The Years

by Annie Ernaux

  We exchanged the words of current morality for others that measured actions, behaviors, and feelings in terms of pleasure, “frustration” and “gratification.” The new way of being was “laid-back,” and feeling good about oneself, a mixture of self-assurance and indifference to others.

  More than ever people dreamed of country life, away from “pollution,” “the rat race,” the “métro boulot dodo,” “the concentration ’burbs” and the “yobs” who lived there. Still, they flocked to cities, urban priority development zones, and residential suburbs, according to their possibilities of choice.

  And we who were under thirty-five grew melancholy at the thought of “digging ourselves in,” growing old and dying in the same middle-sized provincial town. Would we ever make it to the place we envisaged as a basin15 that shook and rumbled, and pulled us in starting at Dijon, when suddenly the train picked up speed and barreled unstopping, as if possessed, all the way to the gray battlements of the Gare de Lyon. It was the ineluctable trajectory of a successful life, the full attainment of modernity.

  The towns of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Ville d’Avray, Chilly Mazarin, Petit-Clamart, Villiers-le-Bel—those pretty, historic-sounding names that made one think of a film, or the attack on de Gaulle, or nothing at all—could not be found on a map. We only knew they were located within a charmed circle from any point of which one could get to the Latin Quarter and drink a café-crème on Saint-Germain, like Reggiani. One needed only avoid Sarcelles, La Courneuve, and Saint-Denis, with their considerable “foreign population,” housed in the “projects” whose “evils” were denounced all the way into school textbooks.

  We left. We settled in a new city forty kilometers outside of the Boulevard Périphérique.16 A lightweight house in a subdivision nearing completion with the colors of a resort village and streets named after flowers. The doors banged shut with a bungalow sound. Under the sheltering sky of Île-de-France, it was a quiet place at the edge of a field with a line of pylons marching across it.

  Farther along were green spaces, glass buildings and government towers, a pedestrian concourse, and other subdivisions linked by bridges over the highway. It was impossible to picture the city limits. We felt ourselves floating in a space too vast. Existence was diluted. It was senseless to go for a walk. As a last resort, we could go for a run in exercise clothes, keeping our eyes straight ahead. Our bodies bore the imprint of the old-style city: streets with cars, people walking on sidewalks.

  When we migrated from the provinces to the Paris region, time had started to go more quickly. The sense of time and its passing was not the same. When evening came, we felt as if we had done nothing except perhaps teach some muddled classes to irritated students.

  To live in the Paris region was:

  —to be cast into a territory whose geography eluded us, scrambled by a maze of roads traveled exclusively by car

  —to be unable to escape the goods of leading brands, displayed in vacant lots or along the roads in motley strings of warehouses, on whose outer walls signs touted the oversized and the All—Tousalon, everything for your living room, Worldwide Wall-to-Wall, Leather Galaxy—and suddenly lent a strange reality to the ads on commercial radio, for home deco and DIY, St. Maclou, of course.

  It was being unable to find a pleasing order in anything we saw.

  We were transplanted into another space-time, another world—probably that of the future, which was why it was so hard to define. The only way to experience it was to walk across the concourse at the foot of the Tour Bleue in the midst of people we’d never know and skateboards zinging past. We knew there were thousands of us, millions between here and La Défense, but we never thought of the others.

  Here, Paris had no reality. At first, on Wednesdays and Sundays, we had worn ourselves out taking the children to see the Eiffel Tower, the Grévin Wax Museum, and the Seine by tour boat. Historic sites that we had dreamt about as children, and now discovered to be so close on the road signs, Versailles, Chantilly, no longer inspired desire. We stayed home on Sunday afternoons, watching Le petit rapporteur and doing home repairs.

  The place we went most often, of necessity, was the three-level indoor shopping center, where the air was tepid and sound muted in spite of the crowds. Fountains and benches were arranged under a canopy of glass. Soft-lit arcades contrasted with the pitiless glare of window displays and store interiors. The boutiques were side-by-side with no space between them, so one could come and go without a door to push or hellos and goodbyes to say. Never had clothes and food appeared more beautiful—accessible with no distance or ritual to negotiate. The boutiques with their playful names, The Frockery, Kardkorner, Jean Genie granted a childlike impunity to the act of poking through merchandise. One felt ageless.

  It was a different self that did the grocery shopping at Prisunic or the Nouvelles Galeries. From Darty Appliance to Pier Imports, the desire to buy leapt up inside us, as if to acquire a waffle iron and a Japanese lamp would make us a different person, the way that, at fifteen, we’d hoped to be transformed by knowledge of the “in” words and rock ’n’ roll.

  We slipped into a downy present, unable to say whether it was because of our move to a place without a past, or the infinite horizon of an “advanced liberal society,” or a fortuitous conjunction of the two. We went to see Hair. In the plane that took the film’s hero to Vietnam, we and our illusions from ’68 were also sent off to die.

  Over weeks and repetitions of the daily circuits, and practice with the parking lots, the sense of strangeness would fade. We would be amazed to find ourselves a part of this huge and nebulous population whose dim roar, rising from the highways morning and night, seemed to imbue us with an invisible and powerful reality. We would discover Paris, locate its streets, arrondissements, and Métro stations, determine the best place on the platform to disembark and transfer to another train. At last we would dare to drive to Place de l’Étoile and Concorde. At the entrance to the Gennevilliers bridge, where the immense vista of Paris suddenly opened up in front of us, we would have the exalted sense of belonging to this huge and hectic life. It was a kind of individual promotion. We would no longer wish to return to what had become for us the undifferentiated “provinces.” And one evening, as our train plunged into a night studded with the bright red and blue neon signs of the Paris region, the Upper Savoie city we’d left three years before would seem like the ends of the earth.

  The Vietnam War ended. So much had happened in our lives since it began that it was part of our existence. The day Saigon fell we realized that we’d never believed an American defeat possible. They were finally paying for the napalm, the little girl on the poster that hung on our walls. We felt the joy and fatigue of things accomplished at last. But disillusion returned. The television showed clusters of humans clinging to boats to flee communist Vietnam. The civilized mug of debonair King Sihanouk of Cambodia, who subscribed to the Canard Enchaîné, could not conceal the ferocity of the Khmer Rouge. Mao was dying and we remembered how, one winter morning in the kitchen, before leaving for school, we heard someone shout Stalin is dead. Behind the god of the River of a Hundred Flowers we discovered a band of criminals led by his widow Jiang Qing. Not far from Paris, at the border, the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Gang kidnapped company presidents and statesmen, later found dead in the trunks of cars, like common mafiosi. It became shameful to hope for revolution, and we didn’t dare admit that we were saddened by Ulrike Meinhof’s suicide in prison. Through some obscure reasoning, Althusser’s crime of choking his wife to death in bed one Sunday morning was blamed as much on the Marxism he embodied as on any kind of mental problem.

  The “new philosophers” popped up on television and did away with the old “ideologies.” They waved Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag at the revolutionary dreamers to make them cringe. Unlike Sartre, who was said to be senile and still refused to go on TV, or de Beauvoir with her rapid-fire diction, they were young. T
hey challenged our consciences in words that we could understand and reassured us of our intelligence. The spectacle of their moral indignation was entertaining, though it was not clear what they were trying to do, other than discourage people from voting for the Union of the Left.

  For us, who as children were enjoined to save our souls with virtuous deeds, in philosophy class to live by Kant’s categorical imperative, act only according to that maxim whereby you can will that it should become a universal law, by Marx and Sartre to change the world—and who, in ’68, had believed that we would—saw no hope in any of it.

  The voices of authority were silent on the matter of the troubled suburbs and the families who had just arrived, sharing public housing with others who’d lived there longer and reproached them for not speaking or eating “like us.” These were ill-defined and little-known populations who lived a long way off from the idea of happiness that pulled society in like a vacuum cleaner. They’d drawn the short straw, were “disadvantaged,” and had no choice but to inhabit “rabbit hutches” where, in any case, no one could imagine being happy. Immigration preserved the face of the helmeted road worker at the bottom of a hole in the highway, or that of the garbage collector beside a dumpster. Theirs was a purely economic existence, triumphantly assigned to them in a virtuous class debate each year by our students, who were convinced they possessed the best of all arguments against racism, i.e.: we need them for work that the French no longer want to do.

  Only facts presented on TV achieved the status of reality. Everyone had a color set. The elderly turned it on at noon when the broadcast day began and fell asleep at night in front of the test pattern. In winter, the pious had only to watch The Lord’s Day to attend Mass at home. Housewives ironed while watching the soap operas on channel 1, or Madame Today on 2. Mothers kept children quiet with Les visiteurs du mercredi and The Wonderful World of Disney. For everyone, TV spelled the availability of immediate, low-cost distraction and peace of mind for wives, who were able to keep their husbands home on Sundays with the televised sports. It surrounded us with a constant and impalpable solicitude that bobbed along on the unanimously smiling and understanding faces of the show hosts (Jacques Martin and Stéphane Collaro), their easy affability (Bernard Pivot, Alain Decaux). We were increasingly united by the same curiosities, fears, and satisfactions. Would the heinous murderer of little Philippe Bertrand or the kidnapped Baron Empain be caught? Would the master criminal Mesrine be run to ground? Would the Ayatollah Khomeini regain control of Iran? It gave us a power of quotation that was constantly renewed by current events and news items. It provided information on medicine, history, geography, animals, etc. The bank of common knowledge grew. It was a happy, inconsequential kind of knowledge which, unlike the kind one learned at school, didn’t need to be accounted for anywhere but in conversation, as long as one began with They said . . . or I saw on TV that . . . to indicate distance from the source or proof of veracity, as one chose.

  Teachers alone accused television of keeping children from reading and of sterilizing their imaginations. The kids couldn’t care less. At the top of their lungs they sang À la pêche aux moules moules moules, and imitated the voices of Tweety and Sylvester.

  An eclectic and continuous recording of the world was achieved thanks to television. A new kind of memory was born. From the magma of the many thousands of virtual things, viewed, forgotten, and divested of voice-over commentary, items floated to the surface, superimposed—infomercials, faces in the news or generally famous, and strange or violent scenes—so that Jean Seberg and Aldo Moro appeared to have been found dead in the same car.

  The deaths of intellectuals and singers added to the bleakness of the times. Barthes’s came too soon. Sartre’s we’d already thought about and then it happened, majestic. One million walked behind the coffin, and Simone de Beauvoir’s turban slipped to the side during the burial. Sartre, who had lived twice as long as Camus, long since laid to rest, along with Gérard Philipe, in the winter of 1959–60.

  The deaths of Brel and Brassens, like that of Piaf in the past, were more disorienting, as if we’d expected them to be there for our entire lives, though we didn’t really listen to them anymore, one too moralistic, the other an affable anarchist, and preferred Souchon and Renaud. These deaths in no way resembled the ludicrous demise of Claude François, electrocuted in his bath the day before the first round of the legislative elections, lost by the Left when everyone expected them to win, nor that of Joe Dassin, struck down at our own age, more or less, so that all of a sudden, the spring of ’75, the fall of Saigon and the surge of hope we associated with Dassin’s L’été indien seemed very remote.

  At the end of the 1970s, at family meals, a tradition maintained in spite of the distances that had to be traveled, memory grew short.

  Over coquilles Saint-Jacques and a beef roast from the butcher—not from the hypermarket—and a side dish of potatoes à la dauphinoise, frozen but as good as homemade, we assured them, the talk turned to cars and brand comparisons, projects for building a home or buying an older property, our most recent vacations, the consumption of time and objects. We instinctively avoided topics that awakened the old social longings and cultural differences, and instead examined the present we shared: the bombings in Corsica, the terrorist attacks in Spain and Ireland, the diamonds of Bokassa, the pamphlet written by a certain “Hasard d’Estaing,” Coluche’s candidacy for president, Björn Borg, E123 food dye; La grande bouffe, which everyone had seen except the grandparents, who never went to movies, and Manhattan—just the mainstream. The women managed a sidelong exchange on domestic issues—the folding of fitted sheets, the wear and tear on the knees of jeans, the use of salt to remove wine stains—within a conversation where the men retained the monopoly on subjects.

  The recitations of memories from the war and the Occupation had virtually ceased. They were only fleetingly revived over dessert and champagne by the oldest of our number, to whom we listened, smiling, the way we did when they brought up Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker. The bond with the past was fading. Only the present was imparted now.

  Children were the subject of anxious discussion between parents, who compared child-rearing styles and ways of dealing with permissiveness they had never themselves experienced. They wondered what to prohibit and what to allow (the pill, wild parties, cigarettes, mopeds), weighed the merits of private education, the usefulness of learning German, and language-study holidays. They wanted a good middle school, a good program, a good lycée, good teachers, possessed by the idea of an excellence that would envelop their children and painlessly infuse them with success that the latter would feel was entirely due to their own merit.

  The time of children replaced the time of the dead.

  When hesitantly asked about their pastimes and favorite music, teenagers replied in a docile manner, laconic and wary, convinced that we were not actually interested in their tastes except as signs of something about them, which they only vaguely perceived—their hidden being perhaps—and which they didn’t care to share, or anyway not with us. And, baffled by RPGs, war games, and heroic fantasy, we made sure they quoted Lord of the Rings and the Beatles, not just Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols, and the hard rock they inflicted upon us day and night. When we looked at them, such nice kids with their V-neck sweaters, checked shirts, and sensible haircuts, we felt that for now they were safe from drugs, schizophrenia, and the National Employment Agency.

  After dessert, the littlest ones were bidden to show us their artworks created with nails and string, demonstrate their skill with the Rubik’s Cube, play Debussy’s The Little Negro on the piano (to the parents’ irritation, no one really listened). We temporized and then decided not to end the family gathering with a card or board game. The young people didn’t play bridge, the elders were wary of Scrabble, and Monopoly took too long.

  And we, on the threshold of the 1980s, when we would enter our fortieth year, were suffused with a w
eary sweetness that came of accomplished tradition, and gazed around the table of faces, dark against the light. For a moment we were struck by the strangeness of repeating a ritual in which we now occupied the middle position between two generations. We were overcome with a kind of reverse vertigo, brought on by immutability, as if nothing in society had moved. In the hubbub of voices, which we suddenly perceived as detached from the bodies, we knew that a family meal was a place where one could go mad without warning and push the table over, screaming.

  According to one’s own desire and that of the State, backed by the banks and household savings plans, couples “achieved home ownership.” This dream come true, this social accomplishment, caused time to contract and moved them closer to old age. Here shall you dwell together till death do you part. Having sailed through work, marriage, and children, they’d reached the end of the road of reproduction, now etched in stone by twenty years of mortgage payments. They threw themselves into DIY, repainted and wallpapered until their heads spun. They were briefly assailed by a desire to turn back the clock. They envied the young who, with unanimous approval, now practiced a “juvenile cohabitation,” which their own generation had not been allowed. All around them, divorce proliferated. They had tried erotic films and lingerie. By dint of making love with the same man over years, women felt they’d become virgins again. The interval between menstrual periods seemed to shorten. They compared their lives to those of singles and divorcées, observed with melancholy a young woman backpacker sitting on the ground outside the train station, peacefully drinking a carton of milk. To test their ability to live without a husband, they went to films alone in the afternoon, quavering inside, and convinced everyone knew they didn’t belong there.

  They reentered the great market of seduction and were again exposed to the foibles of the world from which marriage and motherhood had removed them. They wanted to go on holiday without husband or children, then realized that the prospect of traveling and being alone in a hotel filled them with anxiety. Depending on the day, they wavered between the desire and fear of leaving it all behind to become independent again. To find out what we really wanted and boost our courage, we went to see A Woman Under the Influence and Identification of a Woman. We read The Left-Handed Woman, The Faithful Wife. The decision to separate was preceded by months of scenes and weary reconciliations, conversations with women friends, hints about marital discord on visits to the parents, who’d issued the warning at the time of the wedding, In this family, divorce does not exist.