Forbidden Notebook

by Alba de Céspedes

In those dresses, and in the rapid speech of their high, shrill voices, I recognize their intention to prove to one another that they’re happy, rich, lucky—that, in other words, their lives have been very successful.

Yesterday, too, at Giuliana’s, I had the impression that we moved in different worlds, almost that we spoke a different language. I looked at them with amused curiosity, as one watches a performance. I don’t really know how to explain my impression, but, well, it seemed to me that they had remained stuck in our school years, and that, of all of us, I alone had grown to adulthood.

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.

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.

Gradually, lost in these thoughts, I began to cry. I was alone in the empty house, in the Sunday silence, and it seemed to me that I’d lost those I love forever if in reality they’re different from what I’ve always imagined. And if, above all, I myself am different from what they imagine.

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.

I said that I could understand very well, that I, too, had been twenty, but she smiled and shook her head, she seemed not to believe it. Besides, while I was speaking, I myself had the impression that I was deceiving her. I don’t really remember what being twenty was like, and, if I want to be frank, my twenty seems very different from hers. I don’t recall that I was in control of choosing between what was good for me and what was bad, as she is;

I had only to trust, to obey. If I think about it, that seems to me the cause of Mirella’s restlessness: the possibility of not obeying. That’s what has changed everything, between parents and children, and even between men and women.

The letters surprised me mainly because they don’t seem to be written by the girl I’ve always thought I was. But that isn’t the most important discovery, it’s something else: I realized that Michele doesn’t know me at all if he thinks my attitude at that time was free and rebellious. I’m much freer today, much more rebellious. He continues to address me through an image that no longer reflects who I am. Nothing that’s happened over the years has scratched that image: maybe because we no longer talk the way we did when we were engaged, about ourselves, about what was happening inside us. If I went to him and suddenly tried to summarize the gradual changes in me, describing myself sincerely as I am today, he wouldn’t believe me—he would think that, like all women, I’m inventing a self that is different from who I am.

Michele, in fact, when he surprised me up at that late hour, suspected, perhaps, that I was writing to a man. He would never imagine that I keep a diary. It’s easier for him to believe that I’m giving in to a guilty feeling than to recognize that I’m capable of thinking.

like to follow her everywhere in the life that is all before her, open to her choices. The thought that she spends time with people I don’t know makes me suffer: she’ll often name them and it will be as if she were talking about unknown lands.

“I don’t want you to go,” I said. Michele, on the other hand, encouraged him. Maybe he thinks it would be advantageous for him, or maybe he wouldn’t mind being alone, without so many problems, so many responsibilities. Whereas, if I think of living here without the children, it scares me.

Basically, I want to confess, what I won’t love in Marina is her age, her youth, her right to make mistakes, to be incompetent. I would insist that she be like women of my age, although to make women like that takes, precisely, the years they’ve lived.

He seemed tired, irritated, but when he finally looked up at me, he smiled. Again he mentioned Saturday, sighing, “The family … ” and I did something foolish: I blushed. Then he asked if I would be free to return to the office next Saturday. I said yes, too enthusiastically. Then he raised his eyes and looked at me, unsmiling, with a gentle seriousness. “Around four?” he proposed. I nodded. My hands were cold on the glass top of the desk. Finally, he asked me to show him a letter I had written and, when I returned, he was another man. He even said the letter wouldn’t do and that I had to rewrite it.

I’ve gone several days without writing because I felt detached from myself. I seem able to go on only if I forget myself. If I could not reflect too much and be content with the explanations Mirella provides, for example, I would live in tranquility. I’m increasingly convinced that this anxiety took possession of me starting the day I bought the notebook: an evil spirit, the devil seems hidden in it. So I try to neglect it, leave it in the suitcase or the closet, but that’s not enough. And in fact the more tightly bound I am to my duties, the more limited my time, the more urgent the desire to write becomes.

children go away.” He shook his head. “They don’t go away,” he corrected, “otherwise, in a certain sense, it would be a good thing. We’d be alone, but we could at least enjoy the advantages of our solitude. Instead, we have none of those advantages and we’re still alone.” I liked hearing him say he’s alone, even if he was speaking indifferently, in a slightly cynical tone.

“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.

Some nights ago at dinner, Riccardo claimed that there can’t be friendship between a man and a woman, that men have nothing to say to women, because they have no interests in common, except some precise interests, he added, laughing. Mirella at first maintained the opposite, in a serious tone, bringing up valid arguments, such as the education of the modern woman, her new position in society, but when she heard him laugh that irritating male laugh, she lost control. She said that perhaps those opinions are suggested to him by the type of women he hangs around with. Riccardo turned pale and asked her harshly, “What do you mean?” Mirella shrugged. He got up and repeated, threatening, “What do you mean?” I had to intervene, as when they were children, but, as then, I had the impression that Mirella was the stronger; and for that reason alone I would have liked to hit her.

Then as he said goodbye, he held my hand for a long time. I was pale, I was afraid he would say something, and although I wished it ardently, I fled rapidly down the stairs.

“There’s a right,” he said, “that derives from the intrinsic value of each of us. So what for one might be a fault, for others isn’t. At a certain point in life you have to be aware of your own situation and assert it; that, too, is a duty.”

When he looked at me, I was young, much younger than when I came into the office for the first time, young as I have never been, because I had the happy consciousness that was missing when I was twenty.

“Mirella will never be very happy, signora, she’s too intelligent.” I smiled, saying, “Everyone is intelligent at twenty, over time it becomes increasingly difficult. But maybe, in compensation, one learns to be happy.”

He drove slowly, every so often turning to look at me as if he wanted to hold onto an image that would soon be erased.

And it seemed to me that a mysterious law obliging me to protect myself, to renounce, was forcing me to play a scene with him, the only person with whom I felt I could be sincere.

Shaking her head, she said it’s impossible for us to understand each other. “You recognize only the authority of the family,” she said. “It’s the only one you were taught to respect, without judging it, thanks to punishment and fear.” “And what do you respect, then?” I asked her sarcastically. She answered seriously, “For now, myself.”

“So morality has no importance for you?” She was silent for a moment, then said softly, “Oh, I reflect a lot, believe me. I ask myself constantly what’s good and what’s evil. You always accuse me of being cynical, cold, but it’s not so. It’s not true. I’m different from you, that’s all. I’ve said to you many times: you are able to rely on conventional models of good and evil. You’re luckier. Whereas I need to review them according to my judgment before accepting them.”

Her constant reflecting scares me and, especially, inspires pity. It’s pointless to think so much, the days

Often, faced with men’s bad moods, I wonder what they would do if instead of only their office job they had, like every woman, so many different problems to confront and solve.

I’ve ended up by getting used to things that, at first, I judged unacceptable.

Now he sees nothing anymore, he doesn’t see me; there are the children between us, and Marina, and Cantoni, and all the mountains of plates I’ve washed, and the hours he’s spent in the office and the hours I’ve spent in the office, and all the soups I’ve ladled, as I did last night, while the steam fogged my vision.

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.

He seems to want to discover everywhere an evil that’s not there, a scam he expects from life and would like to thwart by force or by cunning. He’s never suspicious of me, and that’s why I can’t do anything for him. Only the things and people he’s afraid of can reassure him.

When there are children in the house, even at thirty, you have to pretend not to be young except to play, to laugh with them: pretend to be only a father and mother, and by pretending, by waiting for them to go out, for them not to hear, not to imagine, you end up truly not being young anymore.

And yet I think it’s precisely this possibility of being different from the way we are in the office that attracts us; we want to meet in a life different from the one we both lead.

“Nonsense,” I said, “excuses … We all know how certain things happen. The rest we invent later, to justify ourselves.”

And yet I seem to see everything clearly tonight. When I started writing, I thought I’d reached the point where conclusions could be drawn about one’s own life. But every experience—even the one that comes from this long questioning of myself in the notebook—teaches me that all life passes in the anguished attempt to draw conclusions and not succeeding. At least for me it’s like that: everything seems, at the same time, good and bad, just and unjust, even transient and eternal.

I’m only afraid of destroying a capital patiently accumulated, but without kindness, a malicious credit that the people for whom I sacrifice myself will have to pay, little by little. Luckily, I understand it now. I have to protect myself: I don’t want to give up love and become a stingy, pitiless old woman.

I looked at my reflection in the expression on his face and saw that I was beautiful.

When we separated, I would have liked to call him back: I felt that my last chance to be young was leaving me.

feel myself drying up, my arms are branches of a dead tree. I tried to become old, and maybe I only became mean.