Something else keeps me from confessing that I’m writing: it’s the regret that I spend so much time doing it. I often complain that I have too many things to do, that I’m the family servant, the household slave—that I never have a moment to read a book, for example. That’s all true, but in a certain sense that servitude has also become my strength, the halo of my martyrdom. So on those rare occasions when I happen to take a nap for half an hour before Michele and the children return for dinner, or when I take a walk, gazing in the shop windows on the way home from the office, I never confess it. I’m afraid that if I admitted I’d enjoyed even a short rest or some diversion, I would lose the reputation I have of dedicating every second of my time to the family. No one would remember the countless hours I spend in the office or in the kitchen or shopping or mending but only the brief moments I confessed I’d spent reading a book or taking a walk. Michele is always urging me to get some rest, and Riccardo says that as soon as he’s able to earn money, he’ll take me on vacation to Capri or the Riviera. Recognizing my weariness frees him of every responsibility. So they often repeat, severely, “You should rest,” as if not resting were a whim of mine. But in practice, as soon as they see me sitting and reading a newspaper they say, “Mamma, since you have nothing to do, could you mend the lining of my jacket? Could you iron my pants?” and so on.

So, gradually, I, too, have been convinced of it. In the office, when we get a day off, I immediately announce that I’m going to use it to catch up on various projects and add that I’d already planned to do that. I make sure that I won’t stay home and rest, because, if I did, in the eyes of the family that one day would have the appearance of an entire month of repose. 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. If I sometimes say, “I don’t feel well,” Michele and the children fall into a brief, respectful, awkward silence. Then I get up, return to doing what I must. No one makes a move to help me, but Michele cries, “Look, you say you don’t feel well and you’re not still for a moment.” Shortly afterward, they resume talking about this and that, and the children, going out, urge me: “Rest, OK?” Riccardo gives me a threatening little wag of his finger as if warning me against going out to have fun. Only fever, a high fever, allows any of us in the family to believe that we’re truly ill. Fever worries Michele, and the children bring me orange juice. But I rarely have a fever; never, I would say. On the other hand, I’m always tired and no one believes me. And yet tranquility for me originates precisely in the tiredness I feel when I lie in bed at night. There I find a sort of happiness in which I feel peaceful and fall asleep. I have to recognize that, perhaps, the determination with which I protect myself from any possibility of rest is the fear of losing this single source of happiness, which is tiredness.

Again, tonight I stayed up wrapping packages for the children. Michele wanted to keep me company and I said, “No, thanks, you go ahead, go to bed.” But it was because, afterward, I intended to write. Now, under everything I do and say, there’s the presence of this notebook. 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.

I didn’t have the courage to confess that, on the contrary, these things do happen to us; it seemed to me that it wasn’t true. I said weakly, hiding behind a smile, “Yes, you’re right, but let’s speculate, let’s suppose that Mirella’s attitudes become too free, that she stays out late and I don’t like her expression when she returns … ” He interrupted me, annoyed: “I don’t want to hear you say that, even as a joke.” “All right,” I continued, in the same tone. “Then let’s say she comes home with expensive gifts that a man gave her and explains them with a lie, like that night, you remember? When she said she went out with Giovanna and instead went dancing. Let’s imagine she says she wants to live an easy life, in whatever way, by whatever means … ” Michele replied that he would never allow her to speak like that in his house. I objected that the time is past when a father could say “I won’t allow it” and the daughter had to obey because he provided food, clothing, lodging. Now, whether it’s good or bad, I don’t know, but a girl like Mirella can say, “I’m leaving home and going to work.” Then Michele said he didn’t want to waste his time listening to this absurd conversation, I had nothing to do, evidently, if I got lost in these speculations, he had the paper to read, I was never interested in the international situation, I didn’t realize what was happening in the world. I said I am very well aware of it and in fact these problems don’t seem unrelated. He said, “What could they possibly have to do with each other?” I didn’t know what to say, but I feel that way.

[...] I’m afraid his determination to go to Argentina is a gesture of discouragement; maybe he thinks it’s a way of avoiding inner struggles, but I don’t think going to a new country is enough to avoid them. He brought home a brochure, an advertisement from a travel agency, that showed the mountains and lakes of Argentina. I pointed out that his trip wouldn’t be a vacation, the mountains and lakes have no importance, and Italy has plenty of mountains, too, but he wants to go anyway. Michele exhorted me not to dissuade him and, although my opinion differs from his, these decisions are up to the father, so I stopped saying anything. Michele and Riccardo often leaf through that brochure together and look at the mountains, getting excited. Michele said to him, “If you like it there, I’ll come, too.” I objected: “And us?” “You, too, of course,” he added, “we’ll all go.” Riccardo said, “You can get rich quickly over there.”

I thought that for Michele and me it would be different. We were young: just married, we would leave for Venice, we’d have a big room on the Grand Canal. My mother often said she’d had to fight with her parents for a long time in order to marry my father; she had decided to run away with him, if they wouldn’t let her. I couldn’t take what she said seriously—the very idea made me laugh. I imagined them meeting at night, in a coupé. She’d arrive breathless, holding up her dress with its train, and papa would be waiting for her, twisting the ends of his mustache. But in those clothes, in those gestures, I imagined them already old, familiar and irritated with one another, as they are now. It’s so hard to see the people around us as different from the figures t

I’d like so much to talk about these things with Michele. But if I try, I don’t know why, I get embarrassed and pretend to be joking. Last night I sat beside him as he was reading the paper and told him that Riccardo intends to get married soon, before going to Argentina. He said it would be a really bad idea, because a man who marries is no longer free to direct his life as he pleases, he’s ruined. Humiliated, I asked if, then, he … But he immediately interrupted me, saying that our case is an exception. So, almost teasingly, I asked if he was happy. With some annoyance he answered, “What difficult questions! Yes, of course, why shouldn’t I be? The children are good, they’re healthy. Riccardo will have a great career in Argentina, Mirella’s already working, then she’ll get married. What more could we wish for, mamma?” He smiled, patting my hand fondly, and went back to reading.hey’re compelled to represent for us.

[...] Today, for example, I was sorry I’d gone to the office and wasted time doing nothing: the kitchen still had to be cleaned up and Michele needs some shirts that these past evenings, in order to write, I didn’t iron. Sometimes, in a happy state of intoxication, I imagine giving in to disorder: leaving the pots dirty, the laundry to be washed, the beds unmade. I fall asleep in that desire, a violent, greedy desire, similar to the desire for bread I had when I was pregnant. At night I dream of having to remedy all that disorder and not succeeding, not finishing in time, before Michele gets home. It’s a nightmare.

Suddenly, I thought that I, too, hide a notebook, and that Mirella, looking for a hiding place for hers, might find it. If she read it, she would discover that I am different from what she thinks. She would know all my secrets, would know about the director, also of the appointment I agreed to for Saturday, of the apprehension with which I ask myself if he is in love with me. The thought of him, the fear of the notebook being discovered, and the impression that a dense mystery envelops each of us give me no peace. I see Mirella who leaves home with her diary in her purse, Michele who returns to the bank on Saturday to write his script in peace, Riccardo who has put up the photograph of the Argentine mountains on his bedroom wall, and it seems to me that, although we love each other so much, we protect ourselves from each other like enemies.

It’s very difficult to talk to Riccardo about Mirella: when they’re together they’re like enemies. Maybe it’s always been that way, but until now I thought it was petty sibling spite. Now I’m afraid there’s some other reason, more profound, that I can’t define, and that grieves me deeply. I don’t want to think that Riccardo doesn’t love his sister; rather, it’s as if he poured out on her an animosity directed toward himself. Today he said that women take advantage of working to do as they like. I reminded him that I, too, work and that it was helpful for our family, including him. He replied that I do it only out of necessity, and therefore my work is a proof of solidarity with my husband, basically a proof of submission. He added that, if I could, I would do without it, and I don’t know what restraint, maybe the Saturday appointment, kept me from contradicting him.

I went to the kitchen and started frying the potatoes, then the eggs. I think Mirella was lying, and in any case, if she destroyed the diary, she did it after meeting Cantoni. Soon she joined me and asked if I needed help. She rarely offers, so I looked at her with amazement. She’s really a pretty girl, her hair cut so short is very becoming. The joy of the money earned made her more ardent, and yet unusually sweet. She smiled: “Mamma, why can’t you admit that I’m happy in my way?” I told her that happiness, at least as she imagines it, doesn’t exist, I know through experience. She objected: “But you have the experience of one life alone, yours. Why don’t you want to leave me at least the hope?” I told her to go ahead and hope, it costs nothing. Then I handed her a plate with the fried eggs and asked her to bring it to her brother. She asked me why he couldn’t come get it himself. “I’ll call him,” she said. I turned to her harshly: “Take it,” I commanded. “Riccardo is tired, he studied all day.” “And didn’t you work all day?” she said brusquely. “And didn’t I work all day?” Yet she brought it to him. When she returned, she said, “That is what disgusts me, mamma. You think you’re obliged to serve everyone, starting with me. So, little by little, the others end up believing it. You think that for a woman to have some personal satisfaction, besides those of the house and the kitchen, is a fault, that her job is to serve. I don’t want that, you understand? I don’t want that.” I felt a shiver run down my spine, a cold shiver that I can’t get rid of. Yet I pretended indifference to what she said. I asked her ironically if she wanted to start being a lawyer in her own home.

At the table Michele and Riccardo didn’t even notice her absence. Michele was enthusiastically describing the visit to Clara: they hadn’t been able to read the script, because other people had arrived, but Clara had promised to read it soon and would call to make another appointment. Both Michele and Riccardo were satisfied and lively. Michele opened the window: it’s already spring outside, they said, and I was almost sorry I’d stayed in the house all day. I showed Michele the drawers I’d reorganized; he said, “Great, that’s great,” and then resumed talking about Clara and her friends, people known in the world of cinema. He said they all have cars, and one of them had driven him home. Riccardo took advantage of his father’s mood to announce to him that he is engaged, that I know who the girl is, and that he wants to introduce her to him soon. I was afraid that Michele would get angry, and I was irritated with Riccardo, who was spoiling a happy day. But Michele seems to have changed his mind about marrying young. He said to him as well: “Great, that’s great.”

Michele stared at her, rigid in the black dress, in the tremulous light of the candles. “She was a saint,” he said, and kissed my hands, softened by his grief. “You were always so kind to her.” Maybe it’s true. At a certain point we no longer understand what is kindness and what is ruthlessness in the life of a family.

I liked hearing him say he’s alone, even if he was speaking indifferently, in a slightly cynical tone. Yet, shaking my head, I persisted in saying that he has a great business and the opportunity to have a comfortable, easy life. He replied that that’s not important, either; it’s other things that count, he said, and in a flash Venice passed before my eyes. “At a certain age,” he continued, “everything we’ve done is no longer enough. It was useful only in making us what we are. And just as we are, now that we’re truly ourselves, what we’ve wanted to be or could be, we’d like to start to live again, consciously, according to our current tastes. Instead, we have to continue to live the life we chose when we were someone else. I’ve worked my whole life, I spent thirty years becoming what I am. And now?” He addressed this question into the void bitterly. Then, as if regretting he’d let himself go, he added, laughing, that an age should be established—“forty-five, let’s say”—past which we had the right to be alone in the world, and to choose our life from the beginning. “Besides,” he observed, “no one understands what we do, the effort it costs us, no one, except those who work with us.” I felt that he was criticizing his wife; maybe Michele is similarly critical of me sometimes. I said to myself that I wasn’t asking for anything, I bought only shoes for the children, clothes for the children, food, and no mink coats. But I wondered if there was a difference; and concluded yes, to my disadvantage, because Michele can’t even complain. “Still,” I said with a mischievous smile, remembering what Mirella had said about Barilesi, “if someone invited you to give up the effort that the work requires, would you give it up?” As we were talking, we had stood up and gone to the window. Shadows were falling on the garden below, a melancholy garden of palms and oleanders. “No,” he confessed candidly. We laughed. “But maybe precisely because I have nothing else,” he added in a lower voice.

[...] Some nights ago at dinner, Riccardo claimed that there can’t be friendship between a man and a woman, that men have nothing to say to women, because they have no interests in common, except some precise interests, he added, laughing. Mirella at first maintained the opposite, in a serious tone, bringing up valid arguments, such as the education of the modern woman, her new position in society, but when she heard him laugh that irritating male laugh, she lost control. She said that perhaps those opinions are suggested to him by the type of women he hangs around with. Riccardo turned pale and asked her harshly, “What do you mean?” Mirella shrugged. He got up and repeated, threatening, “What do you mean?” I had to intervene, as when they were children, but, as then, I had the impression that Mirella was the stronger; and for that reason alone I would have liked to hit her.

[...] “I understand,” I retorted, “so if reputation doesn’t count and a woman of forty-three is free to act like a girl in search of a husband, if you yourself approve all this, you mean that I, too, could … ” ‘What do you have to do with it?” he immediately interrupted, in an irritated, reproachful tone. “How can you compare your case with Clara’s, mamma? You have a husband, two grown children … Clara is alone, and we all know the world of the cinema … ” He was lying the way one lies to a child, and suddenly I realized that it wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to me like that. He’s always done it, or at least for so many years that I’ve forgotten any other way he has of speaking. And as I answered him compliantly, admitting that my case is different, I, too, was lying, out of fear of him, of his judgment. He came over to me, caressed me. “You understand, right?” he said, and I nodded. But maybe because of the lie or maybe because in a confused way I sensed that he was right, I felt an uncontrollable sadness rising in me. I’m afraid that because my way of being seems natural to him it no longer has any value in his eyes. Rather, he admires Clara, who is so different from me and with whom I no longer have anything in common, not even our past as young wives, which today, with her present life, she denies, derides. I wondered if for Michele I’m still a living woman or already, like his mother, a portrait on the wall. So I am for my children. Certainly, so my mother is for me. I wished desperately to escape the evil spell of that portrait. “I’m afraid,” I was about to say, but he, ignorant of my thoughts, wouldn’t have understood.

Mirella was sitting on the ottoman in her room. When I entered, she didn’t even lift her head up from her hands. I sat on a chair in the corner and looked at her. Her nightgown was already lying on the ottoman, white, a child’s nightgown. I’ve never understood Mirella, while I always understand Riccardo. Sometimes I think that if she weren’t my daughter, it would be hard for me to love her. She’s not content just to let herself live, to be loved, as I did at her age. Maybe it’s because studies were very different then for girls. I would never have thought of being a lawyer. I studied literature, music, art history. I was taught only what is beautiful and sweet in life. Mirella studies forensic medicine. She knows everything. For me books were a weakness that I had to overcome little by little, over the years; they give her the pitiless force that divides us.

Then there was a silence, and I was happy in the echo of my name. “What’s happening, Valeria?” he asked, without looking at me, still staring at that initial. I said, “I don’t know,” and looked down. He continued, “Shall we be frank? May I speak?” I would have liked to say no, to put on my coat and go, instead I nodded. “I was afraid,” he confessed. I looked up again, surprised, because I had always thought of him as a strong man. “It began about two months ago, when you told me—you remember?—that your family’s financial situation had improved. I asked you, half in jest, if you would abandon me. You answered seriously, instead, as if you had already reflected on this possibility. You said, I remember it well: ‘Not for now.’ ” Immediately I explained to him that I had said that without intending to, maybe instinctively, considering that, if there was no financial reason to work, at home they wouldn’t accept this, my personal activity; on the contrary … He interrupted me: “Yes, I understand. Besides, I myself didn’t give it any weight at the moment. It was later, that Saturday, when we were alone here in the office by chance. Suddenly, while we were working together, I felt an unknown sensation of sweetness and your words came to mind. From then on I began to be afraid, I imagined coming here every morning and not finding you. Maybe because the others—you saw Marcellini?—work only to get their salary and leave, they work with me the way they’d work with anyone. Or maybe because you know everything about the office, and know how much tenacity, how much effort … Or maybe that’s not why,” he added, lowering his voice. “In other words, I was afraid of being alone again, the way I was when I started. Worse, in fact, because today I no longer have that enthusiasm, that anxiety for achievement that sustained me then. I don’t believe in anything anymore, today. There: I understood that here, without you, I would be alone just as I am at home. First I thought it was a moment of weariness—every so often I like to feel sorry for myself … Instead, as the days passed, I understood better what my life would be without you, Valeria. An overwhelming boredom with work seized me, a boredom with life, in fact, a nausea. Do you understand?” I murmured, “Yes, I understand.” And then, after a pause, “It would be like that for me, too.”

I called Clara and told her I’d like to come see her, and she invited me to lunch, but we didn’t set a day. I said how grateful I was for what she’s doing for us, I repeated, “Let’s hope for the best.” She said that in reality she didn’t have much hope, but that I shouldn’t discourage Michele, because she was still intending to try several paths. “The script has an interesting beginning, don’t you think?” I answered vaguely. I didn’t want to confess that I don’t know anything about it. “Of course,” Clara continued, “it all has to be rewritten, but as it’s been corrected, it might work. The plot, of course, is very dark, very risqué.” I said, “Yes … yes … ” “That’s also its strength, its attraction, I don’t deny it,” she observed. “That man who says he’s a different person to every woman is very successful. And then when he goes to the street with the prostitutes, and the following scene, when he comes home and there’s his wife, who says, ‘I kept dinner warm for you’ … There are wonderful ideas, a great film could be made. But I’m afraid it won’t work, no producer is courageous enough. I advised Michele to lighten it, but he says it’s impossible and ultimately he’s not wrong. Its character is really in that fever, that sexual obsession.” Then she said, “Too bad,” and added that Michele would have had a lot of talent for the cinema, and repeated, “Too bad.”

When Michele came home I didn’t tell him I’d talked to Clara.

I couldn’t make a decision and she felt it; I was afraid, in fact, that she was betting on that and her calm was due to a calculation. I asked her affectionately, “Do you say that because you think you can’t act otherwise? That you don’t have a choice? There’s always a remedy, at least greater harm can be avoided. You’ve been his lover, right?” I saw her blush violently. “That concerns me alone.” So I lost control again. “Shameless!” I said. “Aren’t you ashamed of speaking like that?” “No,” she answered firmly. “And whatever my response, it wouldn’t change anything. You can impose your will on me, even for a few months; you can shut me in a convent or throw me out of the house. You have full rights, and I will obey you. Those are the relations between you and me. The rest concerns me alone.” Annihilated by that coldness, I replied, “So morality has no importance for you?” She was silent for a moment, then said softly, “Oh, I reflect a lot, believe me. I ask myself constantly what’s good and what’s evil. You always accuse me of being cynical, cold, but it’s not so. It’s not true. I’m different from you, that’s all. I’ve said to you many times: you are able to rely on conventional models of good and evil. You’re luckier. Whereas I need to review them according to my judgment before accepting them.” “But what can your judgment be, at twenty?” I exclaimed angrily. “You have to rely on those who have experience, submit.” She smiled. “If things were like that, nothing would ever change, everything would be transmitted intact from generation to generation, without improving, slaves would still be sold in the square, don’t you think? It’s precisely now that I can rebel. At forty, when I’m old, I won’t be able to do much, I’ll want to stay comfortable.” I was about to say that, on the contrary, it’s precisely at forty that one rebels, but I don’t know if it’s true, and then Mirella is so much more educated than I am, she always cites names and books that say I’m wrong. “You’re not religious, Mirella?” I asked her instead.

[...] “Have you thought that you’ll never be able to have a family of your own, children?” I said. “That you’re destroying your future for something that will end soon, you understand, it will end in any case. You’ll never be happy.” “And you, are you happy?” she asked me, harshly. I had tears in my eyes because the conversation had moved me, exhausted me. “Of course,” I said emphatically, “I’m happy, I’ve always been happy, very happy.” She stared at me tenderly with a gaze that made me want to lower mine. “How good you are, mamma!” she exclaimed. She said good night with a quick hug and I followed her along the hall like a beggar. “Why do you want to be so hard, so bitter, Mirella?” I whispered. I heard her close the door, and I went back to the dining room. Shattered, I collapsed onto a chair, rested my head on my arms crossed on the table. I imagined going to the telephone, calling Guido, telling him to come right away. I imagined going to talk to Cantoni. I couldn’t wait for morning so that I could act. It almost seemed to me that if I could stand up morning would come sooner. And yet I had a feeling of nausea, of rejecting every action. Unaware, I fell asleep. When I roused myself, it was dawn.

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.