Childhood Diary

1981

“Rome, January 11, 1974

Villa Tiburtina Clinic


Here I am for the joy of Mom and Dad. I was born at 3 a.m., and I'm tiny—I weigh only 2,700 kg.

I was put in the nursery with 8 boys and only 1 girl. I arrived crying and woke everyone up, and then we made a nice chorus together.


January 12

My mom's room is near the nursery. She can't go inside, but every now and then, she looks at me through a glass door. I'm the smallest of all, but they say I'm the most beautiful. Lots of people come to see us, and every now and then, they take us to their mothers. Almost every day, someone leaves, and others are born. I continue to be the smallest.


January 13

On the third day, I become a little yellowish on the face, my mom is very worried but the pediatrician assures her that it's nothing and that it will pass in a few days, in fact on the fifth day I get better.


January 15

On the fifth day, Mom and I go home where my grandparents and aunts are waiting for us, and so for many days there is almost a queue to see me, all the attention is on me. I am a quiet child, I sleep and eat almost regularly, and I only cry after midnight. I should go without eating until 6 but the first few days I can't do it and at 3:30 I complain, Mom gives me chamomile tea but I would like the usual milk, but there is nothing to be done so I got used to waiting and I sleep peacefully until 6.


January 17

I go out for the first time, and my mother takes me to the clinic to have my tongue fillet cut, because it's stuck there and I have trouble eating.

I sleep with my fists closed, I rest my face on one, and with the other, I pull up the covers until my mother notices.

The umbilical cord fell off on January 20 and my mother started to give me baths, I like it but with one little hand, I hold on tightly to my mother's arm.


January 27

I go out for the second time to go to the church where my baptism takes place, together with my parents, godparents, grandparents, uncles, and cousins, it's raining and cold, so we go on foot because we can't go by car, we stay in the church from 12 to 1 pm. I cry the whole time until we get home, I eat and then I sleep until the evening even though there are so many people celebrating my birth.”


“My name is Stefano but my mom and dad call me “Paciuchino”.


My full name is Stefano
I saw the light at 3 am
in Rome on Friday the 11th
I weighed 2,700 kg
and measured 50 cm
eyes: blue
hair: blond”

My mother and father in the 70s before I was born

This is the diary that my mother wrote from the day I was born. A few pages. Only today did it fall into my hands, or rather only today did I start reading it.

I was impressed to read it in the first person, not from my mother's voice but as if I were the one telling the story: a technique that I have often used in my short stories.

Of course, I would never have imagined that I myself would be the protagonist of a love story written by my mother. She wanted me so much that, as soon as I was born, she decided that I should write the diary, recounting my first days of life, as if I were a little celebrity.

Who knows why she stopped after only two weeks; maybe because that jaundice that on the third day made my skin yellow and that went away after a few days actually wasn't what the pediatrician thought but something more serious and dramatic. The first of an unfortunate series of problems that will mark my life, at least a third of it is spent between doctor visits and hospitals.

But it is precisely that interruption that makes me love this secret diary.

I imagine my mother, at 27, bent over writing those pages in the hospital and at home, with the crib nearby from which my closed fists emerge, unaware of everything that will overwhelm her shortly thereafter.

As if our lives could have stopped, hibernating, at those moments of happiness typical of the birth of the first child.

In the drawer where the diary is there are bundles and bundles of old photographs and albums. I am lucky to be from the generation in which fathers took lots of photographs and kept them in albums. Now we live in an abstract cloud in which we collect thousands of images without being able to touch a single one. My father took lots of photographs and developed roll after roll of film while my mother, with Carthusian rigor, marked the date on the back of each photograph.

Taking those old black and white or faded color photos and scattering them on the floor is like when you try to tell dreams that seem vivid but then the connections, images and words to describe them begin to be missing. You feel that you possess them, you remember them perfectly as soon as you open your eyes but then, in practice, images are missing in words.

That is, I recognize my mother and father when they were young, I know that I am that chubby child with glasses but I couldn't say anything about those images.

I see my sad look, I know that I suffered a lot as a child, but I am completely distant and detached from that suffering, as from happiness. After all, it would make no sense to live decades remaining attached to what we were at ten years old, just as I can only know my mother who is now not that little girl who had not yet brought me into the world.

For this reason, reading the lines written by her is like honey carefully placed on the wounds of memory.

Because it refers to a past that does not exist for me because it allows me to know her thoughts, and her emotions, more than an old photograph. That constant repetition that I was the smallest child but the most beautiful fills my eyes with warm tenderness because they are not only written words but are real graphic symbols of maternal love, equivalent to a kiss on the cheek.

1977

Growing old means turning more to our past, often struggling with anger towards a house so beloved that has now closed its doors and windows in our faces forever. And that house was us.

We become archaeologists of ourselves, even if I think it is much better to continue living in the present without tormenting ourselves too much looking for what is now lost under tons of sand.

What we had to do we have done, we have become what we are.

For this reason, it says that Photography kills the living, precisely because the child Stefano who smiles at me between my fingers no longer exists, except in the layers of nerves, muscles, and blood of what I am now.

Our past life could flow very quickly like an avalanche that overwhelms us or be like a roll of film now expired and faded that unwinds slowly.

I prefer to abandon myself to these few pages written by my mother, to my voice through her voice, intent on making a beautiful chorus with the other newborns.


When everything was still possible.


Thank you Mom.

1979

Italian version