by Annie Ernaux
I expect nothing from psychoanalysis or therapy, whose rudimentary conclusions became clear to me a long time ago—a domineering mother, a father whose submissiveness is shattered by a murderous gesture To state “it’s a childhood trauma’’ or “that day the idols were knocked off their pedestal” does nothing to explain a scene which could only be conveyed by the expression that came to me at the time: to breathe disaster. Here abstract speech fails to reach me.
Yesterday I went to the archives in Rouen to consult copies of the 1952 Paris-Normandie newspaper, which the delivery boy from the local news dealer brought round to my parents’ house every day. This too was something which I could not face doing before, as if I would breathe disaster again simply by opening the June edition of the paper. As I climbed the stairs, I felt that I was heading toward some fearful encounter. In a room nestling under the eaves of the Town Hall a woman brought me two big black registers containing all the back issues published in 1952. I began reading from January 1. I wanted to delay the moment when I would reach June 15; I wanted to re-enter the innocent unfolding of days I had known before that date.
In the top right-hand corner of the first page was the weather forecast of Abbe Gabriel. There was nothing I could associate with it—no games, no walks, no bicycle rides. I did not feature in this drifting of clouds, sunny with bright intervals, strong winds, that punctuated the passing of time.
Although most of the events mentioned were known to me—the war in Indochina, the Korean conflict, the riots at Orleansville, Antoine Pinay’s economic program—I wouldn’t have set them in 1952, having no doubt memorized them at a later stage in my life. I could find no connection between “Six bicycles loaded with plastic explosive blow up in Saigon” or “Jacques Duclos imprisoned at Fresnes and indicted on charges of plotting against security of the state” and the images I had of myself in 1952. I found it strange to think that Stalin, Churchill and Eisenhower were once as real to me as Yeltsin, Clinton and Kohl are today. Nothing looked familiar. As if I hadn’t lived in those days.
Gazing at the photograph of Antoine Pinay, I was struck by his resemblance to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, not the decrepit man of today, but that of twenty years ago. The expression “Iron Curtain” took me back to the days of my Catholic school, when the mistress would tell us to recite a decade on our rosary for the Christians who were behind it: I would imagine a huge metal wall with men and women hurling themselves against it.
On the other hand, I immediately recognized the strip cartoon Poustiquet, similar to the ones published on the back page of France-Soir for so many years, and the joke of the day, wondering whether it used to make me laugh: “Well, then, young man, are the fish biting?—Oh no, Sir! These are yellowtail and they’re as cute as can be!” I also recognized the advertisements and the names of movies showing in Rouen before they came to Y—September Affair, Ma Femme est formidable and so on.
There were horrific news items every day: a two-yearold had died eating a croissant; a farmer had sliced off the legs of his son, playing hide-and-seek in the wheat fields; a bombshell had killed three children in Creil. This was what I wanted to read about most of all.
The price of milk and butter made front-page news. Agricultural issues seemed to feature prominently, illustrated by information on foot-and-mouth disease, reports about farmers’ wives and ads for veterinary products, Lapicrine, Osporcine. Judging by the number of throat lozenges and syrups that were advertised, people seemed to suffer from chronic coughing or else they relied exclusively on these products to get better instead of consulting a doctor.
The Saturday edition had a column called “Ladies’ Choice.” I seemed to detect a vague likeness between some of the jackets pictured here and the one I was wearing in the Biarritz snapshot. However, as regards the other clothes, I was sure that neither myself nor my mother had ever dressed that way and among the different hairstyles reproduced on that page I could not see the frazzled, crown-shaped perm I had in the photograph.
I got to the weekend edition dated Saturday 14-Sunday 15 June. The headlines read: “Wheat harvest up an estimated 10%—No favorites for the 24-hour race at Le Mans—Jacques Duclos undergoes lengthy questioning in Paris—Joelle’s body is found near her parents’ house after a ten-day search. She had been thrown into an outdoor latrine by a neighbor who confessed to the crime.”
I did not feel like reading on any further. Walking downstairs, I realized that I had gone to the archives thinking I might actually find some record of what had happened to me in the 1952 newspaper. Later on, I reflected with astonishment that at the same time a continuous stream of cars had been roaring round the racetrack at Le Mans. I found it impossible to equate the two images. Then I said to myself that not one of the billion events that had happened somewhere in the world that Sunday afternoon could stand the comparison without producing the same feelings of dismay. Only the scene I had witnessed was real to me.
I have before me the list of events, films and advertisements that I jotted down with satisfaction while I was leafing through Paris-Normandie. I can expect nothing from this sort of document. Pointing out that cars and refrigerators were scarce and that 9 out of 10 screen stars used Lux Toilet Soap in 1952 is no more relevant than listing the different types of computer, microwave oven and frozen food that characterize the 1990s. The social distribution of goods is far more significant than their actual existence. In 1952, what mattered was that some did not have running water when others had bathrooms; today what matters is that some buy their clothes from Froggy when others go to Agnes B. When it comes to illustrating social change, newspapers can provide only collective evidence.
My overriding concern is to find the words I would use to describe myself and the world around me; to name what I considered to be normal, intolerable or inconceivable. But the woman of 1995 can never go back to being the little girl of 1952, who knew nothing beyond her small town, her family and her convent school, and who had a limited number of words at her disposal. With the immensity of time stretching ahead of her. We have no true memory of ourselves.
To convey what my life was like in those days, the only reliable method I have is to explore the laws, rites, beliefs and references that defined the circles in which I was caught up—school, family, small-town life—and which governed my existence, without my even noticing its contradictions; to expose the different languages that made up my personality: the words of religion, the words my parents used to describe their behavior and daily environment, the serialized novels I read in Le Petit Écho de la mode or Les Veillées des chaumieres; to use these words, some of which I still find oppressive, in order to dissect and reassemble the text of the world surrounding that Sunday in June, when I turned twelve and thought I was going mad.
Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it. Neither shall I content myself with merely picking out and transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them like documents, examining them from different angles to give them meaning. In other words, I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.
(It may not be necessary to commit such observations to paper, but I won’t be able to start writing properly until I have some idea of the shape this writing will take.)
I may have chosen to be impartial because I thought the indescribable events I witnessed in my twelfth year would fade away, lost in the universal context of laws and language. Or maybe I succumbed to a mad and deadly impulse suggested by the words of a missal which I now find impossible to read, a ritual which my mind associates with some sort of Voodoo ceremony—take this, all of you, and read it, this is my body, this is the cup of my blood, it will be shed for you and for all men.
In June ’52, I had never left the stretch of land commonly referred to as
these parts, an expression understood by all despite its vagueness—the Pays de Caux, running along the right bank of the Seine, sq
ueezed in between Le Havre and Rouen. Beyond that lay uncertainty, along with the rest of France and the world, dismissed as over there with a sweeping gesture toward the horizon, conveying indifference and the impossibility of ever living there. The only way to visit Paris is on a package tour, unless one has relatives to show one round the city. Taking the subway is seen as a complicated process, far more terrifying than the ghost train at the local fair, supposedly requiring a difficult and lengthy training. The general belief is that one cannot go anywhere that is not familiar, people feel genuine admiration for those who aren’t afraid of going places.
The two big cities from around these parts, Le Havre and Rouen, arouse less suspicion; they are inscribed in the linguistic memory of all families and belong to ordinary conversation. Many factory hands work there, leaving in the morning and coming back in the evening with the micheline, a small local train. In Rouen, the larger city, closer to us than Le Havre, they’ve got everything you need—department stores, specialists for every type of complaint, several movie theaters, an indoor pool for learning how to swim, the Saint-Romain festival lasting the month of November, tramways, tea rooms and huge hospitals where people are taken for major operations, detoxification programs and electroshock treatment. Unless you happen to be a laborer working on a building site, you would never go there in your “everyday” clothes. My mother takes me there once a year to consult the eye specialist and buy me a pair of glasses. She takes advantage of the trip to purchase beauty care products and other articles “you can’t get in Y.” We never feel quite at home there because we don’t know anyone. People appear to dress and speak better than in the country. In Rouen, one always feels slightly “at a disadvantage”—less sophisticated, less intelligent and, generally speaking, less gracious with one’s body and speech. For me, Rouen symbolizes the future, just like serialized novels and fashion magazines do.
In 1952 my whole life centers around Y—its streets, its stores and its inhabitants, for whom I am Annie D or “the D’s girl.” For me there is no other world. Y is the underlying reference in all conversations; its schools, church, fairs and ladies’ fashion stores dictate our social status and our ambitions. With its seven thousand inhabitants, this town lying half-way between Le Havre and Rouen is the only one where we can say, referring to a great many people, “he or she lives on that street, works there, has so many children,” where we can reel off the times for Mass and the movies showing at the Cinema Leroy, where we know who is the best baker or the least dishonest butcher. Because my parents were born there and, before that, their own parents and grandparents in villages nearby, there is no other town which we knew so intimately both historically and geographically. I know who lived next door fifty years ago and where my mother would buy bread on the way back from school. In the street I pass men and women whom my mother and father almost married before they met. People “who aren’t from around these parts” are those we have no knowledge of at all, whose story is either unknown or cannot be checked, and who in turn know nothing about us. Be they from Brittany, Marseilles or Spain, anyone who doesn’t speak “the way we do” is, to some extent, labeled a foreigner.
(I find it impossible to name this town, as I have done in previous books. Here it is not a geographical landmark on a map, lying somewhere between Rouen and Le Havre, cut across by the railroad tracks or highway N15. It is a nameless place of origin: as soon as I go back I succumb to a state of lethargy that prevents me from thinking or even remembering, as if the place were going to swallow me up once again.)
Description of Y in 1952.
The town center, razed by a fire during the German advance in 1940 and subsequently bombed in 1944 like the rest of Normandy, is undergoing reconstruction. It features a combination of construction sites, wasteland, recent concrete buildings—two stories high with new businesses at street level—temporary shacks and early edifices spared by the war: the Town Hall, the Cinema Leroy, the post office and the covered market. The church was burned down: a small playhouse on the main square is used in its stead. Mass is celebrated on stage, before people seated in the orchestra or in the gallery running around the room.
The town center is circled by a network of cobbled and tarred streets, lined with sidewalks, two-story houses in brick or stone and mansions behind closed gates, belonging to lawyers, doctors and company directors. This is where the public and private schools are to be found, located in their respective neighborhoods. Although this area lies outside the center, it is still part of town. Beyond live the people who say they are going “to town” or even “to Y” when they pay a visit to the center. There are no clear geographical boundaries separating the city center from the other districts: the disappearance of sidewalks, more and more vegetable gardens and old houses (with half-timbering, two or three rooms, no more, no running water, an outdoor toilet), hardly any stores at all except a café-grocery-coal depot, the first housing developments. The practical implications of this distinction, however, are clear to all: the city center is where you don’t go shopping in your slippers or your overalls. The neighborhoods lose in value the further one strays from the city center—fewer and fewer villas, more and more blocks of houses clustered around a shared courtyard. The more remote areas, with dirt tracks, potholes in rainy weather and farmhouses fronted by embankments, already belong to the country.
The Clos-des-Parts neighborhood extends lengthwise from the town center to Cany bridge, running from the rue de la République to the Champ-des-Courses district. Its main axis is the rue du Clos-des-Parts, which connects the route du Havre to Cany bridge, cutting across the heart of the city.
My parents’ store is located at the lower end of the street—we would “go up to town”—on the corner of a graveled alley opening on to the rue de la République. So one can take either the latter or the rue du Clos-des-Parts to go to the private school: the two streets are parallel. They have absolutely nothing in common. The rue de la République, wide, tarred, flanked by sidewalks from end to end, is used by cars or buses heading for the coast and the beaches twenty-five kilometers away. The upper stretch of the road features stately residences; no one knows the people who live there, not even “by sight.” The presence of a Citroen garage, a few adjoining houses giving straight on to the street and a bicycle repair store at the lower end do not detract from its noble character. On the right, before reaching the bridge, below the railroad line, lie two huge ponds with a narrow dirt track running in between; one is filled with black water, the other one has a greenish tinge because of the moss sprouting on its surface. It’s known as the “traveler’s pond,” the death spot of Y; women come over from the other end of town to drown here. As you can’t see it from the rue de la République, from which it is separated by an embankment crowned by a thick hedge, it doesn’t appear to be part of the street.
The rue du Clos-des-Parts is a narrow, uneven street, with no sidewalks, characterized by sudden dips and sharp bends; it has practically no traffic except for workers cycling home in the evening, cutting across to join the route du Havre. In the afternoon, it offers the silence and faraway sounds of the country. There are a few villas belonging to entrepreneurs, with adjoining workshops, and many singlestory buildings standing side by side, rented out to clerks or manual workers. Four winding paths inaccessible to cars branch off the rue du Clos-des-Parts, serving the huge Champ-de-Courses neighborhood that extends to the racecourse, dominated by the sheer mass of the old people’s home. It’s a shaded district with hedges and gardens fronting old houses: there are more elderly people, “lowerincome groups” and large families here than anywhere else. From the rue de la République to the paths cutting across Champ-de-Courses, it takes less than three hundred meters to switch from wealth to poverty, from city life to country life, from space to confinement. To switch from protected people, of whom we know nothing, to people of whom we know everything—the welfare benefits they receive, what they eat and drink, what time they go t
o bed.
(To describe for the very first time, with no criterion other than accuracy, streets along which I used to walk as a child without ever thinking about them, is to expose the social hierarchy they implied. I almost feel I am committing a sacrilege: replacing the sweet landscape of memory—a whirl of impressions, colors and images (the Edelin Villa! the blue wisteria! the blackberry bushes in Champ-de-Courses!)—by a far harsher one that strips it of all magic, but whose truth cannot be questioned, not even by memory: in 1952 I could tell simply by looking at the lofty façades tucked away behind lawns and gravel paths that the people living there were not like us.)
Our place still refers to:
1) the neighborhood
2) the house and store belonging to my parents, in my mind inextricably linked.
The grocery-haberdashery-café is in a group of old, low houses with yellow and brown half-timbering, flanked at each end by a recent two-story building in brick, on a strip of land stretching from the rue de la République to the rue du Clos-des-Parts. We live in the part that opens on to the latter street, together with an elderly gardener who is allowed to walk through our courtyard. The grocery store, with its single bedroom upstairs, is housed in the new building made of brick. The front entrance and one of the store windows give on to the rue du Clos-des-Parts; another window faces the courtyard, which one walks through to enter the café, set up in the original farmhouse. The store opens on to a series of four rooms: the kitchen, the café, the cellar and a junk room known as the “back room’’; all these rooms communicate with each other and the courtyard (except the kitchen, squeezed in between the grocery and the café). None of the first-floor rooms afford any privacy whatsoever, not even the kitchen, which customers use as a shortcut to get to the café. The fact that there is no door between the café and the kitchen means that my parents can keep on talking to customers, who also have the benefit of our radio. From the kitchen, a winding staircase leads to a tiny loft with the bedroom on the left and the attic on the right. In this room belongs the bucket used as a chamber pot by my mother and myself, and by my father at night (in the daytime he and the customers use a urinal set up in the courtyard—a barrel surrounded by planks). The outdoor toilet is used by us in summer and by customers throughout the year. Except when it’s a nice day and I can sit outside, I usually read and do my homework at the top of the stairs, under a light bulb. From there, I can see everything that goes on through the bars of the banister, without being seen.