Gabriella and Claudio (Part One)

"A private airstrip in Sardinia.  A silver Lamborghini roars up.  The handsome Italian gets out, his black hair tossed by the wind, kisses his blonde lynx goodbye, and disappears up the waiting stairs of the private Lear jet.  Destination?  London, Berlin, Milan....could be any one of the many places where he is so hotly desired."

I was only in my 20th summer when I read those words, and am now in my 51st, but I have never forgotten them and they frequently spring to mind, as do memories of that magical time.

I believe I emerged from my mother's womb a born Anglophile.  All through my formative years in elementary school and high school, my nickname was always "Mary Queen of Scots," so deep was my obsession with all things related to the British Isles.  Dreaming of the time when I would actually step foot on that "sceptered isle set in a silver sea, " I never could have guessed how special and magical it would turn out to be.

My father is a composer/conductor, and in his youth he had the good fortune be studying conducting at the same time as Claudio Abbado came to Zagreb, where we were living at the time (and where I was born), to conduct a concert, with my father put in charge of preparing his rehearsals.  They became fast friends and spent all their time together while Claudio was in Zagreb, forging a friendship which would endure for many years.  My father and mother were already together at that time, 2 highly attractive individuals who shared the gorgeous Adriatic coast as their homeland: my mother from a lovely seaside town called Omis, my father from an island so beautiful it seems more fantasy than reality, Hvar.  They met in Zagreb, where they were both studying, and with Claudio formed a sort of Jules et Jim camaraderie.  My mother was breathtakingly beautiful, and I just know Claudio must have been very taken with her, and probably jealous of my father.

Life swept them in different directions, my mother and father to marriage and children, then a move to Los Angeles in search of the good life, which unfortunately eluded them.  Claudio returned to his native Italy, just across that selfsame Adriatic, where the good life found him.  He scored one triumph after another, becoming one of the most successful and sought-after conductors in the classical world, a destiny my father could only dream of and envy, as he eked out a meager living giving piano lessons to the likes of Dean Martin's son (when he got lucky).  For the uninitiated, make no mistake, the top echelons of the world of classical music are among the most glamorous and elite that there are, most of their denizens people of extreme education, discriminating taste and wealth.  It all seemed to come so easily to Claudio, and before long he became the conductor of the London Symphony, one of the world's top orchestras.

Meanwhile, my mother had divorced my father and remarried, and I was off studying English Lit. at Berkeley.  My Anglophilia was raging unabated, and I couldn't believe I hadn't yet been to this beguiling land.  The summer after my sophomore year, my boyfriend, Steve, and I planned to meet in London after I spent some time on Hvar, and he in Jerusalem interning at Hadassah Hospital under the aegis of his family's friend Dr. David Weiss.  My mother, who had kept in touch with Claudio, contacted him to let him know I would be coming to London for the first time.  I still remember where I was sitting in my bedroom in the lovely house on Arch and Glen when she called to incredulously read me the letter he'd sent in reply, telling my mother that although he and his family would be away on tour, he would be happy to offer his home at 36 Jubilee Place, SW1, for my use, household staff included.  My mother and I were both gobsmacked, to say the least.  Now my trip was really shaping up to be something special!

I visited Steve for a while in Israel that summer, which is another post, then returned to Hvar.  Finally, the summer was almost over, and it was time for London.  Steve arrived a day or 2 before me and met me at the airport, and together we took a taxi to 36 Jubilee Place.  It was a lovely residential street off of the Kings Road in posh Chelsea, and the home a white-washed multi-level dream of chintz, lace, and china.  The Abbados' maid/cook welcomed us inside, but propriety dictated that we not share a bedroom.  Because only one guest room had been prepared for our use, poor Steve had to sleep in the downstairs living room, in the sleeping bag of the Abbados' 7-year-old son, Sebastian, until another room could be prepared for him the next day.  My peals of laughter at the sight of 6'4" Steve stuffing himself into that little sleeping bag still ring in my ears.

Steve and I marveled at our great good luck that we were ensconced in this neighborhood of unutterable poshness.  We were living like "toffs," even though we were scruffy college students on our first visit to London (well, my first, Steve had already been and was a wonderful guide).  I remember opening my bedroom window that first morning, looking down at the garden with its honeysuckle, lavender and begonias, and the first thing I thought of was the lyrics to Joni Mitchell's marvelous song "Chelsea Morning":

"Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I knew
There was milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges, too
And the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses"

The happiness I felt can only be felt when one is 20, madly in love for the first time, convinced it is the last time too, there will never be, COULD never be, another, and in Chelsea with Claudio Abbado's home for just the 2 of us, and London as our oyster.

Anka

We are never too old to make surprising discoveries about our own family.  I always knew that my best-beloved grandpa Milan had a sister named Anka who lived in Buenos Aires, who he hadn't seen in decades, and that it was his dearest wish to see her one more time before he died.  All of that I knew, plus the sad circumstances she found herself in in Buenos Aires before she died, but other than that I knew next to nothing.  I didn't know the tragic and romantic story behind the one-dimensional person I'd been told about.  Somehow my mother and I stumbled upon the subject of Anka a few weeks ago and I have been living with it ever since.  It's a story which deserves to be shared, so I couldn't think of a better post for the real beginning of my blog.

Anka was one of the eldest children in a family of 10 or 11, my darling grandpa being among them.  Their parents died very young and left Anka as the caretaker of them all.  She was a great beauty with a sparkling and vivacious personality, but she had an elder brother who abused her cruelly, in ways which are now lost to time, and made her life at home a misery.  A friend of hers had emigrated to Buenos Aires and beguiled her with tales of the beauty and magic of the place.  This friend had shown Anka's photo to a male friend who immediately fell in love with her astonishing beauty and offered to marry her without even a meeting.  After one too many instances of abuse, Anka fled her hometown of Omis in Croatia (then Yugoslavia) and escaped to Buenos Aires, her heart filled with hopes and dreams of whatever fate might hold for her there.

The young man who was enamored of her was alas not to her liking, but with her beauty and charm she had no shortage of suitors, and shortly met a handsome, dashing boat captain, also Croatian, with whom she fell madly in love.  The two of them made a gorgeous couple and were married in no time.  Soon a son was born, Dushko, and their happiness was complete.  However, it was not to last long, for Anka's handsome husband died young of a heart ailment.  She never forgot him or got over him, she never remarried.

Although she had her beloved son Dushko, he married a cold-hearted woman who was as grasping as she was devious.  They all lived together in the family home, a lovely house in the best part of Buenos Aires.  However, Dushko's wife kept whispering in his ear, "your mother is old, she will become forgetful, people could take advantage of her, we must secure the house to make sure she doesn't get swindled out of it and we end up homeless."  Anka of course wanted nothing but to make her son happy and secure, and, suspecting nothing, she gladly signed the house over to them.  She couldn't have foreseen the tragic consequences: that her beloved only son would die young of cancer and leave her at the mercy of a heartless, venal shrew.  This awful daughter-in-law promptly threw Anka out of the only home she had known and placed her in a nursing home with no air or ventilation, where she shared a room with several others.  Thus this lovely, gentle woman found herself alone, surrounded by strangers in a place that was colder than any she'd known, despite the fierce heat of the Buenos Aires summers scorching her lonely room.

It was thus that my grandfather found her when he was able to achieve his dream of visiting her once before he died.  He had not seen her in all the long decades since she had left Omis as a young and beautiful girl with her entire life and future so full of promise, shimmering ahead of her, with one exception.  She returned to Omis just once in the intervening years, shortly after I was born, so at least I did get to meet this extraordinary woman, though sadly I have no recollection.

My grandfather was able to realize his dream of visiting Anka in Buenos Aires before he died, courtesy of my boyfriend, Dan, who in his generosity and greatness of spirit gave that gift to my grandfather, and not only to him, but also to my grandmother, my mother and my aunt, Anka's nieces.  In the end my grandmother was paralyzed by her fear of flying and stayed behind, which was fine because she and I had such a great time going to movies and spending oodles of time together.  But the rest of them larked off to Buenos Aires, with a pit stop in Rio, and we got to live vicariously through them.  Once they got to Buenos Aires, they found that the administrators of the nursing home had not told Anka that her brother was coming; they thought it would just be a lovely surprise.  When they went into her room to tell her she had a surprise visitor, her still-luminous eyes grew wide, and she asked, "is it my brother?"  I wonder if that was a symptom of her great longing to see him or if she had a premonition, but of course I will never know where those words came from.

My grandpa, mom and aunt were appalled at the state in which they found Anka.  She had only one friend in the world who still visited her regularly, Sabina.  This dear and loyal friend told my family that she would gladly take Anka into her home and care for her, only she didn't have any room.  My amazing boyfriend stepped in to wave his magic wand again, and provided Sabina with the funds to have an annex built onto her home in which to house Anka.  The moment this annex was built, Sabina rushed to the nursing home, only to find Anka's bed empty, her disappeared.  Her awful daughter-in-law had gotten wind of my family's plan and, determined to hold on to Anka just in case this was a plot to wrest the house away from her (or whatever other sick ideas were in her head), she had spirited her away to another home.

Undaunted, this true and faithful friend Sabina went knocking on every nursing home door in Buenos Aires, until one day she found Anka again.  She explained the situation to the people in charge and told them Anka's family in the United States wanted her with Sabina, and she begged their cooperation.  Some were sympathetic, others felt it was not their place and saw the daughter-in-law as the proper guardian and were loathe to participate in what they viewed as deception.  Still, Sabina promised Anka that she would return for her the next day, and hurried to prepare her home for Anka's arrival.  She went back to get her as soon as she possibly could, but she was too late.  The witch had triumphed once again, and this time for good.  Though she spent hours and days and weeks searching, though my family repeatedly contacted the consulate and the diocese, Anka was gone forever, beyond anyone's reach.

My family was notified some years later that Anka had died, but even then was denied the knowledge of where she had been buried, where was her grave.  Now it is far too late to do anything that could help my beautiful great-aunt, but I often fantasize about flying down to Buenos Aires, taking some local authorities with me, and marching to the door of this woman who I now view as evil incarnate, grabbing her by the throat, and forcing her to tell me where my great-aunt is buried, so that at least in death she can know that she is not forgotten.  

I feel such a deep sense of grief and despair when I think of her final years, abandoned and all alone in some godforsaken nursing home or who knows what kind of place, wondering where was anyone to visit her, to take her in their arms and assure her that she was not alone, that she was loved and cherished, and her life was not worthless.  Did she have any idea that my family was desperately trying everything they could to find her, Sabina was searching every nook and cranny of that once-beautiful city, now so out of reach to her it might as well have been Calcutta, pounding the pavement every day?  I am so very fearful that she had no idea, that she thought everyone had just forgotten and discarded her, though I fervently hope she knew the situation with that wicked daughter-in-law, so hopefully was able to place the blame exactly where it belonged.

In order to escape her desperate, lonely existence, she must have traveled in her mind's eye back through the decades and envisioned the breathtakingly beautiful young girl she once was, setting sail for the enticing, unknowable new world, stars in her eyes, sparkles of sunlight dancing like fairies on the waves, transporting her to a life she could only dream would be filled with joy, romance, and a happy ending.  I hope with all my heart that these and other happy visions of the all-too-brief good years of her life sustained her and buoyed her through that infernal darkness, and I hope her last thoughts were filled with the joy of her pending reunion with my darling, precious grandpa, her other loved ones, and of course of her handsome, dashing captain.  I hope she died with a smile on her lips, and I hope that she knows how much she was and is loved, that she was not forgotten during her life, and is not forgotten now.

Losing My Virginity

I never thought I'd have a blog.  It seemed like something for people who actually had something to say and were not afraid to say it.  As for me, I often feel as if I have not much of any import to say, I'd rather listen.  But then again, through the years so many people have complimented me on my stories and my way with words.  And then today there it was, at the end of a blog I looked at ("The Londoner," quite fun), a shimmering, glimmering, enticing invitation: "start your own blog, we'll show you how, click here."  I could not resist.  Like so many English majors working in retail, or some such menial job, I've always dreamed of being a writer, of having people read my words, especially if I could come up with some worth reading.  Certainly starting a blog seems much easier than getting Random House to publish my first book, as an ex boyfriend has done (lucky him, have been pea-green with envy for many years now).  Not sure if these will be worth reading, but here it is, my very first blog post!  Who knows if there will be more to come, but I sense that this is the start of something that might well continue for a while.  However for now I have to go eat a piece of cake since it's already late afternoon and I feel the need for a pick-me-up before hitting the gym.  If a girl's going to eat cake, she had better have a gym membership at the ready.