A Man's Place

Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781913097363
• eBook ISBN: 9781913097370
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her exams for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation in  A Man's Place reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires.

11

A Man’s Place

The practical test for my CAPES1 examination took place at a lycée in Lyon, in the Croix-Rousse area. A new lycée, with potted plants in the buildings for the teaching and administrative staff, and a library fitted with a sand-coloured carpet. I waited there until they came to fetch me for my practical, which involved giving a lesson in front of an inspector and two assessors, both distinguished lecturers in French. A woman was marking papers haughtily, without a flicker of hesitation. All I had to do was sail through the following hour and I would be allowed to do the same as she did for the rest of my life. I explained twenty-five lines – referenced by number – taken from Balzac’s novel Le Père Goriot to a class of sixth-formers from the maths stream. Afterwards, in the headmaster’s office, the inspector said to me disapprovingly: ‘You really dragged your pupils along, didn’t you.’ He was sitting between the two assessors, a man and a short-sighted woman with pink shoes. And me, opposite. For fifteen minutes he showered me with criticism, praise and advice, and I barely listened, wondering if all this meant I had passed. Suddenly, in unison, the three of them stood up, looking solemn. I too rose to my feet hurriedly. The inspector held out his hand to me. Then, looking straight at me, he said: ‘Congratulations, Madame.’ The others repeated ‘Congratulations’ and shook hands with me, but the woman did it with a smile.

I kept thinking about this scene while I was walking to the bus stop, with anger and something resembling 12shame. The same evening, I wrote to my parents telling them I was now a qualified teacher. My mother wrote back saying they were very happy for me.

My father died exactly two months later, to the day. He was sixty-seven years old and he and my mother had been running a grocery store and café in a quiet area of Y— (Seine-Maritime), not far from the train station. He had intended to retire the following year. Quite often, and just for a moment, I can’t recollect which came first: that windy April in Lyon when I stood waiting at the Croix-Rousse bus stop, or that stifling month of June, the month of his death.

It was a Sunday, in the early afternoon.

My mother appeared at the top of the stairs. She was dabbing her eyes with the napkin she must have taken with her when she went upstairs after lunch. She said in a blank voice: ‘It’s all over.’ I have no recollection of the minutes that followed. All I remember are my father’s eyes, staring at something behind me, in the distance, and the curled lips exposing his gums. I believe I asked my mother to shut his eyes. Also standing around the bed were my mother’s sister and her husband. They offered to help us wash and shave the body before it grew 13stiff. My mother suggested that we dress him in the suit he had bought for my wedding three years previously. There was an air of simplicity about the whole scene, no crying or shouting, just my mother’s red eyes and the frozen rictus on her face. Our movements were calm and orderly, accompanied by simple words. My uncle and aunt kept saying, ‘He made a quick job of it,’ or, ‘Doesn’t he look different.’ My mother spoke to my father as if he were still alive, or inhabited by a form of life apart, like a newborn baby. Several times she affectionately called him: ‘My poor little man.’

After my father had been shaved, my uncle straightened the body and held it up so that we could remove the shirt he had been wearing for the last few days and change it for a clean one. His head hung forward on his bare chest, mottled with tiny veins. For the first time in my life I saw my father’s penis. My mother covered it up quickly with the clean shirt-tails, joking a little bit: ‘Hide your misery, my poor man!’ When the body had been washed, my father’s hands were joined together around a rosary. I can’t remember whether it was my aunt or my mother who said, ‘He looks nicer like that,’ meaning more decent, more presentable. I closed the shutters and woke up my son who was having an afternoon nap in the next room. ‘Grandpa’s having a snooze.’

Notified by my uncle, the family in Y— came round. They went upstairs with my mother and me and stood in front of the bed, silent for a moment, and then talked in hushed voices about my father’s illness and his sudden death. When they came downstairs, we gave them something to drink in the café.14

I don’t remember the doctor who was called in to sign the death certificate. Within a few hours, my father’s face had changed beyond all recognition. Towards the end of the afternoon, I happened to be in the room on my own. The sunlight filtered through the shutters onto the linoleum floor. He was no longer my father. His sunken features seemed to have developed into one large nose. In his dark-blue suit, which hung loosely around his body, he looked like a bird lying on its back. The face he’d had just after his death – that of a man with wide, staring eyes – had already disappeared. I would never see that face again either.

We started to think about the burial, the funeral directors, the mass, the death notices, our mourning clothes. I felt that these preparations had nothing to do with my father. They concerned a ceremony which for some reason he would be unable to attend. My mother was extremely agitated and she told me that the night before he died, my father, who could no longer speak, had reached towards her in an attempt to kiss her. She added: ‘You know, he was a handsome lad in his youth.’

The smell set in on the Monday. It was something I hadn’t imagined. First faint, then overpowering, the stench of flowers left to rot in a vase of stagnant water.

My mother closed the business just for the funeral. Otherwise she would have lost customers and she 15couldn’t afford to do that. The body of my dead father was lying upstairs while she served pastis and red wine downstairs. In distinguished society, grief at the loss of a loved one is expressed through tears, silence and dignity. The social conventions observed by my mother, and for that matter the rest of the neighbourhood, had nothing to do with dignity. Between my father’s death on the Sunday and his burial the following Wednesday, the regulars would sit down and comment on the news laconically, in low voices, ‘He went out like a light,’ or else affect a cheerful attitude, ‘So the boss really let himself go!’ They told us how they felt when they had heard the news, ‘It knocked me for six, it did,’ or ‘I didn’t know what to think.’ They wanted my mother to know that she was not alone in her grief, an act of courtesy on their part. Many customers recalled the last time they had seen him alive and in good health, searching their memories for all the details of that last encounter, the exact time and place, what the weather had been like, the words they had spoken. Such a painstaking description of a time when being alive was taken for granted showed what a terrible shock my father’s death had been for them. They also asked to see ‘the boss’ out of politeness. My mother didn’t agree to all of the requests. She distinguished between the good customers, prompted by genuine feelings of sympathy, and the bad ones, whose sole motive was curiosity. Just about all of the regular customers were allowed to pay their last respects to my father. The wife of a foreman who lived nearby was turned down because he had always loathed her, her and her tight, puckered lips.

The undertakers came on the Monday. The stairway leading from the kitchen to the bedrooms turned out to be too narrow for the coffin. The body had to be 16wrapped in a plastic bag and dragged, rather than carried, to the coffin which lay downstairs in the middle of the café, closed for an hour. It was a laborious operation, punctuated by the men’s comments on the best way to proceed, how to negotiate the corners and so on.

There was a dip in the pillow where his head had rested since Sunday. We hadn’t cleaned the room while the body was still there. My father’s clothes were lying on the chair where he had left them. I unzipped his overall pocket and took out a wad of bank notes, the previous Wednesday’s takings. I threw away the medicine and put his clothes with the dirty laundry.

The day before the burial we cooked a side of veal for the meal which was to follow the ceremony. It would have been thoughtless to send the people who do you the honour of attending a funeral home with an empty stomach. My husband arrived in the evening, suntanned, embarrassed by a bereavement in which he had no part. He seemed more out of place then than he had ever been. We slept in the only double bed, the one in which my father had died.

In church there were quite a few people from our neighbourhood, housewives and also factory hands who had taken an hour off work. Naturally, none of the ‘high-ranking’ officials with whom my father had dealt over the years made the effort, and neither did the other shopkeepers. He didn’t belong to anything, just paid his yearly contribution to the tradesmen’s union without taking part. In his funeral oration, the priest spoke of ‘an honest, hard-working life’ and ‘a man who had never done anyone any harm.’17

Then there were the handshakes. Owing to a mistake made by the sacristan – unless it was a stratagem devised to increase the number mourners – everyone who had shaken hands with us came round a second time. The second round of handshakes took place quickly and in silence. At the graveside, when the coffin was lowered into the pit, swaying between the ropes, my mother burst in...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• A Man’s Place
• About the Author
• Copyright