Women and forbidden notebooks

There are books that hook us by their title. Forbidden notebook , by Alba de Céspedes – was one of those, in addition to the fact that the Italian author is one of Elena Ferrante's influences. It is a classic of Italian literature, translated into Portuguese this year by Companhia das Letras. The story takes place in Rome, in the 50s and who tells it is Valeria, a 43-year-old middle-class woman, wife, mother of two children and office worker.

It all starts on a sunny Sunday, when Valeria goes out to buy cigarettes for her husband at the tobacconist and sees a stack of black-covered notebooks in the window. She asks the seller for one of the notebooks, who informs her that it is prohibited, that on Sundays they can only sell tobacco. There is an inspector at the door of the establishment. She replies: "But I need it, (...), I really need it." He gives in and hands her a notebook.

From then on, Valeria starts to hide the notebook, having to move it all the time so that they don't discover it. The protagonist does not have a private place for her things. When she claims to have a drawer just for herself, to perhaps keep a diary, she receives laughter as an answer from her husband and children. What might she want to write in a journal?

The fact is that Valeria starts to want her children to go out so that she can be alone and write in her notebook. She realizes that she is rarely alone and to create this opportunity, at a certain point, she "tampers with the household bills" and buys tickets for a soccer game for her husband and children, saying that she had won them from a co-worker.

The notebook entangles her in what she considers a forbidden plot, of secrecy, of hiding, of lies and alibis. Valeria has such a strict sense of obligation to the care of her family and the house that she sometimes feels very guilty for wanting time away from responsibilities to write in her notebook.

However, as time goes by, Valeria discovers the importance and need to have a space of her own. The notebook is the inauguration of this individual space, a way of dedicating time to herself. But, at a certain point, this same notebook starts to seem disturbing to him. She writes:

To find myself again as I always thought I was, I need to avoid being alone: next to Michele and the boys, I regain that balance that was my prerogative. The street, on the contrary, stuns me, throws me into a singular restlessness. I don't know how to explain myself, but outside the house it's not me anymore. Just walk out the gate and it seems natural to me to start living a life totally different from the usual one (...).

From her writing, the notebook also works as an invitation to discover and be another Valeria, different from the one she "always thought she was" – or, we could say, different from the one she was led to think she was or should be. Leaving the domestic environment, in which she seems compressed by the walls and oppressed by the roles of mother and wife, emerges as a possibility of being another. And so, as Valeria writes in an excerpt, the notebook, with its blank pages, and the street show their attractive and disturbing faces.

Alba de Céspedes builds a very rich narrative, which delves into the universe of this common woman and her subjectivity, dealing with all of Valeria's relationships; with her mother, her children, her husband, her boss and her friends. And what seems to cross, to some extent, all these relationships, is a kind of loss of identity that he is becoming aware of. It does not go unnoticed, for example, that her husband calls her "Mommy". She writes:

When I reread what I wrote yesterday, I end up wondering if I didn't start to change my nature from the day my husband, jokingly, started calling me "mommy".

This passage takes me back to a previous one, present right at the beginning of the book:

They were black, shiny, thick notebooks, the ones I took to school and in which – even before starting them – I immediately wrote, on the first page, with enthusiasm, my name: Valeria. (...)
Every time I open this notebook, I look at my name, written on the first page. I feel a certain satisfaction in seeing my sober handwriting, not too high, tilted on its side (...).

By writing her name in the notebook when she buys it, the protagonist manufactures a passport to be herself. With his first name – and the term "proper" is perfect here – marked on the blank page, he begins to rewrite his history. She meets Valeria herself.

The notebook is the character's ruin and salvation, as it promotes a displacement, a vertigo, making her question her position that has long been restricted to mother, wife and housewife. To write, Valeria is taken to an exercise of reading herself and what surrounds her, she comes into contact with something of herself previously unknown. She can see herself not as a mother or wife, titles largely anonymous and always placed in relation to another, but as a woman, a subject.

The notebook, that apparently banal object that is so accessible today – sold at any time, any day – together with the word "forbidden" reminds us of its transgressive, dangerous power. In the hands of a woman, a notebook can put positions and places in check, question roles and functions considered fixed, watertight.

In one passage, she writes about a conversation with her daughter: "If I hadn't written it, I would have forgotten." I would add that one writes not to forget, one writes not to forget oneself. Writing gives substance, leaves a mark, an impression.

I remember, then, the rehearsal Medusa's laughter , by Hélène Cixous, which begins:

It is necessary for the woman to write herself: for the woman to write about the woman, and to make the women come to writing, from which they have been removed as violently as they were from their bodies; for the same reasons, for the same law, with the same mortal purpose. It is necessary for the woman to place herself in the text – as in the world, and in history – by her own movement.

The character of Forbidden notebook testifies to the power of women's writing and I add my voice to Hélène's cry: Women, write! Grab your notebooks and write!