“I Never Forgot You”

After more than six decades, a doomed teenage romance gets a second chance

- Marina Lopes

On a sunny Saturday in April 2017, the phone rang in my grandmother’s house in São Carlos, Brazil. “I’ve been looking for you for decades,” the man on the line whispered in Italian. “You were my first love.”

It had been more than six decades since my grandmother had heard the voice of Aldo Sportelli, now 83.

She pictured his youthful face and wondered what he looked like now. Aldo’s voice trembled as he recalled the last time he saw her in southern Italy. He had spent years tracking her down.

For 10 minutes they caught each other up on how their lives had unfolded—both married for half a century, my grandmother widowed, Aldo’s wife in the last stages of Alzheimer’s, kids, grandkids, careers.

“You just don’t think this type of thing will ever happen to you,” my grandmother told me.

IN 1951, WHEN my grandmother, Marilena, was 14, she set off on a year-long trip to Italy with her grandparents. Her grandfather, Antonio Lerario, was the son of an illiterate fisherman who, in 1885, at the age of 14, had left Italy for Brazil as a stowaway. He joined thousands of Italian immigrants in São Paulo, where he sold bags of rice on the street. He eventually saved enough money to open his own warehouse and went on to create a multimillion-dollar cereal empire.

After World War II, he decided to return to Italy and invited Marilena, his eldest granddaughter, to come along. In April 1951, the SS Conte Biancamano, an Italian ocean liner, departed the Brazilian port of Santos. My grandmother was the youngest passenger in first class, which included counts, members of the Brazilian aristocracy and the archbishop of Rio de Janeiro.