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Want to know how I met a handsome American man in Munich?

Want to know how I met a handsome American man in Munich?
Fred and Catana: Once upon a time in Rome

Fred and Catana: Once upon a time in Rome

In writing my recent book, Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity (Kindle) or Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity, I tell the story of growing up within a culture and a race that was different to my own. Here’s an excerpt:

Sometime at the end of January 1968, a few weeks after my return from Guatemala, the phone rang and my friend Gabi hollered excitedly through the receiver. “Hey Girl, listen. I’m in Milan on a photo shoot and just met this really nice American guy who wants to see Munich. I gave him your number ‘cause I know you speak English. Go and have dinner with him if you’re around. He’s a lot of fun and ever so easy on the eyes!”

“Oh, sure Gabi, how nice. And I hope you’re fine, too,” I responded, irritated. “You may not know it, but I can’t stand Americans!”

“Heeey! Hold on, I don’t like them either, but this one’s civilized. Trust me. He’s from New York. Let me tell you something: you’ll be sorry if you don’t check him out,” she laughed happily. “He’s a dish!”

“Skip the crap Gabi. Tell him to lose my number!” How dare she want me to spend time with a stranger?

“He already left. Have some fun, you old bore and don’t forget to thank me! By the way, his name is Fred,” she said, and hung up.

Fuming, I threw the receiver into the cradle and decided there was no way I’d bother with the American.
He called a few days later as he was passing through Munich en route north to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, London, and Dublin. I was leaving in the morning for the Pret-a-Porter Salon in Paris, and happy to tell him that. I wasn’t fond of Paris but liked the sound of saying I worked there.

“Okay,” he said, and added with an easy American charm, “I’ll call you on my way back to Rome in about four weeks.”
I’d forgotten about Fred when he rang a month later. I was leaving for Berlin the next morning. But… My hair was freshly done, there was no date for the evening, nothing of interest was on TV, and then, well, he sounded pleasant enough, so I figured: dinner, why not? We agreed to meet in Schwabing in front of the Datcha, a trendy restaurant that specialized in southern Russian cuisine. It was the evening of February 28, 1968.

Fred, who first wanted to have a look at his blind date, stood several yards to the side. As I walked by him I felt it was he, but continued. Then, I heard my name.

“This isn’t where we agreed to meet,” I said turning. “How’d you know it was me?”

“Had a hunch it might be you,” he answered. And I figured: sure, how many Black girls are there in Munich anyway?

As we followed the maitre d’, people stopped their conversations, looked at us and smiled approvingly. We were led to a booth with comfortable leather seats. Lit candles were on the table, and aging Russian folk paintings hung on the dark wood-paneled walls. After settling into our chairs and having a good look at each other, we smiled, liking what we saw. I had in front of me a fine-featured, dark haired man with beautiful eyebrows, whose gray-green eyes smiled at me seductively. His classic looks seemed comfortingly familiar. Anywhere, absolutely anywhere in the world, this man would be seen as gorgeously handsome. Our waiter brought the customary bottle of Russian Vodka, filled our double shooters, and placed it on the table in a bucket of ice. We studied the menu and began to compose a meal we’d remember with pleasure for the rest of our lives: a selection of fishy appetizers, followed by Tamalan, an always flawlessly prepared filet mignon, next to a mound of white rice with a raw egg yolk in the middle, sprinkled with sumac, the dark, lemon flavored Middle Eastern condiment. Dessert would be an ambrosial crème brulé with Grand Marnier.
I was twenty-seven years old, Fred thirty-six. He was an actor and commercial TV announcer who had just finished shooting a series of TV ads in Italy for the American market. In my adult years I had avoided Americans. What I knew about the States I didn’t like: a place where the last three summers had seen cities ablaze with rage and rebellion; where Blacks were on the streets demanding the most basic civil rights that had been denied them for centuries; a country whose foreign policy saw fit to keep corrupt rulers in power in third world societies like mine in Guatemala. But I didn’t think of American social issues and foreign policy as I talked and laughed with the confident, charming Irish-American whose sort of wit and humor was completely new to me.

When I told him I was from Guatemala, for instance, he exclaimed grinning: “No wonder I like you! You’re Irish! Who’d have thought I’d meet a girl from Glaghamora in Munich!”

In those days, I was a heavy smoker. Half way through the meal, as I lit yet another cigarette I noted, “You don’t smoke.”

“No, I don’t,” he answered.

“When did you give it up?”

“It didn’t mix with sports, so I never started.”

“Oh, oh,” I said, already fully aware I was in love with the guy, “I guess I’ll have to stop smoking.”

“Please don’t,” he said right away. Leaning over and taking my hand, he looked deep into my eyes. “I’d rather take up smoking than change anything about you.”

WHAT A LINE!

After dinner, we walked to a nearby disco and danced. I, who never danced, stood up and moved my body most shamelessly for Fred until the place closed.

It had begun to snow, and the white flakes fell gently on our shoulders as Fred walked me home. Under a street lantern he drew me to him and placed a full, tender, erotic kiss on my mouth. I gave him my key to the door of my apartment. We stepped over the threshold and became inseparable: unable to keep our hands off each other, ourselves from the other. There was nothing foreign or uncomfortable between us. We explored our bodies and already knew every atom: we had been there and were back. When we fell asleep, exhausted, we were like lovers of another time who had searched for centuries and finally found their way to each other again. As our bodies meshed and molded into each other’s folds, it never occurred to us, even as we separated, that we came from different societies, belonged to different races, and were comfortable in different languages.

I cancelled my early flight to Berlin, booked for midday, and barely made the last plane in the evening. Fred came with me, and we spent our first month together in Berlin. He instantly began to work in commercials, even a German Karl May film, and didn’t make it back to Rome until we moved there – one and a half years later.

Years later, revisiting our enraptured encounter, I asked Fred how Gabi had described me.

“Well,” he ruffled his brow trying to remember, “I asked her whether you were light or dark. She mulled the question back and forth, and then said, ‘dark’.”

“Yeah, what else could it have been,” I shrugged, smirking at him.

“I was expecting a German brunette,” Fred grinned.

“Gabi never told you I was Black?”

“Nope.”

We laughed hard and long and tears ran down our cheeks.

“Then how’d you know it was me when you called my name?”

“Just knew it was,” he shrugged.

Read more: Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity (Kindle) or Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity.

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