Ennio

Bill Laws and I were married that year on Valentine's Day, February 14 – not for the romance but because my resident permit was to expire on that date.  We had a civil marriage, at which I need not  have attended, and we celebrated at a very well-known French restaurant with an older couple Marna and John who were parents of Romi, who I worked for at one point as her bartender at her club in Roppongi, prior to my escape to Rome.  We had skate.  It was nice.  The wine flowed.

However within months, Bill was up to his tricks.  Drinking hysterically.  We were still very active in TADC (Tokyo Amateur Dramatic Club), me doing sets and PR and him directing.  Our last play was an Albee thing Everything In the Garden; at the cast party at our house he seemed to strike up a connection with the Canadian ambassador's 17 year old daughter whom I would find en flagrante the next morning in my living room.  At this point I did not care anymore.

I was finished with McCann Erikson, had done my stint at IBM Japan with Michel Berthier, whom I would meet 40 years later at a rehab center in Jamaica Plain, Boston, following my hip replacement surgery.  Anyway the point is that finding a job was not easy.  So I decided as Bill was traveling so much that I would join the Tokyo Hilton pool as most of my American co-workers at IBM had done.

I figured I would tackle the job thing in the Fall.  And during the heat of summer, enjoy the pool program at the Tokyo Hilton.  It was a solitary exercise: everyone ignored me because I was English and I had a number of bad run-ins with taxi drivers who expected I was going to Haneda airport from the Hilton, rather than my home in Azabu.  Racism is never entirely understood until you are the butt of it.  In Japan, you are reminded 24/7 that you are gaijin and strange.  No more than we discriminate here but for a white woman with very liberal leanings it was quite a wake-up call that I have never forgotten.  Apart from my parents' trailblazing liberalism, that is why I treat everyone with dignity and respect.

One morning I arrived at the pool and there was a squad of Flying Tiger pilots and they had a huge cricket on the corner of the swimming pool and they were talking it into takeoff.  “Heavy on right runway, flaps up, ready to fly”...etc.  We all rolled around laughing at them.  They were on leave from heavy duty Viet Nam materiel delivery.  They mentioned there would be more pilots due to an Alitalia airline strike.

Next day my husband left for a two week fact-finding tour of his territory which ranged as far north as Hong Kong and as far south as Australia.  There was talk of me joining him in Singapore.  We lived in a huge Japanese half western/half eastern house in Azabu which used to belong to the French tutor of the Empress Nagako.  The landlady was Japanese Christian who made her annual pilgrimage to Guadalcanal where her fiance had been killed in WWII.  We called her Ping because she talked and acted like a Ping gram.  She was impossibly flakey so my only worry was taking care of the house and our two dogs and guarding the car (we would find people sleeping in it) and just generally running the show on my own.  Something I am quite inured to now but was nervous about then.

So first thing that happens is that someone dumped tree trimmings against the opposite wall from our compound and it caught fire and I had to call the fire department who later honored me as honorary citizen of my block in Azabu and then we had a huge earthquake and a young girl nearly drowned in the pool at the Azabu Hotel.  My Akita, Tora, attacked our other dog, Vicki, while eating their separate meals and I ended up putting a futon downstairs on the dining platform which was shoji and tatami mat because we had so many aftershocks.  The dogs hung out under the dining room table on the Western side of our dining room.

Next morning I repair to the Hilton pool.  Exhausted, having been up all night with aftershocks and dogs, etc., I drift off to sleep in a long chair.  I hear a splash and I awake and pulling himself out of the pool is this incredible god of a man, perhaps late 40s, in incredible shape, unbelievable tan, sparkling droplets of water on his massive shoulders, salt and pepper hair, little chocolate brown Speedo and he jumped back in and did laps. 

His name was Ennio Petracchi and he was an Alitalia airline pilot and was in Tokyo training on 747s.  He was 46 years old and very handsome and charming.  He was obviously friendly with everyone – it turned out that he slept with every woman in the place including a very wealthy older Japanese lady.  He seemed to be with her in fact. But at the time I was not even contemplating him that way.  He was just a guy – an Alitalia airline pilot on strike like everyone else.

The Alitalia strike was to continue for another eight days.  Working his way through the pool edge, strolling, chatting, shaking hands as he moved forward, he finally reaches me.  And asks me if I would join him downstairs in the lobby for coffee.  I was on my way home, so say yes and sit in lobby cafe trying to figure out what his collection of “Persian rocks” could be and of course, I figure it out: Persian rugs.  He is beguiling, charming and I am young, pretty and very vulnerable.

The next step is that he invites me for a cocktail in his room; I demur and say no come to my house.  Experience Japan.  He does and if he is impressed, he does not show it; to this day I think he was a very shallow guy who had no idea where this would take us.  

From coffee at my house, we eventually end up in his hotel room.  And to his shock and horror he is impotent.  I cannot even describe the degree of attraction and disappointment.  So he spent the next two days translating all of Luigi Tenco for me and finally when I resurface at the pool, I went up to his room and I found him shaving with nothing but a towel around his loins.  He and I both burst into tears.  Well, this time proved magical.  I went home later that night and wept on my futon because I knew this was going to change my life forever.

Last night, we went to the disco Byblos and they played “Me and Mrs. Jones” and I said “I am your Mrs. Jones” and he said, “Yes I know.”  And the next morning he left for Argentina.  Alitalia had resumed flying.

Letters of undying love flew fast and furious; phrases like “sail to sail, back to back, blood to blood” he was an amazing letter writer.  So in the meantime, husband Bill arrives back and I tell all and say I am leaving.  He is not happy about it but recognizes that things are not going well and promptly goes out drinking at the Okura Hotel and gets in a fight with an Australian and I have to go and get him.  I was tired of babysitting.

So I book my flight to Rome via Moscow.  I have friends from Alitalia who meet me and entertain me.  I stay in the Hotel Eden on the Pincio at first and then a long stay at the Hotel Carriage on Via della Croce till I find an apartment.  I wait for hours for Ennio – traffic, flight delays, new jumbo jet training.  I housesit a charming flat in Campo dei Fiori, we have our assignations there.  And then finally he confesses that he is married with three children.  By this time I have already figured that out but I am furious at this opportunity which he has gainsayed for almost a year.

Then one day, no calls, no notes, no cards, no letters.  His wife found a silver necklace meant for me in his flight bag and threatened to take the children to Livorno and leave him.  Carolyn says that is how you depend to spin it.  He needed to lighten his load; that was a convenient method.

At this point, things between Bill and I were at an all-point low.  We had long ago agreed to separate it was just a matter of finding Bill an apartment which we eventually did.  I stayed there one night, a night on which he never came home and then left for Rome on Aeroflot via Moscow.  This time had been spent working during the day for Phillips and at night as a bartender for Romy’s in Roppongi.  I had two friends from Alitalia ground crew in Rome who had been living in Tokyo and who were really Bill’s friends and of course secretly I sort of had Ennio although he was married with three children.

Anyway I arrived in Rome none the worse for wear.  I lodged at first at the Hotel Inghilterra up on the Pincio but eventually moved to Hotel Carriage on Via della Croce.  I got a job with a South African import export man, Guy Landon, and we had offices on Via Lombardia.  He also had a Libyan translator, Valeria Habib, a driver, Pacefice and a Russian woman who had been married to an Englishman and translated for the Pope during the war.  She took me under her wing.

I met Ennio for dinner once shortly after arriving.  He thought the restaurant I chose was touristy.  Another time he kept me waiting in Piazza del Popolo for three hours because of traffic from the airport at Fiumicino.  Finally, I got a flat sitting situation in Trastevere for an American couple.  He visited me a few times there but eventually, it had to end as between flying and family he really was not able to carry on an affair despite trying ever so hard to do so.  RoseAlba, his wife, was pretty formidable, having found a necklace that he bought for me in his flight bag and wondering why he never gave it to her and then confronting him when she realized it had been for someone else, me.

This star-crossed necklace would be, later in March, ripped off my neck when Carolyn and I were mugged on Via Condotti on the last night of Carnivale.  We were crossing Via Condotti and we heard this distant humming.  A troup of about 8 men in wedding dresses and wielding yellow plastic batons were moving down the street.  We stopped, realizing we should get out of the way, but before we knew it, four take Carolyn and four take me.  I found the wire in the gutter the next day but other than that and my LP that is all I have of Ennio Petracchi.  Many years later I was walking on Via Nazionale, hugely pregnant with Tobias in early 1979 and he walked right by me.  He turned and scratched his head but kept ongoing.

I recently found a little stack of his love letters.  And I share a few of the more poetic below.

September 6, 1975

Mia Cara,

At last, I can write you without tricks: your 2nd address is a real help!

Two days ago I had your August 17th and 19th notes.  So different/so painful the first one, so doubtful the second, but that’s normal.  I expected that.  But both so warm and meaningful to me.  I’m leaving now for Beirut, and this is the only paper available at the moment, so I must be very clever and fast.

I enjoyed reading your letters over and over: your true voice was coming out of your lines, your voice I love so much.  It’s incredible: I couldn’t hold your notes with me, however, I still can remember all your words.  I can understand your feelings, getting back to your routine after such an emotionally hard and unusual time.  Can you understand mine?

I hope you have been given (when back to Tokyo) the little present I sent you from Bombay.  When in Bombay, I was like crazy.  I couldn’t stand to leave you and have no chances to even know when meet us again.  I really have no words to describe what I shared with you.  It was such a beautiful, deep and all-taking feeling, even more than love – because we weren’t just two lovers, but two persons, true and knotted, no walls and no masks between us, so desperately close blood to blood and sail to sail.  Whatever it is, it never happened to me before, and now it’s part of me, lives with me, and I feel it every day with my thoughts, my memories and my regrets.

I must go now and close.  But I’ll be soon again with you, to tell you more and better how hard is being apart from you.  Ciao, Tesoro, E.

P.S. Forget your diet.