The Years

by Annie Ernaux

They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.

the words forever bound to certain people, like mottos, or to a specific spot on the N14 because a passenger happened to say them just as we were driving by, and we cannot pass that place again without the words leaping up like the buried water jets at the Summer Palace of Peter the Great, which spray when you walk across them

Somewhere below the ideal and the clear-eyed gazes, we knew, lay a shapeless, oozing plain, riddled with other words, objects, images, and behaviours: unwed mothers, the white slave trade, the film posters from Dear Caroline, ‘rubbers’, mysterious advertisements for ‘intimate hygiene, discretion guaranteed’, the covers of Health magazine (‘women are fertile only three days a month’), ‘love children’, indecent assault, Janet Marshall strangled with her bra in the woods by the adulterer Robert Avril, the words ‘lesbian’, ‘homosexual’, ‘lust’, and sins so abominable they couldn’t even be brought to confession, miscarriage, nasty pastimes, books on the Index, Tout ça parce qu’au bois de Chaville3, free love, ad infinitum, a volume of unspeakable things only adults were supposed to know, the sum and substance of which were the genitals and their use.

And we who were undeceived, who seriously examined the dangers of advertising with our students; we who assigned the topic ‘Does the possession of material goods lead to happiness?’, bought a stereo at the Fnac, a Grundig radio-cassette player, and a Bell & Howell Super-8 camera, with a sense of using modernity to intelligent ends. For us and by us, consumption was purified. The ideals of May ’68 were being transformed into objects and entertainment.

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.

Mitterrand no longer spoke of ‘the people of the Left’. We didn’t resent him too much, not yet. He wasn’t Thatcher, who let Bobby Sands die and sent soldiers to be killed in the Falklands.

As she waits at the hypermarket check-out, she occasionally thinks of all the times she’s stood in line with a cart heaped with food. She sees the vague silhouettes of women, alone or with children circling their cart. They are faceless, distinguished only by hairstyle – a low chig- non, hair cut short, in a bob, or loose and medium-long – and clothing – the seventies maxi-coat, the black midi- coat from the eighties. She sees them as images of herself, taken apart and separated like matryochka dolls. She pictures herself here in ten or fifteen years with a cart filled with sweets and toys for grandchildren not yet born. But she sees that woman as improbable, just as the girl of twenty-five saw the woman of forty, whom she has since become and already ceased to be.