Walter
Walter Kaplan was a Yale-educated architect of hospitals in third world countries, mainly Africa and South America. He had come to Rome in the 50s to study at the American Academy. He met his Italian wife Aurora and decided to stay on. He loved Italy and everything about it. He lived well, designing gateway hospitals for third world countries.
While I was temping for him he told me that he was going on a trip to Guatemala, taking a number of Italian doctors and their wives for an exchange with Guatemalan medical people for a proposed hospital that he was pitching for.
On the weekend they all piled into a boat for a sail around this enormous lake. A freak storm came up and the boat sank. There was an inner tire to hold onto. One by one the other adults slipped below the water. Walter held on for three days and nights. His bald head peeled like a hardboiled egg. Eventually on the fourth day some fishermen found him but he was waterlogged and so heavy they couldn’t lift him out of the water so they went to get help. They brought him back to the village where there was an American woman with the Peace Corps. She would nurse him back to health and then he returned to Rome. He turned the key in the door of the apartment to find when he entered that it was totally empty. Not even a chair to sit on. His wife had left him.
He called me and asked me if I wanted to have dinner. I imagined this would be dinner with him and his wife. When I arrived at the empty apartment he explained the circumstances. Very quickly we became an item but ours was always a very troubled relationship. I had no money and was working for a South African colonial type, another Rome at Your Service assignment. He was ambivalent about his separation from his wife and would not divorce her. He actually needed to stay married to her to stay in Italy. I wanted to settle down, get married, have a child etc.
He went on safari to Africa and many trips to Poland and Hungary pitching for hospital work. Relations between us were strained and finally one day, he came home and waved a piece of paper in my face. He had lodged a complaint with the American Embassy that I was an endangerment to him; that I was unstable, unbalanced emotionally and psychologically. I had no choice but to leave and I did the next day.
He would go on to marry a young Polish woman whom he met on a hospital project in Warsaw. He would eventually build a house in Anguilara, near Lago Bracciano and they would go on to have a son who is 20 years old now. Walter had a rebirth with his Jewish religion some years ago and is now very orthodox. He would be in his 80s now.