A Woman's Story Read online

  Copyright © 1988 by Éditions Gallimard

  English translation copyright © 1991 by Seven Stories Press

  Reading Group Guide © 2003 by Seven Stories Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ernaux, Annie, 1940–

  [Femme. English]

  A woman’s story / Annie Ernaux ; translated by Tanya Leslie

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-60980-326-1

  1. Ernaux, Annie, 1940– —Family. 2. Authors, French—20th century—Family relationships. 3. Mothers—France—Biography. 4. Alzheimer’s disease. I. Title.

  PQ2665.R67Z464213 2003

  843′.914—dc21 2003009351

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  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  My Mother Died

  The Week

  Discussion Questions

  It is said that contradiction is unthinkable; but the fact is that in the pain of a living being it is even an actual existence.

  —HEGEL

  MY MOTHER DIED on Monday 7 April in the old people’s home attached to the hospital at Pontoise, where I had installed her two years previously. The nurse said over the phone: “Your mother passed away this morning, after breakfast.” It was around ten o’clock.

  For the first time the door of her room was closed. The body had already been washed and a strip of gauze had been wrapped around her head and under her chin, pushing all the skin up around her eyes and mouth. A sheet covered her body up to her shoulders, hiding her hands. She looked like a small mummy. The cot sides had been taken down and left on either side of the bed. I wanted to slip her into the white nightdress with a crochet border that she had once bought for her own funeral. The nurse told me one of the staff would see to this and would also take the crucifix my mother kept in her bedside drawer and place it on her chest. The two screws that pinned the copper arms on to the cross were missing. The nurse wasn’t sure they could be replaced. It didn’t matter, I wanted her to have her crucifix all the same. On the trolley stood the bunch of forsythia I had brought the day before. The nurse suggested I go straight to the administration office while they drew up an inventory of my mother’s personal belongings. She had very few things of her own left—a suit, a pair of blue summer shoes, an electric shaver.

  At the administration office, a young woman asked me what I wanted. “My mother died this morning.” “Was she registered at the hospital or as a long-term patient? What was her name?” She consulted a sheet of paper and gave a faint smile: she had already been informed. She went and fetched my mother’s record and asked a few questions about her, where she was born, her last address before being admitted as a long-term patient. These details were probably in the file.

  In my mother’s room, a plastic bag with her belongings had been set aside on the bedside table. The nurse asked me to sign the inventory. I decided not to keep the clothes and other possessions she’d had at the hospital. All I took was a small Savoyard chimney sweep from Annecy and a statuette she and my father had bought when they made the pilgrimage to Lisieux. Now that I was there, my mother could be taken to the hospital morgue (it was customary for the body of the deceased to remain in its room for a period of two hours following the time of death). As I was leaving, I caught sight of the woman who shared my mother’s room. She was sitting in the sister’s office, behind the glass partition, with her handbag in her lap. She had been asked to wait there until my mother’s body was moved to the morgue.

  My ex-husband went with me to the undertaker’s. Behind the wreaths of artificial flowers, a few armchairs were arranged around a coffee table with some magazines. An assistant took us into a room and asked us questions about when she had died, where the burial was to take place and whether or not we wanted a service. He wrote everything down on an order form, occasionally jabbing at a pocket calculator. Then he led us into a dark room with no windows and switched on the light. A dozen coffins were standing against the wall. The assistant explained: “All our prices include tax.” Three of the coffins were open so that customers could also choose the color of the lining. I settled for oak because it had been her favorite tree and because she had always wanted to know whether the furniture she bought was made of oak. My ex-husband suggested mauve for the lining. He was proud, almost happy to remember that she often wore blouses of the same color. I wrote out a check for the assistant. The firm took care of everything, except the supplying of flowers. I got home around midday and had a glass of port with my ex-husband. My head and my stomach started to ache.

  Around five o’clock I called the hospital to ask if I could go and see my mother at the morgue with my two sons. The girl on the switchboard told me it was too late, the morgue closed at half past four. I got out the car and drove around the new part of town near the hospital, trying to find a flower shop open on a Monday. I asked for white lilies but the florist advised against them: they were suitable only for children, possibly for young girls.

  The burial took place on the following Wednesday. I arrived at the hospital with my two sons and my ex-husband. The morgue wasn’t signposted and we lost our way before discovering the low, concrete building which lay on the edge of the fields. An assistant in a white coat was talking on the phone. He signaled to us to sit down in a corridor. We sat on chairs lined up against the wall, opposite the lavatories. Someone had left the door open. I wanted to see my mother once more and place on her breast the two twigs of japonica blossom I had brought with me. We didn’t know whether they intended to show us the body one last time before closing the coffin. The undertaker’s assistant we had seen in the shop emerged from an adjoining room and graciously asked us to follow him. My mother was lying in the coffin, her head thrown back, her hands clasped together on the crucifix. The white gauze had been removed and she was wearing the nightdress with the crochet border. The satin shroud reached up to her chest. It was in a large, bare room with concrete walls. I don’t know where the faint light came from.

  The assistant informed us that the visit was over and he led us back into the corridor. I felt that he had shown us my mother simply to prove that his firm had carried out its duties satisfactorily. We drove through the new part of town until we reached the church, which had been built next to the arts center. The hearse hadn’t arrived so we waited in front of the church. Across the street, someone with tar had smeared “Money, consumer goods, and the State are the three pillars of apartheid” on the façade of the supermarket. A priest stepped forward. He addressed me in affable tones—“Was she your mother?”—and asked my sons where they went to university and what they were studying.

  A curious little empty bed, edged with red velvet, had been laid down on the bare cement floor in front of the altar. Later on, the undertakers placed my mother’s coffin on top of it. The prie
st switched on a tape recorder that played organ music. We were the only people present at the service, nobody around here knew my mother. The priest sang canticles and spoke of “eternal life” and “the resurrection of our sister.” I wanted the ceremony to last forever, I wanted more to be done for my mother, more songs, more rituals. The organ music started up again and the priest extinguished the candles on either side of the coffin.

  Immediately after the service, the undertaker’s hearse left for Yvetot, in Normandy, where my mother was to be buried beside my father. I traveled in my own car with my sons. It rained during the whole journey, with the wind blowing in sharp gusts outside. The boys questioned me about the service because it was their first experience and they hadn’t known how to behave during the ceremony.

  In Yvetot, the family had assembled near the entrance to the cemetery. One of my cousins shouted to me from a distance, “What weather! You’d think we were in November,” to cover the embarrassment of watching us approach. We all walked together towards my father’s grave. It lay open, the freshly dug earth forming a yellow mound on one side. My mother’s coffin was brought forward. When it was lowered into the pit, the men holding the ropes told me to step forward so that I could see it slide down in the hole. A few meters away, the grave-digger was waiting with his spade. He had a ruddy complexion and was wearing blue overalls, a beret, and boots. I felt like going up to him and giving him a hundred francs, thinking he might want to spend it on drinking. There was no harm in that. After all, he would be the last man to take care of my mother, by covering her with earth all afternoon, he might as well enjoy it.

  The family insisted that I eat something before I left. My mother’s sister had arranged for us to have lunch at a restaurant after the funeral. I decided to stay, I felt this was something I could still do for my mother. The service was slow, we talked about our work and the children. Occasionally we mentioned my mother. They said to me, “What was the point of her going on like that.” They all thought it was a good thing she had died. The absolute certainty of this statement is something I cannot understand. I drove back home in the evening. Everything was definitely over.

  THE WEEK following the funeral, I would start to cry for no particular reason. As soon as I awoke, I knew my mother was dead. I emerged from a heavy slumber, remembering nothing of my dreams except that my mother was in them, dead. All I did were the daily chores necessary for living: shopping, cooking, loading the washing machine. Quite often I forgot how to do things in the right order. After peeling vegetables, I would have to stop and think before going on to the next stage, that is, washing them. To read was simply impossible. One day I went down to the cellar and there was my mother’s suitcase. In it were her purse, a summer handbag, and some scarves. I stood paralyzed in front of the gaping suitcase. The worst moments were when I left home and drove into town. I would be sitting behind the wheel and suddenly it would hit me: “She will never be alive anywhere in the world again.” I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that the other people behaved normally. The meticulous care with which they chose their meat at the butcher’s filled me with horror.

  This condition is gradually easing. Even so, I still feel comforted by the fact that the weather is cold and wet, as in the first days of the month, when my mother was alive. I still get that sinking feeling every time I realize “now I don’t need to” or “I no longer have to” do this or that for her. I feel such emptiness at the thought: this is the first spring she will never see. (Now I can feel the power of ordinary sentences, or even clichés.)

  Tomorrow, it will be three weeks since the funeral. It was only the day before yesterday that I overcame the fear of writing “My mother died” on a blank sheet of paper, not as the first line of a letter but as the opening of a book. I could even bring myself to look at some of her photographs. One of them shows her sitting on the banks of the Seine, her legs tucked neatly beneath her. It’s a black-and-white photograph but I can clearly see her flaming red hair and the sun reflected in her black alpaca suit.

  I shall continue to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years. Perhaps I should wait until her illness and death have merged into the past, like other events in my life—my father’s death and the breakup with my husband—so that I feel the detachment which makes it easier to analyze one’s memories. But right now I am incapable of doing anything else.

  It’s a difficult undertaking. For me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to “freeze” her in a series of images unrelated to time—“she had a violent temper,” “she was intense in everything she did”—and to recall random scenes in which she was present. This brings back only the fantasy woman, the one who has recently appeared in my dreams, alive once more, drifting ageless through a tense world reminiscent of psychological thrillers. I would also like to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris. The more objective aspect of my writing will probably involve a cross between family history and sociology, reality and fiction. This book can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words. (Neither photographs, nor my own memories, nor even the reminiscences of my family can bring me this truth.) And yet, in a sense, I would like to remain a cut below literature.

  Yvetot is a cold town, situated on a windswept plateau lying between Rouen and Le Havre. At the turn of the century, it was an important administrative center and the trading capital of a region entirely dependent on farming, controlled by a group of wealthy landowners. My grandfather, who worked as a carter on one of the local farms, and my grandmother, who earned a living from cottage weaving, moved to Yvetot a few years after they were married. Both came from a village three kilometers away. They rented a small cottage with a courtyard in a rural area on the outskirts of town. They were located beyond the railway, somewhere between the last cafés near the station and the first fields of colza. It was there that my mother was born in 1906, the fourth in a family of six. She prided herself on telling people: “I wasn’t born in the country.”

  Four of the children never left the town at all and my mother spent three-quarters of her life in Yvetot. They moved closer to the town center but never actually lived there. They would “go into town” to attend mass, to buy meat, and to send postal orders. One of my cousins now has a flat in the town center, cut across by the N15, a main road streaming with lorries night and day. She gives her cat sleeping pills to stop it from going out and getting run over. The area where my mother spent her childhood is very much sought-after by people with high incomes because of its quiet atmosphere and old buildings.

  My grandmother laid down the law and made sure her children were taught their place, shouting at them and hitting them when necessary. She was an energetic worker, and a difficult person to get on with. Reading serials was her only relaxation. She had a gift for writing and came top in her canton when she passed her primary certificate. She could have become a schoolmistress but her parents wouldn’t let her leave the village. Parting with one’s family was invariably seen as a sign of misfortune. (In Norman French, “ambition” refers to the trauma of separation; a dog, for instance, can die of ambition.) To understand this story—which ended when she turned eleven—one must remember all those sentences beginning with “in the old days”: In the old days, one didn’t go to school like today, one listened to one’s parents, and so on.

  She was a good housekeeper, in other words, she managed to feed and clothe her family on practically no money at all. When the children lined up in church, they were dressed decently (no holes or stains), approaching a state of dignity which allowed the family to live without feeling like paupers. She turned back the collars and cuffs of the boys’ shirts so that they would last
twice as long. She kept everything, stale bread, the skin off the milk for making cakes, ashes for doing the laundry, the dying heat of the stove for drying plums and dishcloths, and the water used for our morning wash so that we could rinse our hands during the day. She knew all the household tips that lessened the strain of poverty. This knowledge—handed down from mother to daughter for many centuries—stops at my generation. I am only the archivist.

  My grandfather, a strong, gentle man, died of a heart attack at the age of fifty. My mother was thirteen at the time and she adored him. After he died, my grandmother’s attitude hardened and she became suspicious of everyone. (She was haunted by visions of horror—going to prison, for boys, and having an illegitimate child, for girls.) When cottage weaving died out, she took in people’s laundry and cleaned offices.

  Towards the end of her life, she moved in with the youngest daughter and her husband. They lived down by the railway, in a prefab without electricity which was once used as a refectory for the factory next door. My mother took me to see heron Sundays. She was a small, plump woman, remarkably agile despite being born with one leg shorter than the other. She read novels, spoke little, and was brusque in her manner. She enjoyed drinking eau-de-vie, which she mixed with the coffee dregs in the bottom of her cup. She died in 1952.

  My mother’s childhood, in a nutshell:

  – an insatiable appetite. She wolfed down the makeweight on her way back from the baker’s. “Until I was twenty-five, I could have devoured the whole sea, and all the fish with it!”

  – the six children packed into one room, sharing a bed with one of her sisters, the bouts of sleepwalking, when she was found standing in the courtyard, sound asleep, her eyes wide open …

  – the dresses and pairs of shoes handed down from one sister to the next, a rag doll for Christmas, the apple cider that ruined one’s teeth.