Maurizio e Caterina: A Love Story

I still can remember how vivid that dream was over a year ago, when the snow covered the ground just outside my bedroom windows.  I was deep in sleep, so it seemed, until he walked into the bedroom.  He stood there, at the foot of my bed, after all of these years, wearing a dark gray three-piece suit and a blue shirt.  I remember thinking how odd it was that he appeared older and that his hair was longer and even though it was curly, it was finer.  He came around the side of the bed, and I sat up.  He reached out to embrace me, and the euphoria that I still remember was so overwhelming it took my breath away.  I felt my soul and his blending into a single entity.  And then just as quickly, he pulled back, and looked at me with those dark, intense eyes.  He said two words: “mio figlio.”  After that, his spirit vanished.

I bolted upright in bed.  The only sound I could hear was my own breathing, fast and heavy, almost as though I had been running.  I reached up to turn on the light, and quickly scanned the bedroom, streaked with dark shadows shaped by the streetlight outside bleeding through the miniblinds.  I knew it was very early in the morning, as the house seemed very still and cold.  Winter was trying hard to hang on, even though this was early March.  Despite having an alarm system, which was activated, I felt like a frightened child.  Could somebody have actually been in my bedroom or in my house?  So, I got up, and did what anybody does who is afraid: I turned on all the lights.  And I walked through all three floors of the house, trying to find evidence of a man having just been there.

Of course, I found nothing out of the ordinary.  Being a professor, I struggle to keep paper from taking over my house, even in the kitchen.  The stacks of music and articles to read towered undisturbed, and my two cats slept soundly, obviously having missed the brief visit of this brooding spirit.  So, I reset the alarm, and went back to bed.  I dozed until around 6 AM, when I decided I had to get up and face a hard reality.  After more than thirty years, I knew that there was something very wrong with a man who I had once loved very deeply.  And, I knew that I had to find him.

This intense dream was not the first time I had thought about Maurizio since I left Firenze that day on the train, in the early spring so many years ago.  I kept all of his letters, and several from his parents, in a special box, along with the last letters from my father written to me in Germany, also a long time ago.  When I moved into my present house, I shipped pieces of furniture I had kept in storage, from the other side of the country.  The old steamer trunk that my parents had surprised me with, thinking that was how I was going to send my clothes to Italy, guarded sentimental keepsakes I was anxious to see again and house under my roof.  Each time the old metal locks would snap back, unlatching the lid, I would finger the box with those precious letters and our pictures.  Underneath a sofa blanket that my mother had knitted for me and next to Maurizio’s correspondence, I kept an old leather jewelry box containing some pieces he had bought for me when we first started to talk about getting married. 

We had little money in those days, but I remember vividly his buying a pretty turquoise ring and earrings for me to wear as a testament of his affection.  The letters, the photographs, and the jewelry embodied a tangible link to him and to his love.  Every time I did raise the lid on that trunk, which was very infrequently, I always promised myself that I would do something with the letters, pictures, and of course the jewelry.  Still, finding the courage to locate him, after all of these years, because I never did marry, was a task I wasn’t able to face.  That is, not until that day, after I had had the dream.

I went to the university that day, and after turning on the lights in my studio, immediately I crossed the room to the wall with the small window, which is covered with a great number of photographs.  Because pegboard covers that wall, in the small studio I inherited now many years ago, I knew I needed something to cover the little holes when I moved in.  In the beginning, I hung diplomas, and pictures of myself in roles like Micaela in Bizet’s CARMEN or Rosalinde in Johann Strauss’ marvelous comedy, DIE FLEDERMAUS, or “The Bat.”  Having produced three separate shows with the opera group my first year, I had collected enough photos of the students in costume to fill up the space, so that nobody would have to get dizzy looking at those tiny dots.   Every year I would add more pictures of the students, and remove more photographs of me.  However, just to the left of my piano, on the wall that is nearly full now, there are two very early photos of him, as he began his career in Firenze at the Comunale Opera House.  Even though we were both just starting out, as budding opera singers, we were able to spend a lot of time in the opera house, in Florence, observing rehearsals and enjoying performances.

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