A Frozen Woman Read online

  ANNIE ERNAUX

  TRANSLATED BY LINDA COVERDALE

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  NEW YORK

  Copyright © 1981 by Éditions Gallimard

  Translation © 1995 by Seven Stories Press

  First trade paperback edition 1996.

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

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ernaux, Annie, 1940-

  [Femme gelee. English.

  A frozen woman / by Annie Ernaux; translated by Linda Coverdale.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-888363-38-8 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-60980-220-2 (e-book)

  Ernaux, Annie, 1940—Biography.

  Authors, French—20th century—Biography.

  Coverdale, Linda II. Title.

  PQ2665.R67F4713 1996

  843’.914—dc20 96-31400 CIP

  A FROZEN WOMAN

  Fragile and vaporish women, spirits with gentle hands, good fairies of the home who silently create beauty and order, mute, submissive women search as I may, I cannot find many of them in the landscape of my childhood. Not even in the next-best model, less elegant, more frumpy, the ones who work miracles with leftovers, scrub the sink until you can see your face in it, and take up their posts outside the school gates fifteen minutes before the last bell rings, all their housework done. Perfectly organized unto death. The women in my life all had loud voices, untidy bodies that were too fat or too flat, sandpapery fingers, faces without a trace of make-up or else slathered in it, with big blotches of color on the cheeks and lips. Their cooking skills did not go much beyond stewed rabbit and rice pudding, they had no idea dust was supposed to be removed on a daily basis, they worked or had worked on farms, in factories, in small businesses open all day long. There were the old ladies we visited on Sunday afternoons, with their boudoirs and the bottle of eau-de-vie to sweeten their coffee, wizened women all in black whose skirts smelled of butter going rancid in the pantry. No connection with those sugary grandmas in story books who wear their snow-white hair in a neat bun and coo over their grandchildren while they read them fairy tales. My old ladies, my granny and my great-aunts, they weren’t nearly that chummy and didn’t like it when you jumped all over them—they’d lost the habit. A peck on the cheek was all, at the beginning and end of the visit, so after the inevitable “You’ve gone and grown some more!” and “Still studying hard in school?” they really had nothing more to say to me, too busy talking with my parents in patois about the high cost of living, the rent, the lack of living space, the neighbors; they’d look over at me every once in a while, laughing. On Sundays in the summertime, we visited Aunt Caroline, biking along bumpy roads that turned into quagmires at the slightest shower, bound for the back of beyond—two or three farms and their pastures lying out on a plain. Caroline was never home, so after a perfunctory knock on the door, we’d check with the neighbors and eventually find her tying up bunches of onions or helping out with a calving. She’d come home, poke at the fire in her wood stove, break up some kindling, and fix us a light meal of soft-boiled eggs, bread and butter, and parsnip wine. A real wonder, that woman. “You’re still bursting with health, Caroline! Aren’t you bored, out here?” She thought that was funny. “What do you mean,” she’d protest, “there’s always things needing doing.” Ever get scared, you know, all alone? That really surprised her, put a twinkle in her eye. “What could anyone get up to with me, at my age . . .” I didn’t listen much, and slipping past the blind wall of the house, edged with nettles taller than I was, I’d go off to the pond to pick through the broken plates and tin cans my auntie dumped down there, all rusty and full of water teeming with bugs. Caroline would walk a little way along with us when we left, a good kilometer or so in nice weather. Then our bikes would leave her behind, a tiny dot in the fields of colza. I knew that this eighty-year-old woman, swathed in blouses and skirts even in the worst of the dog days, needed neither pity nor protection. No more than did Aunt Elise, swimming in her own lard but full of bounce, and a lousy housekeeper: when I crawled around under her bed my dress picked up dust pom-poms, and I’d inspect the dried crud on my spoon for a moment before daring to plunge it through the wrinkled skin of my poached pear. “What’s the matter with you, you’re not eating?” she’d ask, and her puzzlement would explode into a huge guffaw. “That itty-bitty pear isn’t going to plug up your fanny-hole!” Then there was my grandmother, who lived in a crummy prefab between the railway and the lumber yard in the neighborhood called la Gaieté. Whenever we arrived, she would be gathering greens for the rabbits or doing some mending or washing, which irritated my mother. “Why can’t you take it easy, at your age?” Reproaches like that exasperated my grandmother, who only a few years earlier had been hauling herself up to the railroad tracks by gripping clumps of grass, so that she could sell apples and cider to the American soldiers after the Normandy invasion. She’d grumble a bit, then bring in the pot of boiling hot coffee threaded with white foam and pour a drop of eau-de-vie on the sugar stuck to the bottom of the cups; everyone would swirl the brandy gently around. They’d talk, nattering on about the neighbors, a landlord who wouldn’t make repairs, and I’d be a touch bored, as there was nothing to explore in that little house without a proper yard, and almost nothing to eat. My grandmother would slurp greedily at the dregs in her cup. Her high cheekbones were as shiny as the yellow boxwood egg she used to darn socks. Sometimes, when she thought she was alone out in her scrap of a garden, she peed standing up, spreading her legs beneath her long black skirt. And yet, she had come in first in the canton on the exam for the primary school certificate, so she could have been a teacher, but my great-grandmother had said not on your life, she’s my eldest girl and I need her at home to raise the other five. A story told a hundred times, why her life hadn’t come up roses. Once she’d been like me, running around, going to school, with no idea what was coming, and then disaster struck: with five youngsters to hold her back, she was finished. What I didn’t understand was why she later had six of her own, without any dependents’ allowances, either. You didn’t need a map to figure out early on that kids—chicks, everyone I knew used to call them—put you truly in the hole, just buried you alive. And at the same time it seemed irresponsible, careless, the sort of thing you’d expect from poor people who had no common sense. Those large families I saw all around me meant swarms of runny-nosed brats, women pushing baby carriages and staggering along with bags of groceries, and constant griping at the end of every month. Granny had fallen into the trap but you couldn’t blame her, back then it was normal to have six, ten children; we’ve come a long way since. My aunts and uncles were so fed up with big families that my cousins are all only children. I’m an only child, too, and an afterthought as well—that’s what they call children born late in life, when a couple who hadn’t wanted any (or any more) change their minds. I was their one and only, period. I was convinced I was really lucky.

  The sole exception was Aunt Solange, poor Solange with that brood of hers, my mother always said. She lived in la Gaieté, too, and we often went there on Sundays. The neighborhood was like a vast playground where you could do anything you wanted. In the summer, I’d join my seven cousins and their friends, shrieking on the seesaws we made from planks stacked next to the lumber yard. In the winter we played tag in the one big bedroom crammed with beds. I adored all this warmth and uproar, almost enough to want to live there, but my Aunt Solange frightened me. She was old before her time, always puttering in her kitchen, her mouth twitching uncontrollably. Onc
e she spent months laid up in bed when her uterus decided to prolapse on her. Then there were the times when she would get this vacant look in her eyes; she’d open a window, close it, move the chairs around, and bang, she’d start screaming that she was going to take the children and leave, that she had always been unhappy, while my uncle just sat calmly at the table, glass in hand, not saying a word or else sneering, “You wouldn’t have any idea where to go, you idiot.” She’d rush weeping out into the courtyard, threatening to throw herself into the cistern, but her children or the neighbors would grab her first. As for us, we’d head tactfully for the door as soon as the shouting started. Looking back, I would see the youngest girl crying openmouthed, her teary face pressed against the windowpane.

  I don’t know if my other aunts were happy, but they didn’t have that beaten-down air Solange had, and they didn’t let anyone slap them around. With their red cheeks and lips, they were always in a fever of activity, always in a hurry, with barely a moment to stop on the sidewalk, clutching their grocery bags as they leaned down to give me a little air kiss and rumble, “What have you been up to, my girl?” No fond displays of affection, either, none of those puckered-up mouths or cajoling looks people use to talk to children. These women were a bit stiff, abrupt, with tempers that exploded in swear words. At the end of family dinners, at First Communions, they would laugh until they cried, burying their faces in their napkins. My Aunt Madeleine would practically split her face in half, she’d laugh so hard. I don’t remember ever seeing a single one of them knitting or patiently stirring a sauce; they’d serve cold cuts and other charcuterie, then produce from the pantry a pyramid of white paper stained with pastry cream. They couldn’t have cared less about dusting and cleaning, although they made the ritual apologies, “Please, just pay no attention to the mess.” Not domestic, these women, nothing but outdoor types, used to working like men ever since they were twelve years old, and not even somewhere clean, like a textile mill, but in a rope factory or cannery. I liked to listen to them, ask them questions about the whistle, the coveralls they had to wear, the forewoman, the times when they’d all be laughing together in the same room, and it seemed to me that they were going to school, too, only they didn’t get homework or detention. At first, before I began to admire teachers, those awesome and superior beings, before I learned that watching jars fill up with pickles is not a great profession, thought what my aunties did was a fine way to earn a living.

  Towering over my grandmother and my aunts, those incidental figures, there is the woman all in white whose voice resounds within me, envelops me: my mother. Living with her, how can I not be convinced that womanhood is glorious and even be persuaded that women are better than men? She is strength and the tempest, but also beauty, and lively curiosity, a figurehead that opens the future for me, assuring me that one must never be afraid of anything or anyone. A woman who fights against one and all: the suppliers and delinquent payers in her business, the blocked storm drain in the street, the big shots always trying to keep us down. In her wake she carries along a soft-spoken, gentle man, a dreamer who mopes for days over the slightest annoyance but who knows heaps of silly stories, riddles (“Thirty-two white horses upon a red hill”), and songs he teaches me while he’s gardening and I’m collecting worms to toss into the chicken yard: my father. I don’t make any distinction between them in my mind, just that I’m her darling, his pet, their afterthought, and I must be like her because I’m a little girl, and I’ll have breasts like hers, a permanent wave, and stockings.

  In the morning, Papa-goes-to-work, Mama-stays-home, she-does-the-housework, she-prepares-a-tasty-meal, I drone along with the others, repeating everything without asking any questions. I’m not yet ashamed that my parents aren’t normal.

  My father doesn’t leave in the morning, or in the afternoon, or ever. He stays home. He waits on customers in the café and the grocery store, he does the dishes, the cooking, the weeding. He and my mother live together in the same activity, with the men coming and going on one side, the women and children on the other, and all this makes up my world. They know the same things, they worry about the same things. He empties the cash register drawer every evening, she watches him count the take, and one or the other of them says, “Slim pickings,” or sometimes, “A good haul.” The next morning, one of them will deposit the money in their account. Not exactly the same work, true, there’s always a code, but theirs owes nothing to tradition except the laundry and ironing for my mother, the gardening for my father. As for the rest, it seems to have evolved according to their personal preferences and abilities. My mother mostly looks after the grocery store while my father tends the café. On one side, the noontime rush, a tight schedule, customers who don’t like to stand around waiting, women who want all sorts of things, a bottle of beer, a packet of Snowy pins, a wary crowd in constant need of reassurance—you’ll see, this brand here is really much better. A performance, a line of patter. My mother emerges exhausted and beaming from her shop. On the other side, men spending hour after hour over a nice friendly glass, a quiet sit-down, no one watching the clock. No point in hurrying, no need to talk up the merchandise or even talk at all, since the customers hardly let you get a word in edgewise. Lucky for us, my mother says, who ought to know, because my father’s a bit temperamental. Besides, tending the café still leaves him time for lots of other chores. When I finally wake up, to the music of pots and pans mixed in with songs and commercials on the radio, I go down to the kitchen to find him washing the dishes from the night before. He fixes my lunch. He’ll be taking me to school. Cooking dinner. In the afternoon, he’ll do some carpentry in the courtyard or slip out to the garden with his spade on his shoulder. It doesn’t make any difference to me, he’s always the same man, a bit off in the clouds, whether he’s peeling pretty potato ribbons that curl between his fingers, grilling sausages that make our eyes sting with smoke, or teaching me how to whistle while planting leeks. A serene and reliable presence at all times. Compared to the working men in the neighborhood and the traveling salesmen who are gone all day, my father seems always to be on vacation, which suits me fine. On those Thursdays when my playmates insist that it’s too cold for hopscotch in the courtyard, we play dominoes or a board game in the café. In the spring, I go with him to the garden, his pride and joy. He teaches me the funny names some vegetables have: Queen of Sheba onions, and a lettuce called Lazy Blondie. I help him stretch the string over the freshly turned earth.Together we put away a hearty lunch of cold meats and black radishes, turning over our plates to have a baked apple. On Saturdays I watch him kill the rabbit, then make it pee by pressing on its still soft belly. He peels off its skin with a sound like the tearing of old fabric. Papa-booboo who rushes in distress to inspect my bloody knee, goes to fetch the medicine and will sit for hours at my bedside when I have my chicken pox, measles, and whooping cough, reading Little Women to me or playing Hangman. Papa-chick, “You’re sillier than she is,” says my mother. Always ready to take me to the fair, to Fernandel movies, to make me a pair of stilts, to teach me some prewar slang, the cat’s pajamas and other moldy oldies that tickle me no end. Indispensable Papa, taking me to school, waiting for me at lunchtime and in the afternoon, standing with his bike, a little apart from the throng of mothers, with bicycle clips on his pants legs. Upset if I don’t appear right away. Later on, when I’ll be old enough to come home by myself, he’ll watch for my return. A father already getting on in years, amazed at having a daughter. In the unchanging golden light of memory, he crosses the courtyard, head bent because of the sun, a basket under his arm. I’m four years old; he teaches me how to hold the ends of my sleeves in my fists when I put on my coat so that my sweater doesn’t bunch up around my armpits. Nothing but images of gentleness and solicitude. Householders whose word is law, loudmouthed domestic tyrants, heroes of the battlefield and workplace—I know nothing of you. I am my father’s daughter.

  Oedipus? I couldn’t care less. And I adore her, too.
>
  That deep, throaty voice: that’s her. At parties, when it gets late, I fall asleep on her lap. Drafts, slammed doors—everything around her is always in motion, even exploding, like the ashtray that sails through the window one stupendous day to shatter on the sidewalk in front of the bewildered deliveryman who has made the mistake of forgetting some item or other. Just one of her fits of anger, the simple, reinvigorating kind: this business is for shit but for shit, she screams, and then peace, the jar of poppy-red candies that turn your tongue scarlet, the big box of assorted cookies the two of us plunder to console ourselves for her bad temper. I know, we know that she shouts for exercise, for fun, and that in reality she’ll never get enough of being the boss. Even though it’s only a small shop, she’s still the boss. When she lets down her guard, she says she played her cards right after all. The store takes up about three-quarters of her time. She’s the one who sees the salesmen, checks the invoices, figures out the taxes. Days of gloomy muttering when she sits at her paperwork, going over her additions in a low voice, licking her finger to thumb through the bills, and is absolutely not to be disturbed. An exception, this silence, because on other days she’s surrounded by lively noise, the clanking of bottles, the clatter of the scales, stories of illness and death, when the only quiet moment is the little sum totted up on the Camembert wrapper or the kilo bag of sugar, then it’s back to the latest news of who’s dating, who’s looking for work, who’s going through the change of life. My first contact with the outside world is through my mother. My childhood features none of those homes where the only sounds are the faint tac-tac-tac of a sewing machine, the discreet noises of mothers who leave everything in apple-pie order as if by magic. Sometimes I go with other girls from my class to ring doorbells in the well-to-do part of town, along the rue de la Republique or avenue Clemenceau. Clutching our Tuberculosis Society stamps, we wait for a long time before the doors finally open only a crack, revealing timid women cowering in hallways filled with cooking smells, shadowy, depressing women who quickly shut us out again, displeased at having been bothered. As for my mother, she’s the center of a vast network of women all telling her the stories of their lives (but only in the afternoon, when they do their shopping), of children who come in three times in one hour for two chocolate mice and one Malabar bubble gum, of old folks who are slow to pick up their change and the bags they’ve set down at their feet, steadying themselves with one hand on the counter. I never imagine she would do anything else.