Forbidden Notebook

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

Later I stopped writing a little while ago, because I heard a noise at the door, as if someone were inserting the key in the lock. Caught unawares, I didn’t know where to put the notebook. I looked around, but all the furniture appeared to be of glass, transparent. Wherever I might hide it, the notebook would be visible. I turned this way and that,

I took advantage of the moment to tell him that yesterday Mirella insisted on asking for a new coat: she claimed that if we want to, we can afford it, because both her father and I received a bonus for Christmas. In vain I tried to make her understand that the money is already promised to other expenses—maybe she thinks we want to keep it for ourse

They were 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

But maybe it’s hard to maintain friendships for a lifetime no matter what. In reality, at a certain moment, each of us changes, becomes different, some go forward, others remain fixed, and thus we move in opposite directions, so there’s no longer a meeting place, no longer anything in common.

They ate sweets, took compacts out of their purses, ingenious new lighters. Margherita had the same expression on her face as when, in class, she managed to pass from one desk to the next a caricature of the nun teaching. If her husband had unexpectedly come in, she would have blushed as she had the day the nun discovered her and sent her out of th

He said that in the presence of the children, and they looked at me with amazement. It’s terrible to think that I sacrificed my entire self to beautifully perform tasks that they consider obvious, natural.

During those two hours, it had been as if they were acting in a play in which I alone didn’t know my part, I had forgotten the lines. I was silent and gradually I understood that the unbridgeable gap that has opened between us in recent years is due to the fact that I work and they don’t. Or, more precisely, to the fact that I am capable of contrib