A Roman Rhapsody

by Sara Alexander

  1975

  4

  Battaglia

  battle. A composition that features drumrolls, fanfares, and the general commotion of battle.

  For the seven years that followed, Alba’s fingers were in perpetual motion. Giovanna gave up yelling at her to cease their incessant tapping. Over time the compulsive movement paled into mild irritation because Alba performed her duties at home. The silent melodies became just another tick to join her other obsessive behaviors, like wiping a clean counter, scouring a gleaming range, or checking the taps were twisted tight. The more her fingers percussed, the less Alba spoke. The silence cloaked her in a guarded invisibility, a cocoon from which she could witness the world at a safe distance. After dinner, she would sit beside the record player and piano albums Signora Elias had lent her and play without stopping. When Giovanna started moaning about the constant music, Signora Elias also let her borrow some headphones. The pieces she studied wove into her mind like a dance, and after listening for an evening several sections would escape from her fingers onto the keyboard with ease. It was like repeating a conversation, almost word for word, and where discrepancies remained Signora Elias took time to make the necessary corrections, of which there were often very few.

  Each morning Alba rose with the dawn she was named after, striding down to the bakery and back up through the hills of obsidian and crimson-streaked winter sunrises and the peony-orange haze of the summers. Signora Elias greeted her like a cherished granddaughter each of those days, never once forcing conversation, nor prying. The space they created every morning was a secret Signora Elias and Alba held close, clasped in complicit trust like the two photographic faces of a snapped-shut locket.

  When her teachers crowbarred their way into Alba’s personal and mental space, yelling from their desk, haranguing her out of her self-imposed silence, Alba replayed minute details of Signora Elias’s mornings on a loop. The images squared into view, ordered, yet singular, like the family slides her neighbors would project onto their white walls, the mechanical clicks between each image a metronome chasing time; scales, morning light, gleaming floors, fresh coffee, arpeggios, the taut strings of the piano, their vibration, their frequency, their power.

  May of 1975 was in full bloom. The grasslands surrounding Ozieri were splattered yellow with blossom. In the crags between the granite along the roadside leading up to Signora Elias, rock-roses grappled with gravity, their fuchsia-purple blossoms widening to the sun. Giant wild fennel swayed on the gentle breeze, scenting the air with anise. Minuscule orchids appeared in the cracks between the boulders; Alba gazed at their petal faces, minuscule mournful masks. By Signora Elias’s gate, tufts of wild poppies greeted Alba, and each day she visited, another unfurled its blood-splat petals.

  Shafts of morning light cut through Signora Elias’s large room and across the open piano lid, striking a golden gleam across its polished top. Alba could feel its heat trace her outline and light up her fingers. She looked down at the keys. Her fingers sprang into action.

  Signora Elias interrupted at once. “You took a breath, yes, but it was high in your chest, snatched. You cannot expect to be able to keep up with this Bach fugue in this way. Bach is stamina, precision, absolute clarity. He is the source.”

  Alba tilted her head back, blowing a puff of air out from her lower lip, which lifted a few strands of hair that had fallen onto her forehead.

  “And there’s no use in succumbing to frustration either. We can’t create or practice from that place. Sorrow? Yes. Feel the pain of those notes escaping from under you. Then simply work out what you must do to fix it.”

  Alba wanted to say sorry, but the words stuck in her throat, a knot of silence.

  “Don’t apologize,” Signora Elias continued, as always, intuiting what Alba longed to say but couldn’t, “this is the work, Alba. This is the constant reminder that you are merely human. What Bach is laying out for us is the entire cosmos, layers of mathematics, interweaving with glorious symmetry. Then he twists it in on itself, reveling in the asymmetry of those rules. It’s a kaleidoscope of patterns. We know this. So we honor this.”

  Alba was accustomed to Signora Elias’s tempo increasing as she charged through her corrections, sometimes striding beside the piano, then drawing to a curt pause when the pinnacle of her thought was reached, a mountaineer charging toward the peak. She stood still now, in the spotlight of the sun’s glow. “Will you return to the beginning?”

  “Slower.”

  “And?”

  Alba swallowed. “Then I’ll play these first few measures, repeating at speed, playing with alternate rhythms.”

  Signora Elias raised her eyebrows, waiting for the end of the thought.

  “Until my fingers play me,” Alba whispered.

  “Until there is no space between those patterns and you,” Signora Elias added. “I don’t want to see Alba Fresu play with her fingers. I want to see the music ripple out of you. That’s when we know that you truly know the piece. When we have stripped it to its core, asked what it is, why it is, what it needs to tell us, and then step inside.”

  Alba looked at Signora Elias and allowed herself to smile in spite of a sinking in her stomach. When would these exercises become instinctive?

  “It’s about learning to control every minute movement of your body to produce the precise tone the piece requires,” Signora Elias began, “and then, in performance, being able to shift that focus on control alone, and simply allow your technique to be in place, so your musicality can soar. We want to hear the music, not the practice. Music is about control and the loss of it at the same time, a beautiful contradiction. At this moment, from your flushed cheeks I see you are still grappling with the sensations of losing control in the first instance.”

  The past seven years Signora Elias had sat beside her each and every morning leading her down these waterways of her music. Now, at eighteen, as Alba approached her final year at school, their lesson together was a cool balm before class. After it, Signora Elias would permit her to practice unguided.

  “I want to apologize,” Alba replied, her voice dry.

  “I know. Hold on to this thought—my corrections are leading you toward your music, Alba, they are never criticism alone, however it might feel.”

  Signora Elias invited the silence for a moment as if it were an unexpected yet welcome guest. Alba lost herself in it. Her breath dropped down into her abdomen, warm, deep. She felt her lower back unlock, each vertebra separating a little, rising up out of the top of her head. Her fingers lifted back onto the keys. As she exhaled, they became heavy, assured, curious. The first few measures tumbled out effortless, precise. Alba stopped, then began again, each time her breath deepening a little more, each time her feet finding the reassurance of the wooden parquet rise up to meet them. As the cascade of notes became equal, controlled, her hands began to relax, speeding up without tension. Her fingers sank into the ivories, weighted but free. The glorious symmetry of the sounds and patterns washed over her, shining light. She was no longer in Ozieri. She was far beyond the plains, above her turquoise coast. She was deep in the forests of Gennargentu, beneath a gushing waterfall, icy cold electrifying her body. She was everywhere but here. And the feeling lit her up from her feet and lifted up out of her head. She was inside her body and far beyond it at the same time.

  The final run descended and landed, in perfect alignment, both hands announcing the last chord. The vibrations lifted out of the piano thinning to a faint blue glow somewhere in the air above the strings.

  And then it was over.

  She returned back to a stark awareness of the room, once more a piano student surrounded by the landscape paintings on the wall around her, the promise of the spring morning outside sketching hope. She looked over at Signora Elias. Her eyes appeared wet, or perhaps it was the morning light, which caught a spiral dance of dust motes in the space between them.

  “You and I both know our lessons will reach their end after the summer. Your f
ather has made it quite clear that you will be working at the officina. That will leave little or no time for you to be coming here.”

  Alba nodded. The thought of the minutes ticking away toward a time when the piano wouldn’t be part of her daily life made Alba feel like she was suffocating.

  “It’s time at this crucial point in your training that you are allowed to perform. At the very least once. Every performance I gave taught me something I needed to learn, and stayed with me forever. I want to give you that.”

  Alba felt her chest crease into a tight knot.

  “Don’t look so terrified, Alba. Perhaps in preparation you might play for my friend first? She is staying with me at the moment and her favorite thing is to listen to piano music. Would that be alright? After next lesson would be the perfect time.”

  Alba nodded, though the idea sent a sliver of terror scorching through her.

  Signora Elias looked into her. “When you practice in the way you have today Alba, anything is truly possible. When you can acknowledge that fire and channel it with humility and passion, this instrument, and you, will sing.”

  * * *

  The next morning Signora Elias instructed Alba to use their lesson time to warm up and run through her repertoire. “Take all the time this morning to repeat whatever you need. What have I told you?”

  “A piece soars only when it’s shared.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s then that we find out what we really feel about it, how much careful time we’ve given it. Whether our practice has been well directed.”

  “Which, of course, it has. You have the most wonderful teacher, I hear.”

  They laughed at that.

  “We’ll be down in a little while so you aren’t observed during practice. I have a gentleman coming to work on my car shortly, but he shouldn’t make too much noise, I’ll look out for him so her doesn’t ring the bell.”

  “Grazie, Signora Maestra.”

  Signora Elias closed the door behind her as she left. The doorbell clanged soon after. “I spoke too soon! I’ll see to it, you carry on.”

  She thought about the anticipation brewing in her house for Marcellino’s upcoming wedding. The way her mother insisted they practice her makeup. The way every breath of life seemed to be directed toward their firstborn, the boy who could do no wrong, now set to marry the most beautiful young woman in town. The town was electric with the imminent nuptials. Alba was tired of the incessant talk of it after the first day back in the freezing fog of January, when all of a sudden, both families had agreed the marriage should go ahead sooner rather than later. Her mother clawed at her attention now, the picture of her demanding she return at a good hour today to help set up the luncheon with the closer family members as they sampled all the food the caterer was planning on providing. Giovanna, Grazietta, and several other women would already be at their vigna now, setting up a long table in the one-room cottage, the wood heaving.

  With a breath, Alba wiped her thoughts clear. In her mind’s eye, she pictured the surrounding vines, the gnarled rows that grew to eclipse the terror of what first happened there. The grapes had exorcised those memories and now the vigna would be the center of more celebration for the boy who was kidnapped in place of his sister. She pictured the cottage behind her as she walked through the vines, down the hills toward the plains, across them, past the Nuragic towers, onto Lake Coghinas, its glassy surface urging her to step in. She imagined turning around in the water with the jagged mountains surrounding her, breathing in the juniper and toasted thyme air.

  Her breath fell deep, down into the watery bed of her thoughts. Her hands lifted. Her fingers stretched along the piano keys. Her left hand began a wave rolling deep currents of passion and longing whilst her right soared above. She was a bird swooping toward the lake from above, ripples shooting out from the flick of her tail upon the crystal liquid. The music tugged her deeper into thoughtlessness. She was diving into her sea, unfathomable, powerful, free. Her skin flushed, her arms hot and fast as they stretched up and down the keys. Now she was the lover yearning to be understood, to be forgiven, to be heard, to be loved with every fiber, to be touched, tasted, savored, honored.

  The door creaked. Her fingers lifted.

  A shattering silence: Mario’s face was in the slit of the opening.

  Splintering currents of electricity fractured the space between them. She felt naked. Stinging vulnerability crawled up her calves. He didn’t blink. Neither breathed.

  He was the last person in town she would have liked to be spied on by. Now he had the ultimate arsenal for his incessant attacks. Alba snapped into panic. The person she trusted least was privy to the biggest betrayal of her parents. She sat, motionless in cloying dizziness, as if her feet were sticky in almond brittle before the tacky molten sugar sets.

  Signora Elias and her friend swept in, and she watched Mario tumble a clumsy apology for being inside the house rather than outside with his father. The women closed the door behind them. Mario’s face disappeared.

  Signora Elias’s friend was a reed. Long, thin, with an elegant bearing about her. A woman Alba desired not to cross. Yet as she spoke, her voice wove out like a clarinet, woody and warm. Her face lit up listening to Signora Elias, crinkling the wrinkles on her thin white skin deeper still. The many colors of her dress undercut her poise. Here were washes of blues and reds, a scarf swooped across her with a tropical print. Geometric earrings clasped her earlobes in colorful anarchy. She reached a hand out for Alba’s. The nails were painted fuchsia. Her hand was firm, unapologetic.

  “I’m Celeste. So very lovely to meet you, tesoro. Elena has told me so very much about you. I’m terribly excited to hear you play.”

  Alba flushed, embarrassed by her embarrassment. She was about to play for a lady who appeared to value confidence and Alba wished she could find some. It was impossible, having just heard that Signora Elias had already spoken about her to a distinguished friend. It made their lessons at once less private. A secret had been divulged elsewhere too.

  “I would absolutely adore it if you would play?” Celeste asked. Signora Elias turned toward her too. There was a different buoyancy to her this morning. Perhaps she was lonelier than Alba had thought?

  “Si,” Alba replied, “do you have a preference on which one I play first?”

  “Not at all,” replied Signora Elias. “You must play what you feel is right for you this morning.”

  Alba nodded. She scooted the stool a little way from the keys and rolled the knobs at the side up to where was comfortable. She’d never played for anyone else. Signora Elias was right. Doing so was the hardest thing. At once she was exposed, filled with doubt without knowing why. She turned back to Signora Elias, annoyed for seeking reassurance. Signora Elias responded with the calm and clarity Alba needed; an effortless smile, as if Alba playing for a stranger was the most natural thing to do this morning.

  Alba took a breath. Mario’s face crisped into focus. She blew away the picture, though it remained at the fringes, like a spider’s sticky silk. “Clair de Lune” was one of her favorite pieces. She allowed mind to be soothed by the fact. She began, fingers light, silver tones sparkling in a starry Sardinian night, silent, fragrant with sun-cooked rosemary and myrtle. She wove toward the midsection letting her body move into the melody supporting her fingers. Mauves and violets replaced the metallic shimmer from the opening and then returned home, like waking from a dream. Alba lifted her fingers off, unhurried.

  She turned toward the women.

  Celeste was nodding her head. Signora Elias was a sunbeam.

  “My second piece is a Chopin.”

  “I should hope so too,” replied Celeste with a twinkle.

  The further two pieces wound out of Alba’s body like a story she’d lived and retold a thousand times. Then the final staccato of her last Bartok piece leaped off the soundboard with the perk of a vibrant orange. The energy of the frenetic rhythms hung in the air when she turned back to t
he women.

  “That’s all I have ready to share just now,” said Alba, thrumming with a mixture of elation and relief.

  “No ‘just’ about it, Signorina,” Celeste replied with a grin that stretched her thin crimson-painted lips. She stood up, wafting her silk caftan behind her as she did so and planted two kisses on Alba’s cheeks.

  “And what, may I ask, do you intend to do with this talent? And the years of service my wonderful friend has invested in you?”

  The question was so absurd Alba almost chuckled. Off the woman’s serious expression she stopped herself.

  “I don’t really know. I’m not sure how I could ever repay my debt.”

  “No debt to me, Alba,” Signora Elias said. “Celeste is asking you whether you think you would pursue a life in music. Should you have the chance.”

  Alba’s mouth opened then shut again.

  “You have undeniable talent, Alba,” Celeste began. “You have a light inside you and it streams out when you play. It is unfettered. Unaffected. I listen to a great deal of young people play and very few have this, an affinity with the instrument. A respect. A lack of desire to be watched, but rather an ability to communicate with brutal honesty. Believe me when I tell you how rare that is.”

  Alba longed for words, expression, something other than the numbing silence fogging her body.

  “When Signora Elias and I met at the Accademia of Santa Cecilia in Rome we were told the same thing.”

  Signora Elias chuckled now.

  “It is a great responsibility—talent,” Celeste said. “You were born with something to honor, nurture, share. And this fabulous woman Elias saw it right away. I can see that. She’s not as much of a fool as she looks, no?”

  The women laughed in unison now. Celeste’s laughter tumbling out like a scale, Signora Elias’s voice warm, like papassini fresh from the oven.

  “It is so wonderful to meet you, Alba dear.” Celeste stretched out her hands and held Alba’s. “Tell me one thing. How do you feel when you play?”