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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A captivating rediscovered Italian classic: the moving story of a woman's slow rebellion against her bourgeois family life 'A wrenching, sardonic depiction of a woman caught in a social trap' Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Out running an errand, Valeria Cossati gives in to a sudden impulse - she buys a shiny black notebook. She starts keeping a diary in secret, recording her concerns about her daughter, fears her husband will discover her new habit and the constant churn of the domestic routine. With each entry Valeria plunges deeper into her interior life, uncovering profound dissatisfaction and restlessness. As she finds her own voice, the roles that have come to define her-as wife, as mother, as daughter-begin to break apart. Forbidden Notebook is a rediscovered jewel of Italian literature, published here in a new translation by the celebrated Ann Goldstein and with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri. A captivating feminist classic, it is an intimate, haunting story of domestic discontent in postwar Rome, and of one woman's awakening to her true thoughts and desires.
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‘Mind blown. This book is the female Stoner!’
MIA LEVITIN
‘Electric… de Céspedes’s novel anticipates the candid confessionals of writers such as Deborah Levy, Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk… Formally precise, psychologically rich, and suffused in suspicion and suspense’
FINANCIAL TIMES
‘While I’m writing, I confine myself to occasionally reading books that keep me company not as entertainment but as solid companions. I call them books of encouragement, like those by Alba de Céspedes’
ELENA FERRANTE
‘[Valeria] soon makes an enraptured confidante of the reader… The writing sparkles with candour and self-awareness’
IRISH TIMES
‘Recently rediscovered, her work has lost none of its subversive force’
NEW YORK TIMES
Forbidden Notebook
ALBA DE CÉSPEDES
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY ANN GOLDSTEIN
WITH A FOREWORD BY JHUMPA LAHIRI
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
CONTENTS
Forbidden Notebook
Señor don Blas, from what book did you take this text?
From the theater of human life, which is where I read.
—Ramón de la Cruz
FOREWORD
by Jhumpa Lahiri
“Forbidden” evokes, to my English ear, the biblical fruit whose consumption leads to shame and expulsion from Paradise. Eve’s story is not irrelevant to a novel in which a woman succumbs to a temptation: to record her thoughts and observations in a notebook. Valeria Cossati’s impulse to keep a diary leads not so much to the knowledge of good and evil as it does to self-knowledge, advocated by Socrates and serving as a cornerstone of philosophical inquiry ever since. In Valeria’s case, it also leads to solitude, alienation, guilt, and painful lucidity.
The Italian title of Forbidden Notebook is Quaderno proibito—literally translated, “prohibited notebook.” Forbidden and prohibited may be interchangeable in English, but the latter lacks the romance that might soften the former (as in “forbidden love”), and connotes, instead, legal restrictions, interdictions, and punishment. “Prohibited” comes from the Latin verb prohibere (its etymology, essentially, means 2“to hold away”), and it was fundamental to legal terminology in Ancient Rome. It is the word De Céspedes chooses to describe Valeria’s notebook, and to interrogate, more broadly, a woman’s right, in postwar Italy, to express herself in writing, to have a voice, and to hold opinions and secrets that distinguish herself from her family.
The act of purchasing the eponymous notebook, along with the ongoing dilemma of where to conceal it, drives the tension as the novel opens. Having purchased it illegally and smuggled it home, Valeria hides it in various locations—in a sack of rags, an old trunk, an empty biscuit tin. But it always runs the risk of being discovered by her husband and grown children, all of whom laugh at the mere idea that she might want to keep a diary.
As soon as she owns the notebook, Valeria is anxious and afraid, but she is also armed. 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. In lieu of walls and a door, pen and paper will suffice to allow Valeria, albeit furtively, to speak her mind. Thematically, I would call this book a direct descendant of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking treatise and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. It’s just that Valeria does not consider herself an author, but, rather, a traditional homemaker. Her writing is surreptitious, and she must lie to tell the truth.
De Céspedes was herself a writer and a diarist; Forbidden Notebook fuses these forms and disciplines. The diary was for her (as it is for so many writers) preparatory ground, not only for her artistry but for a series of searing first-person female protagonists who are at once invented and real. Melania Mazzucco quotes from De Céspedes’s diaries in her introduction to Dalla parte di lei (“From Her Side”). Already in that novel, published in 1949, which is also concerned 3with women’s rights and roles, De Céspedes is experimenting (as the title clearly suggests) with an intimate first-person female narrative. Three years later, in Quaderno proibito, the diary commands center stage.
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.
From Petrarch to Gramsci to Woolf to Lessing, all diaries and notebooks, whether intended for publication or not, whether invented by their authors or not, whether framed as (or within) novels or not, are all dialogues with the self. They are instances of self-doubling and self-fashioning. They are declarations of autonomy, counternarratives that contrast and contradict reality. The fictionalized diary has always been especially appealing in that we get to know the character not only as a person but also as a writer. This additional authorial persona is especially provocative in light of female consciousness, which has struggled to find its place in history and in the literary tradition.
In her diary De Céspedes confides, “I will never be a great writer.” Here I take her to task for not knowing something about herself. For she was a great writer, a subversive writer, a writer censored by fascists, a writer who refused to take part in literary prizes, a writer ahead of her times. In my view, she is one of Italy’s most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked writers.
Whether or not we choose to read Forbidden Notebook through 4a feminist lens, it is a radical novel. Freshly translated by Ann Goldstein with her signature energy, it blazes with significance. Women’s words are still laughed at, still silenced, still considered dangerous. De Céspedes vindicates, artfully and ardently, a woman’s right to write—a right that must never be taken for granted. Ironically, the harshest condemnation in Forbidden Notebook is generated by Valeria herself, who both speaks out and threatens to cancel herself at the same time.
A NOTE FROM THE TRANSLATOR
Forbidden Notebook originated as a serial novel. It was published in the magazine La Settimana Incom Illustrata, between December 1950 and June 1951, gaining readers from week to week. Written in the form of a diary, it takes place during the same six months as its publication. (It came out as a book the following year.) Italy was still recovering from the devastations of the Second World War and the twenty years of Mussolini and Fascism. The Cossati family—Valeria, the writer of the diary, and Michele and their grown children Riccardo and Mirella—are not as well off financially as the previous generation, and it’s a struggle to make ends meet. There is a lot of talk about money; Valeria no longer has a maid to help with household chores, and in fact has a job herself, in an office, something unthinkable to her mother. The Cossatis’ apartment, in an unnamed outlying neighborhood of Rome (the geographical markers are very sparse in de Céspedes), is small, and in order to create a bedroom for Mirella they’ve had to give up the living room.
There are several references to the period before the war, and specifically to the war in Africa, in which Michele fought. This was Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The fighting lasted until 1937, and the Italians remained occupiers until they were pushed out by the British in 1941. Related to this war are some hardships at home: Riccardo, a seven-year-old when the war started, for years “ate … desserts made from vegetable flour.” There was a wheat shortage at the time, and the price of flour, and therefore of pasta, increased, straining the resources of Italian families. Vegetable flour, produced by Buitoni under the brand name Vegetina, was flour made by grinding up legumes, acorns, and chestnuts.
When Valeria talks about the Befana she is referring to the holiday of Epiphany and the figure of an ugly old witch, riding on a broomstick, who 6brings gifts to good children—somewhat in the manner of Santa Claus—on the eve of Epiphany, January 6.
When Valeria and Mirella mention a latteria, they’re talking about a shop that originally sold milk and other dairy products but which had some tables and where you could also get coffee and simple food.
The notebook in which Valeria keeps her diary is “forbidden” from the very first page, in a material way: the tobacconist’s shop where she buys it, on a whim, is forbidden to sell notebooks on Sundays. This is the result of a law limiting such shops to selling solely tobacco products on Sundays, in order not to cause unfair competition with stationery stores, which were not allowed to open on Sundays.
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.” Forbidden Notebook could also be read as a book of encouragement: encouragement to dig deeply, in the Ferrantian sense, into one’s self and one’s relations with other people. It’s not an easy process—starting with finding the time and the space, the privacy to do it—and Valeria is constantly vowing to stop: to stop writing and get rid of the diary, as she discovers harsh and painful truths about herself and her family.
But the more acute, honest, and distressing her perceptions become, the more compelling is the desire to keep writing, to keep digging; and yet ultimately, she has to stop, as a way of self-preservation. In her introduction to the new Italian edition of the novel, the writer Nadia Terranova says, “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.”
Ann Goldstein, New York, January 2023
Forbidden Notebook
November 26, 1950
I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong. But it’s too late now for regrets, the damage is done. I don’t even know what impelled me to buy it—pure chance. I’ve never thought of keeping a diary, partly because a diary has to be secret, and so it would have to be hidden from Michele and the children. I don’t like hiding things; besides, there’s so little space in our house it would be impossible to manage. Here’s how it happened. Two weeks ago, it was a Sunday, I left the house rather early in the morning. I was going to buy cigarettes for Michele. I wanted him to find them on his night table when he woke up: he always sleeps in on Sunday. It was a beautiful day, warm, though it was late autumn. I felt a childish pleasure walking along the streets, on the sunny side, and seeing the trees still green and people happy as they always seem to be on holidays. So I decided to take a short stroll and go to the tobacco shop in the square. Along the way I saw that a lot of people were stopping at the flower stall, so I stopped, too, and bought a bunch of calendulas. “You need flowers on the table on a Sunday,” the flower seller said to me. “Men notice.” I smiled, nodding, but the truth is, I wasn’t thinking of Michele or of Riccardo when I was buying those flowers, even though Riccardo does seem to appreciate them. I bought them for myself, to hold while I walked.
The tobacco shop was crowded. Waiting my turn, with the cigarette money ready, I saw a stack of notebooks in the window. They were black, shiny, thick, the type used in school, in which—before 10even starting it—I would immediately write my name excitedly on the first page: Valeria. “I would also like a notebook,” I said, digging in my purse to find some more money. But when I looked up, I saw that the tobacconist had assumed a severe expression to tell me: “I can’t. It’s forbidden.” He explained that an officer stood guard at the door, every Sunday, to make sure that he sold tobacco only, nothing else. I was alone now in the shop. “I need it,” I said, “I absolutely need it.” I was speaking in a whisper, agitated, ready to insist, plead. So he looked around, then quickly grabbed a notebook and handed it to me across the counter, saying: “Hide it under your coat.”
I kept the notebook under my coat all the way home. I was afraid it would slide out, fall on the ground while the porter was telling me something or other about the gas pipes. I felt flushed when I turned the key to open the door to the apartment. I started to sneak off to my room, but I remembered that Michele was still in bed. Meanwhile Mirella was calling me: “Mamma …” Riccardo asked, “Did you buy the paper, mamma?” I was agitated, confused, I was afraid I wouldn’t manage to be alone while I took off my coat. “I’ll put it in the closet,” I thought. “No, Mirella’s always going in there to get something of mine to wear, a pair of gloves, a blouse. The night table, Michele always opens it. The desk is now occupied by Riccardo.” I considered that in the entire house, I no longer had a drawer, or any storage space, that was still mine. I proposed to assert my rights starting that day. “In the linen closet,” I decided. Then I recalled that every Sunday Mirella gets out a clean tablecloth when she’s setting the table. I finally threw it in the ragbag, in the kitchen. I had only just closed the bag when Mirella came in and said, “What’s wrong, mamma? You’re all red in the face.”
“It must be the coat,” I said, taking it off. “It’s warm out today.” 11It seemed to me that she might say: “That’s not true. It’s because you’ve hidden something in the bag.” In vain I tried to convince myself that I had done nothing wrong. Again I heard the tobacconist’s voice warning me: “It’s forbidden.”
December 10
For more than two weeks I’ve kept the notebook hidden without being able to write in it. Since the first day, I’ve been constantly moving it around—I’ve had a hard time finding a hiding place where it wouldn’t be immediately discovered. If the children found it, Riccardo would have appropriated it for taking notes at the university or Mirella for the diary she keeps locked in her drawer. I could have defended it, said it’s mine, but I would have had to explain it. For the shopping accounts, I always use certain promotional agendas that Michele brings me from the bank at the first of the year: he himself would kindly advise me to give the notebook to Riccardo. If that happened, I would immediately give it up and never think of buying another. So I protected myself stubbornly from having to do that, although—I have to confess—I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I got this notebook.
I always used to be a little sad when the children went out, but now I wish they’d go so I’d be left alone to write. I had never before considered the fact that, because of the small size of our house and my office schedule, I rarely have an opportunity to be alone. And I had to resort to a trick to start this diary: I bought three tickets for the soccer game and said they’d been given to me by a colleague. A double trick, since, to buy them, I pinched some of the shopping money. Right after breakfast I helped Michele and the children get dressed, 12I loaned Mirella my heavy coat, said goodbye affectionately, and closed the door behind them with a shiver of satisfaction. Then, repenting, I ran to the window as if to call them back. They were already distant, and it seemed to me that they were running toward a dangerous trap I’d set rather than an innocuous soccer game. They were laughing together and that laughter brought me a prick of regret. When I turned back inside, I was about to sit down right away to write, but there was still the kitchen to straighten: Mirella couldn’t help me as she always does on Sunday. Even Michele, so orderly by nature, had left the closet open and some ties scattered here and there; he did it again today. Today, again, I bought tickets for the soccer game, so I can enjoy some peace.
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. Lately, I’ve been hiding it in the old trunk where we store our winter clothes during the summer. But two days ago I had to persuade Mirella not to open the trunk to get out certain heavy ski pants that she wears at home since we gave up heating the apartment. The notebook was there—had she raised the lid of the trunk she would have seen it right away. So I said to her: “There’s time, there’s time,” and she rebelled: “I’m cold.” I insisted with such fervor that even Michele noticed. When we were alone, he said he didn’t understand why I had opposed Mirella. I answered harshly, “I know what I’m doing,” and he looked at me, surprised by my unusual tone. “I don’t like it when you intervene in my discussions with the children,” I continued. “You undermine my authority with them.” And while he objected that usually I criticize him for not being concerned enough with them, and came over to me, saying in a teasing tone, “What’s wrong today, mamma?” I thought maybe I’m starting to get irritable, cranky, like 13all women—it’s said—when they pass forty: and, suspecting that Michele had the same thought, I felt profoundly humiliated.
December 11
As I reread what I wrote yesterday, it occurred to me to wonder if my character began to change the day my husband, jokingly, began calling me “mamma.” I liked it a lot at first, because it seemed to imply that I was the only adult in the house, the only one who knew about life. That increased my sense of responsibility, which is something I’ve always felt, since childhood. I also liked it because it allowed me to justify the impulse of tenderness roused in me by Michele’s manner, which has remained candid and ingenuous, even now that he’s almost fifty. When he calls me “mamma” I respond in a tone that’s severe yet loving, the same I used with Riccardo when he was a child. But now I see that it was a mistake; he was the only person for whom I was Valeria. Since childhood, my parents have called me Bebe, and with them it’s hard to be different from what I was at the age when they gave me the nickname. In fact, although both expect from me everything one expects from an adult, they don’t seem to acknowledge that I really am an adult. Yes, Michele was the only person for whom I was Valeria. For some friends I’m still Pisani, their schoolmate; for others I’m Michele’s wife, the mother of Riccardo and Mirella. For him, instead, since we met, I’d been only Valeria.
December 15
Every time I open this notebook I look at my name, written on the first page. I’m pleased with my plain writing, not too tall, tilting in one direction, which unmistakably reveals my age. I’m forty-three, 14although, when I think of it, I can’t convince myself it’s true. Other people, seeing me with my children, are also surprised and always pay me compliments that make Riccardo and Mirella smile awkwardly. Anyway, I’m forty-three, and it seems embarrassing to resort to childish subterfuge in order to write in a notebook. So I absolutely have to confess to Michele and the children the existence of this diary and assert my right to shut myself in a room to write when I want to. I acted foolishly from the start and if I continue I’ll aggravate the impression I have that in writing these innocent lines I’m doing something wrong. It’s all absurd. And yet I have no peace in the office, either. If my boss keeps me late, I’m afraid that Michele will get home before me and, for some unpredictable reason, dig among the old papers where I hide the notebook. So I often come up with an excuse not to stay, thus losing some overtime pay. I go home extremely anxious; if I spy Michele’s coat hanging in the entrance, my heart skips a beat and I go into the dining room afraid I’ll see him holding the shiny black of the notebook. If I find him talking to the children, I think the same: that he might have found it and is waiting until we’re alone to discuss it. It always seems to me that at night he closes the door of our room with special care, checking the click of the latch. “Now he’ll turn to me and speak.” But he says nothing, and I’ve noticed that he always closes the door like that, because he’s meticulous by habit.
Two days ago Michele phoned me in the office and I immediately feared that he had gone home for some reason or other and found the notebook. As I answered, I froze. “Listen, I have to ask you something …” he began. For a few seconds I wondered breathlessly whether to declare my right to have as many notebooks as I want and write whatever I feel like or, instead, beg him: “Michele, understand, 15I know I’ve done wrong …” But he only wanted to find out if Riccardo had remembered to pay his university fees, because the deadline was that day.
December 21
Yesterday evening, right after dinner, I said to Mirella that I don’t like her habit of keeping the desk drawer locked. She responded with surprise, objecting that she’d been doing this for years. I replied that, in fact, I’ve disapproved for years. Mirella responded energetically that if she studies so much, it’s because she wants to start work, to be independent, and to leave home as soon as she’s of age: then she’ll be able to keep all her drawers locked without anyone being offended. She added that she keeps her diary in the drawer, so she locks it, and, besides, Riccardo does the same thing—it’s where he puts the letters he gets from girls. I replied that then Michele and I should also have the right to a locked drawer. “We do have one,” Michele said, “it’s the drawer where we keep the money.” I insisted that I would like to have one for myself; and, smiling, he asked, “For what?” “Well, I don’t know, to keep my personal papers,” I answered, “some notes. Or maybe a diary, like Mirella.”
They all, including Michele, began laughing at the idea that I might keep a diary. “What would you write, mamma?” said Michele. Mirella, forgetting her resentment, also laughed. I continued to speak without paying attention to their laughter. Serious, then, Riccardo got up and came over to me. “Mamma is right,” he said gravely, “she, too, has the right to keep a diary like Mirella, a secret diary, maybe a love diary. I’ll tell you that for a while I’ve suspected she has a secret admirer.” He pretended to be extremely serious, he scowled, 16and Michele, going along with the game, appeared worried, said yes, it’s true, mamma doesn’t seem the same, we have to keep an eye on her. Then they all burst out laughing again, and came over and hugged me, even Mirella. Riccardo, taking my chin in his fingers, asked tenderly, “Tell me, what do you want to write in your diary?” Suddenly, I burst into tears. I didn’t understand what was wrong with me, except a great weariness. Seeing me cry, Riccardo turned pale and put his arms around me, saying, “I was joking, mammetta, don’t you see I was joking? I’m sorry …” Then he turned to his sister and told her it’s always her fault that these things happen. Mirella left the dining room, slamming the door behind her.
Soon afterward Riccardo, too, went to bed and we were left alone, Michele and I. Michele began to talk to me, lovingly. He said he understood the impulse of maternal jealousy very well but that it was time I got used to thinking of Mirella as a young woman, an adult. I tried to explain that that wasn’t the issue, but he continued, “She’s nineteen years old—it’s normal that she already has something, an impression, a feeling that she doesn’t want to let her family know. A little secret.” “And what about us?” I replied. “Don’t we also have the right to some secrets?” Michele took my hand, caressed it sweetly. “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 looked around to be sure that the children were in bed and that they, too, could believe that moment of weakness was due to maternal jealousy.
“You’re pale, mamma,” said Michele. “You’re too tired, you work too much. I’ll get you a cognac.” I jumped up, refusing. He insisted. “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t want to drink anything, it’s passed. You’re right, maybe I was a little tired, but now I’m fine.” I smiled and 17gave him a reassuring hug. “Always the same, you recover immediately,” Michele commented tenderly. “No cognac, then.” Embarrassed, I looked away. In the pantry, next to the cognac bottle, in an old biscuit tin, I had hidden the notebook.
December 27
Christmas was two days ago. On Christmas Eve Riccardo and Mirella were invited to a dance at the house of some old friends of ours, the Caprellis, who were presenting their daughter to society. The children had welcomed the invitation joyfully, because the Caprellis are a very well-off family who give lavish, tasteful parties. I was also glad because it meant that I could have dinner alone with Michele, as when we were just married. Mirella was pleased with the idea of wearing her first evening dress again, which she had inaugurated at last winter’s Carnival, and Michele would lend Riccardo his tuxedo, as he did last year. With this evening in mind, I had bought a scarf for Mirella, of voile seeded with flecks of gold, and for Riccardo, a dress shirt, one of those modern ones with the unstarched collar. The afternoon passed pleasantly, since all four of us had the promise of a happy evening. Mirella looked lovely in her dress, the anticipation of the coming entertainment had dispelled her usual slightly scowling, faintly stubborn expression. When she came into the dining room and whirled lightly in a circle so that we could admire her full skirt, hiding her face behind the scarf in an unusual gesture of shyness, her father and brother let out loud exclamations of wonder, as if astonished to recognize in their daughter and sister such an attractive girl. I also smiled, I was really proud. I was about to tell her I would have liked to always see her happy and pretty like 18that, 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.
Riccardo went to dress right away, inspired by the sight of his sister. A few minutes later I heard him calling from his room. From the tone of his voice I guessed immediately what was happening. I will confess that I’d been afraid of it for days, but only at that moment did his cry of “Mamma” oblige me to acknowledge my fear. Michele’s tuxedo jacket was too tight for him, the sleeves too short. Standing in the middle of the room, he gave in to the shock of his disappointment. The tux had been tight the year before. We had laughed about it, saying he’d have to refrain from embracing any girls for fear of hearing the jacket rip at the back, the sleeves come unstitched. But Riccardo has grown more robust since then, and maybe also taller. He looked at me, hoping that at my appearance everything would magically right itself, as it did when he was a child. I, too, would have been glad of that. For a moment I thought I could say, “It looks great,” and he could believe me. Instead I said, “It won’t do.” And then right away I went over and felt the sleeves, the chest, imagining lightning-speed adjustments that I wouldn’t be capable of making. Riccardo followed my hands anxiously with his gaze, expecting a favorable diagnosis. I repeated, discouraged, “There’s nothing to be done.”
We went back to the dining room together. Riccardo’s eyes were red, his face pale. “We can’t go to the party,” he announced in a spiteful voice. He looked at his sister as if he would have liked to tear off her dress, his look was like a bite. Mirella, afraid that not even a 19rebellion on her part would be enough to avert this disaster, asked hesitantly, “Why not?” He showed her that he couldn’t button the jacket and that the sleeves left the wrists of his new shirt ridiculously exposed. “Papa has narrow shoulders,” he said rudely.
We went rapidly through the list of friends and relatives who might be able to lend us a tuxedo. I realized that I had already done that, unconsciously, two days earlier, and had concluded that none of the people we know now would have one. Clinging to a thread of hope we telephoned a cousin, but he needed it himself that evening. Mentally, we weighed and measured friends, shaking our heads. Another relative, asked on the phone, was astonished by the request: “An evening jacket? No, I don’t have one. What use would I have for it?” Riccardo, hanging up the phone, said with a nervous laugh, “All the people we know are poor.” And Michele replied, “People like us.” Then Riccardo, pretending to joke, suggested, “Couldn’t we rent one? Like an extra.” Michele said, “That’s all we need.” I felt that he was thinking of his tailcoat, of the morning suit he wore the day of our wedding: both are hanging in the closet under a white sheet. Certainly, he was thinking of his father’s blue and black uniforms. “That’s all we need,” he repeated severely.
I understood very well what had led Michele to speak that way. I, too, recalled many things of the past that are hard to separate from, and yet I thought I should have said that Riccardo’s idea was a very good one, we could rent an evening jacket. I felt that my son expected me to say it, and I would have liked to help him out, but, gripped by an indefinable uncertainty, I refrained from speaking. Meanwhile Mirella was staring at me, and I said decisively, “Mirella will go alone.” Michele wanted to reply. I continued without looking at anyone: “We have to start accepting new situations—not having 20an evening jacket and letting a girl go on her own to a dance, which is something I couldn’t have done in my time. There’s an advantage to everything. You take her, Michele. Then come back. We’ll be comfortable just the same, the three of us. Riccardo, you’ll have to live with it.”
Riccardo said nothing. Mirella hugged me lightly. Then, unsure whether to say goodbye to her brother, left, intending to move modestly and instead, because of the rustling of her dress, flaunting a hint of boldness. I hoped that, before we heard the house door close, a miracle would occur and I could hurry to Riccardo, laughing, as if until then I had been acting in a comedy. I saw myself pulling a new tuxedo out of the closet, I saw the shiny satin lapels. When the door closed, Riccardo scowled and I repeated, “You’ll have to live with it.”
I said it in a humble tone, as if I had something to be forgiven for, and it was precisely against that feeling of guilt that I rebelled inside, even as I said it. I would have liked to promise Riccardo that I’d buy him a tuxedo on the installment plan, as we’d bought Mirella’s dress, but a man’s suit is more expensive, and then a man doesn’t have to find a husband. So I had to acknowledge that I couldn’t burden our budget with this superfluous expense. I remembered when Mirella and Riccardo were small children and asked for toys that were too expensive. I would say that the bank had no more money: they believed it and surrendered to that insurmountable difficulty. But I can’t resort to such subterfuges anymore.
When Michele returned, and we sat down at the table, it seemed to me that Riccardo looked at his father differently, as if measuring him. It was an unusually good dinner and yet we ate halfheartedly. I had bought dried apricots, which Michele really likes, but when I put them on the table he didn’t even notice them. The opaque, wrinkled fruit gave off a sense of sadness and poverty. 21
After dinner we sat listening to the radio. I didn’t dare mention the bottle of spumante that I intended to uncork at midnight. Riccardo’s obstinate silence and his hard gaze restrained me. I’ve seen that hostile expression in his eyes often lately, and I don’t like it in him, such a sweet, polite young man. It’s always there when he has to stay home because the money Michele gives him every Saturday for his personal expenses has run out. He sits near the radio and listens to dance music, sulking, or he pages through a magazine. On Christmas Eve, I understood for the first time that his bad mood is an accusation against his father and me. The truth is, he sometimes claims that although Michele has worked for so many years in a bank, he isn’t a businessman, meaning that he wasn’t able to get rich. He says it with a fond smile, as if that failure were merely a habit or a vestige of snobbishness. And yet, in his slightly protective tone, I always seem to hear something patronizing, as if he would gladly forgive his father for having made him a victim of this ineptitude. Basically, for Riccardo the joke is a way of feeling sorry for himself by giving the impression of absolving his father.
So I went over to Michele, sat down beside him, took his hand, and held it tight in mine: I wanted them to make a single hand. Riccardo was listening to the radio and his head was leaning against the back of the chair, so he wasn’t looking at us. I saw him as he said “Papa has narrow shoulders.” And in hearing those words again—good Lord, I hardly dare confess it, I’m writing in a moment of exasperation, maybe later I’ll erase these lines—in hearing those words again I have to admit I felt myself become mean. I would have liked to get up, stand in front of Riccardo, laugh sarcastically, and say to him derisively, “All right, let’s see where you are in twenty years.” I scarcely know the girl he talks to on the phone for hours, in a low voice, a slender blond girl named Marina, but I felt that he was 22thinking of her at that moment, of linking arms with her and going off. I would also stand in front of her, then, and, still laughing, I’d say, “We’ll see, we’ll see.”
I remembered the day when I told Michele that we could do without a nanny, and he had said yes, without looking at me, he had said the children were big now—they were five and three. I remembered when, later, I told him it would be better to let the maid go as well and, faced with his hesitation, mentioned the risk that she might gossip about what we bought on the black market. And finally, the day I came home and, happily embracing Michele, announced that I had managed to find a job: I had a lot of time available now, since the children were in high school and the house didn’t give me too much to do. “We’ll see,” I said, laughing, to Marina, “we’ll see,” and meanwhile I squeezed Michele’s dear hand.
Later
It’s two in the morning. I got up to write: 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. If it’s true that the hidden presence of this notebook gives a new flavor to my life, I 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 I didn’t have this notebook, I would have forgotten Riccardo’s behavior on Christmas Eve by now. But with it I can’t help being aware that something new took place between father and son that night, although apparently nothing is changed, and the next day they were affectionate 23with one another as usual. Michele didn’t return to the subject, yet I sense that although he understands Riccardo’s attitude, he can’t help judging him ungrateful. I did, too, at first, then I honestly had to recognize it was something else.
The fact is that our children can’t believe in us the way we believed in our parents. I wanted to try to explain this to Michele on Christmas Eve, but I couldn’t translate my confused thoughts into words. Riccardo went to bed, and we waited up for Mirella to come home from the dance. “Michele,” I said, “remember during the war, when we told the children not to tell anyone at school that we had bought shoes on the black market?” He answered me distractedly, asking why I was thinking back to those times. I didn’t know how to make myself clear, but I insisted: “And when we told them not to say that we were listening to radio broadcasts from abroad?”
I would have liked to remind him that around that time Mirella had told some lie or other, and it had been hard to punish her. She was already nearly as tall as I was, and while I was scolding her, she looked me right in the eye. I thought, I never caught my own mother telling a lie. Perhaps that made my mother seem a little cold, but I had never been her accomplice. When my father came home from the office and I saw him take off his hat and put down his lawyer’s briefcase, it never occurred to me to think that he had been unable to make the most of his life and that therefore we weren’t rich. It seemed to me that he possessed something much more valuable than wealth, which I wouldn’t dare to compare. Now I don’t always find the model of life that our parents by their example held up to us—and which naturally inspired us—to be so clear, stable, and well defined. I doubt, in short, whether what we possess and our parents possessed before us—traditions, family, codes of honor—is still valuable in any 24event, compared with money. Yet, despite my doubts, in my heart I can’t help continuing to believe in my convictions of the past. And I would have liked to make Michele understand that, because of these doubts of ours, perhaps Riccardo and Mirella no longer believe in them.
January 1, 1951
It’s as if I were alone in the house. Michele is sleeping, but ever since I began keeping this diary I’ve been afraid he’s pretending to be asleep in order to catch me. I’m writing at the kitchen table and I’ve put the household account book next to me to cover the notebook should Michele unexpectedly come in. Although, if I were discovered deceiving him, it would be even worse—it would be the end of the trust and harmony that is the basis of our relationship, of our twenty-two years of marriage. The truth is, it would be better for me to confess to Michele the existence of this notebook and then maybe implore him not to ask me to show him what I write. On the other hand, if he did catch me, there would always remain between us the doubt that I keep and have kept many other secrets from him. The absurdity of all this is that, frankly, if Michele kept a diary I didn’t know about, I would feel offended.
Something else keeps me from confessing that I’m writing: it’s the regret that I spend so much time doing it. I often complain that I have too many things to do, that I’m the family servant, the household slave—that I never have a moment to read a book, for example. That’s all true, but in a certain sense that servitude has also become my strength, the halo of my martyrdom. So on those rare occasions when I happen to take a nap for half an hour before Michele and the 25children return for dinner, or when I take a walk, gazing in the shop windows on the way home from the office, I never confess it. I’m afraid that if I admitted I’d enjoyed even a short rest or some diversion, I would lose the reputation I have of dedicating every second of my time to the family. No one would remember the countless hours I spend in the office or in the kitchen or shopping or mending but only the brief moments I confessed I’d spent reading a book or taking a walk. Michele is always urging me to get some rest, and Riccardo says that as soon as he’s able to earn money, he’ll take me on vacation to Capri or the Riviera. Recognizing my weariness frees him of every responsibility. So they often repeat, severely, “You should rest,” as if not resting were a whim of mine. But in practice, as soon as they see me sitting and reading a newspaper they say, “Mamma, since you have nothing to do, could you mend the lining of my jacket? Could you iron my pants?” and so on.
So, gradually, I, too, have been convinced of it. In the office, when we get a day off, I immediately announce that I’m going to use it to catch up on various projects and add that I’d already planned to do that. I make sure that I won’t stay home and rest, because, if I did, in the eyes of the family that one day would have the appearance of an entire month of repose. Years ago, I was invited by a friend to spend a week in a country house in Tuscany. I was very tired when I left, because I had arranged things so that Michele and the children would be entirely taken care of during my absence and, on returning, I found endless chores that had accumulated during my brief vacation. And yet, later that year, if I ever mentioned that I was tired, they all reminded me that I had been on vacation and surely my body must have benefited from it. No one seemed to understand that a week of vacation in August couldn’t keep me from being tired 26in October. If I sometimes say “I don’t feel well,” Michele and the children fall into a brief, respectful, awkward silence. Then I get up, return to doing what I must. No one makes a move to help me, but Michele cries, “Look, you say you don’t feel well and you’re not still for a moment.” Shortly afterward, they resume talking about this and that, and the children, going out, urge me: “Rest, OK?” Riccardo gives me a threatening little wag of his finger as if warning me against going out to have fun. Only fever, a high fever, allows any of us in the family to believe that we’re truly ill. Fever worries Michele, and the children bring me orange juice. But I rarely have a fever; never, I would say. On the other hand, 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.
January 3
Yesterday I went to Giuliana’s. Every year I say I don’t want to go to her annual birthday tea, to which she invites some of the old schoolmates she’s stayed friends with. I say I have too much to do to take time off from the office. I claim that, if I could, I would use the time for more important things. Every year Michele and the children insist, and attempt to persuade me that I mustn’t give up the pleasure of seeing my old friends, especially now that our lives are so different and I rarely have the chance to see them. I shake my head, I resist. Then, every year, I end up going. 27
Yesterday at breakfast, I was resisting more vehemently than usual when Mirella said, “Come on, you know perfectly well you’ll go: you had the black hat redone.” We looked at each other unkindly, and I didn’t dare reply. Maybe because Mirella is right. Every year, in fact, without confessing it to myself, in early December I try on one of my old hats that I hardly ever wear anymore, and convince myself that it needs freshening up. Then I catch myself standing in front of a newsstand where fashion magazines are displayed, trying on, in my imagination, the whimsical modern hat pictured on a cover. If someone approaches, I let my glance slide over to the closest daily paper and pretend to be reading the headlines of the political articles. Then, as soon as I’m alone again, I return a fond gaze to the fashion magazine. I go home with that new hat on my head, the feather hanging down on one side, and on my face the fatuous, fleeting expression of the models. I’m amazed that my family doesn’t notice, not even Michele. He greets me as usual saying, “Good evening, mamma.” For days I’m walking down the street with the hat on my head, and I see myself like that, sitting in Giuliana’s living room. Finally, I make up my mind, I telephone a milliner I know who’s very skillful at making alterations, and I whisper mysteriously that I’ll come by the next day. Yet when the hat is in the closet and we’re talking about Giuliana’s tea, I keep saying, “I’m not going, I’m really not.” I’m almost afraid to put it on, as if it were a test I couldn’t pass.
The test, perhaps, is Mirella’s look. Michele always says I look great, and then he feels sorry that he doesn’t earn enough for me to go to that milliner on Via Veneto where I used to buy hats in the early days of our marriage. “Why?” I ask him. “You mean this doesn’t look good?” He immediately says no and in fact compliments me, observing that whatever I wear, I look elegant. 28
I leave the house reassured, pleased. But when I’m in Giuliana’s living room I understand perfectly well what Michele meant. My pretty black felt hat disappears compared with the bright satin of my friends’ hats. We are only six or seven, it’s an intimate gathering, and yet they’re all dressed as if for a formal occasion: they’re wearing jewelry, and it’s clear that they’re showing off their best outfits. 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. Maybe they don’t really believe it, as when in school we showed each other the toys we’d been given and each of us said, “Mine is nicer.” It seems to me that that childish cruelty has stayed with them. Sometimes we jokingly start speaking French, as we did at school; we especially liked speaking French when we went walking on the Pincio all in a line, dressed in dark blue. People would take us for foreigners and that gave us a shiver of pride. In fact, we were all proud of being at the city’s best-known school, where a great number of students belonged to the aristocracy: the latter because they felt their family’s prestige confirmed; the others, like me, because it allowed us to casually utter the surnames of families that had given Popes to the Church and names to palazzi, even if, as was often the case, the palazzi were no longer theirs. I remember very clearly that when I named these schoolmates, my father, who came from a middle-class family of lawyers, was flattered by it. My mother, on the other hand, whose family belonged to the Venetian nobility but had, unfortunately, declined, pretended not to give it any importance. Rather, she would recount anecdotes about those families, and was able to perfectly reconstruct their genealogy, citing births, marriages, early deaths. My father looked at her with respect, and she would involuntarily 29humiliate him by asserting that, until her marriage, she had been a close friend of the families of the students at the school where—at great financial sacrifice—she wanted me to be educated. So at first I thought that if I simply said her maiden name, my aristocratic schoolmates would treat me as a relative. Instead, they seemed never to have heard it before, nor did their mothers recall having known my mother, despite her precise memories of them.
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. Eager to be young again, I tried to imitate them. I made an effort to remind myself that we’re nearly the same age, we have a lot of shared memories, we’re all married, have children—so our problems should be the same. Besides, until I started working, we used to see each other occasionally in the afternoon to play cards. Luisa, Giacinta, and I even have similar financial situations, since their husbands don’t make more than Michele and I combined.
In other words, I didn’t know how to explain our differences, which I feel grow more profound every year. I admit that I tried to understand them, while they were talking, as when I first arrived at the school and tried to follow when they spoke rapidly in French. Camilla humorously described the Christmas presents her husband had given her, expensive gifts she’d managed to get by means of astute and elaborate maneuvers. She wore a small hat decorated with a gray bird of paradise that fascinated me. Giuliana also explained how she had induced her husband to buy her a piece of jewelry. They 30were very entertaining—it was like watching magic tricks. Both she and Camilla talked about their husbands the way we talked about the sisters at school, revealing how cleverly they’d deceived them, even if they had innocent motives such as buying a dress or choosing where to spend a vacation. Giacinta claimed she’d managed to make her husband pay the electric bill every month, when in fact it’s bimonthly. Luisa claimed that the thing to do was to increase the children’s expenses. “It’s the only safe method,” she declared, laughing, and as she laughed, the cluster of violets pinned to the white satin of her hat quivered: “When we’re on vacation, whenever I lose money gambling, the children have tonsillitis or a cold.” Giacinta immediately interrupted her, saying, “Because yours are still small, mine talk—they’d say they’re perfectly fine.”
