Forbidden Notebook

My 15 highlights

• I never would have believed that everything that happens to me in the course of a day would be worth writing down. My life always appeared rather insignificant, without remarkable events, apart from my marriage and the birth of the children. 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.

• Today is Mirella’s birthday. We had a calm day. My parents came to lunch, along with Michele’s father, who is very old and on every such occasion says this is the last family celebration he will attend. One never knows how to respond, because it might be true, and younger family members feel some embarrassment at surviving, it seems like a lack of respect

• 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.

• Hearing Verona named, I started crying. Michele dried my tears with his handkerchief. Then he picked up the newspaper and began reading. I went to the bedroom.

• 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.

• During the whole day I wondered what my behavior toward Mirella should be. I wondered, above all, if it would be good to offer her a precise alternative, say to her: “Either you break off every relation with that man, or you leave this house.”

• 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.

• I have a constant wish to be silent: if I could, I would lie in bed for hours and hours thinking, without following a precise thought. I like getting lost in the certainty of being alive. I feel an affectionate presence around me, a contented gaze.

• 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.

• While I was copying the names, slowly, carefully, as if I were taking a calligraphy test, I observed that, judging from that address book, our friendships changed after the war. Maybe because since then economic conditions in general have changed and families like ours, who saw their incomes diminish and their children grow, have to adapt, of necessity, to a different social position. In fact, if I think about it carefully, I sense that that happened because, during the war, some understood what was important and others didn’t.

• 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.

• “A boy, remember,” he said. “It has to be a boy.” My father-in-law is a retired colonel, and doesn’t appreciate women or their company.

• When she comes to our house, she says very little. Riccardo treats her badly, sometimes he answers her brusquely, and I don’t understand why, loving her, he pretends to be so authoritarian, even aggressive. Marina never reacts; and it’s good, because in marriage there has to be one who commands and one who obeys.

• A few nights ago, we went to the movies. It was an American film, and at a certain point you saw the husband helping his wife wash the dishes. Everyone laughed, and I, too, I confess, felt like laughing. Then you saw the wife working in an office, serious, with glasses, giving orders to some colleagues, and no one laughed. I said obviously the assumption is that women are capable of doing more things than men, and Michele got mad.

• We don’t write letters anymore. We’re used to feeling ashamed of our loving feelings, as if they were sinful, and so, gradually, they’ve become that. Michele, besides, considers me cold, not very affectionate, and has kept the habit of lamenting it, jokingly, in the presence of the children or friends. At first it upset me, then I got accustomed to laughing at it.