In the early months of my stay in Rome, every meeting that might open a professional path acquired an almost disproportionate importance. I still had no stable job and did not know whether Italy would remain only a stage on the way to America or would become, by force of circumstance, the country in which I would have to rebuild my life. In this state of waiting, with one foot in the Romanian past and the other in a still unclear future, the name of a firm such as Datamat Ingegneria dei Sistemi S.p.A. sounded like a possible entrance into a real professional world.
Giovanni M.'s recommendation
The connection with Datamat came through Giovanni M., the acquaintance I had gained through Anca's intervention, via one of their patients, A. Panella, a friend of Giovanni's. As a former police commissioner, Giovanni knew many Italian professional circles well and had personal relations with important people, among them the owners of Datamat. In his cordial and efficient way, Giovanni arranged a meeting that did not yet have the formal character of a hiring interview, but rather that of an introduction. For me, however, every such meeting meant a great deal. In emigration, a half-open door may seem, for a few days, almost a gate.
Datamat was, in those years, one of the important Italian companies in the field of computing and information systems. It specialized in the development and implementation of ICT solutions, system integration and software projects in highly specialized and critical sectors such as Defense and Space, Banking and Finance, Telecommunications and Public Administration. Datamat was born from the initiative of four young officers of the Italian Navy who, after graduating in Electronic Engineering and completing specialization courses in the United States in Real-Time Systems, founded the company in Rome in 1971.
The company's main headquarters was in EUR, on Via Laurentina — an imposing nine-story building. For a computer scientist coming from communist Romania, who had worked in the university and in research, but who now had to transfer his entire biography into a new context, a meeting with the management of such a company could seem the beginning of a reintegration. It was not yet employment, not even a firm promise, but it was a sign that what I knew how to do might interest someone.
The meeting took place in December, in M.'s office, in an atmosphere more friendly than official. People from the top of Datamat were present, including one of the owners, whom I shall note here as F.O., as well as E.C., technical director, electronic engineer and director of the telecommunications division. Giancarlo D. L., head of personnel, whom I shall hereafter call G.D.L., also took part.
For them, the meeting was probably the satisfaction of a professional and human curiosity, in addition to a gesture of kindness toward Giovanni. In those years, as the socialist countries were beginning to free themselves from the Moscow embrace, genuine computer specialists were passing through Italy — and therefore through Rome — looking for temporary jobs while waiting for visas to the United States or Canada. Like me, in fact. For me the meeting was even more: I found myself before people who represented exactly the world into which I needed to re-enter — the world of firms, projects, computers used not only in theory but in concrete applications, in systems, in contracts, in technologies that were changing rapidly.
A Romanian in an Italian computer company
The discussion began naturally, with reminiscences between Giovanni M. and the others, with common memories and with that Italian sociability that can give a professional meeting the air of a conversation among old acquaintances. From time to time, attention turned back to me. I was asked for details about Romania, about the university, about engineering education, about computers and about the place of automation in Romanian technical education.
I noticed then a certain surprise when I explained that in Romania there had existed for twenty-five years a specialization called Automation, with a status comparable to Electronics and of Soviet origin. I also explained that our training in computers, software and automatic systems was by no means marginal and that we were up to date with everything valuable across the ocean. In Italy, university and professional paths were organized differently, and the image they had of Eastern Europe was often simplified. I had to explain not only what I had done, but also what had been possible in a country many people viewed through political clichés.
I was trying to convey that I was not a beginner seeking conversion to a new field, but a man who came with real experience in computing, programming languages, compilers and software engineering. Yet emigration erases, for a time, the obvious facts. Titles, books, articles, years of teaching and research must be put back into circulation, explained and recognized within another frame of reference.
Italy and the hunger for new technologies
Italy in those years had an evident need for applied computing. Computing equipment was available. There were also funds to invest in new technologies. Large companies and public institutions had begun to feel the pressure of new technologies, and the market needed people capable of understanding them, explaining them and applying them. In many companies there were groups of consultants, trainers and specialists devoted to personnel development, updating technical knowledge and adapting to new computing tools.
In that atmosphere, my experience could be useful. I came from an environment in which computing had often been forced to be inventive because of a lack of resources, to build tools, to adapt languages and to seek technical solutions under difficult conditions, under intellectual suffocation, but perhaps precisely for that reason more penetrating at the level of understanding. It was an experience different from the Western one, but not necessarily inferior. Sometimes constraint produces a deeper understanding of technical mechanisms.
I do not know how much my interlocutors understood of this difference. I do know, however, that the meeting ended well. It was said that we would keep in touch. For a man in my position at the time, such words were enough to feed hope for several weeks.
The interview on Via Laurentina
In December 1989, G.D.L. called me for an interview at Datamat's headquarters in the Laurentina area. It was the Christmas holiday period, and the building, several stories high, seemed almost empty. I remember that impression of an empty technical space: only the doormen, the corridors and the offices without the usual bustle of a working day. In a large building built for intense activity, the holiday silence made the meeting with G.D.L. even stranger.
The interview took place in English, sometimes supplemented with Italian. It was not a standard interview, with precise questions and technical tests. We spoke a great deal about Romania because, precisely then, in December 1989, Romania had become the center of dramatic world attention. The fall of the Ceaușescu regime, the television images, the uncertainty and violence of those days had transformed every Romanian in the West into an involuntary witness.
For me, the discussion had a double charge. I was speaking about a country I had left a few months earlier, but which was changing before the eyes of the world. At the same time, I was trying to support my professional future in a country in which I still had no clear place. Romania was the inevitable subject, but I needed my interlocutor to see me not only as a Romanian caught by history, but as a specialist who could be useful. Obviously, G.D.L. understood that I was soon going to find out whether I would obtain the American visa and that, if the answer was positive, I would have to leave.
We also discussed, of course, my CV, my university experience and the fields in which I had worked. G.D.L. was cordial and attentive. At the end, he told me that after the holidays he would call me to begin work at Datamat. For me, that sentence had the weight of a promise.
The call that never came
The holidays passed. The period immediately after them passed as well. The call did not come. At first I found reasonable explanations: the holiday, reorganization after Christmas, events in Romania, the slow rhythm of large firms. Then the explanations began to wear thin. In a normal life, a delayed phone call is only an inconvenience. In emigration, a call that does not come can become a form of suspended destiny.
The wait was all the more oppressive because I had few alternatives. Each professional possibility seemed to open a path, and each silence seemed to close it. It was not only a question of a job. It was a question of recognition. I needed someone to confirm, through a contract, through a collaboration, through a summons, that my experience could be transformed into a new life.
I still do not know why that call never came. Perhaps Datamat did not at that moment have an immediate need for my profile. Perhaps the events in Romania changed priorities. Perhaps, in a large firm, a promise made in an almost empty building on the eve of the holidays simply got lost among other urgencies. In the life of an emigrant, many important things do not end with an explanation, but with a silence.
A forgotten promise
Later, when my professional situation had already changed, I had the opportunity to see G.D.L. again and asked him directly why he had not called me then. He remembered the interview; he even remembered the promise, but he no longer remembered the reason why things had not continued. His answer, sincere in its way, made me understand once again the difference between what is decisive for a person in difficulty and what may be, for an institution, only a minor episode.
For me, that promise had been a possible salvation. For Datamat, it had probably been one of many discussions held in an agitated year. It was not ill will. It was the usual disproportion between a person's biography and an organization's memory. What can become a chapter of life for one party may remain, for the other, a forgotten note.
The return years later
The relationship with Datamat did not end there, however. After a few years, when my professional life in Italy had acquired another consistency, I returned in relation to the company from a different position. Not as the employee awaited in vain after the holidays, but as a provider of knowledge, training and specialized competences for employees who had to update themselves in new computing technologies.
This return had a special meaning for me. It did not repair the call that had not come, but it placed it in a broader perspective. What had not been achieved then by direct employment was achieved later in the form of professional collaboration. Datamat thus remained linked to my Italian biography not through failure, but through a deferred and partly recovered promise.
A lesson about emigration
The Datamat episode taught me something about the condition of the qualified emigrant. It is not enough to have competences. One must find the place, the moment, the right person and the institutional mechanism that can transform them into recognition. Between personal value and professional integration there is sometimes a distance difficult to cross.
In Romania, before leaving, I already had a professional identity. In Italy, that identity had to be reconstructed from fragments: a meeting, a recommendation, a course, a contract, a collaboration. Datamat was one of the first mirrors in which I clearly saw this situation. It was not only who I had been that mattered. What mattered above all was who I could become in the eyes of a world that did not know me.
That is why I keep in my memory that call which never came. Not as a wound, but as a sign of a period in which every promise seemed to contain a possible life. Some promises are fulfilled, others are lost. But even the lost ones may remain, years later, landmarks on the road by which a person tries to find his place again.