café had closed, while we were sitting having dinner, I kept complaining that the frames of my spectacles were crooked. While I was fiddling with them, my mother suddenly grabbed them and, screaming, hurled them on to the kitchen floor. The lenses shattered into tiny pieces. All I can remember is a loud clamor—my parents flinging insults at each other and my own sobs. I felt that some terrible tragedy had to follow its course, something like, “now we really are living in madness.”

  This can be said about shame: those who experience it feel that anything can happen to them, that the shame will never cease and that it will only be followed by more shame.

  Some time after my grandmother’s death and the injuries sustained by my aunt, I went on a bus trip to Étretat with my mother—our traditional one-day summer outing to the seaside. She traveled there and back in her mourning clothes, waiting until she got to the beach to slip on her blue crepe dress, the one with red and yellow flowers, “to stop people in Y from gossiping.” A photograph she took of me, mislaid or deliberately thrown away twenty years ago, showed me standing in the sea with water up to my knees, with the Aiguille and the Aval cliff top pictured in the background. I am holding myself perfectly straight, my arms hanging down my sides, trying to pull in my stomach and push out my non-existent breasts, squeezed into a knitted woolen swimsuit.

  That winter my mother signed my father and myself up for a package tour organized by the local bus operator. The idea was to go to Lourdes, visiting a few tourist spots on the way down (Rocamadour, the Padirac chasm), to stay there for three or four days and to head back toward Normandy by a different route, via Biarritz, Bordeaux and the châteaux of the Loire. My mother had already been to Lourdes on her own—now it was our turn to go. The morning we left, during the second half of August—it was still dark—we stood for ages on the sidewalk of the rue de la Républi
que, waiting for the bus that was coming from a small coastal town where it had to pick up some passengers. We drove all day, pausing at a café in Dreux in the morning and stopping for lunch at a restaurant in Olivet, along the banks of the Loiret river. In the afternoon rain set in and I could no longer make out the landscape through the window. I had grazed my finger in the café in Dreux, breaking a lump of sugar into two to give to a dog, and now it was beginning to go septic. As we were heading south, I began to feel disorientated by the change of scenery. I feared that I might never see my mother again. Apart from a crackers manufacturer and his wife, there was no one we knew. It was night-time when we reached Limoges and checked into the Hôtel Moderne. For dinner, we sat alone at a table in the middle of the dining hall. We dared not speak because of the waiters. We felt intimidated and vaguely apprehensive.

  Right from the beginning, people kept the same seat and stayed there throughout the trip (making it easy for me to remember them). In the front row on the right, just ahead of us, were two young girls from Y, belonging to a family of jewelers. Behind us sat a widow, who owned some land, and her thirteen-year-old daughter, enrolled at a convent school in Rouen. In the next row there was a retired post office clerk—a widow, also from Rouen. Further on, a schoolmistress working for state education, unmarried, overweight, in a chocolate brown coat and sandals. In the front row on the left was the crackers manufacturer with his wife; behind them, a couple from the small coastal town, who sold cloth and ladies’ fashion wear, the young wives of the two bus drivers and three farming couples. It was the first time we were in the situation of having to spend ten days in the company of complete strangers, all of whom were better off than us, with the exception of the bus drivers.

  The next few days, I wasn’t quite so upset by being away from home. I enjoyed discovering the mountains and the hot weather—inconceivable in Normandy—eating out twice a day and sleeping in hotels. Being able to wash in a basin, with hot and cold running water, was a luxury for me. I thought that it was “nicer at the hotel than back at home”—something I always felt while I was living with my parents, proof maybe that I belonged to the world down below. Every time we checked into a hotel, I was anxious to see my new bedroom. I could have stayed there for hours, doing nothing, just being there.

  My father continued to be wary of everything we saw. During the bus trip, he kept watching the road, which was often quite steep, and paid more attention to the driver’s conduct than to the landscape. He resented having to sleep in a different bed every night. Food was particularly important to him: he was suspicious of the dishes we were served, which we had never tasted before, and was critical of ordinary produce, like bread or potatoes, which he grew in his garden. When we visited churches and châteaux, he would lag behind, visibly bored, as if he was only doing it to please me. He was not in his element, in other words, not doing things and seeing people that reflected his usual tastes and lifestyle.

  He began loosening up when he made friends with the retired post office clerk, the crackers manufacturer and the cloth merchant, who were more talkative than the other passengers because of their job and who shared some of his concerns (corporate taxes) despite the obvious differences between them—they all had scrubbed hands. They were all older than my father and, like him, had no intention of traipsing around in the sun all day. Therefore they spent plenty of time over meals. Conversation touched on the arid landscapes we had driven through, the recent drought, the Mediterranean accent, anything that was different from where we lived, and the Lurs murder case.

  I had thought it the normal thing to do to seek the company of thirteen-year-old Élisabeth: after all, there was only one year between us and she too went to convent school, even if she was already in seventh grade. We were the same height but her blouse billowed out and she looked like a young girl already. On the first day, I was glad to see that we were both wearing a navy blue pleated skirt and a jacket; hers was red, mine was orange. She did not acknowledge my advances; when I spoke to her she would just smile, looking very much like her mother, whose mouth opened on to several gold teeth and who never said a word to my father. One day I put on my gym outfit—a blouse and skirt—which we had to wear out now that the Christian Youth gathering was over. It did not escape her attention: “You too went to the fair?” I was proud to say yes, mistaking her question and beaming smile for a sign of intimacy between us. Then, catching her strange intonation, I realized that it meant, “so you’ve got nothing else to wear except your gym suit.”

  One day I caught these words, uttered by a woman traveling in our group, “she’ll be a real beauty later on.” Afterward I realized that it wasn’t me she was talking about but Élisabeth.

  There was no question of my approaching the two girls from the jewelry store. I had no place among the women’s bodies traveling on the bus; I was just a child growing up—tall, flat and healthy-looking.

  When we arrived in Lourdes, I succumbed to a strange condition. Everything I saw—the houses, the mountains, the entire landscape—kept filing by in front of me. When I was sitting in the hotel restaurant, the outside wall opposite kept whizzing past my eyes. It was only indoors that things stayed still. I didn’t say anything to my father; I thought that I had gone mad and that this condition would stay with me all my life. Every morning, when I got up, I wondered if the landscape had stopped spinning. I seem to remember that things were back to normal by the time we reached Biarritz.

  My father and I duly performed the devotions recommended by my mother. Taking part in the torchlit procession, attending High Mass out in the open, under the beating sun—a woman lent me her folding chair when I almost passed out—saying our prayers in the Grotto of the Miracles. I could not say whether I enjoyed visiting these places, which caused my mother and schoolmistresses to go into raptures. I felt nothing while I was there. I recall being vaguely bored, on a gray misty morning, somewhere along the banks of the Gave river.

  Along with the group, we visited the medieval castle, the caves at Bétharram and the Panorama, a sort of tent with a huge circular screen inside reproducing the landscape in the days of Bernadette Soubirous. Apart from the retired post office employee, we were the only ones not to visit the Gavarnie cirque and the Spanish bridge. These excursions weren’t included in the package tour and my father probably hadn’t taken enough money with him. (At a sidewalk café in Biarritz, he is dismayed to hear the price of the Cognacs he and the other two tradesmen have been drinking.)

  Neither of us had formed any preconceived idea about the trip. There were so many customs we knew nothing about. The young girls from the jewelry store had a guidebook which they could be seen holding every time they left the bus to visit a monument. They rummaged in their beach bag and brought out cookies and chocolate. Except for a bottle of mentholated spirit and a few sugar lumps, in case we felt sick, we had brought no food with us, thinking it improper to do so.

  I had only one pair of shoes, white, bought for the Communion ceremony, and they soon became grubby. My mother hadn’t given me any white polish. It never occurred to us to go out and buy some; that seemed impossible in a strange town, where we didn’t know any of the stores . . . . One evening, in Lourdes, seeing all the pairs of shoes lined up outside the bedroom doors, I decided to put mine down too. The next morning they were no cleaner and my father teased me: “I told you so. You have to pay for that.” This was not something that was conceivable for us.

  All we bought were medals and a few postcards to send to my mother, the family and the people we knew. No newspapers, except Le Canard enchaîné, just once. The places we drove through gave no news of our area in the local press.

  In Biarritz, I had no swimsuit or shorts. We are walking along the beach, fully dressed among the suntanned bodies in their bikinis.

  Again, Biarritz: sitting outside a big café, my father embarks on a dirty story about a priest which I have already heard back home. The others give a force
d laugh.

  Three images, on the way back.

  During a stop on a sandy plateau with burnt vegetation, possibly in the Auvergne. I have just finished defecating far from the group, who are sitting at a roadside café. I realize that I have left part of myself in a place where I shall probably never come back. In a few hours, tomorrow, I shall be far away, back at school, yet this part of me will remain abandoned on this barren plateau for days and days, until winter.

  Standing on the staircase in the château of Blois. My father, who has caught a cold, is seized with a fit of coughing. All you can hear is his cough, echoing under the vaults, drowning out the guide’s commentary. He waits behind while the other members of the group reach the top of the staircase. I turn round and wait for him, possibly with some reluctance.

  One evening—it was our last day—in Tours, we had dinner in a brightly-lit restaurant where the walls were lined with mirrors, frequented by a sophisticated clientele. My father and I were seated at the end of a long table set up for the group. The waiters were paying little attention to us; we had to wait a long time between courses. At a small table nearby sat a girl aged fourteen or fifteen, suntanned, in a low-cut dress, and an elderly man who appeared to be her father.

  They were talking and laughing quite freely, completely at ease, oblivious of other people. She was dipping into a thick milky substance in a glass—some years later I learnt this was yogurt, which people like us had never heard of. I caught sight of myself in the mirror, pale and sad-looking with my spectacles, silently sitting beside my father, who was staring into the far distance. I could see everything that separated me from that girl yet I wouldn’t have known what to do to resemble her.