Forbidden Notebook

by Alba de Céspedes

For although acquiring a diary throws her into crisis, the quaderno is both an object and a place, both a literary practice and a room of one’s own.

The private becoming public, the individual subject dividing, and the writer becoming her own reader and vice versa—the diary, an elusive, elastic container, straddles all this and more. Diary writing may be the most private of forms, but when placed within the context of a novel or when it serves, as it does here, for the structure of the novel itself, this form of confession, dating back at least in the Western tradition to Augustine, contradicts its very nature.

In an interview, Elena Ferrante lists some books that “keep me company … as solid companions,” while she’s writing. Among them is de Céspedes’s 1949 novel Dalla parte di lei (Her Side of the Story). These books are not for entertainment, she says, but “books of encouragement.”

“The genius of Alba de Céspedes in this book is in shattering the illusion that writing is a place of refuge, and replacing it with the certainty that it is a place that always both pollutes and sabotages us.” As Valeria discovers: toward the end of the novel, she tells her daughter, “Save yourself, you who can do it.”

The strangest thing is that when I can finally take the notebook out of its hiding place, sit down, and begin to write, I find I have nothing to say except to report on the daily struggle I endure to hide it.

“Oh, darling,” he said, “what secrets would we have at our age?” If he had uttered those words in a bold, joking tone, I would have rebelled; but the grieved tone of his voice made me go pale.

I was about to tell her I would have liked to always see her happy and pretty like that, as a girl should be at twenty. Then I considered that maybe with others she is like that, completely different from how we know her. And when I asked myself uneasily if one of those attitudes is a fiction, a deception, I realized that it’s not that she’s different, but the roles she’s compelled to play at home and outside are different. The most disagreeable is reserved for us.

I’m always tired and no one believes me. And yet tranquility for me originates precisely in the tiredness I feel when I lie in bed at night. There I find a sort of happiness in which I feel peaceful and fall asleep. I have to recognize that, perhaps, the determination with which I protect myself from any possibility of rest is the fear of losing this single source of happiness, which is tiredness.

Instead, ever since I happened to start keeping a diary, I seem to have discovered that a word or an intonation can be just as important, or even more, than the facts we’re accustomed to consider important. If we can learn to understand the smallest things that happen every day, then maybe we can learn to truly understand the secret meaning of life. But I don’t know if it’s a good thing, I’m afraid not.

It’s terrible to think that I sacrificed my entire self to beautifully perform tasks that they consider obvious, natural.

Because if children can confess freely that they’re bored with their parents, a mother who confesses she’s bored with her children seems unnatural.

We’re always inclined to forget what we’ve said or done in the past, partly in order not to have the tremendous obligation to remain faithful to it. Otherwise, it seems to me, we would all discover that we’re full of mistakes and, above all, contradictions, between what we intended to do and what we have done, between what we would desire to be and what we are content to be.

So perhaps that night I hid the notebook with greater care than usual: I climbed up on a chair and put it in the linen closet. It seemed to me that, hiding it, I could more easily overcome a doubt that had taken hold of me: that I had lived for some twenty years with my daughter, nourished her, brought her up, studied her character with loving attention, and had to admit that, in truth, I don’t know her at all.

and it seems to me that, although we love each other so much, we protect ourselves from each other like enemies.

At a certain point we no longer understand what is kindness and what is ruthlessness in the life of a family.

“At a certain age,” he continued, “everything we’ve done is no longer enough. It was useful only in making us what we are. And just as we are, now that we’re truly ourselves, what we’ve wanted to be or could be, we’d like to start to live again, consciously, according to our current tastes. Instead, we have to continue to live the life we chose when we were someone else.

“And you, are you happy?” she asked me, harshly. I had tears in my eyes because the conversation had moved me, exhausted me. “Of course,” I said emphatically, “I’m happy, I’ve always been happy, very happy.” She stared at me tenderly with a gaze that made me want to lower mine. “How good you are, mamma!” she exclaimed. She said good night with a quick hug and I followed her along the hall like a beggar.

“A woman who works,” Clara continued, “especially a woman of our age, always carries in herself the struggle between the traditional woman she’s been taught to be and the independent woman she’s chosen to become. There’s a constant conflict. To resolve it, to overcome it, costs you a lot, above all in the eyes of men.

It’s strange: our inner life is what counts most for each of us and yet we have to pretend to live it as if we paid no attention to it, with inhuman security.

Facing these pages, I’m afraid. All my feelings, thus dissected, rot, become poison, and I’m aware of becoming the criminal the more I try to be the judge. I have to destroy the notebook, destroy the devil that hides in its pages, as in the hours of a life.

At night, when we sit at the table together, we seem transparent and loyal, without intrigues, but I know now that none of us show what we truly are, we hide, we all camouflage ourselves, out of shame or spite.

I have to burn the notebook as soon as possible, right away, I can’t even reread it and risk softening, I can’t say farewell. This will be the last page: on the following pages I won’t write and my future days will be, like those pages, white, smooth, cold.

Of all that I’ve felt and lived in these months, in a few minutes there will be no trace. Only a faint odor of burning will linger in the air.