Forbidden Notebook

Forbidden Notebook

ALBA

DE CÉSPEDES

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN

BY ANN GOLDSTEIN

WITH A FOREWORD

BY JHUMPA LAHIRI

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

Foreword

A Note from the Translator

Forbidden Notebook

November 26, 1950

December 10

December 11

December 15

December 21

December 27

Later

January 1, 1951

January 3

January 5

January 7

January 9

January 10

January 14

Later

January 15

January 17

January 18

January 19

January 20

January 24

January 25

January 27

January 28

January 29

January 30

February 2

February 3

February 5

February 6

February 7

February 10

February 12

February 14

February 16

February 17

February 19

February 21

February 24

February 25

February 26

February 27

February 28

March 2

March 7

March 9

March 10

March 14

March 16

March 18

March 20

March 21

March 22

March 26

March 29

March 30

April 1

April 2

April 3

April 6

April 8

April 10

April 12

April 13

April 16

April 17

April 18

April 24

April 26

April 27

April 29

April 30

May 4

May 5

May 6

May 8

May 10

May 12

May 16

May 19

May 22

May 24

May 27

Available and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press

Copyright

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 2to 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

November 26, 1950

Iwas 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.