The Years

by Annie Ernaux

  But we outsmarted the surveillance and went to see The Girl in the Bikini and Tempest in the Flesh with Françoise Arnoul. We would have loved to resemble the movie heroines, possess the freedom to behave as they did. But between the films and books, on the one hand, and the dictates of society on the other, lay a vast zone of prohibition and moral judgment. To identify with anything we saw in the films or their heroines was forbidden.

  In these conditions, we faced endless years of masturbation before making love permissibly in marriage. We had to live with our yearning for this pleasure that was considered the preserve of adults, which clamored for satisfaction at any cost, despite all attempts at prayer or diversion. Our lives were burdened with a secret that bracketed us with perverts, hysterics, and whores.

  It was written in the Larousse:

  Onanism: all means adopted to cause sexual enjoyment artificially. Onanism is often the cause of very serious accidents. Children must be supervised at the approach of puberty. Bromides, hydrotherapy, gymnastics, exercise, mountain cures, iron-based and arsenical medications, etc., will be alternately employed.

  Whether under the bedclothes or in the lavatory, we masturbated before the eyes of all society.

  Boys were proud to leave for their military service. We thought they looked handsome in their uniforms. On recruitment night, they made the rounds of the cafés to celebrate. It brought them glory to be recognized as real men. Before military service, they were still considered kids, devoid of status in the labor or marriage market. Afterwards, they could have a wife and children. The uniform they paraded through the neighborhood when they were on furlough lent them an aura of beauty and virtual sacrifice. The shadow of the victorious veterans, the GIs, hovered over them. The rough cloth of the jacket we brushed against as we stretched up to kiss them made tangible the absolute division between the worlds of men and women. When we looked at them we had a sense of heroism.

  Beneath the surface of the things that never changed, last year’s circus posters with the photo of Roger Lanzac, First Communion photos handed out to schoolmates, the Club des chansonniers on Radio Luxembourg, our days swelled with new desires. On Sunday afternoons, we crowded around the windows of the general electrics shop to watch television. Cafés invested in TV sets to lure clientele. Motocross trails wound up and down the hills, and we watched the deafening machines race all day. Commerce grew increasingly impatient and galvanized the daily routine of towns and cities with new watchwords such as “initiative” and “dynamism.” The two-week trade fair became a fixture among the more traditional rites of spring, the funfair and the church bazaar. Loudspeakers bellowed sales pitches through the streets of the town center, interspersed with songs by Annie Cordy and Eddie Constantine. Buy, we were urged, to get a chance to win a Simca or a dining room suite. From the podium in front of the town hall, a local presenter entertained the crowd with the jokes of Roger Nicolas and Jean Richard, and rounded up candidates for quiz shows, The Hook or Double or Nothing, as on the radio. From a corner of the podium, the Queen of Commerce ruled from beneath her crown. The world of merchandise took advantage of the holiday to stake its claim. People said, “Gets you out of the house,” and “It’s a nice change, you don’t want be an old stick-in-the-mud.”

  A diffuse joy spread among the young of the middle classes. They organized surprise parties—surpats—and invented a new vocabulary, C’est cloche!, Formidable!, la vache, adding vachement to every sentence, imitated the accent of la Marie-Chantaaal,4 played table soccer and called the parents’ generation “old farts,” snickered at Yvette Horner, Tino Rossi, and Bourvil. They sought models for their age, raved over Gilbert Bécaud and the broken chairs at his concert. They listened to Europe No. 1, which played only music, songs, and ads.

  In a black-and-white photo, two girls stand on a garden path, shoulder to shoulder, arms folded behind their backs. Behind them, flowering shrubs and a high brick wall, above them, sky with big white clouds. On the back: July 1955, St. Michel Convent School grounds.

  The taller girl, on the left, is blonde with short tousled hair, a light-colored dress, and ankle socks. Her face is in shadow. The one on the right is brunette with short curly hair, a high forehead, and glasses. A shaft of light lies across her rounded face. She wears a dark short-sleeved sweater and a polka-dot skirt. Both wear ballerina flats, the brunette barefoot in hers. They have removed their school smocks for the photo.

  Even if we don’t recognize the brunette as the girl in pigtails from the photo on the beach (she could just as easily have become the blonde), it was she, and not the blonde, who was that consciousness, captured inside that body, with a unique memory thanks to which we are able to confirm that the curly hair is the result of a perm, a May ritual since the year of her Holy Communion, the skirt cut from a dress worn the previous summer and grown too tight, the sweater knit by a neighbor. And it is with the perceptions and sensations received by the spectacled fourteen-and-a-half-year-old brunette that this writing is able to retrieve something slipping through the 1950s, capture the reflection that collective history projects upon the screen of individual memory.

  Apart from the ballerina flats, nothing in the appearance

  of this teenage girl reflects what was “all the rage” that year or what was in the fashion magazines and the big-city stores, long plaid midi-skirts, black sweaters, and chunky lockets, ponytails and bangs like Audrey Hepburn’s in Roman Holiday. The photo could easily date from the late forties or early sixties. For those born later it is simply old, and belongs to the prehistory of self, where all lives that precede one’s own are leveled and disappear. Yet the beam that lights one side of the girl’s face and the sweater, between the breasts, was for her a sensation of heat from the June sun of a year that no historian, or anyone else who lived at the time, could mistake for any other but 1955.

  Maybe she does not perceive the gap that separates her from other girls in her class, the ones with whom it would be unimaginable to have her picture taken. The gap between them can be seen in their respective diversions, how they spend their time outside of school, and their general way of life, which set her apart as much from the well-off girls as from those employed in offices and factories. Or perhaps she has a good idea of the gap but doesn’t give it a thought.

  She has never been to Paris, one hundred and forty kilometers away, or to a surpat. She doesn’t have a record player. While doing homework, she listens to songs on the radio, copies the lyrics into a notebook, and carries them inside her head for days while walking or sitting in class, toi qui disais qui disais que tu l’aimais, tu l’aimais, tu l’aimais qu’as-tu fait de ton amour pour qu’il pleure sous la pluie.

  She doesn’t talk to boys, but thinks about them all the time. She’d like to be allowed to wear lipstick, stockings, and high heels. Ankle socks are a disgrace, she takes them off as soon as she leaves the house to show that she belongs to the jeune fille category and can be followed in the street. To this end, on Sunday mornings after Mass, she “hangs out” in town with two or three friends who share her “humble background,” always careful not to break the strict maternal law of the witching hour—that time (“When I give you a time, I mean that time, and not a minute later”). She compensates for the curfew by reading the serial novels, Les gens de Mogador, Afin que nul ne meure, My Cousin Rachel, La citadelle. She constantly steps out of herself and into stories, imagined meetings that end in orgasms under the sheets at night. She imagines herself as a whore, yearns after the blonde in the photo and the girls in the grade ahead, who bring her back to her smeared and sticky body. She would like to be them.

  She has seen La strada, The Unfrocked One, The Proud and the Beautiful, The Rains of Ranchipur, La belle de Cadix. The number of films she wants to see that are forbidden, Children of Love, The Game of Love, The Companions of the Night, etc., outnumber the ones that are allowed.

  (One possible summary of the life of a provincial teen: g
oing up to town, daydreaming, bringing oneself to orgasm and waiting.)

  What knowledge of the world does her mind contain, outside of what she’s learned in school so far, in eighth grade? What does she know of the events and news items that will make people say “I remember that!” when a phrase heard by chance calls them to mind?

  —the great train strike of the summer of ’53

  —the fall of Dien Bien Phu

  —Stalin’s death announced on the radio, one cold morning in March, just before children left for school

  —primary school pupils lining up at the canteen to drink the glass of milk from Mendès France5

  —the blanket of squares knitted by all the students and sent to Abbé Pierre, whose beard gives them fodder for dirty jokes

  —smallpox vaccinations at the town hall for the entire town because several people had died of it in Vannes

  —the floods in Holland

  There is probably nothing in her thoughts about the most recent deaths from an ambush in Algeria, the latest episode in the troubles, which started on All Saints’ Day in 1954, but she will only know this later. She will see herself again that day in her room, sitting next to the window with her feet on the bed. She watched guests emerge one after the other from a house across the road to urinate behind the blind wall in the garden. And so she will never forget the date of the insurrection in Algeria, nor that All Saints’ afternoon, of which she will retain one clear image, a kind of pure fact: a young woman squatting over the grass, as if to lay an egg, and standing again, pushing her skirts down.

  To this storehouse of illegitimate memory she consigns things too unthinkable, shameful, or crazy to put into words: —a brown stain on a sheet of her mother’s that had once belonged to her grandmother, dead for three years—an indelible spot that violently attracts and repels her, as if it were alive

  —the scene between her parents on the Sunday before her sixth-grade entrance exam, when her father tried to kill her mother, dragging her to the cellar next to the block where they kept the sickle planted

  —the memory that comes to her every day on the way to school as she passes an embankment where, two years earlier, on a Sunday in January, she saw a little girl in a short coat gleefully sinking her foot into the water-gorged clay. The footprint was there the next day and remained for months.

  The summer holidays will be a long stretch of boredom and minuscule activities conceived to fill the days:

  —listening to the arrival of each stage of the Tour de France; pasting the winner’s photo into a special album

  —watching cars go by and writing down the department numbers from the license plates

  —in the regional newspaper, reading the summaries of films she will not see and books she will not read

  —embroidering a napkin ring

  —squeezing blackheads without applying Eau Précieuse or lemon slices

  —going up to town to buy shampoo and a Petit classique Larousse, and then, eyes downcast, passing the café where the boys are playing pinball

  The future is too immense for her to imagine. It will happen, that’s all.

  When she hears the little pre-school girls in the playground singing Cueillons la rose sans la laisser flétrir, it seems to her a very long time since she was a child.

  In the mid-1950s, at family meals, teenagers remained at the table. They listened but did not speak, smiled politely at the jokes that were not funny, the approving comments whose object was their physical development, the salty innuendos designed to make them blush, and answered only the cautious questions about their schoolwork. They did not feel ready to enter fully and legitimately into general conversation, though the wine, liqueurs, and blonde cigarettes they were allowed at dessert marked a first induction into the adult circle. They let themselves be permeated by the kindness of the festive group, whose social judgment, usually harsh, had abated and turned into gentle amenity. The mortal enemies of the year before, reconciled, passed each other the mayonnaise bowl. We were a little bored, but not so much that we’d have preferred to be sitting in the next day’s math class.

  Comments were made on each course as it was consumed, summoning memories of the same dish eaten in other circumstances and advice on the best way to prepare it, followed by debate on flying saucers—were they real?—and who would be the first to reach the moon, the Americans or the Russians. They discussed Sputnik, Abbé Pierre’s emergency settlements, and the high cost of living. Then the war was back on the table. They recalled the exodus, bombardments, and postwar restrictions, zoot suits and golf pants. We listened to the romance of our birth and early childhood with an indefinable nostalgia, the same we felt when passionately reciting Rappelle-toi, Barbara, whose lyrics we’d copied into a secret notebook of poems. But we sensed distance in the voices. Something had died with the grandparents, who had seen both wars, the growing of children, the full reconstruction of cities, progress, and furniture on the installment plan. The Occupation and rural childhoods with all their privations merged into a single bygone era. People were so thoroughly convinced that life was better now.

  There was no more talk of Indochina, so distant and exotic—“two bags of rice at either end of a bamboo pole,” according to the geography book—and lost without great regret at Dien Bien Phu. Only diehards had fought in that battle, the engagé volunteers

  who lacked other occupations. That conflict had never been part of anyone’s present life. Nor did the company wish to darken the atmosphere by bringing up Algeria. No one knew how the troubles there had started, but they all agreed, as did we, who’d studied it for the brevet exam, that Algeria, with its three départements, was French, like much of Africa, where our territories covered half the continent in the atlas. Of course, someone had to suppress the rebellion, clean up the “nests of fellaghas,” the cutthroats whose treacherous shadows one saw in the dark face of sidi-my-goood-fréennde the peddler (though he seemed a nice enough fellow) who sold bedside rugs off his back. Added to the derision to which the Arabs and their language were ritually subjected, habana la moukère mets ton nez dans le cafetière tu verras si c’est chaud, was a certainty of their essential savagery. So it was only right that new and recalled conscripts be sent there to restore order, although everyone agreed it was unfortunate for parents to lose a twenty-year-old son, about to be married, whose photo appeared in the regional newspaper with the caption “Killed in an ambush.” These were individual tragedies, a death here, a death there. No enemy, no soldiers, no battle. No feeling of war. The next one would come from the East with Russian tanks, as in Budapest, to destroy the free world. There’d be no point in taking to the roads as one had done in 1940. With the atomic bomb, no one stood a chance. As it was, the Suez Canal affair had been a very close call.

  No one talked about concentration camps, except incidentally, to say that someone had lost his or her parents at Buchenwald. Sorrowful silence would follow. It had entered the realm of private misfortune.

  The patriotic songs from after the Liberation were no longer brought out at dessert. The parents sang Dalida’s Parlez-moi d’amour, the older young people Mexico, and the children My Granny Was a Cowboy. We’d have been too ashamed to sing Etoile des neiges as before. When they begged us for a tune, we claimed not to know any in full. We were sure that Brassens and Brel would fall like lead balloons on the end-of-meal beatitude. We felt that what was needed were the songs sanctified by other meals and tears dabbed away with the corners of napkins. We were fiercely opposed to disclosing musical tastes they wouldn’t understand. The only English words the others knew were fuck you, learned at the time of the Liberation. They were unaware that the Platters and Bill Haley even existed.

  But the next day, in the silence of the study hall, we knew from our feeling of emptiness that the previous day, much as we had pushed it away, believing ourselves bored and alienated, had truly been a holiday.

 
The few young people lucky enough to remain in school were drawn into the infinitely slow time of study—the regular chiming of class bells, the return of quarterly compositions, the endless explanations of Cinna and Iphigenia, the translation of the Pro Milone—and felt as if nothing ever happened. We scribbled down writers’ reflections on life, discovered the joys of describing ourselves to ourselves with shimmering turns of phrase, existence is to drink oneself without thirst. We were overcome by nausea and a feeling of the absurd. The sticky body of adolescence met the être en trop of existentialism. On our binders we pasted photos of Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman, and carved James Dean’s initials into our desks. We copied out the poems of Prévert, the songs of Brassens, Je suis un voyou and La première fille, which were banned from the radio. On the sly, we read Bonjour Tristesse and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The sphere of desires and prohibitions was becoming immense. We glimpsed the possibility of a world without sin. Adults suspected us of being corrupted by modern writers and of having no respect for anything.