A Woman's Story Read online

  On the other hand:

  – going for rides on the old carthorse, skating on the frozen pond in the winter of 1916, skipping games and hide-and-seek, and the insults thrown at the “young ladies” who went to the local convent school (these insults were accompanied by the ritual sign of contempt—turning around and slapping one’s bottom sharply);

  – leading the full outdoor life of a little country girl, displaying the same knowledge as the boys: sawing wood, shaking the fruit off apple trees, and killing hens by plunging a pair of scissors down their throat. There was, however, one difference: she made sure no one touched her “place.”

  She went to the local primary school, missing class when she was needed in the fields or when one of her brother or sisters fell ill. She remembered little of this period, only that the schoolmistresses expected the girls to be polite and clean: they inspected their collars and fingernails and asked them to remove one of their shoes (they never knew which foot to wash). My mother went through school without experiencing the slightest flicker of enthusiasm. In those days, nobody “pushed” their children, they had to “have it in them.” School was merely a phase one went through before earning a living. One could miss school, it wasn’t the end of the world. But not mass. Even if one stood at the back of the church, one could share in the beauty, the opulence, and the spirit of the ceremony—gold chalices, embroidered chasubles, hymns—and get the impression one didn’t live in total poverty. Early in life, my mother developed a strong taste for religion. Catechism was the one subject she learned with passion and she knew all the answers by heart. (Later, in church, her responses were said in the same breathless, exalted tones, as if to show that she knew.)

  She was neither happy nor unhappy to leave school at the age of twelve- and a half, the common practice in those days.† She got herself a job in a margarine factory where she suffered from the cold and the damp, her wet hands developing chilblains that stayed with her all winter. After that, she couldn’t stand the sight of margarine. So, no “dreamy adolescence” for her, but the long wait until Saturday evening and the pay one brought back to one’s mother, saving just enough to afford some face powder, a copy of L’Echo de la Mode,† and a few giggles and grudges. One day the foreman got his scarf caught in one of the machines. Nobody came to his rescue and he had to disengage himself on his own. My mother was standing right next to him. How can one understand her attitude without having been subjected to the same degree of alienation?

  In the wake of the industrialization of the twenties, a rope factory was set up in the area, tapping all the local youth. My mother was taken on, as were her sisters and two brothers. To make life easier, my grandmother moved into a small house a hundred meters away from the factory, where she and her daughters did the cleaning after work. My mother liked it in the clean, dry workshops, where one was allowed to chat and joke. She was proud of her job. Working in a big factory made her feel civilized compared to the barbarians—the country girls who stayed behind with the cows—and free compared to the slaves—the housemaids reduced to “licking the arses of the rich.” And yet she realized how removed she was from her one and only dream: to become a shop girl.

  Like many large families, my mother’s family was a tribe: my grandmother and her children had the same way of behaving in public and of living out their semirural working condition. This meant that people knew at once who they were, “the D—s.” Whatever the circumstances, they would always be shouting, both the men and the women. Despite their gay, exuberant nature, they were touchy and quick to take offense, telling people straight out what they thought of them. Above all, they were proud of the effort they put into their work. They found it hard to believe that anyone could show greater physical commitment. They overcame the limitations of their class by assuming they were “somebody.” This may explain the frenzy with which they consumed everything, their work, their food, laughing hysterically, only to announce an hour later, “I’m going to drown myself in the water tank.”

  My mother was the one with the proud, violent temper. She was aware that she belonged to the lower class and she resented it, refusing to be judged according to her social status alone. She would often say of the rich, “They’re no better than us.” She was an attractive blonde with grey eyes, pleasantly plump and bursting with health. She read anything she could lay hands on. She enjoyed singing the latest popular songs, making-up, and going out with friends to the cinema or to the theatre, to see Roger la Honte and Le Maître de Forges. Always ready for a “bit of fun.”

  But in those days, in a small town where people’s main concern was to learn as much as they could about their neighbors, one was inevitably torn between wanting to “enjoy one’s youth” and fearing for one’s reputation. My mother tried to live up to the best possible image people could have of her kind: “Factory girls, but nonetheless respectable.” She went to mass and to Holy Communion, embroidered her trousseau at the local orphanage run by nuns, and never went to the woods alone with a boy. How could she know that her short skirts (she took them up herself), her urchin cut, the “bold” expression in her eyes, and especially the fact that she worked with men, meant that she would never be seen as a “decent young girl,” which was what she had always longed to be.

  My mother’s youth involved trying to escape the dull certainties of her fate: inevitable poverty, the threat of alcoholism, and everything else that happened to a factory girl who had slipped into bad habits (smoking in public, hanging around the streets at night, going out in soiled clothes). The sort of girl that no “respectable young man” would look at twice.

  None of her brothers or sisters were spared. Four of them have died over the past twenty-five years. For a long time their frenzied appetite was quenched by alcohol, the men together in cafés, the women alone at home. (Only the youngest sister, who didn’t drink, is still alive.) Unless they had had a certain amount to drink, they remained sullen and taciturn. They slogged through their work in silence, “a good employee” or “a charwoman who never gave any cause for complaint.” Over the years they got used to being judged solely in terms of how much they had drunk, they were “tipsy” or they were “sloshed.” One year, on Whit Saturday, I met my aunt M—on the way back from school. It was her day off and as usual she was going into town with a shopping bag full of empty bottles. She kissed me on both cheeks, swaying slightly, incapable of uttering a single word. My writing would never have been what it is had I not met my aunt that day.

  Fora woman, marriage was a matter of life or death. It was either the hope of “making it work together” or else hitting rock bottom. So one had to be able to recognize the man who would make a woman happy. Naturally, not a farmer’s boy, even one with money, with whom one would end up milking the cows in a village without electricity. My father worked at the rope factory. He was a tall, well-groomed man who definitely had a “style of his own.” He didn’t drink but saved all his pay for the housekeeping. He had a quiet, cheerful nature and was seven years older than her (“One didn’t go for the young lads!”). Smiling and blushing, my mother would tell me: “I was courted quite a bit in my time. Several men proposed to me but it was your father I chose.” She used to add: “He didn’t look common.”

  The story of my father’s life was no different from my mother’s. He came from a large family, his father was a carter, his mother a weaver, and he left school at the age of twelve to start working in the fields. His elder brother had got himself a good job as a railwayman and two of his sisters had married shop assistants. Before that they worked as housemaids: they spoke without raising their voices, moved in a ladylike manner, and never drew attention to themselves in public. True, they enjoyed an air of “respectability” but tended to look down on factory girls like my mother. Her appearance and her ways were too reminiscent of their own world, the one they were leaving behind. In their opinion, my father “could have done better for himself.”

  They were married in 1928.

  In
the wedding photograph she looks like a madonna, with pale, regular features, a kiss-curl and a half-veil hugging her head. Heavy breasts and hips; pretty legs (the dress leaves her knees uncovered). She isn’t smiling but her face wears a serene expression, a glint of curiosity and amusement in the eyes. He, with his moustache and bow tie, looks much older. His brows are knitted and he looks worried. Maybe he is afraid the photograph will come out wrong. He’s got his arm around her waist and she’s resting one hand on his shoulder. They are in a country lane, beside a courtyard overgrown with grass. The leaves of two apple trees interlace to form a dome above their heads. A small house is visible in the background. I can conjure up the scene vividly: the dry earth beneath their feet, the loose gravel and the country smell of early summer. But she is not my mother. Stare as I may at the photograph, until the faces actually seem to move, all I see is an impenetrable young woman, ill at ease in a costume that could have come straight out of a twenties film. Only the broad hand clutching her gloves and the proud upward tilt of her head tell me it is she.

  The young bride was both proud and happy, of that I have very little doubt. But of her desires I know nothing. The first few nights of her married life—she once confided to a sister—she went to bed still wearing her pants under her nightdress. It didn’t mean much. In those days, sex was inevitably tinged with shame. Even so, one had to make love, and properly too, if one was “normal.”

  At first she enjoyed playing the married woman who had settled down, showing off the new china and the embroidered linen, and walking arm-in-arm with her “husband.” There were the laughs, the arguments (she didn’t know how to cook), the making up (she never sulked for long), and the feeling she was starting a new life. But wages were still low. They had the rent to pay, and the installments on the furniture. They had to economize on everything and ask their parents for vegetables (they had no garden), so in effect they were leading much the same existence as before. They themselves lived their lives differently. Although they both wanted to succeed, he feared the struggle ahead and felt tempted to give in and accept their lot. She, on the other hand, was convinced that they had nothing to lose and that they should try to come up in the world “at any cost.” She was proud to be a factory girl but too proud to stay one all her life, dreaming of the only ambition which lay within her reach: running a grocery business. She was the driving force behind their relationship and so he followed her.

  In 1931, they took out a loan on a grocery shop and a small adjoining café situated in Lillebonne, an industrial estate of seven thousand inhabitants twenty-five kilometers away from Yvetot. The store lay in the Valley, where nineteenth-century cotton mills ruled people’s lives from infancy to death. Even now, to mention the Valley in prewar times is to evoke images of horror: the highest concentration of alcoholics and unmarried mothers, the damp running down the walls, and the babies dying from diarrhea within two hours. My mother was twenty-five at the time. It was here that she must have become the woman that she was, and acquired the expression, the personality, and the manners that I thought had always been hers.

  As the business didn’t bring enough money, my father used to get jobs working on building sites. Later he was taken on by a refinery in the Basse-Seine, where he ended up as foreman. She ran the shop on her own.

  From the very start, she threw herself into it (“a friendly word for every customer,” “always in a good humor”), showing remarkable patience (“I could have sold anything!”). She was familiar with the industrial poverty one found in the Valley, having known it herself, if on a lesser scale. She was also aware of her situation and realized that her own livelihood depended on families who were living from hand to mouth.

  Not a moment to herself, I’m sure, what with rushing in and out of the shop, the café, and the kitchen, where a little girl had started to grow up. (She was born soon after they moved to the Valley.) Staying open from six in the morning—when the factory girls picked up the milk—to eleven o’clock at night—the last rounds were for the card and billiard players. Being “interrupted” at any moment by customers who would pop in several times a day. She resented earning little more than a factory girl and was worried they would never “make ends meet.” On the other hand, she enjoyed a sense of power—after all, didn’t she help other families survive by giving them credit?—and she loved to share in the conversations—Oh! the lives that went on in that shop. In short, she felt happy in her new, broadened surroundings.

  She gradually became more “civilized.” Because she had to go everywhere (the tax office, the town hall) and deal with suppliers and representatives, she learned to watch her language and never went out hatless. Before buying a dress, she would consider whether it was “chic.” She hoped, and later knew, that she would never be taken for a “country lass.” Besides Delly’s popular romances and the Catholic works by Pierre l’Ermite, she took to reading Mauriac, Bernanos, and Colette’s “scandalous stories.” My father found it more difficult to adapt. His experience as a factory hand had left him with a shy, gauche manner and somehow he never quite felt at home behind the bar.

  There were the black years of the economic crisis, the strikes, Léon Blum (“the first man to be on the side of the workers”), the social reforms, and the late-night parties in the café. There were the visits from her relatives—they laid down mattresses in all the rooms—who returned home loaded with provisions (she was a generous person and, after all, the only one to have made it). There were also the arguments with “the other side of the family.” And then the sorrow. Their little girl had a gay, excitable nature. In one photograph she looks tall for her age, with skinny legs and knobby knees. She is laughing, one hand raised to her forehead to keep the sun out of her eyes. Another photograph shows her at her cousin’s confirmation. Although her face wears a serious expression, she is playing with her fingers, spread out in front of her. She died in 1938, three days before Easter. They only wanted one baby as they felt the child would be happier alone.

  There was the sorrow, over which a veil was slowly drawn, the stark silence of depression, the prayers, and the belief that their little girl “had gone to heaven.”

  And then, in early 1940, life once more: she was expecting a second child. I was to be born in September.

  I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.

  It was two months ago that I started this book and wrote “My mother died on Monday 7 April” on a blank sheet of paper. I can accept that sentence now. When I read it, the emotions I feel are the same as if someone else had written it. But I can’t bear going near the hospital and the old people’s home, or suddenly remembering details about the last day of her life. Initially, I thought I would find it easy to write. In actual fact, I spend a lot of time reflecting on what I have to say and on the choice and sequence of words, as if there existed only one immutable order which would convey the truth about my mother (although what this truth involves I am unable to say). When I am writing, the only thing that matters to me is to find that particular order.

  Then the exodus: she walked all the way to Niort with some neighbors, sleeping in barns and drinking the local wine, then cycled back on her own, passing the German roadblocks, to have her baby at home one month later. She wasn’t afraid and was so dirty when she got back that my father didn’t recognize her.

  Under the Occupation, life in the Valley centered on their shop and the hope of getting fresh supplies. She tried to feed everyone, especially large families, because her natural pride encouraged her to be kind and helpful to others. During the bombing, saying she preferred to die “in her own home,” she wouldn’t take refuge in the public shelters carved out of the hillside. In the afternoon, between warnings, she would take me for a walk in my stroller, claiming the fresh air would do me good. Those were the days of easy friendship: sitting on a bench in the public park while my father was left in charge of the empty shop, she would get talking to demure young women who sat k
nitting in front of the sand pit. The English and the Americans entered Lillebonne. The tanks crossed the Valley, distributing chocolate and packets of orange powder, which one picked up from the dust. Every evening, the café packed with soldiers, maybe the occasional brawl, but all the same a time of rejoicing and, of course knowing how to say “shit for you.” Afterwards she spoke of the war like a novel, the great story of her life. (Oh! how she loved Gone with the Wind.) I think she saw the war years as a break in the struggle to succeed. With so much misery around, fighting for social advancement had lost all meaning.

  The woman of that time cut a handsome figure, with a fine head of hair, which she dyed red. She had a formidable voice and would often shout in thunderous tones. She liked to laugh too—a deep, throaty laugh, which revealed her teeth and gums. She sang as she did the ironing—Le Temps des Cerises, Riquita Jolie Fleur de Java. She wore turbans and had two favorite dresses, a summer one with big, blue stripes and a soft, beige one made of seersucker. She powdered her face with a puff in a mirror above the sink and dabbed perfume behind her ear. When she put on lipstick, she always started with the heart-shaped bit in the middle. She turned to face the wall when she fastened her corset. Her flesh bulged through the crisscross of laces, joined together at her waist by a knot and a small rosette. I knew every detail of her body. I thought that I would grow up to become her.

  One Sunday they are having a picnic on the edge of an embankment, near the woods. I remember being between them, in a warm nest of voices, flesh, and continual laughter. On the way back we were caught in an air raid. I am sitting on the crossbar of my father’s bike, while she rides down the slope ahead of us, her back straight, the seat firmly wedged between her buttocks. I am afraid of the shells, afraid too that she will die. I believe we were both in love with my mother.