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White pages california khatib12/14/2023 ![]() These columns steered readers toward a modern, more secular morality, one that stressed women’s equality. For years she wrote a popular advice column, tackling questions about marriage, infidelity and love with meditations on art and philosophy. ![]() De Céspedes was imprisoned twice for anti-Fascist activities, first in 1935 and again in 1943, after she had joined a resistance radio program, broadcasting from Bari under the pseudonym Clorinda.īy the 1950s, she was known throughout Italy. The government banned two of her novels, including “Nessuno Torna Indietro,” or “There’s No Turning Back,” which, published in 1938, became a best seller and was translated widely. Her grandfather helped lead Cuba’s fight for independence and served as its first president, and she kept alive her family’s political commitment, often running afoul of Italy’s Fascist regime. Even her daughter, Mirella, who is studying law, has a drawer all to herself, and it locks.Īlba de Céspedes y Bertini (1911-97) was born in Rome, the daughter of a Cuban diplomat and his Italian wife. Nowhere in the small apartment is safe from intrusion, driving her to move the diary from the linen closet to a suitcase to a heap of rags. In the notebook she is simply Valeria to her children and husband she is “mamma,” and her parents still call her, at age 43, “Bebe.” Yet no transgression or admission feels as central as the fact of the diary - “an evil spirit,” she thinks. The written record of Valeria’s feelings and observations makes it impossible for her to ignore her discontent: the chill she feels in her marriage, her warring impulses toward her children, the guilt and pleasure she finds in her work. What might have been a family story, with all its betrayals and unhappy detours forgotten, becomes an excruciating study of the diarist herself. … Sometimes I think I’m wrong to write down everything that happens fixed in writing, even what is, in essence, not bad seems bad.” “Instead, since I began writing, not everything that happens in our house seems to me pleasant to recall. “Maybe I wanted this notebook in order to tell the tranquil story of our family: Maybe that’s what impelled me to buy it,” Valeria writes. “What would you write, mamma?” her husband, Michele, teases. She is terrified by the thought that her family might discover it, especially after they mock her for the mere suggestion she might like to keep a journal. She is a “transparent” woman, simple, “a person who had no surprises either for myself or for others.”īut from the moment Valeria brings the diary into her home, it changes her. She has coped with these pressures handsomely, she believes. Valeria is married with two adult children the family is under financial strain, compelling her to work in an office and manage her household without the help of a maid. This deception begins the Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Céspedes’s novel FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK (Astra House, 259 pp., $26), first published in 1952. She doesn’t yet know there’s a devil hiding in its pages. She’s not permitted to buy one there on Sundays, she’s told, but the tobacconist gives her one anyway, which she stashes under her coat. Valeria is buying cigarettes for her husband when she is entranced by the stacks of gleaming black notebooks at the tobacco shop. Rome, 1950: The diary begins innocently enough, with the name of its owner, Valeria Cossati, written in a neat script.
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