At this precise moment of the winter of 1967–68, she is probably not thinking of anything, absorbed in her enjoyment of their self-contained unit of three, which a telephone call or the doorbell would disrupt, and her temporary discharge from tasks whose main object is the maintenance of the unit, shopping lists, laundry counts, what are you making for dinner tonight—an incessant looking-ahead to the immediate future, which complicates the exterior dimension of her duties, her teaching job. In family moments she feels rather than thinks.
The thoughts she considers real come to her when she is alone or taking the child for a walk in the stroller. For her, real thoughts do not concern people’s ways of speaking and dressing, the height of sidewalks for the stroller, the ban on Jean Genet’s The Screens, or the war in Vietnam. They are questions about herself, being and having, existence. Real thoughts plumb the depths of transient sensations, impossible to communicate. These are the things her book would be made of, if she had the time to write, but she no longer even has time to read. In her diary, which she rarely opens, as if it posed a threat to the family unit and she were no longer entitled to an inner life, she writes, “I have no ideas at all. I don’t try to explain my life anymore” and “I’m a petite bourgeoise who has arrived.” She feels she has deviated from her former goals, as if her only progress in life were of the material kind. “I’m afraid of settling into this quiet and comfortable life, and afraid to have lived without being aware of it.” Just as she makes this observation, she knows she isn’t ready to give up the things this diary never includes, the living-together, the shared intimacy, the apartment to which she eagerly returns after class, the sleeping side-by-side, the sizzle of the electric razor in the morning, the tale of The Three Little Pigs at night, the repetition she believes she hates, which ties her down—all the things whose lack she felt when she left for three days to write the CAPES,12 and which, when she imagines their accidental loss, make her heart grow heavy.
She no longer imagines herself lying on the beach or as a writer publishing her first book. The future is laid out in precise material terms: a better job, promotions and acquisitions, the start of kindergarten for the child. These are not dreams but concrete plans. She often revisits images of herself single, in the streets of cities where she has walked and in the rooms she has occupied—in a young ladies’ hostel in Rouen, in Finchley as an au pair, or a penzione on via Servio Tullio, on holiday in Rome. These are her selves, it seems to her, who continue to exist in these places. In other words, past and future are reversed. The object of desire is not the future but the past; she desires to be back in the room in Rome, in the summer of 1963. In her journal she writes: “Out of extreme narcissism, I want to see my past set down on paper and in that way, be as I am not” and “There’s a certain image of women that torments me. Maybe orient myself in that direction.” In a Dorothea Tanning painting she saw in a show three years before in Paris, a bare-chested woman stands before a row of doors that stand ajar. The title was Birthday. She thinks this painting represents her life and that she is inside it, as she was once inside Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, and later Nausea. With every book she reads, To the Lighthouse, Rezvani’s Les années-lumière, she wonders if she could write her life in that way too.
She is visited by fleeting images of her parents in the small Normandy town, her mother taking off her work coat to go to evening prayer, her father coming up from the garden with a spade over his shoulder, a slow-moving world that continues to exist, more surreal than a film and far removed from the world in which she lives, modern and cultivated, forward-moving—toward what is difficult to say.
Between what happens in the world and what happens to her, there is no point of convergence. They are two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received than forgotten, the other all static shots.
At every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we’re told to think—no less by books or ads in the Métro than by funny stories—are other things that society hushes up without knowing it is doing so. Thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things. Then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognized at last, while underneath other silences start to form.
Later, journalists and historians would love to recall the words of Peter Viansson-Ponté in Le Monde a few months before May ’68: France is bored! It would be easy to find bleak photos of oneself, full of undatable gloom, of Sundays in front of the TV watching Anne Marie Peysson, and one would be sure things had been that way for everyone—frozen, uniformly gray. And television, with its fixed iconography and minimal cast of actors, would institute a ne varietur version of events, the unalterable impression that all of us had been eighteen to twenty-five that year and hurled cobblestones at the riot police, handkerchiefs pressed to our mouths. Bombarded by the recurrent camera images, we suppressed those of our own May ’68, far from notorious—the deserted Place de la Gare on a Sunday, no passengers, no newspapers in the kiosks—or glorious—one day when we were afraid of lacking money, gas, and especially food, rushing to the bank to withdraw cash and filling a cart to overflowing at Carrefour, from an inherited memory of hunger.