Happening – WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781910695838
• eBook ISBN:
  9781910695845
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

Happening

I got off at Barbès. Like last time, men were idly waiting, clustered at the foot of the Métro overhead. People were trudging along the pavement with pink shopping bags from the discount store Tati. I turned into the Boulevard Magenta and recognized the clothes shop Billy, with its anoraks hanging outside. A woman was walking towards me – plump legs sheathed in black stockings with a bold pattern. The Rue Amboise-Paré was almost empty until you reached the vicinity of the hospital. I made my way down the long vaulted corridor 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 didn’t 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 doctor’s office, where there were more people. I began marking the essays I had brought with me. Soon afterwards, 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 doctor emerged from her office – a 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 ponytail 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 doctor appeared in the doorway or when someone left her office. We would follow them with our eyes.

The telephone rang several times – people 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 scene – one 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 couldn’t associate the two: lovemaking, warm skin and sperm, and my presence in the waiting room. I couldn’t imagine sex ever being related to anything else.

The 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 Barbès 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 Lariboisière Hospital the same way I had awaited Dr N’s 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. It’s one way of measuring it, possibly the most reliable one of all.

In October 1963, in 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 classes to resume. When I got back to my room in the girls’ halls of residence in the Rue d’Herbouville, I would still hope to see a stain appear on my panties. I began writing in my journal every evening – the 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 clerk – his 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.

One evening I was talked into going to the theatre by some of the girls who had a spare ticket. They were putting on Huis clos by Jean-Paul Sartre and I had never been to see a contemporary production. The theatre was packed. I stared at the brightly lit stage at the back, obsessed with the fact that I no longer had my period. All I can remember about the play is the character called Estelle, a blonde girl in a blue dress, and the Boy dressed as a manservant, with red, lidless eyes. In my journal I wrote: ‘Fantastic. If only I didn’t have this REALITY inside me.’

By the end of October I had given up hope. I made an appointment to consult a gynaecologist, Dr N, on 8 November.

On All Saints’ Day I went back to spend the weekend with my parents as I did every year. I was afraid my mother would ask me why my period was late. I was sure she kept an eye on my underwear as she sorted through the dirty laundry I would bring her once a month.

The following Monday I woke up feeling queasy, with a strange taste in my mouth. The pharmacist gave me a bottle of Hépatoum, a thick greenish liquid that made me feel even worse.

O, one of the girls from halls, suggested that I fill in for her and teach French at a convent school, the Institution Saint-Dominique. It was a great opportunity to earn some money on top of my scholarship. I was received by Mother Superior. She was holding a copy of the sixteenth-century Lagarde et Michard. I told her that I had never taught before and that the idea scared me. That was perfectly normal, she herself had been unable to enter a philosophy class for two years without keeping her head down, her eyes glued to the floor. Seated opposite me, she mimicked the scene. Suddenly all I could see was her veiled skull. As I was leaving with the Lagarde et Michard, I pictured myself teaching seconde under the close scrutiny of the girls and I felt like vomiting. The next day I called Mother Superior and told her I had changed my mind. In a curt voice, she instructed me to return the book.

On Friday 8 November, walking towards the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville to catch a bus to the Rue Lafayette where I had an appointment with Dr N, I ran into Jacques S, a humanities student whose father ran a local factory. He asked me why I was heading for the Left Bank. I replied that I had a stomach ache and was going to see a stomatologist. He quickly put me right; a stomatologist is a specialist for mouth disorders, not stomach complaints. Fearing that he might suspect something because of my slip-up and might offer to accompany me to the doctor’s office, I took leave of him hurriedly when the bus drew up.

As I clambered down from the examination table, my thick green sweater falling back onto my thighs, the gynaecologist informed me that I was most certainly pregnant. What I had taken to be stomach pains were bouts of morning sickness. He prescribed injections to bring back the bleeding although he seemed to doubt their effectiveness. On the doorstep he beamed at me, ‘love children are the most beautiful of all.’ What a terrible statement.

I walked back to my halls of residence. In my journal I wrote: ‘I am pregnant. What a nightmare.’

In early October, on several occasions I h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Happening
• About the Author
• Copyright