During the Aqua Parade water ballet in late 1953, Melissa started having dinners with the manager of the tour, an Italian by the nickname of Tonino (no full name is available). He spoke no English and was 22 years older. “My Italian improved quickly because I knew Spanish having been raised in Mexico,” she wrote in a memoir in 2017, “but I was hardly fluent. Tonino had traveled all over Italy, and he would tell me about different parts of the country. He told me about the Mussolini years and about having been drafted to fight in Ethiopia. I liked him a great deal and I sensed that he was attracted to me.”
Tonino was very understanding of the sexual abuse that she had suffered as a child (she had never told anyone other than her mother). He was her first real experience of having a boyfriend. When the Aqua Parade tour went bankrupt, they lived together in Milan all of 1954.
She worked in the city for the whole time in two jobs after the water ballet flopped.
One habit that she adopted was using her hands as she talked in Italian, which she learned quickly. She probably had already gotten used to this when she lived as a child in Mexico. For the rest of her life, she would gesture with her hands when speaking in any language.
She got her first driving license and was taught by Tonino and others to honk the car horn frequently as she was driving. She did not adopt this habit.
One night, when she was walking alone in Rome near the Victor Emmanuel II National Monument, also known as the Vittoriano, she was being followed by a suspicious man. She sought help from the traffic policeman who was working on an “island” in the middle of the traffic. She asked him to do something about this stranger. The traffic cop replied, “If I didn’t have to do what I’m doing now, I’d be doing what that man is doing.” The suspicious man, not knowing what the cop had said, went away and Melissa carried on safely.
Her relationship with Tonino, which had started off very well, became strained as he became increasingly jealous.
Melissa, in a memoir, wrote about the change in her personality that took place over that year. “I cannot define the reason why or how, but it seemed that since achieving my sexual maturity, I had developed steel in my spine,” she wrote. “Gone was that little voice that I often had heard within me saying: ‘I shouldn’t’ or ‘I can’t’. What I am writing here is (…) a recognition of a change in my personality. One example is how I ended my relationship with Tonino.
One evening after another of the jealous outbursts, I was really annoyed as we returned to our small apartment. Tonino kept on with his tirade, and I felt anger rising within me. I happened to be standing by the wash basin in the bathroom with a row of bottles on the shelf above the basin in front of me. I started yelling at him – first time ever. I thought of taking his bottle of Atkinson’s lavender cologne and throwing it at him across the room. A little voice inside said, ‘I bet you won’t do it’. It was like a taunt. . . and I threw it! He stopped yelling and looked thunderstruck. But I so enjoyed throwing that bottle, that I threw at him his Pantene hair lotion and then his Botot mouthwash! It felt terrific and he ran out of the room and did not return that night.
The next day when I saw him, I told him that I was leaving him and that he would never hear from me again. A few days later I was on my way back to the USA and began a new life full of adventure and much happiness.”
In January 1955 she took a ship back to the US and began fulfilling her dream of attending Georgetown University.