Lost love reunites six decades later
Stunted teenage affair rekindled after desperate search
IT WAS a sunny Saturday in April 2017, but my grandmother’s house was dark. She was alone – chain-smoking in her dusty living room in Sao Carlos, Brazil, tan curtains drawn over the windows to better see the TV commentators rant over the state of the country – when the phone rang.
“I’ve been looking for you for decades,” the man on the other end of the line whispered in Italian. “You were my first love.”
It had been more than six decades since my grandmother had heard the voice of Aldo Sportelli, now 82. She pictured his youthful face and wondered what he looked like on the other end of the phone. Aldo’s voice trembled as he recalled the last time he saw her, speeding away from him on a train in southern Italy. Their stunted teenage romance left a mark on him, and he had spent years unsuccessfully trying to track her down.
For 10 minutes they caught each other up on how their lives had unfolded – both married for half a century, my grandmother widowed, Aldo’s wife in the last stages of Alzheimer’s, kids, grandkids, careers – and of course they spoke of Polignano a Mare, the town where it all began.
“I couldn’t believe it,” my grandmother told me that day. “You just don’t think this type of thing will ever happen to you.”
In 1951, when my grandmother, Marilena, was 15, she set off on her greatest adventure: a year-long trip to Italy with her grandparents. Her grandfather, Antonio Lerario, was an illiterate fisherman who eventually saved enough money to open his own warehouse and went on to create a multimillion-dollar cereal empire.
As a returning rice tycoon, Antonio and his family would stay in the most famous hotel in the Puglia region: the Grotta Palazzese.
Marilena spent her days people-watching from the hotel terrace. After catching local businessmen ogling her from the restaurant, her grandmother started shooing her to the kitchen.
Aldo, two years her senior, was smitten. Aldo would tell me, “it was my first infatuation”. He wanted to become an engineer. She had no idea what awaited her when she returned to Brazil.
As her year in Italy drew to a close, Aldo decided to make his move. One day, as she was going down the stairs to the kitchen, he went in for a kiss. Unsure of what to do, she slipped out of his embrace and rushed away.
My grandmother’s family was not happy with the budding romance. For a fisherman turned cereal magnate, the son of a hotel owner was not what he had in mind for the family heiress.
Aldo’s mother eventually sat him down and told him the social distances between him and Marilena were too large to bridge. “At that time, I thought they were right,” Aldo recalls.
The two continued an awkward but flirty relationship over her last few weeks at the hotel. Before she left, she asked him to sign a keepsake memory book for her. He sketched her face and wrote, “Marilena, if you allow it, a friendship can be an enduring bond. Will it be that way with us? I hope so.”
When it came time for her to leave, he went to the station and watched as the train pulled away. It was one of the saddest moments of his life, Aldo says.
In college, she met my grandfather. By 1969, she was married with four children in tow. When she heard Aldo’s voice on the other end of the line that day in April, she had been married for 52 years and widowed for four. She didn’t know it yet, but one last adventure awaited her.
Aldo Sportelli studied engineering. In 1959 he met Beatrice at a party. He married late, at 35. They had two children, Vito and Sabrina.
For decades Beatrice suffered from depression, and the marriage was hard on Aldo.
After his mother died in 1995, he was filing through letters she left behind when he came across a familiar face in a white wedding dress: his beloved Marilena, on another man’s arms. Her grandmother must have sent her wedding photo to the Sportellis.
“I thought, ‘Where is she?’” he recalls. “The thought that I would never again be able to hear from the young girl who captured my boyhood heart tormented me.”
And so began his search.
Aldo tried to reach the photographer who had taken the wedding photo, but he was long dead.
Meanwhile, in 2012, Beatrice was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. She eventually barely recognised her children, and any emotional connection she maintained with Aldo and her kids dissolved.
Finally, two decades after he started his search, he contacted the daughter of an old family friend who worked at the Brazilian tax authority, and she agreed to help. She found Marilena, who now went by her married name, and passed him her phone number.
When Aldo phoned Marilena, it had been nearly a year since his wife had spoken a word. “I never forgot you,” he told her on the phone that afternoon.
The next day, Aldo called again. He wanted to know more. What did her children do? What were her days like? “I don’t even know what he looks like, and we are talking every day,” my grandmother said to me that week on the phone.
Sure enough, Aldo, at 82, had a Facebook account. Looking dignified sitting in a mahogany chair, wearing a red tie, he had white hair but the same sad eyes and shy smile he had at 17. “He’s handsome,” my grandmother said when I showed her the photo.
Aldo kept calling. Week after week he wanted to know how she was. “It is nice to have someone care about me again,” my grandmother told me.
The messages soon grew rosier: heart emoji and photos of flowers. My grandmother, who had spent the past few years shutting herself off from the world, came back to life.
On their calls, her Italian flowed as though she had never stopped speaking it. She began dressing up for their virtual dates, putting on lipstick and fixing her hair. “Poor old man,” she would say, as she excused herself from the family to talk to him yet again. “He has nobody.”
The new romance split my family. My uncles were protective and wondered what his real interests were. But my mother was thrilled. “We have to take you back to Polignano!” she said. My dad agreed.
My grandmother, however, rejected the idea. “He has a wife!” she would remind us, laughing the whole thing off.
Still, my mother was persistent. Soon, Marilena called Aldo with the news. “We’ll be there for two weeks in September,” she said.
In September, my grandmother landed in Bari, nervous but smiling. When we arrived at the hotel, a bouquet of pink roses was waiting for her. “Welcome to your hometown,” Aldo had written on the card.
Aldo asked us to meet him at the church of San Vito, where Mass would soon be starting. With sky-blue eyes hiding behind silver Ray-ban sunglasses, slicked-back hair and a tan jacket hanging loosely around his shoulders, he was as cool an octogenarian as I’ve seen.
When my grandmother saw him, she leaped out of the car and walked toward him, her arms open. “So beautiful,” he said, trembling as he hugged her. She blushed and introduced him to the family. “It’s a historic moment, a miracle,” he announced.
After Mass, we lingered outside, reluctant to say goodbye. My grandmother handed him two gift bags. He opened one to reveal a new iphone – his was old and always cutting out in the middle of their conversations. “And this one is for Beatrice,” she said, pointing to the second gift. He opened it to find a grey shawl. Aldo stared at my grandmother for a long time, tearing up and mouthing, “Thank you.”
We asked him out for lunch, but he had to go home and relieve the housekeeper who was watching his wife.
So we went back to the hotel, and my grandmother sat in the living room, waiting to finally be alone with Aldo where they felt most comfortable: on the phone. My grandmother told him about her day, but it was as if an ocean still separated them.
By the time she hung up, she seemed to have finally grasped Aldo’s reality. They were both healthy, of sound mind and nearing the final years of their lives. Surely this was their last chance at romance. But while my grandmother was a free woman, Aldo’s past still gripped him. His marriage, a forgettable detail while on the phone, was proving a more formidable obstacle in person.
Aldo sent her a message late that night reflecting on their encounter. “There we were, you and I, as if we had been good friends for 68 years, helping each other in sorrow and rejoicing together in joy,” he wrote. “I thank God for allowing me the chance to be with you, be it for a gust of wind.”
Over the next few days my grandmother and Aldo would meet for coffee daily. “Your grandma and I have pre-established paths,” Aldo wrote to me a few days into the trip. “We have before us duties of responsibility. We cannot want things that will take us off track. But, you see, while we fulfil these duties, it is nice to hold the hand of those who are next to us on the path of life.”
On our final morning, Aldo took my grandmother’s hand in his. “Now, I will do the hardest thing: Turn around and walk away,” he said.
But my grandmother didn’t allow herself to indulge in the finality of the moment. She gave him one last hug, and, as we walked away, she held up her phone and said: “I’ll see you tomorrow.” | The Washington Post