The Event (2)
Annie Ernaux
Translated by xia23
In Rouen in October, 1963, I expected my periods for more than a week. It was a sunny and warm month. I felt clumsy and sweaty in my coat which went out very early, especially inside the department stores where I was strolling, buying some stockings, while waiting for the courses to take. When I entered my room, in the university dormitories for girls on Herbouville street, I always hoped to see one stain over my underwear. I started to write NOTHING, in capital letters and underline in my agenda every evening. At night I woke up, I knew immediately it was “nothing”. Last year at the same period, I had started to write a novel, this seemed to me a quite distant and just like it never recurred.
One afternoon I went to a movie theater to watch a black and white Italian movie, Il posto ("The Place" in Italian) [2]. It was slow-moving and sad, the life of a young boy in his first job, a place of office. The hall was almost empty. On watching the frail silhouette, in a rain coat, of the small employee, his humiliations in front of the hopeless desolation in the film, I knew my period would not come back.
One evening I let myself be dragged to a theater by some dorm girls who had one extra ticket. It was “Huis clos” (“No exit”in French) [3] and I had never watched this contemporary piece. It was a full house. I travelled with the scene, distant and well-informed violence, thinking continuously that I did not have my period. I only recollected the character of Estelle, the blonde in a blue dress, and the character of Garçon dressed as a flunkey with red eyes without eyelids. I wrote “formidable. If only that I never had such REALITY in my kidneys” in my agenda.
At the end of October I stopped believing the periods would come again. I made an appointment with a gynecologist, the doctor N., for November 8.
In the weekend of all Saints’ day [4], I returned to my parents’ house as usual. I had a fear that my mother would not be interested in my period arriving so late. I was sure that every month she would check my underwear from my dirty linen I brought her for wash.
One Monday, I got up feeling queasy in my stomach and had a strange taste in my mouth. In a pharmacy, they gave me Hepatoum [5], a thick and green liquid which made me sick even more.
O., a dorm girl, offered me her teaching job on the French course in the Saint-Dominique institute. It was a good occasion to get a little money on top of my scholarship. The superior welcomed me with the Literature Collection of the 16th Century by Lagarde and Michard [6] in her hand. I told her that I had never taught and that scared me. That was normal, she said herself, in two years, had never been able to enter the philosophy class without lowering her head to look at floor. Sitting on a chair opposite to me, she mimed this souvenir. I only saw her veiled head. On leaving with the Lagarde and Michard she had given me, I saw myself in the 10th grade class [7] under the girls’ gazes and I wanted to vomit. Later, I called the superior for refusing the courses. She talked to me coldly and tookt the textbook back.
On Friday, November 8, while I headed for a location in l’Hôtel-de-Ville by bus and went to see Dr. N., in La Fayette street, I came across Jacques S., a student majoring in French, the son of a regional factory head. He wanted to know if I would spend some time on the Left Bank [8]. I said that I was sick in my stomach and was going to see a stomatologist. He categorically corrected me: the stomatologist does not take care of stomach but only for infections of the mouth. For fear that he might suspect something due to my blunder and he might want to accompany me to the doctor’s office, I abruptly left him when the bus arrived.
Just at the moment when I went down from the table, my big green sweater fell again over my thighs, the gynecologist told me that I was surely pregnant. What I thought to be once for stomach was actually nausea. He prescribed injections for me for letting my periods come back even though it didn’t look like that he believed that would have any effect. At the door step, he smiled joyfully, “the children of love are always the most beautiful thing". It was an awful phrase.
I went back to the university dorm on foot. In the agenda, there is “I am pregnant. It is horrible”.
At the beginning of October, for several times I made love to P., a student of political science, whom I had met in vacations and went to see again, in Bordeaux. I knew myself the risk in a period, according to Ogino [9] calendar of birth control, but I never believed “this could take” in the interior of my stomach. In love and pleasure, I did not feel an intrinsic body different from men’s.
All images of my stay in Bordeaux – the room on Pasteur Avenue with incessant noise from vehicles, the narrow bed, the Montaigne terrace, the theater where people had seen an epic, “Abduction of Sabines” [10] – only had the sole significance: I was here and I did not know that I was full of energy to become pregnant.
The nurse of Crous gave me an injection that evening, without comments and another one the following morning. It was the weekend of November 11. I returned to my parents’ house. In a moment I had a quick and brief flow of pinkish blood. I dumped my underwear and my stained pants on the pile of dirty linen, good on evidence. (Agenda: incoherent outpouring. Something to distract my mother). On my return to Rouen, I called my doctor N. who confirmed my state and announced he would give me a pregnancy certificate. I received it later. Child birth of: Ms. Annie Duchesne. Prediction: July 8, 1964. I saw the summer, I saw the sun. I tore the certificate.
I wrote to P., that I was pregnant and I did not want to keep it. We had parted the uncertainty about the rest of our relationship and I felt satisfaction from disrupting his carefreeness, even though I had no illusion over the profound relief which my decision of abortion caused him.
One week later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. But that was not something I could be interested in.
The months followed were soaked in light of limbo. I see myself walking continuously on streets. Every time I thought of such a period, it came to me like literary expressions “The crossing of appearances”, “Beyond good and evil”, or still “The voyage to end of the night”. This always seemed to reflect what I had lived and felt, something inexpressible, yet beautiful.
For many years, I have hung around this event of my life. Reading the abortion story in a novel I am deep in shock without images or thoughts as if the words instantly metamorphosed into violent sensation. The same way, listening to La Javanaise [11], J’ai la mémoire qui flanche [12] by chance, introducing only some song which accompanied me during this period, touches me deeply.
A week ago I started to write this story, without any certainty to continue. I only wanted to verify my desire of writing here. One desire which I lived through continuously, each time I was writing the book I had worked on for two years. I endured powerlessly to stop thinking of that. I gave in, I thought I was frightened. But I also talked to myself that I might die without having done this event. If there was a mistake it would be this one. One night, I had a dream that in my hands I held a book I had written on my abortion, but people could not find it anywhere in a book store and it was not listed in any catalog. At the bottom of the book cover, the words OUT OF PRINT were in capitals. I did not know if the dream meant that I had to write such book or if it was worthless to write.
With such a story, it is time that I start and reluctantly prepare myself. Now I know that I have decided to go all the way, to what it comes to, in the same way which I had, at the age of 23, when I tore the certification of my pregnancy.
I want to immerse myself again in this period of my life, knowing what has been caught here. Such exploration will be part of the framework of a story, and will only be able to rend an event which has been from the time inside and outside of myself. An intimate agenda and a dairy kept during these months will bring me reference points and necessary proofs for establishing the facts. I will try hard to come down in each image, until I have the physical sensation of “join”, and some words come into sight, of which I could to say, “that is right”. To hear each of these phrases again, indelible on me, the sense becomes then so unbearable or conversely so comforting, that thinking them today submerges me from disgust or from sweetness.
The form under which I have lived through such experience of abortion – the clandestine nature – coming within one past story seems to me not a valid ground for leaving it buried – even if the paradox from one fair law is almost always written by forcing the former victims silenced, in the name of “that’s the end of it”, so the same silence as before covers what happened. It is precise because no more banning hangs over abortion that I can, setting aside the collective means and the necessary methods, which have been simplified and imposed by the fight of the 1970s – “violence against women” etc. –, confront, in its reality, such unforgettable event.
Doctors are sentenced to be in prison and be fined 1) the author who maneuvers abortion on someone; 2) the doctors, midwives, pharmacists, and culprits, who have indicated or favored these maneuvers; 3) the woman who does her own abortion or who grants abortion; 4) the provocation into abortion and the propaganda for contraception. A ban on the profession is being abled in addition to pronounce guilty, for those culprits in the second category, the permanent or temporary deprivation of exercise for their professions.
Nouveau Larousse Universel (New Universal Larrouse), edition of 1948.
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[1]. p. 274-278. L’Événement. Annie Ernaux. Écrire la vie, QuartoGallimard. 2011
Annie Ernaux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Ernaux
Born 9/1/1940 - , Nobel Laureate in literature in 2022.
[2]. Il posto:
In wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Posto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WLfcVz3l10
[3]. Huis clos:
In wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Exit_(1954_film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq23YQSE4-s&t=70s?
[4]. La Toussaint: All Saints’ day.
p. 987, Harrap’s French and English College Dictionary, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2006.
In wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Saints'_Day
[5]. Hepatoum:
Drug family: herbal medicine aiming digestive; this drug is used for facilitation of the bile secretion in intestine (translated from French).
https://www.vidal.fr/medicaments/gammes/hepatoum-4493.html
[6]. Anthology of literature of 16th century, by Lagarde and Michard
[7]. La classe de seconde: seconde, 10th grade (sophomore) in high schools in America.
p.177, p. 898. Harrap’s French and English College Dictionary, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2006.
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