Alba de Céspedes

“What’s wrong today, mamma?” I thought maybe I’m starting to get irritable, cranky, like
all women—it’s said—when they pass forty: and, suspecting that Michele had the same thought, I felt profoundly humiliated.

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

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, under
stand, I 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.

If it’s true that the hidden presence of this notebook gives a new flavor to my life, I have to acknowledge that it isn’t making it any happier. In the family you have to pretend not to notice what happens, or at least not to wonder about its meaning. If I didn’t have this notebook, I would have forgotten Riccardo’s behavior on Christmas Eve by now. But with it I can’t help being aware that something new took place between father and son that night, although apparently nothing is changed, and the next day they were affectionate
with one another as usua

Perhaps that made my mother seem a little cold, but I had never been her accomplice. When my father came home from the office and I saw him take off his hat and put down his lawyer’s briefcase, it never occurred to me to think that he had been unable to make the most of his life and that therefore we weren’t rich. It seemed to me that he possessed something much more valuable than wealth, which I wouldn’t dare to compare. Now I don’t always find the model of life that our parents by their example held up to us—and which naturally inspired us—to be so clear, stable, and well defined. I doubt, in short, whether what we possess and our parents possessed before us—traditions, family, codes of honor—is still valuable in any
event, compared with money.

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.

I look at my mother as at a sacred image, an old print, and I feel alone with this notebook, separate from everyone, even from her.

. I belong to a generation that isn’t ashamed of showing how tired we are.