Forbidden Notebook

by Alba de Céspedes

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

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.

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

Maybe we have to become almost old and have grown children, as I have, to understand our own parents and, reflected in them, something more about ourselves.

I need to be alone sometimes. I would never dare confess it to Michele, I’d be afraid of upsetting him, but I dream of having a room all for myself. Even a maid who works all day without stopping says “Good night” and has the right to shut herself in a room, in a pantry. I’d be content with a pantry. But I can’t remove myself, ever, and only by giving up sleep can I find time to write in this notebook. If, when I’m at home, I interrupt what I’m doing, or at night, in bed, I stop reading and stare into space, there’s always someone who kindly asks what I’m thinking about.

Basically, it’s good that every day I have to cook, wash the dishes, make the beds, because thanks to these obligations, I’m bound to the obligation to go on as if everything that is happening around me weren’t happening.

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

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.

I would have stayed all night at the window looking at the sky for her, if she had asked me. It was a serene, starry night, a night when you see the planes pass winking their headlights gaily like evil eyes. “Don’t worry,” I murmured, “the weather’s clear.”

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 often have a desire to confide in a living person, not only in this notebook. But I’ve never been able to. Stronger than the desire to confide is the fear of destroying something that I’ve been constructing day by day, for twenty years, the only thing I possess.

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

We’re so far apart that we can’t even see each other anymore; and we keep going,

The need to work to earn money, to read the newspaper to follow political events, gives him the privilege of isolating himself, protecting himself; whereas my job is to let myself be devastated.

It seems to me that, with a deliberate purpose, she wants to keep me from being young and happy. And so sometimes I think about not giving it up, to spite her. 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.

Everything in me is confused, and I can’t talk about it with my mother or my daughter because neither would understand. They belong to two different worlds: the one that ended with that time, the other that it gave birth to.

Maybe she even despises it and intends, by the way she lives her life, to rebel against me. She doesn’t understand that it was I who made her free, I with my life racked between the old, reassuring traditions and the call of new demands. It was up to me. I’m the bridge she’s taken advantage of, the way young people take advantage of everything, cruelly, without even noticing that they’re taking, without paying attention. Now I, too, can collapse.

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