A Roman Rhapsody

by Sara Alexander

  “Go on, Alba!” Giovanna called from the kitchen window that opened out onto the terrace, “go and have fun already! You’ve worked hard enough! This is your day too, you know!”

  The words were ridiculous droplets of forced maternal altruism, an impeccable performance enjoyed by everyone it seemed, apart from the person to whom it was directed. Her mother’s gushing happiness held the same violent edge as the woman’s disappointment. Since her parents put a definitive end to her visits to Signora Elias, the offer of her place at the accademia had not been mentioned again, and Alba couldn’t help feeling that the whole experience was a warped dream, or a memory she had been taught to remember. But her fingers ached. They hadn’t played since the letter was torn up in her kitchen. The deeper she sank into the numbness the more alive her mother became; her own fading life force was feeding her. The music had spun out of Alba and into her mother; she sang of summer and love and weddings and feasts. Her pans and pots and ladles and spoons percussed joy and hope.

  A towel landed on Alba’s face. She looked across at Raffaele, who was grinning, performing on her behalf. A wan smile threatened her lips. Marcellino took the helm in Bruno’s newly acquired British jeep, delivered from England by one of his cousin’s foreign husbands. The teenagers crammed into the back, some on the metal benches that lined the sides, others on the space between them. Mario’s sister sat on his lap, Alba sat cross-legged on the metal floor by Raffaele. Lucia, clutching her protruding belly, yelled at Marcellino as he bombed down the white roads oblivious to the bumps and his wife’s discomfort. After passing the scant smattering of shops edging open for the season, onward through the pineta, they arrived at the beach at last. Tall white dunes rose into view as the party negotiated the steep incline and skidded down toward the coast. As always, the wind whipped, and the fine sand prickled Alba’s calves as it flew across the beach. The other people on the beach had long since given up on their umbrellas and lay them down, closed, beside themselves as they worshipped the glaring sun above. Nothing about this section of the coast was an alluring invite. The others in the group yelled in the water now, dashing toward the edge and diving into the deep. Lucia planted herself onto the sand, propping herself up on her elbows.

  “I’m surprised your mother let you out for once, Alba.”

  She looked down at Lucia beneath her huge sunglasses. Two miniature concave Albas reflected back to her on the glass.

  “Enjoy your freedom while you can, no? Soon you’ll be making babies like me and then all this jumping around will feel like a story your grandma would tell you at bedtime.”

  A blank space formed where the image of a kind grandmother ought to materialize. Alba nodded, to close the start of a conversation she could not relate to, if nothing else. The older women in Alba’s family shared whispered gossip, dabbled in magic and superstition in equal measure. They did not weave soporific fairy tales.

  “For heaven’s sake, Alba, go and have a swim. You stand there like the world’s ending already. I’d do anything to have just graduated from school again!”

  And with that Lucia let out a breathy laugh and eased herself down onto the warm sand beneath her towel.

  Alba peeled off her T-shirt and shorts and let them fall to the ground. She slipped out of her flip-flops and felt the grainy heat under her soles. The white slid away underfoot till she reached the water, waves rushing up to her, white foam curling into clear. She dove in, feeling the cool envelop her, head racing to the bottom desperate to drown the noise around her. Her body rushed to the surface for air and then her arms beat through the surface without pause. Three strokes, one breath, repeat. The turquoise rose into view for a snatched intake of air, then down into the sloshing blue, pounding a beat in her ears. Her arms wouldn’t stop. All these weeks without her music had built up an avalanche of physical frustration, more than she could bear. Her hand cupped like the shape of a pianist’s diving into the water, pulling it away from her. The repetition was the closest way to reach her scales, to sense the symmetry of those exercises in her muscles, to feel the pulse that had greeted her every morning and now lay buried in a not so distant past.

  She may have heard voices, which she chose to ignore; the shouts of her brothers, their cousins, Raffaele, Mario, all unnecessary interruptions. The ache for the solitude and complicit dance of music burned. With each stroke, each tension and relaxation of her muscles, her body fought to drive the feeling out further like a tide. She reached the first curve of rocks and pulled herself up onto them, the sun pounding down, drying her salty skin. Raffaele swam over to join her.

  “Need company?” he said, hauling his dripping body beside her. “Well, you don’t have the choice right now, sorry. I’ve had just about as much as I can take of your cousin’s ball throwing. Mario’s swum out to catch squid so at least I don’t have to listen to him for a bit.”

  Raffaele stopped mid-flow. “Alba?” he murmured, watching her fat tears roll down her face. “Have I bored you to tears already? I’ve got to stop doing that. I think it’s becoming a habit.”

  Alba snorted a laugh.

  “Okay, a glimmer of hope in the dark, no?”

  He reached his arms around her wet shoulders.

  “You can tell me. Right? Of all the people here today, you can talk to me. If I actually shut up, that is.”

  He smiled at her second laugh. Her sobs ebbed.

  “They’re killing me,” she whispered.

  Raffaele held the silence. It caught Alba off guard. She took a deeper breath.

  “Mamma. Papà. This insane wedding talk.”

  Raffaele interlinked his fingers in hers. “Only until we get to do what we want with our lives. We don’t have to stay here, do we? We get to be who we really are if we’re together.”

  He lifted her chin with a gentle finger of his other hand.

  “I love you, Alba. I don’t want you to be that wife in the kitchen. We know that. Our marriage is a refuge. From all the things they’ll force on us if we don’t stick together.”

  “I don’t want to be a wife. I want to be a pianist.”

  Alba withdrew her fingers from inside his hand.

  Her words splat out in starts, competing with tears. “Signora Elias taught me more than I can describe. She passed on magic, in secret. Mamma and Babbo found out after the Accademia di Saint Cecilia’s in Rome offered me a full scholarship. They burned the letter. I’m still not out of their sight for a minute. I’ve started full-time at the officina, but you knew that already. I haven’t played for days.”

  Raffaele held her. Alba caught the slosh of turquoise water rise up toward their feet upon the ochre rock.

  “I feel like I’m disappearing,” she said, shuddering.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “It was my hidden life. I’m dead without it. Can you understand that?”

  His smile was a silver streak of grief.

  “The only person who can help me now is you, Raffaele.”

  “How?”

  “Help me get to Rome.”

  Raffaele’s face was struck with disbelief.

  “I need to buy a ticket for the boat. Once I’m there I’ll be okay.”

  “You want me to help you escape?”

  “This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, Raffaele. We can’t stay here and wither away. Is that what you really want? For yourself? For me? I love you, Raffaele. I don’t want to destroy your life with a fake marriage. I want you to be free. I want us to set me free too.”

  Raffaele dropped his head onto his hands. Alba’s chest creased with spidering panic and the intoxicating liberation of unburdening her secret.

  Mario’s head appeared around the rocks. He pulled his snorkel mask up to the top of his head, his eyes reflecting the glint of the sun-kissed water. He pedaled water and reached his full net of squirming squid overhead.

  “Full catch!” he yelled, triumphant.

  Alba watched him register the tears drying on her face, Raffaele ash
en.

  “Don’t look so sad! They didn’t feel a thing, si?”

  Raffaele offered a half-hearted laugh, to make Mario go away if nothing else.

  “Your ma’s going to be happy, no?” Mario asked, flicking his mask back onto his face and racing back to the shore to show off his hunt.

  Raffaele and Alba waited for him to be out of earshot.

  “Your parents are one of the wealthiest families in Ozieri, Alba. You’ve been working for Signora Elias for years, you can’t find the money?”

  “Mamma took everything. There’s no way she’ll give me a single lira toward this. You’re crazy to even suggest me asking them.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “About two hundred thousand lire. That will be enough for the fare and my first week. Just till I find a job. Signora Elias and her friend told me my accommodation and tuition is all covered by the scholarship. If I don’t go now, I will never play again. I can’t live like that.”

  Alba watched Raffaele’s expression spin through a spectrum of colors; uncertain blues, doubtful grays, flecks of amber hope.

  “You’re my last hope, Ra’. If we love each other, then let’s do the right thing for each other.”

  He held her. She could feel his heart pulsing beneath the thin skin of his chest.

  “So you’re asking me to raise a load of money, in secret, without rousing suspicion, so that you can live your dream and I’ll never see you again?”

  Alba looked at him squarely. “I don’t want to hurt you, Ra’.”

  “You are.”

  * * *

  When the party returned to the beach house, salt crusted, sun toasted, the table was laid with ramekins of gherkins and tiny pickled onions, olives, trays of sausage and cheese, piles of pane carasau, thin crisp bread drizzled with olive oil and a sprinkling of coarse sea salt. Mammas shooed their overgrown offspring toward the outdoor showers, hurrying them up. Fathers put their worlds to rights around the fire, passing around bottomless glasses of wine, clinking toward the embers whilst Bruno eased the flesh off the skewers and onto large trays of cork, with stems of wild myrtle branches upon it, letting the tender meat and its juices soak onto the fragrant platter. Ceramic troughs of culurgiones were paraded toward the hungry guests once everyone sat, at long last. The little pasta parcels, pinched-together dough in the shape of wheat, filled with creamy ricotta and spinach drizzled with fresh tomato sauce, arrived to cheers and clinks and the promise of happiness and wealth and health. The guests congratulated her parents’ generosity, their hospitality, oblivious to the fact that the person they appeared to be celebrating was their mute prisoner. The hypocrisy of this pounding celebration made Alba’s throat scratch. A swell of salty water popped in her ear.

  Dinner was an indeterminate age of gluttony. At last the watermelon arrived and the eaters stabbed the red flesh, poking out the seeds, some cutting perfect staircases of sweet crisp fruit, others vertical splices. Alba ate half of hers before the teenagers and younger adults were urged to leave the elders in peace and make trouble someplace else.

  “Come on, Alba, you’ll come out with us, right?” Raffaele asked. “Please, God, don’t leave me with all these cool lot. It’s like sending me to purgatory. Dear God, don’t do that. They’ll all be eyeing up the girls in the square and jeering me on. I’d rather not commit social suicide without you beside me, si?”

  Raffaele filled her hand with his and led her off the table. They shuffled toward the back of the pack, slow stroll widening the gap between them and the group.

  “Have you thought about what we talked about?” Alba asked.

  “You ask just to make me cry on the street in front of these lot?”

  Raffaele’s voice eased away from his nervous tempo. They walked a few silent steps, the scuff of the dusty white road underfoot, the streets dark save for sporadic streetlamps, surrounding bungalows alive with the clinks of other parties.

  He drew them to a stop in the dark between two streetlights.

  “I love no soul in the world more than you, Alba.”

  Alba swallowed.

  “It terrifies me to help you leave.”

  The cicadas’ warbled beat intensified. Alba smelled juniper and wild myrtle on the whisper of breeze. “It terrifies me to stay.”

  “What will I do?”

  “Follow your own dreams.”

  “Since when do you talk like those stupid movie girls?”

  Alba shrugged.

  “Our marriage plan was our escape. Now you go off to your music and I’m here marooned.”

  An ending and beginning opened up in the breaths filling the space between them. She could hear his muffled tears in the dark. Her arms wound around her best friend.

  “I love you, Ra’.”

  “I want to help you. I’d be a shit if I didn’t. And the thought of you hating me for not doing it is worse than being abandoned by my best friend.”

  Alba held his hand.

  “Who will I talk to about Claudio?” he asked.

  “You’ll write. Long letters. Gory details.”

  Raffaele’s smile was wan; the streetlamp caught its fade.

  “When do you need the money by?”

  “Late August.”

  His looked toward the darkened end of the street where it reached the piazza. “Do I look like a magician?”

  They joined the others in the piazza, eating gelato, watching the visiting clowns warble through a half-rehearsed comedy routine, which delighted the younger children of out-of-towners and left Alba longing for solitude. She slipped away from the crowd. Her body needed to move. She didn’t notice the houses fall away in her periphery, the darkened woods didn’t fill her with fear. The dunes rose before her after a while and at last the moonlit water. She sat down, feeling the sand peel away beneath her, tipping downhill. The waves lapped in rhythm like a sleeper’s breath.

  “You should be careful running about alone like that in a strange place, Alba.”

  Mario’s voice startled her. She twisted round to him. He was seated, far enough away to not have noticed him, cradling his knees, watching the water.

  “You should be careful scaring young women who need to be alone for a change,” she called out.

  “Sarcasm is a killer. Probably the only fact in this world, I’d say,” he replied.

  Alba watched his chin raise into a smug grin. His humor was more disarming than his aggression.

  She sat in defiant silence. So did he.

  “What’s all that stuff about music college they were on about?” he asked after a while.

  Alba shook her head.

  “Alba, we’re alone now, no one has to know that we’re actually able to talk without a fight. You don’t have to let anyone see the fact that you can answer a real question with a real answer.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He retreated into her imposed silence.

  “I never forgot about that time, you know.”

  His tone dipped burned ochre. She turned to face him.

  “When I heard you play at Elias’s.”

  They looked at each other for a breath.

  “You going to pretend to forget?” he prodded.

  She turned to face the water. They watched the curling laps disappear into the dark.

  “Never heard anything like it in my life.”

  He stood up. Alba waited for a further snide gibe to follow his unexpected admission. The water rushed up to the sand fighting the pull, then acquiescing. Her breaths followed their rhythm, an incessant seesaw of advance and retreat. Whose battle was to be won?

  She turned back.

  He’d gone.

  8

  Nocturne

  a composition inspired by, or evocative of, the night, and cultivated in the nineteenth century primarily as a character piece for piano, generally with three sections, often slightly melancholic in mood

  After the party returned to Ozieri from the coastal town of Rena Maj
ore, Alba waited a few days and used her parents’ siesta to run to Signora Elias. She arrived, as planned, thanks to a note Raffaele had passed to her on Alba’s behalf.

  “You look like a ghost, Alba,” Signora Elias cooed as she ushered her inside, closing the heavy door behind her against the heat.

  “I haven’t slept properly in a week.”

  “Understandable,” Signora Elias replied, whilst leading her to the kitchen table where she poured Alba a glass of cold water.

  “They won’t change their mind.”

  “That’s their prerogative. What does your mind say?”

  “I have to go to Rome.”

  Signora Elias took a long sip of her water. “What if I said that’s what you must do then?”

  Alba’s face creased with desperation. “Mamma has all the money you ever gave me. I don’t have a lira.”

  “And what will you do about that?”

  Alba’s eyes lowered. She summoned a breath to say what had been eating at her the entire journey home. “I need help.”

  “I know. Raffaele told me so. Actually, he asked me to.”

  “For help?”

  “For money, yes.”

  Alba shifted in her seat.

  “If you want to make decisions on your own, Alba, and for yourself, you will have to work for them and then, the hardest part, stand by them. I could give you the fare and be done with it, yes. But what kind of betrayal would that be of your parents? We’ve already come this far. They’ve been very clear about how they feel. If you want this, I mean really can’t live without this, you are going to have to put in the work. Choosing this life is a huge commitment. Not just hours of practice, but all the other real responsibilities around it. The work starts now.”