Forbidden Notebook

by Alba de Céspedes

“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.”

I can’t sleep. Yet again it’s the fault of this notebook. Before, I’d immediately forget what happened at home; now, instead, since I began to write down daily events, I hold on to them in my memory and try to understand why they occurred.

have to acknowledge that it isn’t making it any happier. In the family you have to pretend not to notice what happens, or at least not to wonder about its meaning. If

That’s all true, but in a certain sense that servitude has also become my strength, the halo of my martyrdom.

So they often repeat, severely, “You should rest,” as if not resting were a whim of mine.

No one seemed to understand that a week of vacation in August couldn’t keep me from being tired in October. If

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.

house: “I can’t, I don’t feel like it.” Michele says it’s because of the war, and of a new war people fear might break out at any moment. All of us, and especially the young, are afraid of not being in time to have fun, so they want to take advantage of the present and enjoy themselves every day. Maybe it’s because they have that precise intention that they don’t succeed.

I would insist that she be like women of my age, although to make women like that takes, precisely, the years they’ve lived.

Michele has less imagination than I do, so he’s not concerned.

All I have to do is enter the house for this joyful impulse to dissolve. At home, I don’t know why, I always feel like I have to apologize. Maybe because I know I’m neglecting many things on account of this notebook. I stay up late and then, during the day, I’m tired. Today,

the impression that a dense mystery envelops each of us give me no peace. I see Mirella who leaves home with her diary in her purse, Michele who returns to the bank on Saturday to write his script in peace, Riccardo who has put up the photograph of the Argentine mountains on his bedroom wall, and it seems to me that, although we love each other so much, we protect ourselves from each other like enemies.

In a moment it was evening, and I had to start setting the table again with the same dishes I had washed and put away a little earlier.

For me books were a weakness that I had to overcome little by little, over the years; they give her the pitiless force that divides us.

It’s sad to have given so much of oneself to one’s children to reach the conclusion that the only people they don’t trust is us. Sabina

Also, if I took the notebook to the office, I’d find nothing of my own when I come home.

For the sake of the family, I think, we destroyed each other, and now the family should save us. But

went over and hugged him: I, too, felt trapped in a solitude I’d never felt before I got to be this age. Michele wasn’t surprised by my sudden act of tenderness; people who live together for a long time learn to say everything without words, and maybe that’s what makes their relations irreplaceable.

I’d like to forget them, and I can’t. The others are sleeping, at this hour: sleep cancels the day they’ve been through, and the new day appears, free of the weight of the preceding days, which I, on the other hand, preserve in these pages as if in an exorbitant account book in which no debt is ever forgiven.

More often, though, it seems to me that giving it up is the only way to be stronger than she is, to defeat her, not only today but forever, condemning her to admire a life with no escape, like mine.

it’s useful to ignore the fact that life is only a long, difficult path on which, hour after hour, a hope stays with us that we’re never able to transform into reality.

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.