by Annie Ernaux
Afterward, my father complained with unusual vehemence about this restaurant, where he claimed we had been served mashed potatoes made with “pig slop,” white and tasteless. Several weeks later, he was still venting his anger over the meal and its disgraceful “pig slop.” Although he never actually said so—it was probably then that I began decoding his speech—it was his way of expressing resentment at having been treated with contempt because we were not chic customers who ate “à la carte.”
(After evoking the images I have of that summer, I feel inclined to write “then I discovered that” or “then I realized that,” words implying a clear perception of the events one has lived through. But in my case there is no understanding, only this feeling of shame that has fossilized the images and stripped them of meaning. The fact that I experienced such inertia and nothingness is something that cannot be denied. It is the ultimate truth.
It is the bond between the little girl of 1952 and the woman who is writing this manuscript.
Except for Bordeaux, Tours and Limoges, I never went back to any of the places we visited during that trip.
The restaurant scene in Tours is by far the most vivid. When I was writing a book about my father’s life and roots, it would haunt me relentlessly, proof that there existed two separate worlds and that we would always belong to the one down below.
Chronology may be the only connection between the scene of that Sunday in June and the bus trip to Lourdes. Yet who can say that an incident following in the wake of another is not somehow overshadowed by the first one? And who can say that the natural order of events does not carry meaning?)
After we had got back home, I couldn’t stop thinking about our trip. I kept seeing myself in hotel rooms and restaurants, or walking down sun-drenched avenues. Now I knew there was another world—a huge place with a blazing sun, bedrooms and washbasins with hot water, and little girls talking to their father the way they do in novels. We were not part of it. That’s the way it was.
I’m pretty sure it was that summer that I invented the “perfect day” game, a sort of ritual inspired by Le Petit Écho de la mode—which boasted far more advertisements than the other papers we bought—after I had read through the serials and a few of the articles. The game always went the same way. I would imagine I was a young girl living alone in a big, beautiful house (alternatively, living alone in a room in Paris). I would shape my body and appearance using the products advertised in the magazine: pretty teeth (Gibbs), luscious red lips (Rouge Baiser), a slender figure (girdle X) and so on. I would usually be wearing a dress or a suit available by mail order; my furniture would come from the department store Les Galeries Barbès. The academic studies I chose were those which the École Universelle claimed provided the best job opportunities. I wouldn’t eat food unless its nutritional value was stated: pasta, Astra margarine. I would delight in forging my personality out of the products advertised only in that particular paper (a rule scrupulously observed), slowly taking time to explore each new “ad,” piecing the images together to paint the picture of a perfect day. One possible scenario would involve waking up in a Lévitan bed, having a bowl of Banania for breakfast, brushing my “glossy hair” with Vitapointe and studying my correspondence course to become a nurse or maybe a social worker. Every week a new batch of advertisements would rekindle the game which, unlike the fantasies derived from literature, was both creative and exciting—I was using real objects to build the future—as well as frustrating—I could never work out a schedule for the whole day.
It was a secret, nameless activity which, in my mind, could not possibly be shared by others.
In September business suddenly grew slack: a Coop or Familistère store had opened in the town center. The trip to Lourdes had no doubt proved too heavy a burden financially. In the afternoon, my parents would talk in low voices in the kitchen. One day my mother accused my father and myself of not having prayed properly in the grotto at Lourdes. We burst out laughing and she blushed, as if she had revealed a secret bond she shared with heaven, which was beyond our understanding. They were thinking of selling the business and getting taken on as store assistants in a grocery, or else going back to the factory. The situation must have taken a turn for the better because none of that happened.
Toward the end of the month, a decayed tooth was giving me trouble so for the first time in my life my mother took me to see the dentist in Y. Before releasing a jet of cold water on to my gum for the injection, he asked me: “Does it hurt when you drink cider?” It was the usual drink among workers and country people, both adults and children. At home I would drink water, like the girls from my school, occasionally adding a few drops of grenadine. (Was I doomed to pick up every single sentence that reminded us of our place in society?)
At the beginning of the school term, a group of two or three of us were busy cleaning the classroom one Saturday afternoon in the company of Madame B, the teacher in charge of the sixth grade. Carried away by my dusting, I broke into the love song Boléro at the top of my voice, then immediately stopped. I refused to continue, despite strong encouragement on the part of Madame B, convinced that she would pounce on the first signs of vulgarity I showed before denouncing them violently to the other girls.
There is no point in going on. My shame was followed by more shame, only to be followed by more shame.
Now everything in our life is synonymous with shame—the urinal in the courtyard, the shared bedroom (owing to a common rural practice and the lack of space, I slept in my parents’ bed), my mother’s violent behavior and crude language, the drunken customers and the families who couldn’t pay up. Being acquainted with the various degrees of drunkenness and having to finish off the month with corned beef were enough to put me into a category for which those at private school felt only indifference and scorn.
It was normal to feel ashamed: I saw it as an inescapable fatality resulting from my parents’ occupation, their financial troubles, their working-class background and the way we generally behaved. And the events of that Sunday in June. Shame became a new way of living for me. I don’t think I was even aware of it, it had become part of my own body.
I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others. But what degree of shame could possibly be conveyed by the writing of a book which seeks to measure up to the events I experienced in my twelfth year.
Summer 1996 is drawing to an end. When I began thinking about this text, the market square in Sarajevo suffered a mortar attack that killed several dozen people and wounded hundreds of others. In the written press some journalists wrote, “we are overcome by shame.” For them, shame was something they could feel one day and not the next, something that applied to one situation (Bosnia) and not another (Rwanda). No one remembers the blood shed on the market place in Sarajevo.
While I was writing this book, my attention was immediately caught by any news item, however slight, attributed to the year 1952—the release of a movie, the publication of a book, the death of an artist and so on. I felt that these events brought home the reality of that faraway year and my identity as a child. In his novel Fires on the Plain, published in 1952, the Japanese author Shohei Ooka writes: “All this may just be an illusion but all the same I cannot question the things I have experienced. Memories too belong in that category.”
I look at the picture taken in Biarritz. My father has been dead for twenty-nine years. The only link between me and the little girl in the photograph is what happened that Sunday in June, a scene which she carries around in her head and which prompted me to write this book because it is still with me today. Only this can bring the two of us together since orgasm, the moment when my sense of identity and coherence is at its highest, was something that I was not to experience until two years later.
October 1996
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Scottish translator TANYA LESLIE was the first translator of Annie Ernaux into English, the one who established a voice for Ernaux in English that was both true to the French and universal, a rare feat in the translation of French literature. After her first translation of Ernaux for Seven Stories/Four Walls Eight Windows, A Woman’s Story, in 1991, she went on to do A Man’s Place (1992), Simple Passion (1993), Shame (1998), “I Remain in Darkness” (1999), and Happening (2001). Over the years, Leslie and Ernaux, who both lived in the Paris region, became friends.
