Forbidden Notebook

My 2 highlights

• 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 in October.

• 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.