Forbidden Notebook

It’s terrible for a mother to ask herself that question about her own daughter, a girl of twenty. But I couldn’t talk to anyone about it; Riccardo and Michele would react violently. Men always say, “You’ll be sorry if my daughter, you’ll be sorry if my sister …” They say, “I won’t tolerate it.” It’s easy to say “I won’t tolerate it.” Yet things hap

I belong to a generation that isn’t ashamed of showing how tired we are. Whereas she seems never to allow herself a moment of surrender: from early morning she’s all dressed, as if ready to go out, all smooth, polished, powdered, her thin neck wrapped in a ribbon of ribbed silk. I looked at her yesterday, while I was working, bent over, slightly hu

“I was always very anxious about you, about your future. When you got married you seemed to do it only in order to leave home, to be free. I thought you’d be a terrible wife, since you didn’t seem at all in love with Michele. Then it passes,” she repeated. I wanted to reply, assure her that I had never wanted to go, leave them, I wanted to say that

This morning I happened to open her closet and I saw a new purse, of pigskin, that must have cost at least ten thousand lire. I didn’t know what to do. I would have liked to speak to Michele about it, but he had already left, and then I considered that, if I speak to him or Riccardo, this attitude of Mirella’s, which perhaps is only temporary, once

My mother and I talk only about material things, things far from what is truly important to us: she’s always been cold toward me; even when I was a child she seldom hugged me and when she did it increased my awe. She sent me to boarding school early. I think her attitude comes from the habitual reserve of her aristocratic family. In fact, she alway

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. Now, suddenly, I seem to comprehend the abyss of solitude I would fall into if I could no longer telephone my mother and tell her that Michele and the children are fine and ate happily.

When I was twenty, Michele and the children already existed, even before I met him and they were born. They were my fate, even more than my calling. I had only to trust, to obey. If I think about it, that seems to me the cause of Mirella’s restlessness: the possibility of not obeying. That’s what has changed everything, between fathers and children

The rooms are very small, but maybe for that reason it seemed to me that they embraced us more closely, gathered us into a single shell. I’d always thought, too, that in many ways—the most important ones—our family was more fortunate than others. In all these years Michele and I have never fought seriously, he has always worked, I found a job when

If I hadn’t written it, I would have forgotten about it. We’re always inclined to forget what we’ve said or done in the past, partly in order not to have the tremendous obligation to remain faithful to it. Otherwise, it seems to me, we would all discover that we’re full of mistakes and, above all, contradictions, between what we intended to do and