Ernaux Annie - Happening

Copyright 2000 by ditions Gallimard
English translation copyright 2001 by Seven Stories Press

A Seven Stories Press First Edition

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
[Evnement. English]
Happening / Annie Ernaux ; translated from the French by Tanya Leslie.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-60980-226-4
1. Ernaux, Annie, 1940 2. Authors, French20th centuryBiography. 3. AbortionFrance. I. Leslie, Tanya. II. Title.
PQ2665.R67 Z46413 2001
843.914dc21
[B]

2001040059

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v3.1

I wish for two things:
that happening turn to writing.
And that writing be happening.

MICHEL LEIRIS

I wonder if memory is not simply a question
of following things through to the end.

YKO TSUSHIMA

I GOT OFF AT BARBS MTRO STATION . Like last time, men were idly waiting, clustered at the foot of the overhead subway. People were trudging along the sidewalk with pink shopping bags from the discount store Tati. I turned into the Boulevard Magenta and recognized the clothing store Billy with its anoraks hanging outside. A woman was walking toward meplump legs sheathed in black stockings with a bold pattern. The Rue Amboise-Par was almost empty until you reached the vicinity of the hospital. I made my way down the long passage inside the Elisa wing. For the first time I noticed a bandstand in the courtyard running along the glassed-in corridor. I wondered how I would be seeing all this on the way back. I walked through door 15 and up two floors to the reception area of the screening unit. I handed the secretary a card with my number. She consulted a box of files and pulled out a brown envelope containing documents. I held out my hand but she didnt give it to me. She laid it down on the desk, instructing me to take a seat and wait for my name to be called out.

The waiting room consists of two adjoining areas. I chose the one nearer the doctors office, where there were more people. I began marking the essays I had brought with me. Soon afterward, a very young girl with long blonde hair handed over her card. I made sure that she too was not given an envelope and was told to sit down and wait. The people already waiting there were seated far apart: a man in his thirties, fashionably dressed with a receding hairline; a young black guy with a walkman; a middle-aged man with weathered features, slumped in his seat. After the fair-haired girl, a fourth man strode into the room: he settled confidently in a chair and pulled out a book from his briefcase. Then a couple arrived: the girl in leggings stretched over a pregnant stomach, the man in a business suit.

There were no magazines on the table, only a few leaflets on the nutritional value of dairy produce and how to come to terms with AIDS. The woman in leggings was speaking to her companion; she kept standing up, embracing him, caressing him. He remained silent and motionless, both hands stiffly resting on an umbrella. The girl with sandy hair was staring at the floor, her eyes half-closed, a leather jacket folded over her knees; she seemed petrified. At her feet lay a large overnight bag and a small backpack. I wondered if she had any particular reason to be worried. Maybe she had come to pick up her results before going away for the weekend or visiting her parents in the country. The lady doctor emerged from her officea young woman, slim, vivacious, in a coral skirt and black stockings. She called out a number. No one stood up. It was someone from the next room, a boy who hurried by; I glimpsed a pony tail and glasses.

The young black man was summoned, then someone from the other room. No one moved or spoke, except the woman in leggings. The only time we all looked up was when the lady doctor appeared in the doorway or when someone left her office. We would follow them with our eyes.

The telephone rang several timespeople wanting an appointment or inquiring about opening hours. At one point, the receptionist left the room and came back with a biologist to answer a call. He kept saying, no, your count is normal, perfectly normal. His words rang out ominously in the quiet room. The person on the phone was bound to be HIV positive.

I had finished marking my essays. I kept picturing the same blurred sceneone Saturday and Sunday in July, the motions of lovemaking, the ejaculation. This scene, buried for months, was the reason for my being here today. I likened the embracing and writhing of naked bodies to a dance of death. I felt that the man whom I had half-heartedly agreed to see again had come all the way from Italy with the sole purpose of giving me AIDS. Yet I couldnt associate the two: lovemaking, warm skin and sperm and my presence in the waiting room. I couldnt imagine sex ever being related to anything else.

The lady doctor called out my name. Before I had even entered her office, she flashed a broad grin at me. I took this to be a good sign. Closing the door, she immediately said, the tests are negative. I burst out laughing. I paid no attention to what she said after that. She seemed in a happy, mischievous mood.

I rushed down the two flights of stairs and walked back the same way in a trance. I told myself that once again I had been saved. I wondered if the girl with long blonde hair had been saved too. At Barbs station, crowds stood facing each other across the platforms, with occasional bursts of pink Tati bags.

I realized that I had lived through these events at Lariboisire Hospital the same way I had awaited Dr. Ns verdict in 1963, swept by the same feelings of horror and disbelief. So it would appear my life is confined to the period separating the Ogino method from the age of cheap condom dispensers. Its one way of measuring it, possibly the most reliable one of all.

IN OCTOBER 1963, IN THE CITY OF ROUEN , I waited for my period for over a week. It was a warm, sunny month. I felt heavy and stuffy in my winter coat, especially in the department stores where I had taken to browsing and buying stockings, waiting for college to resume. When I got back to my room in the girls dorm in the Rue dHerbouville, I would still hope to see a stain appear on my panties. I began writing in my diary every eveningthe word NOTHING in big, underlined capital letters. I would wake up in the middle of the night and instinctively know that nothing had happened. The year before, around the same time, I had started work on a novel; now this seemed faraway, something that was not to be pursued.

One afternoon I went to see Il Posto, an Italian film in black and white. It was the slow, sad story of a young man working as an office clerkhis very first job. The cinema was almost empty. As I watched the frail figure of the boy in his cheap raincoat, the humiliations he suffered during his pathetic existence, somehow I knew the bleeding would not come back.