At home Mirella, seeing that I was worried, drew me aside and asked, “Is it my fault, mamma?” I nodded yes. She added, in agitation, “It was Sandro who insisted on talking to you. I knew what that would mean for you.” We talked a little, but, ultimately, it didn’t matter to me. She confirmed what Cantoni had said, and I noticed that they used the same words. “I’ll talk to your father,” I said. “Today I don’t have the strength. He’ll decide. Maybe it will be good for you to go, later on. We’re used to living according to certain principles, they may be false and backward, as you say, but we can’t change.” Again I marveled at how coldly she acts, without apologizing and without invoking the blindness of passion as a pretext. When Michele and I were engaged, I sinned with him, but I pretended to do it reluctantly, swept away by him, without consenting. It was the same on our wedding night, and later, too, whenever Michele approached me at night. If I went to Venice, maybe I would arrive pretending not to know why I’m going or what would inevitably happen. That is the difference between Mirella and me; it seems to me that, accepting consciously certain situations, she is freed forever from sin. I would have liked to ask her if her conscience is at peace, her mind tranquil.

What anguish. I would be better off to stop writing. I’m afraid that being tired keeps me from being objective. Sometimes I think that I haven’t loved Michele for many years now, that I continue to repeat that phrase out of habit, not noticing that loving feelings no longer exist between us, and have been replaced by others, perhaps equally valid, but completely different. I think again of the anxiety with which I waited for Michele as a fiancé, of the desire we had to be alone, to talk, of the time that went by rapidly, on the thread of looks and words, and of the tedium that now descends when we’re alone together, and no outside distraction, not the radio or the movies, comes to save us. And yet once I even wished that the children would hurry up and get married, so that we could return to being alone, as before; I thought that everything was still intact. Maybe, if our children had remained children, I would never have noticed this change. Or if Guido had never spoken to me, or if I had never listened to Cantoni. I was really convinced that it was still love, and until Mirella confessed she was afraid that her life would resemble mine, I was also convinced that I was happy. Maybe, in reality, I still am, but what I feel when I’m with Michele is a cold happiness, very different from what I feel when Guido talks to me or takes my hand. These candid gestures are love and the gestures I perform with Michele, instead, are only affection or solidarity or habit, even those rare, more intimate ones: pity, or, rather, compassion for human weakness. I seem to have suddenly understood all that. Maybe Michele has understood it for a long time. He’s much more intelligent than I am, especially in these things. Then I heard Clara say that love has to be invented day by day. I don’t know what that means, in practice, but I sense that I’ve never been able to invent it.

Sometimes her behavior toward me even seems to be intentionally hostile. A few days ago, for example, she called Michele to tell him that she was planning to send him these famous tortellini that he likes very much, and that she would prepare them herself, with her own hands. Michele was really pleased by this attention and said that the women from the time of his mother and my mother were extraordinary. Offended, I pointed out to him that though my mother could prepare tortellini, she would never have been able to earn a cent to help her husband. Michele replied that it was precisely the housewife virtues that made women extraordinary. I couldn’t help going to Mirella’s room and venting to her about this business of the tortellini. To her, as to my mother, I tried to explain that I didn’t have time to do more. Mirella interrupted, asking me, “What do you care about tortellini?”

And yet I do: I feel guilty toward Michele for not making tortellini, but driving with Guido I don’t feel at all guilty. The only remorse I suffer, when I’m with him, is that I’m stealing time from the family, from the house, the same I feel writing in this diary. Perhaps wealthy women, who have a cook, never feel any remorse. Yesterday Michele left all the meat on his plate, saying it was tough, Riccardo did the same, and both asked where I had bought it, almost accusing me, I felt, of having chosen badly. That meat left on the plates wrung my heart. It was as if Guido were guilty of the unsatisfied hunger in Riccardo and Michele. I imagined the refrigerator in his house, overflowing with good food, and I felt an awareness of sin rising in me. Maybe Mirella isn’t wrong when she claims that money corrupts everything. I’ve begun to understand it since I’ve been going out driving with Guido; our relations have changed now that we no longer see each other only in the office.

[...] When I look at Michele, I’m sorry I no longer want to go to Venice with him. Everything would be easy, simple, clear, and I wouldn’t struggle with so many opposing feelings. But if I went with him, I wouldn’t feel that happiness I long for. We’d sit at a café in Piazza San Marco, silent, listening to the music, distracting ourselves with the faces of the passersby, as we do sometimes in August when Rome is deserted and we sit in the café in the square nearby, where there’s a little orchestra that often plays Ratcliff’s Dream. Maybe we’d find some excitement at a table in a trattoria with good food; but I don’t like going to a trattoria with Michele. At the end, when I see the bills that, after checking the figure twice, he places on the table, I always think it wasn’t worth the trouble.

[...] Sitting down again, he said we’ll soon get used to Marina, she’s a good girl and he likes her. It’s true. He likes her because she’s pretty. He, like Riccardo, smiles when he sees her around, because she possesses that animal meekness that men take for sweetness. Not even what happened between them serves to make Michele suspicious: he thinks she’s an example of loving, female obedience that flatters him, too, because he’s a man. But I know what a different idea he has of a woman like Clara, for instance, even if he doesn’t talk about her or complain that she never called. [...]

I want to tell the truth, confess that the moment Guido asked me to go to Venice, I had decided to accept. I’ve never had the candor to admit it, even in this diary. Otherwise, I would have to acknowledge that the effort I made to forget myself for twenty years has been in vain. I succeeded until the moment when, hidden under my coat, I carried home this shiny black notebook like a bloodsucker. Everything started then; even the change in my relations with Guido began the day I admitted I could hide something from my husband, even if it was a notebook. I wanted to be alone, to write; and those who want to be enveloped in their own solitude, in a family, always carry in themselves the seed of sin. In fact, because of these pages, everything seems different, even what I feel for Guido. I blame his money for the weaknesses that I can’t overcome or accept. I want to delude myself that an outside force drives me to betray my duties, I don’t dare confess that I love him. I really think that the strongest feeling in me is cowardice.

I still remember the day I told my mother I was going to start working. She stared at me for a long time, in silence, before lowering her eyes, and, because of that look of hers, my work has always weighed on me like a sin. Mirella disapproves of this feeling, I know perfectly well. Maybe she even despises it and intends, by the way she lives her life, to rebel against me. She doesn’t understand that it was I who made her free, I with my life racked between the old, reassuring traditions and the call of new demands. It was up to me. I’m the bridge she’s taken advantage of, the way young people take advantage of everything, cruelly, without even noticing that they’re taking, without paying attention. Now I, too, can collapse.

[...] I was working and she was studying, as she often does now, until late at night, because she’s decided to take a lot of exams. “Lucky you!” Riccardo said to her yesterday: “I have other things to do now, I can’t prepare my thesis. And in September, when I start at the bank, I’ll have even less time.” [...]

[...] But as soon as I held the notebook, I lost my sense of peace. In it, the image of Guido emerges everywhere between the lines: his words, written, acquire unthought-of echoes, bewildering appeals. I should have said yes the first day he invited me to leave since, in reality, I desire nothing else. My giving it up is only another proof of that lack of courage that Mirella calls hypocrisy. Facing these pages, I’m afraid. All my feelings, thus dissected, rot, become poison, and I’m aware of becoming the criminal the more I try to be the judge. I have to destroy the notebook, destroy the devil that hides in its pages, as in the hours of a life. At night, when we sit at the table together, we seem transparent and loyal, without intrigues, but I know now that none of us show what we truly are, we hide, we all camouflage ourselves, out of shame or spite. Marina gives me long looks every night, and I’m afraid that, looking, she sees in me this notebook, knows the subterfuges I use to write in it, the cleverness with which I hide it. She’s certain to find it someday and find in it a motive to dominate me as I dominate her for what she did with Riccardo. Sitting opposite me, she waits with the inexorable patience of people without intelligence.