by Annie Ernaux
For now, our most stubborn desire was to possess a record player and a few LPs, expensive objects we could enjoy alone, endlessly, ad nauseam, or with others, those considered the most progressive among all the tribes of youth, the affluent high school girls who wore duffel coats, called their parents “the oldsters,” and said ciao instead of goodbye.
We could not get our fill of jazz, Negro spirituals, and rock ’n’ roll. Everything sung in English was suffused with mysterious beauty. Dream, love, heart, words of great purity and no practical use, conveyed the sense of a world-beyond. In the privacy of our rooms, we engaged in solitary orgies of playing the same disc over and over. It was like a drug that blew the mind away, smashed the body, and opened a whole new world of love and violence, inseparable from surboums, those unbridled parties we interminably longed to attend. Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Armstrong and the Platters embodied modernity, the future. They sang for us alone, for the young, leaving behind the antiquated tastes of parents, the ignorance of country bumpkins, Le Pays du sourire, André Claveau and Line Renaud. We felt ourselves part of a circle of the enlightened. Still, Piaf’s Les Amants d’un jour gave us goosebumps.
Again we were back in the silence of vacation, the distinct, separate sounds of the provinces—the footsteps of a woman on her way to do her shopping, a car swishing by, the pounding from a welding shop. We drained the hours with tiny goals, and activities we made to last as long as possible. We filed last year’s homework, tidied a closet, read a novel, trying not to finish too quickly. We gazed at ourselves in the mirror and willed our hair to grow long enough for a ponytail. We kept an eye out for the unlikely arrival of a friend. At supper it was like pulling teeth to get us to speak. We didn’t finish our food and were reproached, “If you’d gone hungry during the war, you wouldn’t be so fussy.” In opposition to the desires that made us restless, we were served the wisdom of limits: “You ask too much of life.”
Girls and boys hung around in separate packs, crossing paths on Sunday after Mass or at the movies. Glances were exchanged and then inevitably they spoke. The boys mimicked teachers, reeled off puns and spoonerisms, called each other fairies, cut each other off—“You don’t have to tell us the story of your life,” “Please shut your mouth when you’re talking to me,” “You seem a little gassy, go home and boil an egg.” They delighted in talking so quietly that we didn’t understand and then yelling, “Masturbation makes you deaf!” They pretended to cover their eyes before the sight of a boy’s swollen gums and cried: “We saw enough horrors in the war!” They assumed the right to say whatever came to mind. They were custodians of the word and of humor. They unleashed a flood of dirty stories and gravely intoned the De Profundis Morpionibus.6 The girls replied with distant smiles. They didn’t necessarily find them funny, but knew that all the swirling and hovering was a show the boys put on for their benefit, and the girls were rightly proud. The boys supplied words and expressions that would make the girls seem advanced in the eyes of other girls, as when they said Time to hit the hay and Nice threads! But anxiously they wondered what they would say if ever they were alone with a boy. They needed the whole group’s curious solicitude
for support, every step of the way until the first date.
The distance that separates past from present can be measured, perhaps, by the light that spills across the ground between shadows, slips over faces, outlines the folds of a dress—by the twilight clarity of a black-and-white photo, no matter what time it is taken.
In this photo, a tall girl blinks against the sun. Her hair is dark, shoulder-length and straight, her face smooth and full. She stands at an oblique angle, one hip slightly outthrust to emphasize the swell of the thighs in the pencil skirt, while making them look slimmer. The light grazes her right cheekbone and accentuates her chest, which presses out from under the sweater. A white Peter Pan collar is folded over the neck of the sweater. One arm is hidden while the other hangs at her side, the sleeve rolled up above a wristwatch and a broad hand. The contrast with the photo from the school garden is striking. Other than the cheekbones and the shape of the breasts, now more developed, there is nothing to remind us of the girl with glasses of two years ago. She poses in a courtyard that gives onto the street, in front of a low shed with a patchily mended door, the kind one sees in the country and close suburbs. In the background, the trunks of three trees planted on a high embankment stand out against the sky. On the back of the photo: 1957, Yvetot.
At the precise moment when she smiles, she is probably thinking only of herself, of this photo of herself gazing at the new girl she feels herself becoming:
—when, in the tiny island of her bedroom, she listens to Sidney Béchet, Édith Piaf, and the 33 rpms ordered from the Concert Hall Record Club
—when she copies down sentences that tell one how to live, which have the undeniable weight of truth because they come from books: There is no real happiness except that which we are aware of while we are feeling it
Now she is aware of her social standing. Her family doesn’t have a Frigidaire or a bathroom, the lavatories are at the back of the yard and she still hasn’t been to Paris. She is lower down on the social scale than her schoolmates. She hopes they won’t notice, or that if they do, she’ll be forgiven because she is “fun,” “a good sport,” calls a person’s home their “pad,” and says, “That gives me the screaming meemies.”
All her energy is focused on “having a certain something.” Her major worry remains her glasses for myopia. They make her eyes look smaller and give her an “egghead” look, but if she takes them off she doesn’t recognize anyone on the street.
When she imagines herself in the more distant future, after the bac,7 she models her body and her general look on photos from women’s magazines. She is thin with long billowing hair, like Marina Vlady in The Blonde Witch, and has become a teacher somewhere, perhaps in the country, free and independent. She has her own car, the ultimate sign of emancipation—a 2CV or 4CV.
Across this image lies the shadow of a man, a stranger she’ll meet, as in the Mouloudji song Un jour tu verras. Or they’ll run into each other’s arms, like Michèle Morgan and Gérard Philipe at the end of Les orgueilleux. She knows she
must “save herself for him” and considers her knowledge of solitary pleasure an offense against Great Love. Though she’s written down the days when there is no risk of pregnancy,
according to the Ogino8 method, she is all emotion. Sex and love are worlds apart.
Her life beyond the bac is a stairway rising into the mist.
With the abbreviated memory one needs at sixteen simply to act and exist, she sees her childhood as a sort of silent film in color. Images of tanks and rubble appear and blur with others of old people who have died, hand-made Mother’s Day cards, the Bécassine albums, the First Communion retreat, games of sixes played against a wall. Nor does she care to remember the more recent years, all awkwardness and shame—the time she dressed up as a music-hall dancer, the curly permanent, ankle socks.
From 1957, she will remember (but does not yet know it):
—the Sunday afternoon in the bar of the beach casino in Fécamp where, fascinated, she watched a couple dance to slow blues on the deserted dance floor, their bodies pressed against each other. The woman was willowy and blonde, and wore a white dress with “accordion” pleats. Her parents, whom she’d dragged into the bar against their will, wondered if they had enough money to pay for the drinks
—the icy lavatories in the schoolyard, where she’d had to retreat one February day in the middle of math class with an attack of gastroenteritis. Her thighs marbled with cold, her insides twisting in pain, she thought of Roquentin in the public garden and said to herself The sky is empty and God does not answer. She has no name for that feeling of utter abandonment, nor the feeling that comes over her on fair days, when she stands in the courtyard from the photo, and the voice of the loudspeaker booms from behind the trees, an
d the music and commercials run together in an unintelligible blur. It is as if she were standing outside the fête, separated from some earlier thing.
No doubt the information she receives about world events is transformed into sensations, feelings, and images with no trace of the ideologies that initially provoked them. And so what she sees is:
—Europe bisected by a great iron wall, sunshine and color to the west, and to the east darkness, cold, snow, and Soviet tanks that one day will cross the French border, invade Paris as they had Budapest; the names Imre Nagy and Kadar obsess her, and from time to time she rolls the syllables on her tongue
—in Algeria of the scorched and blood-soaked earth, gutted by ambushes, small men in swirling burnooses flutter, as in The Taking of the Smalah of Abd-el-Kader, a painting she remembers from her ninth-grade history book, depicting the conquest of Algeria in 1830
—the dead soldiers in the Aurès Mountains of Algeria resemble Rimbaud’s Sleeper in the Valley; as in the poem, they lie in the sand where the light falls like rain with two red holes in their right side
These representations, which probably convey assent to the repression of the rebels, are undermined by a photo in the local paper of stylish French youths, deep in discussion at the door of a high school in Bab el-Oued, as if to say the cause for which twenty-year-old soldiers die is not so easy to justify.
None of this appears in the diary she has started to keep, in which she describes her boredom and the long wait for love in high-flown, sentimental prose. She mentions that she has to write an essay on Polyeucte but prefers the novels of Françoise Sagan, “which, though fundamentally immoral, have the ring of truth.”
More than ever, people relied upon the acquisition of things to build better lives. According to their means, they exchanged the coal-fueled stove for a gas cooker, the oilcloth-covered wooden table for Formica-topped, the 4CV for a Dauphine. The old-fashioned safety razor and cast-iron steam iron were replaced with electrical equivalents, metal utensils with plastic. The most enviable and expensive object was the automobile, synonymous with freedom, a total mastery of space and, in a certain way, the world. To learn to drive and get your license was considered a victory, hailed by friends and family as when you passed the brevet at the end of ninth grade.
People enrolled in correspondence courses to learn drawing, English, secretarial skills, or jujitsu. These days we need to know more, they said. A new profusion of F stickers on license plates proved they no longer feared vacationing abroad without speaking the language. On Sundays the beaches were crowded with bikini-clad bodies, bared to the sun and the gaze of all. It was less and less “done” to remain sitting on the beach, or to gather one’s skirts and wade in up to the ankles. People said of the shy or of anyone who didn’t yield to the joys of the group, “They’ve got hang-ups.” It was the dawning of the “society of leisure.”
But they grew heated over politics and lost their tempers. Prime ministers were shown the door every two months, the young tirelessly sent off to be killed in ambushes. People wanted peace in Algeria but not a second Dien Bien Phu. They voted for Poujade. “Where are we going?” they repeated. The coup d’état
of May 13 in Algiers put them into a state of catastrophe. They stockpiled kilos of sugar, liters of oil in preparation for civil war. None but General de Gaulle, they believed, could save Algeria and France. They were relieved when the savior of 1940 magnanimously agreed to return and take the country in hand, as if they felt protected by the long shadow of the man whose great height, the object of their constant jokes, was visible proof of his superhuman status.
We who remembered the gaunt face from the posters in the ruined town, the kepi and the little prewar mustache, we who had not heard the appeal of June 18, 1940, were startled and disappointed to hear the old-man’s quaver in the voice, see the jowly cheeks and bushy eyebrows that made one think of a country notary run to fat. The personage summoned from Colombey made it grotesquely clear how much time had passed since we were children. We resented him for so rapidly thwarting, while we were reviewing sines and cosines and Lagarde et Michard,9 what had seemed to us the start of a revolution.
“To get your two bacs”—the first at the end of the eleventh grade, the second the year after—was an incontestable sign of intellectual superiority, a guarantee of future social success. For most of those around us, the exams and competitions that we would later sit were less important than the bac. They said it was “nice to have got even this far.”
To the rousing theme from The Bridge On the River Kwai, we set out for what we felt would be the summer of our lives. The passing of the bac granted us social existence. We had proved not unworthy of the adults’ faith in us. Parents arranged to make the rounds of family and friends to break the glorious news. But then, at first imperceptibly, that July began to resemble the one of the year before with convoluted schedules of LP listening, reading, and scribbling the first lines of poems. Our euphoria waned. To restore the value of our success, we needed reminders of how the summer would have been had we failed. The true reward for passing the bac would have been a love affair, like the one in Marianne of My Youth. In the meantime, we flirted, secretly met with a boy who went a little lower each time, and whom we’d have to leave soon, for we were not about to lose our virginity to a boy our girlfriends referred to as Lobster Face.
Space opened up at last that summer, or maybe it was another. The wealthiest students left with their parents for England or the French Riviera. Others went to summer camps to work as counselors, enjoy a change of air, see more of France, and pay for the next year’s schoolbooks. They trekked down country roads singing Pirouette cacahouète with a dozen twittering little boys or clingy little girls, with a bag of snacks and the snake bite kit slung over their shoulder. They received their first wages and a social security number, proud of their responsibilities as interim purveyors of the secular republican ideal, joyously implemented through its “active education methods.” They supervised the Lion Cubs at the sinks as they washed and brushed their teeth, all in a row in their underpants. They presided at chaotic tables where the arrival of rice pudding raised howls of enthusiasm, and firmly believed they were helping to build a model of order that was just, harmonious, and good. All in all, it was a glorious and grueling holiday, sure to never be forgotten, especially not the heady new mingling of the sexes, far from parental eyes at last, and how, wearing jeans, Gauloise in hand, we took the stairs two at a time down to a cellar and the music of a surboum. A feeling of absolute, precarious youth washed over us, as if we were fated to die at the end of the holidays like the girl in She Danced Only One Summer. Borne on this tide of emotion, we moved from a slow dance to a cot, or the beach, with a man’s sex (only seen in photos, and even then . . .) and semen in our mouth, having recalled the Ogino calendar just in time and refused to open our thighs. Day broke, pallid and meaningless. Over the top of the phrases we’d wanted to forget as soon as we’d heard them, put my cock in your mouth, suck me, we had to write the words of a love song instead, that morning was yesterday, only yesterday and already far away, to make it beautiful, construct a romantic fiction about “the first time,” and shroud in melancholy the memory of a failed deflowering. And if that didn’t work, we’d buy éclairs and sweets—whipped cream and sugar to drown our sorrows, or anorexia to purge them. But one thing was certain: it would never again be possible to remember how the world had been before the night we lay with a naked body pressed to ours.
For girls, shame lay in wait at every turn. The verdict of too loomed large over their clothing and makeup: too short, long, low-cut, tight, flashy, etc. The height of their heels, whom they saw, what time they went out and came in, the crotch of their underwear, month after month, were subject to all-pervasive surveillance by society. For those obliged to leave the family fold, society provided the Young Ladies’ Residence, separate from the boys’ dorm, to protect them from men and vice. Nothing, not int
elligence, education, or beauty mattered as much as a girl’s sexual reputation, that is, her value on the marriage market, which mothers scrupulously monitored as their mothers had done before them. “If you have sex before marriage, no one will want you,” they said, the subtext of which was no one except a market reject of the male variety, an invalid, a madman, or worse, a divorcé. The unwed mother lost her entire worth and had nothing to hope for, except perhaps a man who would sacrifice himself and take her in, along with the fruit of her sin.
Until marriage, love stories were played out before the eyes and judgments of others.
Still one flirted and went farther each time, resorting to practices unnamed except in the medical literature, fellatio, cunnilingus, and sometimes sodomy. Boys made fun of rubbers and rejected the coitus interruptus practiced by their fathers. We dreamed of contraceptive pills, sold in Germany, so people claimed. On Saturdays, girls in white veils lined up to be married, giving birth six months later to robust “premature” babies. Between the freedom of Bardot, the taunting of boys who claimed that virginity was bad for the health, and the dictates of Church and parents, we were left with no choices at all. No one asked how long abortion and living together outside of marriage would remain outlawed. Signs of collective change cannot be perceived in the specific features of lives, except perhaps in the disgust and fatigue that led thousands of individuals at once to think, in exasperation, “So that’s how it is—nothing will ever change.”
In the black-and-white group photo, inserted in an embossed folder, twenty-six girls stand in three tiered rows in a courtyard, under the leaves of a chestnut tree, against a façade whose small-paned windows could be those of a convent, a school, or a hospital. All the girls wear pale smocks that give them the look of a nursing corps.
Below the photo, written by hand: Lycée Jeanne-d’Arc—Rouen—Philosophy section, Class of 1958–1959. The names have not been inscribed, as if when the class president delivered the photos, it had been unthinkable that any could be forgotten. Certainly, none of the girls could have imagined herself forty years later, an elderly woman looking at faces once so familiar and seeing only a triple row of ghosts with bright fixed gazes.