A Roman Rhapsody

by Sara Alexander

  “So we are agreed, yes, Signora Fresu?”

  “Si. I know you know best, Signora.”

  “I do. I will make allowances, but only if we expel Alba for this last month and have her retake the missed classes throughout the summer to catch up. If I allow Alba to stay in the class now, what kind of message am I giving to the others?”

  Neither Giovanna nor Alba had an answer for that.

  Their silence pleased the teacher.

  * * *

  The vise that strangled Alba’s household continued to tighten. Sometimes her mother looked like she was close to breaking, even though a stream of women flowed through the house delivering never-ending trays of gnochetti, sauce, pasta al forno. Grazietta swept the swept floors, dusted where there was none to remove, and incanted prayers where necessary. Sometimes Alba would find her clapping into the corners of the room, shifting the menacing energy. Her brothers left for school each morning. Her uncles would come by for lunch, when they would update Giovanna on the search efforts. Alba wafted around the house like a ghost, finding comfort in invisibility. Grazietta would give her stitching to occupy her, but needlework was her nemesis, and after a while even Grazietta grew impatient with her.

  Everyone’s prayers were answered a week later.

  Her father’s release was the miracle the entire island had been praying for. Her town threw a festa in his honor the following day. It was the first time in their history that a captive was released unharmed and without a paid ransom. Bruno Fresu had left an indelible mark on Sardinian history. This, along with him remaining intact, unlike other victims whose ears or digits were cut off and sent to relatives as warnings, gave rise to nothing short of a national holiday. Tables lined the length of the vicolo. Every family cooked something for the feast. Her uncle Benito built a firepit at the end of their street and spent the entire day overseeing a suckling pig, dripping its fat into the moist flesh, caressed with rosemary wands dipped in olive oil, its salty scent curling down the street. The feast was bigger than any wedding any of them had ever been to.

  Her father sat at the head of the snaking tables. He was thin. His skin pale. His eyes no longer the sparkling onyx Alba remembered. He shaved away his thick beard that had grown the past month, on Giovanna’s insistence. Without it, his face looked smaller still. Everyone raised their glasses. There were tears. Alba even noticed several of the older men wipe their faces, then place their flat caps on their heads to shade their emotions.

  The party trickled through the night till the wine-infused singing began. The men warbled in their thick Sardinian voices. The sound rang up the stone fronts, echoed down the viccoli to the piazza. Alba imagined the valley beyond, plains humming with the distant rumble of their celebratory voices. And beyond farther still, the empty caves where he had slept, the damp crevices where her father had been stowed. Her heart hardened trying to clamp her tears from escaping. Everyone was celebrating now, it was no longer her time to grieve for her missing father. The tears crystallized into a heavy weight in her chest. She wanted to feel the happiness surrounding her, but it felt like she was celebrating a family she knew, not her own. She hated herself for begrudging everyone’s fawning on her brother, or rather, the flicker of infuriating pride she saw in his eyes as they caught her own. Marcellino was crowned the prince after all, and Alba, as always, the disappointing renegade. All the faces along the long table joined in her parents’ disapproval of the girl who should have gone through this mortal test but failed even to show up. Her father seemed happiest that his son had survived more so even than being reunited with his family and having been released himself. Where Alba grasped for any feelings close to pride, relief, love, only anger surfaced, a bitter taste in her mouth, burned artichoke, singed pigskin.

  * * *

  Her father was closeted in quiet. After his return, the house became a hushed mausoleum. Alba had never seen her mother so stilted; tiptoeing around her kitchen so as not to make any sudden noise. She waved over at Alba, who was on dusting duty.

  “Come on, get a move on, I’ll be late!” Giovanna whispered, emphasizing every vowel with a theatrical movement of her lips.

  “For what, Mamma?”

  “You’re to come to work with me today. I can’t leave you here. Babbo needs to rest!”

  Before Alba could ask anything further, she was bundled out of the door and the two began marching uphill. The sounds of the market awakening clanked up from the main square. Giovanna stomped at full speed. Alba was glad the morning heat had not fully cooked. By the time they reached Signora Elias’s villa Alba could feel the droplets of sweat snake down the back of her neck. Giovanna gave her daughter’s shirt a tug or two and it curled back into its original shape. She smoothed her work apron. The door opened.

  Signora Elias appeared behind it, the doorframe encasing her like a painting of an aging Madonna, black hair scraped off her face into a low bun, streaked with waves of gray. Her face wrinkled into a grin. The tiny woman, with the sharp intelligent eyes of a bird, snapped her gaze from mother to daughter.

  “Buon giorno, Signora. Sorry I am a little late today,” Giovanna said, breathless.

  “Nonsense. Your husband had quite the celebration last night. I fell asleep to the sound of it!”

  She stepped back a little to let the two inside.

  “This must be your girl, yes?”

  “Si. She won’t make any trouble, Signora.”

  Giovanna’s face creased with streaks of worry. Did her mother fear Alba might pick a fistfight with this old lady too?

  “Piacere, Signorina,” Signora Elias said, reaching out a hand for Alba to shake. No adult had ever done such a thing. Alba felt Giovanna flick her shoulder to reciprocate.

  Signora Elias’s hand was small but strong. Her fingers were assured, muscular, belying her size and age. She looked straight into Alba, without the pity or mistrust she was more accustomed to receiving from older Sardinian women. They shuffled through the darkened hallway, along the cool of the tiles, which opened out into the biggest room Alba had ever seen. At the far end three sets of double glass doors framed the Ozieri plains. Parched yellows streaked with ochre beneath the graduating blues of the summer sky, and they stood as if floating in the space above it.

  “Stop gawking!” her mother spat under her breath.

  Alba scurried behind her mother as they worked their way through to the utility cupboard beside the kitchen and removed all the cleaning supplies for the morning’s work. Her eyes slit sideways, registering the paintings on the walls, the huge Persian rug that covered the center of the room. As Giovanna flew out through the kitchen Alba had just enough time to see the enormous range, the double oven below, the bold, colorful designs on the tiles surrounding it. Giovanna headed to the upper floors only to discover she’d left the broom downstairs. She ordered Alba to fetch it.

  That’s when she heard it for the first time.

  A golden sound; uplifting like the first light, reassuring as the afternoon sun’s streaking glow through the fig trees. In silence Alba’s feet stroked the carpet lining the stairs, not wanting to interrupt the cascade of notes running toward her, the mesmerizing trickle of a creek as it winds its way around mossy boulders and uncovered tree roots, cooling, comforting, ancient.

  At the foot of the stairs she reached stillness. In the far corner of the room Signora Elias sat on an upholstered stool, facing toward the enormous glass-paned doors and the expanse of their burnished valley. Her fingers caressed the keys of a deep mahogany instrument. Its lid was lifted at an angle like a sail, the mirror sheen of the wood reflecting the paintings on the opposite side of the room. Bright yellow notes of birdsong followed by sonorous, melancholic blues. Alba couldn’t move. Elias danced on further carousels of notes till, at last, her fingers eased down onto the white and black, peaceful, heavy. The song reached its final rest. Alba couldn’t quite count all the different tones and sensations that wove out of the piano, but she knew the ending made her think of a s
unset dipped in orange and ruby, or the memory she had created of her father before the kidnapping, edged with the silver-gray tinge of a farewell.

  2

  Pianoforte

  1. formal term for piano

  2. mid-18th century, “soft and loud,” expressing the graduation in tone

  Alba couldn’t force the following week to pass quickly enough. The days dripped by unhurried, excruciating, as if she were listening to a leaking tap’s droplets echo into a metal watering can till it reached the rim. Her restlessness did not go unnoticed by Giovanna, who admonished her for hurriedly rolling out the gnochetti from a large lump of dough, sweeping the floor without noticing what furniture she banged against in the process, and eating her food without chewing it first.

  For Alba, the sounds around her became a claustrophobic symphony of erratic percussion, orderless, out of time, passionless. Her brothers rushed in from school each lunchtime, with stories of whom they had defeated in the playground, peacocking their self-appointed celebrity status amongst their peers for being sons of a hero. Her father would give them a swift glare, but his eyes smiled. He still spent his days in his room, but somehow the cacophony of her brothers brought him pleasure where the smallest noise of Alba’s broom would make Giovanna wince at best, swing her hand at her daughter at worst.

  Alba tried to bury the worm of envy inching around her belly. When the feeling deepened, she thought about Signora Elias. The sounds of hungry boys and crisscrossing conversations then hushed into the near distance as the memory of her song rippled closer.

  “Alba! Do as your father said!” Giovanna’s voice pierced the reimagined musical haze.

  “What, Mamma?”

  “Clear up. They’ve finished, can’t you see? Bring the cheese from out back.”

  Alba stood and reached the cool stone cupboard toward the back of the room where several perette cheeses hung to form a hardened skin. She reached one and brought it to her father.

  “What’s got into you today, Alba?” he asked, grabbing a knife and wiping it clean on the tablecloth.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re a wet cloth. This is how you thank your mother? She’s supposed to be taking it easy. Lord knows we’ve put her through enough.”

  We. The way he slipped that tiny word into his sentence made Alba feel like she was folding down into a tiny parcel of tight paper. We. Giovanna had wanted her to go. The events had all been, in part, her fault. Bruno gripped the round-ended cheese in his palm and carved a slice. The boys eyed him as if they hadn’t just licked their bowls of gnochetti clean. Bruno passed each of them a peeled piece, which they prized off the tip of his knife, then started to peel the rind off his own.

  “Well, don’t just sit there, Alba. Go and help your mother.”

  Alba left the room for the narrow kitchen beside it. Giovanna was filling a plastic container inside the deep sink with suds and water.

  “Is this how you’re helping him get better?” Her words were swallowed by the sloshing water. Alba could hear the force of it smack against the side, thwacks of cascading frustration.

  Replying was pointless.

  * * *

  At last, Wednesday rolled around. Giovanna’s calls for Alba not to run on so far ahead fell on deaf ears, or rather ears that were attuned to the treble of birdsong, the metallic click clang of the house at the end of the street whose upper terrace was being rebuilt, or the bee that buzzed close, which Alba watched land on the passiflora creeping up a neighbor’s front door. As they wove farther uphill toward Signora Elias’s home, the sun bore down and the cicadas hummed. Alba noticed their perfect synchronization, how their notes shifted but nevertheless sang in unison.

  Alba rang the bell before Giovanna could stop her. And Signora Elias’s smile silenced Giovanna before she could yell.

  “Good morning, Signora. Alba is with us again today, I see?”

  “Sorry, Signora, it won’t always be like that.”

  “It’s been too long since I’ve had children in my house. I’ve been looking forward to it all week.”

  She welcomed them inside. This time the smell of the silent house was powdered with a sugary vanilla scent. Alba’s mouth watered.

  “I’ve made sospiri this morning. I hope you’ll have some, Alba. If Mamma says it’s alright?”

  Giovanna shook her head. “We’ll get on with our work, Signora.”

  “Very well, Giovanna, but I want you to send Alba down when you begin with the bleach in the bathroom. Those smells are toxic for young noses. She will sit down here in silence, of course, until you come down again, yes?”

  This time Alba knew her mother could not refuse. A victory. She would have grinned if she knew it wouldn’t lead to mild physical harm.

  Giovanna raised her eyebrows in unspoken agreement. When Signora Elias turned away to walk to her piano, Giovanna gave Alba a glare. In the utility cupboard Alba found all the cleaning equipment from the week before. This time she took a moment to commit the kitchen to memory. The white-tiled counters stretched one length of the facing wall with a window at the far end, which opened out onto the valley. Beyond lay the purple hills of Tula surrounding Lake Coghinas. A small wooden table beside the wall opposite the range was covered in baking parchment and topped with perfect medallions of almond paste sospiri, dipped in white icing. They were uniform in size and the morning light cast a tempting gleam across the tops of their perfect leveled surfaces.

  “Run on up to your mother before she calls now, won’t you, Alba.” Signora Elias’s voice made her jump round. Her guilt dissipated off the old woman’s grin. “You’ll have some when you come down, I promise.”

  * * *

  Giovanna gave Alba several more chores to do before she at last allowed her downstairs with a squinty-eyed Sardinian glower. Alba left, trying not to look too happy about the fact.

  “There you are at last!” Signora Elias called out, coming in from the kitchen with a porcelain plate of sospiri. She placed it down on a lace doily, which sat at the center of a spindle-legged side table, a pink velvet hall chair beside it.

  “Do sit down, Alba, we were never meant to digest standing up you know.”

  Alba took a tentative seat.

  “Those are for you. And yes, I will be offended if you don’t finish them all. You’ve lived on our island long enough to know that, surely?”

  Alba wanted to join her laughter, but the corners of her mouth clamped down the impulse, in case her mother heard.

  “This is my practice time, Alba. If you don’t mind, I will carry on as I always do. I don’t do very well if I don’t stick to my routines. I don’t go to church often like the other women my age in town. But if I miss my morning practice my day does go off track somewhat. Perhaps I’m getting old after all.”

  Her smile lit up her little face, her eyes a dance of sagacity and infectious childlike joy. Alba took her first bite. It was perfection; sweet, nutty, smooth.

  “Glad you like them,” Elias said. Alba looked up. The signora must have other magic powers beyond the songs her fingers made.

  Signora Elias sat on the piano stool. She turned away from Alba now and let her hands rest on her lap. Alba watched her breathe in and out three times. For a moment she wondered if maybe the old lady wasn’t falling asleep. No sooner had she thought that, the woman’s hands sprung to life. Her wrists lifted and her fingers touched the keys, soundless, elegant as a ballerina’s silent feet.

  They gave a twirl upon the keys, followed by a fierce, effortless run of notes. In her left hand, the notes spaced at even intervals undulating up and down toward the center notes. In her right, her fingers trilled into ripples of watery movements as if the two hands fought to be heard over each other; a heated conversation. The music rolled on, in waves, urgent, chasing, till Signora Elias reached up for the higher notes, spreading her palm wide and playing stacked notes at the same time. The tune from the earlier passage repeated, fuller for the addition of the lower notes, emphatic. T
he scarlet sounds burst with passion, insistence. And then, as quickly as the storm blew over the instrument, it fell back, like a tide fast retreating. The reds were replaced by golden yellow tones, making Alba think of how the sun shines all the warmer after a summer downpour. Yet beneath the hope, Alba heard nostalgia, as if the song harkened to a lost peace. The tune was a bitter balm. An involuntary tear left a wet streak on her cheek. Then the waves crashed in again, Signora Elias’s fingers racing, till, at last, her rocking hands wove an ending, the repetition of the midsection playing over echoes of the tumultuous start, reaching a truce, both points of view sounding in their own right.

  And then it was over.

  Signora Elias looked at Alba’s face.

  “The first time I heard Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu I cried like a baby. You show remarkable self-control to shed only a solitary tear.”

  Alba laughed at that, in spite of herself.

  “That’s the piece which made me want to become a pianist.”

  Signora Elias held the silence, unhurried, as unflustered by it as the great splash of sound she’d just made. Then she stood up from her stool. Alba took it as her signal to leave, and she jumped up from her seat and pounced toward the stairs. Elias called out to her.

  Alba turned back.

  “My piano. Would you like to play it?”

  Alba wanted nothing more than to know how that magic poured out of her fingers, but she stood, frozen between terror and embarrassment.

  “Mamma will be busy for a while yet. I can show you some things. Only if you like, of course.”

  Alba glanced toward the stairs, imagining the look on her mother’s face if she came down to see her daughter fingering this magnificent instrument.

  “Here, take a seat and I’ll adjust the stool to your height.”

  Alba felt the thickness of the plush rug beneath her feet. She walked to the stool as if drawn to it by an invisible cord of golden thread. She listened to the metallic squeak of the stool as it rose.