by Annie Ernaux
Two months later, because it had happened before and we had been there for it, we thought a true event had begun when university and lycée students took to the streets to protest the Devaquet Law. We marveled, we hardly dared hope. May ’68 in winter—for us it was the fountain of youth. But youth put us in our place. Their banners read 68: passé, 86: the better way. We didn’t hold it against them. They were good kids. They didn’t throw cobblestones and expressed themselves sedately on TV. In the demonstrations they charmed us with couplets sung to the tune of Petit navire and Pirouette cacahuète. You had to be Pauwels and Le Figaro to say the kids were suffering from “AIDS of the brain.” For the first time, we saw the next generation in its huge and daunting reality, the girls on the front lines with the boys and the Beurs, and all of them in jeans. Their great number made them adults—were we so old already? A boy of twenty-two, who in photos looked like a child, died under
the blows of the riot police in rue Monsieur-le-Prince. In a somber crowd of thousands, we marched behind banners emblazoned with his name, Malik Oussekine. The government withdrew the law, the protesters returned to university and high school. They were pragmatic. Their goal was not to change society. They simply didn’t want their chances ruined of acquiring good positions within it.
And we, who knew very well that a “secure profession” and money didn’t necessarily bring happiness, couldn’t help but want happiness for them.
Cities sprawled farther and farther into the countryside, which was soon dotted with new pink villages. There were no vegetable gardens or chicken runs, and dogs were forbidden to roam free. The landscape was crosshatched with highways that tangled around Paris in a kind of aerial figure eight. People passed more and more hours in quiet and comfortable cars with big windows and music. It was a kind of transitory housing, increasingly personal and familial, where strangers were not admitted (hitchhiking was a thing of the past) and people sang, quarreled, told secrets with their eyes on the road, not the passenger, and reminisced. Cars were spaces at once open and closed. Other motorists were reduced to a flash of profile as we passed them, bodiless beings whose sudden reality in accidents, as broken marionettes slumped in their seats, filled us with horror.
When we drove alone at the same speed for a long time, the familiar gestures grew automatic and we ceased to feel our bodies, as if the car were driving itself. Valleys and plains slipped by in a spacious, rounded movement. We were nothing but a gaze in a cockpit, transparent to the end of the moving horizon, a huge and fragile consciousness that filled inner space and the entire world beyond it. All it would take, we sometimes told ourselves, was for a tire to explode or an obstacle to appear on the road, as in Sautet’s film The Things of Life, for consciousness to vanish forever.
Media time, ever more frenetic, forced us to think about the presidential elections, counting down the months and then the weeks that remained. People preferred to watch the menagerie on TF1’s Bébête Show, reviled by the highbrow, and Les Nuls on Canal+, “coarse but never vulgar” according to a distinction currently in vogue, or dreamed of their next vacation, listening to Desireless sing Voyage voyage. It was quite enough that you had to be afraid of making love, now that everyone knew AIDS was not only a disease of homosexuals and drug addicts, contrary to what one had first believed. Between the end of pregnancy scares and the onset of HIV scares, the interval of calm had seemed short-lived.
In any case, compared to ’81, our hearts were no longer in it. We had neither expectations nor hopes, only a desire to keep Mitterrand in and Chirac out. Mitterand was reassuring, the favorite uncle, a man of the Center surrounded by yuppie ministers from whom the people of the Right feared nothing anymore. The Communist Party was running out of steam. Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost had aged him. He was stuck in the Brezhnev era. Le Pen was omnipresent; there was no getting around him. He drew the fascination and terror of journalists with a gravitational pull. For half the population he was “the guy who said out loud what others were secretly thinking,” i.e., there were too many immigrants.
Mitterrand’s reelection restored our tranquillity. Far better to live without expectations under the Left than in constant fury under the Right. In the irreversible flow of time, this election would not be earth-shattering but only a backdrop to a spring, when we learned of Pierre Desproges’s death from cancer, and laughed more than we had in a long time at the Groseilles and Le Quesnoy families in a film that seemed tailor-made to incite people to vote for Mitterrand. We would barely remember adjacent events, which came at an opportune time—the release of the hostages in Lebanon, that interminable saga, and the massacre of Kanaks in the Ouvéa cave—or the TV debate in which Chirac insisted Mitterrand look him in the eye and swear that a probable lie was true. We were worried, and then relieved to see that true to form, Mitterrand didn’t flinch.
Nothing happened but an accommodation of poverty with the minimum guaranteed income, and a promise to repaint the stairwells in the housing projects, an adjustment to the lives of a population large enough to receive the denomination of “underclass.” Charity was becoming institutionalized. Panhandling vacated the major cities for provincial supermarkets and beaches in the summer. New techniques were invented, kneeling with the arms crossed, the discreet soliciting of change with a hushed voice, and new pitches that grew shabby faster than plastic grocery bags, themselves emblematic of dereliction. The homeless were as much a part of the urban landscape as advertising. People grew discouraged—too many poor—and irritated at their own powerlessness—how can you give to everyone?—and found relief in quickening their pace in Métro corridors when passing recumbent bodies, whose utter lack of movement served as obstacles to their purposeful advance. On the State radio, industry groups sent out celestial messages, Welcome to the world of Rhône-Poulenc, a world of challenge, and we wondered whom they could possibly be talking to.
We looked elsewhere. The Imam Khomeini pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, a writer of Indian origin whose only crime was having offended Mohammed in a novel. The news traveled around the planet and left us dumbfounded. (The pope also pronounced a death sentence by prohibiting the condom but those were deferred and anonymous deaths.) And so, three girls who persisted in wearing headscarves to school were perceived as the advance guard of Muslim fundamentalism, obscurantist and misogynistic, and finally provided us with an opportunity to think and suggest that the Arabs were not like other immigrants. We started to see ourselves as too nice for our own good. Rocard had already removed a burden from innumerable consciences when he declared, “France cannot take on all the misery of the world.”
The new came from the East. The magical words “perestroika” and “glasnost” had never ceased to enchant us. The Gulag and the tanks of Prague forgotten, our image of the USSR changed. We noted signs of their resemblance with ourselves, and the West in general: freedom of the press, Freud, rock and jeans, haircuts and the beautiful suits the “new Russians” wore. We waited, indeed hoped, for some kind of fusion between Communism and Democracy, the market economy and Lenin’s planning. We longed for an October Revolution with a happy ending. We warmed to the Chinese students with their little round metal-rimmed glasses who gathered in Tiananmen Square. And we believed in their victory until the tanks suddenly appeared (not them again!). A young man stepped forward, alone and tiny—that image we would see dozens of times, like the last sublime image of a film—on the same Sunday that Michael Chang won the final at Roland-Garros, with the result that the student of Tiananmen Square merged with the tennis player, though we found Chang so irritating with his repeated signs of the cross.
On the evening of July 14, 1989, at the end of a gray day of heat, we sat on the chesterfield and watched Jean-Paul Goude’s cosmopolitan fashion show, with voice-over commentary by Frédéric Mitterrand. We had the impression that all the world’s revolts and revolutions were our handiwork, from the eradication of slavery to the shipyards of Gdańsk a
nd Tiananmen Square. There before us were all the peoples of the earth, every struggle of the past, present, and future, all progeny of the French Revolution. When Jessye Norman sang La Marseillaise, her dress of bleu-blanc-rouge rippling in the artificial wind, we were seized by an emotion at once ancient and scholastic, a surge of glory and History.
The East Germans crossed borders, swarmed around churches with candles to bring down Honecker. The Berlin Wall fell. What followed was a short-lived epoch when tyrants were executed after an hour’s trial, and soil-covered corpses were exposed in mass graves. What was happening defied the imagination—so we really had believed that Communism was immortal—and our were at odds with reality. We felt left out, and envied the people in the East for experiencing such moments. Then we saw them crowding into the stores of West Berlin, and they moved us to pity with their awful clothes and bags of bananas. Their inexperience as consumers was touching. Then the spectacle of their collective hunger for material goods, which showed no restraint or discrimination, antagonized us. These people weren’t worthy of the pure and abstract freedom we had devised for them. The sense of affliction we’d been accustomed to feeling about those who lived “under the Communist yoke” gradually turned into a disapproving observation of the use they made of their freedom. We liked them better when they were lining up for sausage and books, deprived of everything, so we could savor the luck and superiority of belonging to the “free world.”
The hazy lack of differentiation in the world “behind the iron curtain” cleared to reveal two distinct nations. The Germany of which Mauriac had said “I love it so much, I’m glad there are two” was reunified. The rumor was going around that politics was dead. The advent of a “new world order” was declared. The end of History was nigh, Democracy would cover the earth. Never had we believed with such conviction that the world was headed in a new direction. In the middle of a heat wave, the indolent order of vacation time was shattered. The enormous headline SADDAM HUSSEIN INVADES KUWAIT recalled another of the same date, fifty-one years earlier, often reproduced, GERMANY INVADES POLAND. Within days, Western powers mobilized in support of the United States. France flaunted the Clemenceau24 and considered a call to arms, as at the time of Algeria. Beyond all doubt, World War III was imminent if Saddam Hussein didn’t pull out of Kuwait.
There was a need for war, as if people had suffered a lack of events for a long time, coveting the ones they could only experience as television viewers. There was a desire to reconnect with age-old tragedy. By grace of the drabbest of all American presidents, troops would be dispatched to fight “the new Hitler.” Pacifists were sent to Munich. Under the spell of media simplifications, people believed in the technological delicacy of bombs, “clean war,” “smart weapons,” and “surgical strikes”: “a civilized war,” wrote Libération. People let out their breath in a belligerent and virtuous sigh of relief. “Kicking Saddam’s ass” was a just war, a “lawfare,” and though no one said so, a legitimate opportunity to be finished, for once and for all, with the complicated Arab world, whose children in the banlieue and veiled daughters occasionally got on our nerves, but who, at the moment, as luck would have it, were staying out of trouble.
We who had broken with Mitterrand when he appeared on the screen and tonelessly declared “Guns will talk,” and who couldn’t bear the spirited propaganda for “Desert Storm,” had only the puppet newsreaders from Les Guignols de l’info to raise our spirits in the evening, and Big Bertha once a week. In that cold and foggy January, streets were deserted, cinemas and theaters empty.
Saddam promised a mysterious “mother of all battles.” It never came. The aims of war grew increasingly obscure. Bombs caused thousands of invisible deaths in Baghdad. The hostilities ended in a pall of shame, one Sunday in February, with routed Iraqi soldiers lost in the sand. The fracas ceased without really ending, for the “devil” Saddam Hussein was still on the loose and Iraq under embargo. There was mortification for having let ourselves be possessed, and humiliation for having devoted all our thoughts and feelings for days to a fiction wrought by CNN propaganda. We didn’t want to hear another word about a “new world order.”
The USSR, which we no longer thought about, shook the summer awake with a half-baked coup by old Stalinist fogies. Gorbachev was discredited, chaos declared and dismissed within hours, all because of a beady-eyed brute who, by some miracle, had clambered onto a tank and been hailed as the hero of freedom. The affair was skillfully managed, the USSR disappeared and became the Russian Federation with Boris Yeltsin as president. Leningrad was St. Petersburg again, much more convenient for finding one’s way around the novels of Dostoevsky.
Women, more than ever, were a closely watched group whose behaviors, tastes, and desires were subject to assiduous discourse and uneasy, triumphant attention. They were now deemed to “have it all” and “be everywhere.” Girls “did better at school than boys.” As usual people looked for signs of emancipation in women’s bodies, in their sexual and sartorial daring. The fact that they talked about “cruising guys,” discussed their fantasies, and wondered aloud in Elle if they were “good in bed” was proof of their freedom and their equality with men. The perpetual display of their breasts and thighs in advertising was supposed to be construed as a tribute to feminine beauty. Feminism was a vengeful, humorless old ideology that young women no longer needed, and viewed with condescension. They did not doubt their own strength or their equality. (But they still read more novels than men, as if they needed to give their lives an imaginary shape.) “Thank you, men, for loving women,” read a headline in a women’s magazine. The struggle of women sank into oblivion. It was the only struggle that had not been officially revived in collective memory.
With the pill they had become the sole rulers of their lives, but word hadn’t got out yet.
We, who had undergone kitchen-table abortions, who had divorced and believed our struggle to free ourselves would be of use to others, were now overwhelmed by fatigue. We no longer knew if the women’s revolution had really happened. We continued to see blood after fifty. It didn’t have the same color or odor as before, it was a sort of illusory blood, but we were reassured by this regular scansion of time that could be sustained until death. We wore jeans, leggings, and T-shirts like girls of fifteen. Like them we said “my boyfriend” when referring to our regular lover. As we aged we ceased to have an age. When we heard Only You or Capri c’est fini on Radio Nostalgie, the sweetness of youth washed over us. The present swelled and carried us back to our twenties. Compared to our mothers, strained and perspiring throughout menopause, we felt as if we had outsmarted time.
(Young women dreamed of binding a man to themselves; those of over fifty, who’d had all that already, didn’t want it anymore.)
Children, especially boys, had trouble leaving the family home with its well-stocked fridge, washed and folded clothes, and background hum of childhood. They made love in all innocence in the room next to ours. They settled into a protracted youth; the world wasn’t waiting for them. And by continuing to feed and care about them, we lived in a time that stretched back uninterrupted to their childhood.
The photo of a woman facing the camera, visible from the thighs up. She stands in a garden filled with brush. Her long reddish-blonde hair trails in separate strands over the collar of a big black coat, loose and expensive-looking. A section of scarf, candy-pink and strangely narrow compared to the coat, is draped over the left shoulder. In her arms she holds a black-and-white cat of the most common variety. She smiles at the camera with her head slightly tilted, gently seductive. The lips appear very pink, probably enhanced with gloss to match the scarf. The part in her hair is a stripe of a lighter color, indicating regrowth. The full face and high cheekbones draw a youthful contrast with the circles under the eyes and the fine lines on the forehead. One cannot discern the body’s girth in the bulky coat, but the hands and wrists that emerge from the sleeves to hold the cat are thin with prominent
joints. It is a winter photo, the sunlight pale on the skin of the face and hands. Tufts of dry grass and barren branches stand out on a background of vegetation and a distant line of buildings. On the back is written, Cergy, 3 February ’92.
She radiates a kind of contained abandon, or “fulfillment,” as the magazines say of women between forty and fifty-five. The photo was taken in the garden below the house where she lives alone with the cat, a year-and-a-half-old female. Ten years before, she lived there with her husband, two teenage sons, and sometimes her mother. She was the hub of a wheel that could not turn without her, the maker of all decisions, from washing the sheets to booking hotels for the holidays. Her husband is far away now, remarried with a new child. Her mother is dead and her sons live elsewhere. Serenely she notes this dispossession as an inevitable part of her trajectory. When she shops for groceries at Auchan, she no longer needs a trolley; a basket is enough. She returns to nurturing only on weekends when her sons come home. Outside of work obligations, teaching and correcting class work, her time is devoted to personal pleasures and desires, reading, films, phone calls, correspondence, and love affairs. The incessant concern for others, material and moral, which characterized marriage and family life, has faded. It has been replaced by an interest in humanitarian causes, which is lighter. In this dissolving of constraints and opening of possibilities, she feels she is in step with the times, as they are delineated in Elle or Marie Claire for thirty-something women of the middle and upper classes.
Once in a while she looks at herself naked in the bathroom mirror. A delicate torso, small breasts, very slender waist, slightly rounded belly. The thighs are heavy, with a bulge above the knees. The sex is clearly visible, now that the hair is more sparse, the cleft small compared with the ones displayed in X-rated films. Near the groin, two blue streaks, traces of stretch marks from her pregnancies. She is surprised; it is the same body she’s had since she stopped growing at around the age of sixteen.