When we were very young...
	- un cantico per una ragazza indimenticabile -

It was the summer of '68, I had just graduated from high school, I had an old motorcycle and an even older side­car, and I felt an indomitable urge to see the land where the lemon trees bloom. Ingrid, my elder sister, had signed up for a two-months' language course in Italy, and suggested that I join her for the two weeks I could afford. Since I did not speak more than a dozen words italian (“Prego“, “Grazie“, “Si“, “Scusi“, “Vino rosso“, “Il conto“,“Dove sono i gabinetti“), the assurance that I'd have an inter­preter at hand if I needed one tipped the scales towards following her suggestion. My few pieces of bag­gage were soon gathered, and on the morning of my nine­teenth birthday I proudly started my first solo holiday trip. After a slow, bouncy voyage across the Alps and through the gorgeous late-summer landscapes of Lombardy, Piemont and Liguria I found myself on the Capo Mele camp­ing site, about a kilometer south of the small Riviera town of Laigueglia. The site was very much like an Arcadian sanctuary, halfway up the steep coast, accessible via a narrow winding pathway lead­ing to the tenting ground underneath ancient olive trees¹. Nights I slept in my tiny (almost rain-proof) tent which I shared with a few hun­dred ants, huddled against myself in a surplus U.S. Army mummy sleeping bag, with a Mormon-Tabernacle-sized choir of crickets and cicadas performing their chirpy lullabies for me. During the daytime, the olive grove provided cooling shadow, which I dis­dained, however, for I spent the days basking on Laigueglia's narrow beach, writing picture post­cards, taking notes in my diary, and keeping an eye out for girls. Whom, by the way, I could not have handled anyway, because I suffered from a first-rate in­feriority complex.

Ingrid, she attended her language course in the mornings, and the rest of the day she, together with a couple of fellow female students, went hunting for (or being hunted by) pappagalli. She had a nicely calib­rated scale of priorities, and interpreting for me was very low on the list. In the evenings, she went bar-crawling with the ladies. Eventu­ally, she introduced me to the crowd they had picked up in the first few days. They were a friendly lot, and one of them, Tino, even helped me find a spare part for my poor old motocicletta.

Needless to say, after the second day of greedy sun-soaking I was badly burnt, and took refuge from the not yet ozone-holey but nevertheless nasty rays of the noonday sun in the campeggio's cool shade. My next-tent-flap neighbor did not dwell in a minuscule bivouac coffin like I did, but resided in a veritable mansion wrought from ample cotton tarpaulins, angular and pretentious, with a porch, separate living and sleeping wings, adorned at one side with an open-air kitchenette sport­ing a twin-burner gas cooker. Which was cooking unsupervised, merrily throwing about foot-long flames, the regulator valve obviously having been overwhelmed by the liquid gas evaporating in the midday heat, the flames, agitated by occasional gusts of wind, licked towards the fabric windscreen, and had - I didn't believe my eyes - set it on fire. Che cazzo di merda. There was no time to plot or plan, a few swift strides took me to the site of the conflagration, I reached for the knob to turn it off, and then clobbered the blazing cloth into a smoldering rag with a few applauding bare-handed² blows. Alarmed by the clapping noises, the lord of the manor stuck his noggin round the corner, and belli­gerently asked what the blazes I thought I was doing and did I know I was trespassing? Whereupon I calmly in­formed him that I had taken the liberty of extinguishing his blazes, which made him dumbly gawp at me, then his ruined kitchen, then at me again... I wiped the ashes from my sweaty palms, shrugged, turned and went away. And the tent-lord? He did not utter a single word of gratitude, nor did he show a trace of emotion about the fact that in a few minutes' time the parched trees would have made a spectacular pyre for the lot of us. I sometimes wonder if it had ever dawned on him that he had missed his chance of becoming a news item by the skin of his teeth.

But I digress. To get to the beach, I had to trudge along the coast road for the above mentioned kilo­meter, through the shadowy alleyways of the picturesque little town, then down a short flight of stone steps, to the seashore. At the end of the first week, on my daily walk to the tanning ground, I sud­denly noticed a petite girl with a short-cropped head of black curls, carrying a beach bag, walking daintily in front of me. I was thunderstruck. What a heavenly sight. But while I dazedly stared after her, she turned a corner and was lost and gone. Maledizione! And so, the next morning, I got up really early, sat at a table outside a caffetteria with a cup of espresso, stalking the appari­tion. Right, there she came, oh dear, en face she was just as delectable, the coffee was paid for, I jumped up and tailed my lovely prey. She went to the beach, of course, and there I spent the rest of the day³ about 5 meters from her, yearning for and dreading a glance from the adorable creature. Oh, did I mention that I was abso­lutely hopeless with girls? The following day, I took a few stealthy pictures with a borrowed camera⁴. And two days later, I had to leave⁵ anyway, so my desire⁶ was to re­main unful­filled. Ingrid, from whom I had borrowed the camera, stayed a few weeks longer, and I confessed my sorrows to her⁷. She said she would look into the matter.

On my way home, I was in turmoil⁸. The only souvenirs I had of her were two short video clips burned into my brain. The first one held the flash of lightning that had struck me in the alleyway. The second one showed a few seconds of her at the beach, spreading a towel to lie on – poised like a queen, but without any queenly haughtiness. Her body language quietly but firmly said „ALPHA“. Any old fool could have seen that she was determined to take her fate into her own hands, and that she was overwhelmingly likely to succeed. But I am not any old fool, I'm a prize-winning one.

Late in autumn I received two pieces of news. The first was that the pictures were lost⁹. The second was a slip of paper on which my elfin maiden had written her name and ad­dress. They sounded to me like an aria from an italian opera, and I remember them to this day¹⁰. Ingrid had talked to the 12-year-old (!) young lady, had learned that my surreptitious glances had not gone unnoticed, in fact had not been unwelcome, and I should write to her. During the winter, we exchanged a few short cards and letters, hers in a neat, ornate, very controlled handwriting, mine scrawled in a tense, hurried hand, although composing them was slow and tedious, and I wore out a pocket dictionary in the pro­cess¹¹. Every now and then I experienced an epiphany of her alluring likeness¹². The following summer, I returned to Laigueglia for two weeks, which was all I could squeeze from the little money I had been able to scrimp and save. So much to accomplish, so little time...

What a reunion. The child had grown. Below her waist, and not in the vertical dimension. It didn't look like baby fat, but more like an incipient neapolitan pasta depot. But to make things really diffi­cult for us, her par­ents had ordered her keen-eyed, bespectacled sister to watch over her. It seemed the minder had inherited her slender Pappa's shape, whereas my last summer's dream girl showed a tendency¹³ to become like her rotund Mamma. It was all a bit different from what I had seen in my dreams, and maybe I showed some subtle signs of disappointment – for a second or two.

The two weeks seemed to pass quite slowly, and frankly, I was not completely happy. Nor was my little friend. Looking back, I think it would not have worked, anyway: she was only 13, still minor, and had I tried to take advantage of her, I might have gotten an opportunity to get acquainted with the italian penal system. And the only time when we could have escaped our chaperone (about a kilometer from the shore there was a convenient little floating platform) was wasted because I did not have enough italian to understand when she repeatedly pointed to that remote object, ac­companying the gesture with „Nuotiamo lontano!“. How boneheaded can one get?

As a legacy from the previous year, Ingrid and I knew a mixed crowd of tourists and locals (one of the vitelloni nick-named me „Von Braun“¹⁴, because Ingrid had told them I wanted to study physics), we'd meet on the beach or in caffetterias to do what one does in one's vacations, and I used to meet Emi there¹⁵. But we were never alone, not even when her appointed bodyguard was not looking our way for an instant. Ilselore, one of the girls from the group, accused me of treating the little darling cruelly and coldly - alas, little did she know about the tempest raging in my soul. I became in­creasingly frustrated, my italian improved ever so slowly, and my clumsy efforts to get closer to Emiliana were derailed dis­creetly, but effectively. Sunday night we had a beach party around a big bonfire, but her participation was vetoed by her parents: “Ha una rinite”. Humbug! She'd have been safe and warm with me, that's for sure. Well, towards the end¹⁶ we had made some progress: I found more and more ways to sneak her a furtive, innocent caress¹⁷, many of which she acknow­ledged with a softly (and tenderly) whispered „Maledetto!“¹⁸. Ah, the sweet snare I had set for myself was closing, closing... But it felt so good. On my last day, somebody came up with a couple of outboard-driven rubber dinghies, we went on a day trip to the Gallinara, had lots of childish fun¹⁹, I nearly melted with desire, and then it was over. Arrivederci, Emi. Arrivederci, Liana.

Yes, my time was up, my money was spent, I had to leave, and we had not yet shared as much as one chaste kiss. I hadn't even been able to take her up to Madonna della Guardia to - very re­spectably - enjoy the breathtaking view with her, because her parents wouldn't allow her to ride on the moto with me (e senza la sorella!).

What should I do? What could I do? I contemplated my options: Wait three years, keep her at it with a couple of romantic lines every few weeks? And then? Ask her to marry me? I could not see how either of us would have been able to support a family by then. Ask her to live in sin with me whenever we had a chance to meet? Come on, this was Italy, love out of wedlock was a big taboo, and asking a young girl to break this rule would have been an impudent and unsavory proposition²⁰. Due to my lack of skill for expressing abstract ideas in italian, we had not discussed religion, but I'm fairly certain that her family was catholic, and would have fought any­thing but marriage with tooth and claw. And then there was the little fact that I was still a vir­gin, desperately eager to end that state²¹, and that the bleak prospect of a long, drawn-out courtship in slow motion - two weeks at most out of every fifty-two - did not appeal to me at all. After all, three years seemed to be half an etern­ity when I was twenty. Notabene: Had I prom­ised to wait for her age of consent²², I would have com­mitted myself to stay celibate as well. I tend to keep a promise²³. Worse still, I imagined that she'd soon be a ravishing young woman, that suitors aplenty would swarm around her like flies around a honeypot, and that I - out of sight, out of mind - wouldn't stand the slightest chance of holding her attention. I had lost all hope²⁴, and being an im­patient and selfish lout, I threw in the towel.

After I had returned home, she sent two more postcards, and when I did not reply, there was a final Christmas card that screamed „MALEDETTI! PERCHÉ NON SCRIVETE?“. She must have been deeply hurt²⁵. Ah but I was ever so prudent, so clear-sighted, so rational. And I had done it again. For in the fall of '68, I had written to another girl that I did not love her. I had been too gutless to face her, but had just sent her a short letter which I then thought honest, but in fact was unkind and mean. We had not yet crossed the line, we had only kissed and necked a little, but she liked me, and I had thought I liked her, too - until I had come home from Italy with that insane, doomed pas­sion in my heart²⁶. For Emiliana, I could not muster even that pathetic trifle of “decency”.

That was it. I had insolently and self-righteously severed another priceless bond²⁷. But this time, there remained a thorn buried in my conscience. About once a year, out of the blue²⁸, I'd wistfully re­member the few precious hours of tantalizing bliss I had spent in the dear little italian girl's company, asking myself “What if?“, and then I'd gently put the question back into its velvet-padded secret drawer, seeking no answer.

❃ ❃ ❃

Fast-forward to 2011. Somewhere, I stumbled over a news story about a major fire on a camping ground. I re­membered my little fire­fighting feat from so many years ago, and, on a whim, wrote it down. While rummaging in my memory²⁹ for details, I found quite a lot more than I had been looking for, and after I had cobbled the story together, I started wondering what had become of E.B.

I googled her name. Yeees - - there is a signora, born and raised in Naples, who obtained a Ph.D. in biological science at the grand old Università degli studi di Napoli in 1979³⁰, had a brilliant career in the U.S.A. and Europe, was the scientific director of a large european research institute in S........, and now holds the chair for microbiology & molecular genetics at ...... University in California, where she is involved in research that may ultimately lead to a cure for addiction. I also found photographs of this lady, and if my memory serves me well (which it does not always do any more), there is nothing that precludes her being my acquaintance from Laigueglia. There is that radiant smile, there are those incredible turquoise eyes and the black curls³¹. There is, however, not a trace of what I had taken for the early stages of a pasta depot, so it must have been baby fat after all. And she is still stunning.

Could it really be her? I sent her a tentative e-mail, and to my surprise, she immediately replied in a heartwarmingly friendly and understanding manner. She could even re­call that my first name is Dieter. I hadn't expected this at all, but did I rejoice? Was I happy for her? Far from it. Being self-centered as I had always been, I only ex­perienced a great feeling of loss tearing through my soul. I got literally sick with gut-wrenching bouts of grief and re­morse, and thought I had made the greatest blun­der of my life when I had not tried to win her with might and main. The pain I had so casually dealt to her had finally come home to roost. After a few wretched days, how­ever, I slowly began to accept that one cannot lose that which one has never had. I still don't know what I ought to have done under the circumstances, but to my shame I have to admit that, considering my own mediocrity and lack of ambition³², I had inadvert­ently done The Right Thing by withdrawing my paws from this excep­tional woman. A light burning as brightly as hers must not be confined into a petty bour­geois scheme of life, which was all I would have had to offer. The best I can do to regain my peace of mind is try and talk my­self into believing that spurning her affection so unfeelingly may well have given her an extra push³³ to­wards her magnificent success.

I shall not have to open the secret drawer anymore, for at long last, the question has been answered.

Oh Emi, it is a bitter pill for me to swallow that there was no way we could have lived together happily ever after. Not that I knew it then, but I only had a choice between breaking your heart and wrecking your life. Thank God I broke your heart.

1   I had been afraid that nowadays the trees were gone, the camping ground having become a tarmac-covered rectangle suitable only for trailers and motor-homes. »They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.« Surprisingly, this is not the case.

2   Luckily, in those days it wasn't a Nylon tent, or else my hands would have required a paramedic's attention.

3   In my diary, I wrote : “By the way, yesterday (and today, too) I spotted a beautiful back. I am certain that there won't be anything coming from it (how could there, when I can't speak italian), but it is comforting to know that I can still get un­settled by such sights.“

4   A day later: “The owner of the beautiful back is (as far as I could judge this from a distance) a rather delightful, about 13-year-old bambina radiating a graceful liveliness.“

5   I had to leave early on the 6^th because I had a deadline: I was to be drafted into military service and had to appear for the medical examination on the 9^th. The ride on my old, slow moto took three days, and that was that.

6   And then: “I must be bonkers. Can't help it, but... I'm... I'm simply crazy about the child! Hopelessly & senselessly.“

7   Finally: “Correction: Not 13, more like 15. Not rather delightful, but delightful. And I'm not sane, but completely shattered, for I must leave tomorrow. And never again shall I see my beautiful back, nor its appendages!!“

8   At the end of the 3-day journey's first leg, I scribbled: “Alas, during this whole ride (and a long ride it was!), every time I spotted a beautiful sight (and oftentimes I saw beautiful sights, very often!) I had to think of my little ragazza. And that hurt. In my head, a line from a corny pop song keeps repeating itself interminably: »I guess your chances come but once, and boy I sure missed mine«. I am sure there is such a thing as love at first sight (Och, she has beau­tiful eyes, brightly blue, with a greenish tinge, almost turquoise, and those lips...), and I am suffering from a severe case... But it's no use, she'll likely have forgotten me in a week's time (I hope that I'll not!!), and it's double no use, because we didn't even meet – it's so tragic.“

9   Ingrid had given the priceless roll of film to a “friend“ who'd said he'd develop and print it for her. But they had a row, and he came to her flat at night and taped the undeveloped film to the outside of her door. In the morning, it was gone. May all sorts of unfortunate coincidences happen to this rotten swine.

10 The magic words were: Emiliana B*rr*ll*, Via L.Tausillo .., 80125 Fuorigrotte, Napoli; even though I had misread “Tansillo“ and “Fuorigrotta”, the letters still arrived at their destination. The napoletani call the quarter “Forerotta“, and from the little italian I have learned since, I know this is somewhat derogatory. I looked it up in Google Street View: An eight-storied block of flats on a wide street, not far from the San Paolo soccer stadium. From the looks of it, the build­ing may already have existed in the sixties. These days, it is definitely not a slum, but I can imagine that 40 years ago it was a neighborhood which a bright, ambitious girl tends to compare with other, nicer places. The phrase "I remember the back streets of Naples" comes to mind.

11 In December, I wrote: “I have to learn italian. What a mess I am. I get the shivers crisscrossing my back when I think of the state I was in when I had to leave Laigueglia. And oh, the misery, the disaster that the photographs are lost, because I shall never again be able to see my little Emi as she was in those precious moments. To top it all, I never learned how do draw, so I can't even preserve the image of her dear face with pencil and paper. Well, I can't write properly either. Come to think about it, there isn't anything I can do well.“

12 For instance, the Juliet in Zeffirelli's “Romeo & Juliet“, or the Blessed Virgin in Andrea del Sarto's “Annunciation“

13 The diary: “She is aware of it, and that's good, although she'll probably need an iron will to avoid becoming a great big Mamma by the time she's 25. Right now, she is still delicious.“ What a shallow, overbearing jerk I was. Emiliana did not have an iron will, but one of steel (not to mention lots of courage), whereas mine turned out to be the weak one.

14 A moniker which was usually followed by “...Zitto!”

15 Being associated with me was her admission ticket into our crowd, who accepted her as a peer although she was much younger than the rest, and this was probably good for her self-esteem.

16 When she announced she'd rather be called “Liana“, which was fine by me. »What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.«

17 The palm of the human hand is extremely sensitive and a grossly underrated erogenous zone - just the spot for a loving touch when suspicious eyes are watching.

18 Is it a malediction when it comes with a smile? I dare say it isn't.

19 To show off in front of Emi/Liana, I swallowed my fear and took a high dive from the cliff into the crystal-clear water of the bay. It was an intoxicatingly terrifying experience, and I have never since felt the desire to repeat it.

20 Especially when it's a penniless foreign student who drags the innocent schoolgirl into disrepute.

21 Despite a multitude of efforts on my side this irksome state was to persist for three more years – isn't it ironic?

22 Which I had assumed to be 16, like it was - and still is - in Germany. Had I known it was only 14 in Italy... But I never asked. Chalk up another 10 points for imbecility.

23 This is why I usually don't promise anything at all.

24 How fainthearted I was. Had I had the least bit of faith in Emiliana, had I recognized her for the strong person she is, I should have realized that if she had wanted me, she would have found ways and means to get me.

25 She has erased this desperate outcry from her memory, and stated “...it is too strong and I was and am not like that.“

26 There was another, much more important reason, but I only understood its significance many years later when I had learned a few things about the biochemical and physiological mechanisms of mate selection: I found her body odor unpleasant, even though she took her personal hygiene very seriously. In contrast, Emi's barely perceptible fra­grance was like a whiff of an exquisite perfume, applied in the best of taste. I think now that she didn't use any per­fume at all. At that time, however, I had no idea what this meant. After all, I was a physicist and not required to know about this stuff. I wonder how I smelt for her...

27 It was to be the last time I had done it. All my further relationships save the last one were terminated by the girls.

28 Last year, it was triggered by an Australian exchange student called Aimée (sounds a bit like Emi, doesn't it?). In the year before that, it was a pop singer called Emiliana. And when my daughter's girlfriend Amy called the other day and I picked up the phone, I nearly had a heart attack when she said “Hi. This is Amy.”

29 And in my diaries - I still keep them for occasionally reminding me of my misspent youth. And, come to think of it, of the equally misspent better part of my early middle age...

30 She was 23 then. I got my Ph.D. in 1982, when I was 33. Game, set and match for Emiliana.

31 The photo showing the unruly black curls was taken in the eighties. In the newer images she has a much more grown-up, elegant hair style, and I wouldn't have recognized her.

32 I was poor, but I was never poor enough to realize it, so I did not feel I had to accomplish extraordinary things in order to improve my life. My achievements were always fair, but never excellent, and I was content to have found my little niche in an exciting and important research project which has nothing to do with weapons.

33 Had I been in Emiliana's place, I might have said to myself: “Questo coglione, che cosa pensa, davvero? Pensa che non sia abbastanza buona per lui? Mostrerò a questo stronzo borioso di un' studente chi di noi è migliore!” - But I wasn't in her place, and I cannot know what she would have said.