The Years

by Annie Ernaux

  At this moment in time, no inventory could be made of the girl’s abstract knowledge or of what she has read. The degree in modern literature she is about to receive is only a vague indicator of level. She is a voracious reader of existentialism and surrealism, has read Dostoevsky, Kafka, all of Flaubert, and is also passionate about new writing, Le Clézio and the nouveau roman, as if only recent books could provide an accurate view of the here and now.

  It seems to her that education is more than just a way to escape poverty. It is a weapon of choice against stagnation in a kind of feminine condition that arouses her pity, the tendency to lose oneself in a man, which she has experienced (see the high school photo from five years before) and of which she is ashamed. She feels no desire to marry or have children. Mothering and the life of the mind seem incompatible. In any case, she’d be sure to be a bad mother. Her ideal is the union libre in the poem by André Breton.

  At times, she feels weighed down by the quantity of her learning. Her body is young and her thinking is old. In her diary she writes that she feels “hypersaturated with all-purpose ideas and theories,” that she is “looking for another language” and “longs to return to an original purity.” She dreams of writing in a language no one knows. Words are “little embroidery stitches around a tablecloth of night.” Other sentences contradict this lassitude: “I am a will and a desire.” She does not say for what.

  She sees the future as a great red staircase, the one in a Soutine painting reproduced in the journal Lectures pour Tous. She cut it out and hung it on the wall of her residence room.

  She sometimes lingers over images of her childhood, the first day of school, a funfair in the rubble, holidays at Sotteville-sur-Mer, etc. She also imagines herself in twenty years trying to remember the discussions of today—everyone’s—on Communism, suicide, and contraception. The woman of twenty years from now is an idea, a ghost. She will never live to be that age.

  To see her in the photo, a handsome solid girl, one would never suspect that more than anything, she fears going mad. Only writing—or perhaps a man—can protect her from that, if only momentarily. She begins a novel in which images past and present, her dreams at night and visions of the future, alternate with an “I” who is her double, detached from herself.

  She is convinced that she has no “personality.”

  There is no relation between her life and History, though traces of the latter remain fixed in her mind by the gray weather and sensation of cold one March (the miners’ strike), by clammy humidity one Whitsun weekend (the death of Pope John XXIII), by a friend’s remark, “World war will begin in two days” (the Cuban Missile Crisis), the night at a national students’ union dance that coincided with the coup d’état by Generals Salan, Challe, etc. The time of current events, no more than that of sensationalistic news items, which she disdains, is not her time, which is wholly comprised of images of herself. A few months later, Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas will leave her even more indifferent

  than the death of Marilyn Monroe had the summer before, because it will have been eight weeks since her last period.

  The increasingly rapid arrival of new things drove the past away. People did not question their usefulness, they just wanted to possess them and suffered when they didn’t earn enough to buy them outright. They got used to writing checks and discovered the “financial arrangements” available through Sofinco Consumer Credit. Comfortable with novelty, they took pride in using the vacuum cleaner and electric hair dryer. Curiosity prevailed over distrust. We discovered the raw and the flambé, steak tartare and au poivre, spices and ketchup, breaded fish and instant mashed potatoes, frozen peas, hearts of palm, aftershave, and Obao bubble bath. The traditional Coop and Familistère stores made way for supermarkets, where customers delighted in touching the merchandise before paying for it. We felt free. We didn’t ask anyone for anything. Every evening, the Galeries Barbès department store welcomed buyers to a free country-style buffet. Young middle-class couples purchased distinction with a Hellem cafetière, Eau sauvage by Dior, a shortwave radio and hi-fi, venetian blinds, burlap wall-covering, a teak living room set, a Dunlopillo mattress, a secretaire or “bureau cabinet,” furniture whose names, until then, they had only seen in novels. They frequented antique shops, entertained with smoked salmon, avocado stuffed with shrimp, meat fondues. They read Playboy, Barbarella, and Lui, Le Nouvel Observateur, Teilhard de Chardin, Planète. They daydreamed over listings for apartments of grand standing with walk-in closets, in sparkling new apartment buildings. Hiding their anxiety, they took their first plane trip and were moved to see the green and gold squares below. They lost their tempers with the phone company because they were still waiting for the service they’d ordered a whole year earlier. Others saw no point in having a phone and continued going to La Poste, where the counter clerk dialed the number they were calling and sent them to a booth.

  People were never bored. They wanted the full benefit of everything.

  In the popular booklet Thoughts for 1985, the future seemed bright. Heavy and dirty work would be performed by robots, and everyone would have access to culture and knowledge. We weren’t sure how, but the first heart transplant in faraway South Africa seemed to bring us one step closer to the eradication of death.

  The profusion of things concealed the scarcity of ideas and the erosion of beliefs.

  Young teachers were using the Lagarde et Michard from their own high school days, gave out stars for good performance, and assigned term papers. They joined unions, which asserted in every newsletter, “We have the Power!” Rivette’s The Nun was banned, while erotica could be bought by mail order from the publisher Terrain Vague. Sartre and de Beauvoir refused to appear on television (but nobody cared). Worn-out values and languages lingered on. Later, remembering the nice growly voice of Nounours the bear say Night-night, children, we would feel that de Gaulle himself had tucked us into bed each night.

  Waves of migration swept through society from every direction. Country people trundled down from mountains and up from valleys. Students were expelled from the city center to campuses in the hills. In Nanterre, they shared the same mud as new arrivals from the shantytowns. OS households and repatriated Algerians left one-story houses with outdoor latrines to be thrown together in housing developments, divided into units marked with an F and a number. But communal living was not what people wanted; it was central heating, pale-colored walls, and indoor bathrooms.

  The thing most forbidden, the one we’d never believed possible, the contraceptive pill became legal. We didn’t dare ask the doctor for a prescription and the doctor didn’t offer, especially if one wasn’t married—that would be indecent. We strongly sensed that with the pill, life would never be the same again. We’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man.

  Young people all over the world were making themselves heard with violence. In the Vietnam War, they saw grounds for revolt and in Mao’s Hundred Flowers reasons to dream. There was an awakening of pure joy, expressed by the Beatles. Just listening to them, you wanted to be happy. With Antoine, Nino Ferrer, and Dutronc, zaniness was gaining popularity. Full-fledged adults pretended to ignore it, listening instead to the Tirlipot game show on RTL, Maurice Biraud on Europe 1, and Saint-Granier’s minute of common sense. They compared the beauty of the television newswomen and discussed whether Mireille Mathieu or Georgette Lemaire would be the new Piaf. The troubles in Algeria had just ended. They were sick and tired of war, and watched uneasily as Israeli tanks mowed down Nasser’s soldiers, confused by the return of a situation they had thought settled, and by the transformation of victims into victors.

  Because summers had started to be all alike, and caring only for oneself was more and more of a drag, the self-realization imperative taking us nowhere fast, by dint of solitude and discussions in the same cafés; and because youth had come to feel like a vague and cheerless time whose end we could not see, and we’d not
ed the social superiority of couples over singles, we fell in love more purposefully and, aided by a moment’s lack of attention to the Ogino calendar, found ourselves married and soon to be parents. The meeting of an egg and a sperm hastened the unfolding of individual histories. People finished school by taking jobs as monitors, part-time pollsters, and private tutors. A term in Algeria or Sub-Saharan Africa to do community work was tempting as an adventure and a way of fixing a final deadline before one settled down.

  Young couples with steady jobs opened bank accounts and took out Cofremca loans to acquire fridges with freezer compartments, dual-fuel ranges, etc. They were surprised to discover that by the grace of marriage, they were poor in the face of all they lacked, the cost of which they’d never guessed, nor the necessity, which now went without saying. Overnight they became adults to whom parents could finally, without fear of rebuke, impart their knowledge of practicalities: saving money, caring for children, washing floors. How proud and peculiar one felt to be called “Madame” with a name not one’s own. Sustenance, the twice-daily feeding circuit, became an abiding concern. Diligently we began to patronize places we’d never really gone before, the Casino supermarket, the grocery section of Prisunic, and the Nouvelles Galeries. The vague desire for the carefree kind of life we’d had before—to go to a film or out with friends at night—dwindled with the arrival of the baby. As we sat in the dark cinema, watching Agnès Varda’s Happiness, he was always on our mind, so little and so alone in his cradle, and we rushed to him the moment we got in, relieved to see him breathing, peacefully asleep with his small fists closed. So we bought a television, thus completing the process of social integration. On Sunday afternoons, we watched Sky Fighters and Bewitched. Space shrank, time took on a regular rhythm, carved up by work schedules, the day nursery, bath time, Magic Roundabout, and Saturday shopping. We discovered the joys of order. Our melancholy at seeing a personal project fade into the distance—painting, writing, or making music—was compensated by the satisfactions of contributing to the family project.

  With a swiftness that astounded us, we were forming tiny cells, impermeable and sedentary. Young couples and new parents were invited to each other’s homes. Unmarried people, oblivious to monthly bills, tiny Gerber jars, and Dr. Spock, were viewed as an immature species whose freedom of movement vaguely offended.

  We never thought to assess our experience in the light of world events or politicians’ speeches, but did allow ourselves the pleasure of voting against de Gaulle. Instead we chose a dashing candidate whose name somehow plunged us back into the years of French Algeria, François Mitterrand. In the humdrum routine of personal existence, History did not matter. We were simply happy or unhappy, depending on the day.

  The more immersed we were in work and family, said to be reality, the greater was our sense of unreality.

  On sunny afternoons, from their benches in the park, young women exchanged views on diapers and children’s nutrition, while keeping an eye on the sandbox. The gossip and secrets of adolescence, when girls interminably walked each other home, seemed very far in the past. That life from before (three years ago at most) seemed unbelievable. They regretted not having taken greater advantage of it. They had entered the Land of Worry over food, laundry, and childhood diseases. They had never imagined resembling their mothers but now were taking up where the latter had left off. They possessed greater levity, offhandedness fostered by The Second Sex and Moulinex Liberates Woman, but unlike their mothers, they denied the value of things they nonetheless felt obliged to do without knowing why.

  With the characteristic anxiety and fervor of young married couples, we invited the in-laws for lunch, to show them how nicely settled we were (and with so much more taste than our siblings). After we’d had them admire the venetian blinds, touch the velvet chesterfield, experience the power of the hi-fi speakers, and brought out the wedding dishes (though a few glasses were missing), when everyone had found a place at the table and commented upon our directions for eating the fondue bourguignonne, made from a recipe we’d found in Elle, the petit-bourgeois conversation began, about work, holidays, cars, the thrillers of San-Antonio, the length of Antoine’s hair, the ugliness of Alice Sapritch, the songs of Dutronc. There was no escaping the discussion of whether or not it was more cost-effective for married women to work outside the home. We made fun of de Gaulle, Frenchman, I understand you! Vive le Québec libre! (as if being forced into a runoff by Mitterrand had unleashed the irreverence and revealed the senility of he whom Le Canard Enchaîné no longer referred to as anything but “Charles le Run-offed”). We praised the intelligence and integrity of Mendès France and speculated on the futures of Giscard d’Estaing, Defferre, and Rocard. The table buzzed with peacefully disparate and mocking remarks, about the Barbouzes,11 Mauriac and his stifled cluck of a laugh, the tics of Malraux (to think we’d once imagined him as the revolutionary Chen, whereas now just seeing him in his trench coat at official ceremonies could make anyone stop believing in literature!).

  In the mouths of the middle-aged, allusions to the war shrank down to personal anecdotes, full of misplaced vanity, which to the young sounded like drivel. There were commemorative speeches and wreaths for all that, we felt. Names from the Fourth Republic, Bidault, Pinay, brought nothing to our minds except amazement at the loathing they still aroused (“that bastard Guy Mollet”), from which we deduced that they’d played a role of some importance. As for Algeria, now transformed into mission territory, to the financial advantage of young teachers, the page had turned.

  Contraception was too alarming a subject to broach at family meals, and abortion a word that could not be spoken.

  We changed plates for dessert, quite mortified that our fondue bourguignonne had not been greeted with the expected congratulations, but with curiosity and comments that were disappointing at best, considering the trouble we’d gone to with the sauces, and even a touch condescending. Coffee was served, the table cleared, and a game of bridge set up. The whiskey raised the volume of the father-in-law’s voice and thickened his tongue. How was it possible that people still said Ten thousand English jumped into the Thames for not having trumped. We sat amidst the new family, saw the faces glowing with contentment, heard the baby crooning, wanting up from his crib, and a sense of impermanence flickered through us. We were amazed to be where we were and to have all that we’d desired, a man, a child, an apartment.

  In the photo, taken indoors, a close-up in black and white, a young woman and a little boy sit side by side on a single bed, fitted out with cushions to make a sofa. Behind them is a window with sheer curtains. An African artifact hangs on the wall. The woman wears an outfit in pale jersey, a twin set and a skirt just above the knee. Her hair, parted in dark asymmetrical bands, accentuates the full oval of the face. Her cheekbones are lifted in a big smile. Neither her hairstyle nor her outfit corresponds to the images one later saw of 1966 or 1967. Only the short skirt is consistent with the fashion launched by Mary Quant. The woman holds the child by the shoulder. He is bright-eyed, intelligent-looking, and wears a turtleneck with pajama pants. He is talking and his mouth is open, revealing small teeth. On the back is written Rue Loverchy, Winter ’67. So the photographer, invisible here, is the student, the flighty kid who in less than four years became a husband, father, and senior administrator in a city in the mountains. It is definitely a Sunday photo, for that is the only day they can be together, and as lunch simmers fragrantly on the stove, and the babbling child assembles Lego blocks, and the toilet flusher is repaired while Bach’s Musical Offering plays in the background, they build their common store of memory, consolidate their sense, all in all, of being happy. The photo plays a role in this construction, anchoring their “little family” in the long term. It acts as a pledge of permanence for the child’s grandparents, who will receive a copy.

  At this precise moment of the winter of 1967–68, she is probably not thinking of anything, absorbed in her enjoyment of their se
lf-contained unit of three, which a telephone call or the doorbell would disrupt, and her temporary discharge from tasks whose main object is the maintenance of the unit, shopping lists, laundry counts, what are you making for dinner tonight—an incessant looking-ahead to the immediate future, which complicates the exterior dimension of her duties, her teaching job. In family moments she feels rather than thinks.

  The thoughts she considers real come to her when she is alone or taking the child for a walk in the stroller. For her, real thoughts do not concern people’s ways of speaking and dressing, the height of sidewalks for the stroller, the ban on Jean Genet’s The Screens, or the war in Vietnam. They are questions about herself, being and having, existence. Real thoughts plumb the depths of transient sensations, impossible to communicate. These are the things her book would be made of, if she had the time to write, but she no longer even has time to read. In her diary, which she rarely opens, as if it posed a threat to the family unit and she were no longer entitled to an inner life, she writes, “I have no ideas at all. I don’t try to explain my life anymore” and “I’m a petite bourgeoise who has arrived.” She feels she has deviated from her former goals, as if her only progress in life were of the material kind. “I’m afraid of settling into this quiet and comfortable life, and afraid to have lived without being aware of it.” Just as she makes this observation, she knows she isn’t ready to give up the things this diary never includes, the living-together, the shared intimacy, the apartment to which she eagerly returns after class, the sleeping side-by-side, the sizzle of the electric razor in the morning, the tale of The Three Little Pigs at night, the repetition she believes she hates, which ties her down—all the things whose lack she felt when she left for three days to write the CAPES,12 and which, when she imagines their accidental loss, make her heart grow heavy.

  She no longer imagines herself lying on the beach or as a writer publishing her first book. The future is laid out in precise material terms: a better job, promotions and acquisitions, the start of kindergarten for the child. These are not dreams but concrete plans. She often revisits images of herself single, in the streets of cities where she has walked and in the rooms she has occupied—in a young ladies’ hostel in Rouen, in Finchley as an au pair, or a penzione on via Servio Tullio, on holiday in Rome. These are her selves, it seems to her, who continue to exist in these places. In other words, past and future are reversed. The object of desire is not the future but the past; she desires to be back in the room in Rome, in the summer of 1963. In her journal she writes: “Out of extreme narcissism, I want to see my past set down on paper and in that way, be as I am not” and “There’s a certain image of women that torments me. Maybe orient myself in that direction.” In a Dorothea Tanning painting she saw in a show three years before in Paris, a bare-chested woman stands before a row of doors that stand ajar. The title was Birthday. She thinks this painting represents her life and that she is inside it, as she was once inside Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, and later Nausea. With every book she reads, To the Lighthouse, Rezvani’s Les années-lumière, she wonders if she could write her life in that way too.