A Roman Rhapsody

by Sara Alexander

  13

  Elégie

  a poem or song composed especially as a lament for a deceased person

  By the last days of November Alba was at last feeling like she remembered where everything lived behind the counter at Bar Calisto. She’d learned to dodge Antonio’s verbal bullets, anticipate when he was about to launch an attack, clear tables before he asked, and polish the glasses till they sparkled. He didn’t go as far as to praise her but the odd extra thousand lire here and there, enough to help her buy a few extra groceries, made her know that he saw she was a good worker and one who could be trusted. It didn’t matter that he called her his Sardinian shepherdess, a term of endearment compared to what he called some of the other staff.

  The patrons of Bar Calisto came for his very peculiar brand of Roman swagger, his ability to say things as they were, and with such blunt passion that it was impossible to argue against it. Add that to the fact that his aperitivo snacks were the best and cheapest on the square, his Negronis mixed to perfection, and he had created a winning formula.

  Alba cleared one of the heaving tables as the group of customers seated around it signaled for her to bring them another round of Camparis and a plate of Antonio’s prosciutto-and-fresh-tomato-topped crostini, sliced toasted day-old rolls scraped with garlic, small cubed tomatoes and parsley tumbled over the top with coarse salt and a drizzle of his own olive oil he crushed at his farm outside the city.

  Dario, the waiter she had first spoken to when she’d arrived a few months ago asking for the job, was behind the counter, pirouetting with various bottles in hand, the lion tamer of Antonio’s espresso machine. “You going to go human pace now, Alba, or stay snail?” he called, lifting the bottle of wine up as he emptied it into a glass, throwing it into the bin behind him without looking.

  “Two more Campari, table four,” she answered, not taking the bait.

  “Take that tray to Antonio,” he called back.

  She lifted the large metal tray that lay upon the counter. There were small bowls of peanuts and olives. A pile of crisps was surrounded by a rainbow of crostini, some topped with black olive tapenade, others with thin slices of boiled egg and a twirl of mayonnaise, a few with crumbled gorgonzola and surrounding them all, folds of thin-sliced salami and twists of deep red prosciutto. Her mouth watered.

  The stairs behind the beaded curtain toward the back of the bar were wide enough for one person and rose crooked with age, steep as a ladder. They creaked as she squeezed up with the heavy tray. At the top of the stairs was Antonio’s office, cigarette smoke filling the air just beyond and seeping out from the uneven gap at the foot of the door. There were voices of several men, their tone urgent, a group of people trying to argue without making noise.

  “Signori, let’s keep to the original plan,” she heard Antonio say. “We go in, we surround, we plant what we need, and then let the chaos do its job.”

  “But Antonio,” another voice interrupted, “you want it to be so obvious? It’s like leading a trail of crumbs right to us.”

  “Isn’t that the point, for Christ’s sake?” another interrupted, more heated than the first. “We don’t stand for hiding in the shadows! We’re not the Mafia. If you can’t get your head around that then you shouldn’t be here in the first place.”

  Alba coughed, for want of a third hand to knock.

  The men’s silence was instant.

  Antonio opened the door. Four faces looked up, their cheeks red with disagreement, an ashtray between them almost overflowing.

  “Get back to the animals,” Antonio said to her, grabbing the tray from her hands. The door eased shut to the sound of the men’s laughter.

  “Why the face?” Dario asked as he pushed the tray of Camparis over to her along the marble. “You didn’t interrupt them up there, did you?”

  Alba shook her head and lifted the drinks.

  “One bit of advice,” Dario began as Alba tried to recall a shift when he hadn’t preached uninvited titbits of sagacity. “You go up when Anotnio’s having one of his meetings? You act like you heard nothing. If people ask you what you know about what goes on up there you pull that Sardinian silence. Shouldn’t be difficult for you. You get me?”

  Alba nodded, but didn’t. Or didn’t want to.

  * * *

  “You going to use this practice with me to perform or do the work?” Goldstein’s question hung unanswered in the suffocating Gitanes air, wafting through the wintry midmorning light shafting in through the windows. He looked over at her from his perch on the stool in front of his grand piano.

  “It’s a question, Alba. I’m wanting you to talk.”

  “I tried to find interesting ways to practice this section, like you said.”

  “Good. I can hear it.”

  Alba sat, expectant.

  “Tell me why I’ve asked you to work on Schumann’s overplayed ‘Traumerei’?” he asked.

  She shrugged. He waited.

  Alba watched him run his square hand down through his thick beard.

  “Be wary of the wrong type of perfection, Alba. Do not be dominated by that. Invulnerability is boring. It’s not exciting. I don’t want to watch a pianist perform their practice. I want to know that they are human. Our job is to allow our audience to feel. What you feel is not necessarily what they will feel.”

  Alba rolled her wrists. They ached a little.

  “You must surprise the audience with the shift in harmonics. Keep us on our toes. Again, from this midsection.”

  Alba began the rolling wave of the left hand. The right hand cut in, high notes floating over the bass.

  “So what is Schumann trying to say here?”

  “Say?”

  “We have studied together for this entire term, for crying out loud. We don’t play black dots. We are pulling apart the composer’s mind. Climbing into their skin. Finding out what they are trying to say, not just what they want us to hear. Christ, what on earth have I been preaching for the past hour?”

  The familiar claustrophobia of his lessons closed in.

  He looked at her, then twisted to his piano. He played the measures. His tone was wistful, ardent, and full of the yearning that ran through all the music of these Romantic pianists. His interpretation of Schumann sang a life of manic genius and periods of utter despair. Alba could hear the man who threw himself into the Rhine. She could feel a private moment of reflection in the deceptive simplicity of the melody, in the absence of an orchestral fanfare, virtuoso runs, and flashy trills. Instead, Schumann’s pared-down contemplation drove the listener deep into a child’s fading dream; innocent, yet fringed with the sadness of the inevitable, and imminent, loss of it.

  He stopped.

  “Schumann is intensity, introspection, lyricism,” he said, his voice caramel.

  Alba felt the weight and warmth of the words land without reply.

  “Qualities you possess in spades if you were courageous enough to know yourself,” he added.

  He snapped his lighter to life. “The Greeks knew that the universe is music,” he began, on a deep inhale, “and here we are, silent Signorina, before machines of vibrating strings. No more than that. Our Signor Pythagoras, from my homeland, developed a musical scale based on universal harmonies. Life is a song, Alba!” He breathed out a cloud of smoke, his wistful meanderings more disarming than his fire. “It is a symphony of major and minor keys, polarities, opposites that weave a harmony that unites us into a whole grand symphony of life.”

  He turned toward her. She took her cue to play.

  He listened without interruption.

  When she finished the first phrase, she lifted her hands. He smiled. She felt her shoulders soften down her back.

  “Tell me you won’t play like that at the master class next week.”

  An unexpected smart. They hurt the most.

  “Vittorio won’t waste the opportunity,” he continued, “he already thinks he is a maestro. But you must match him. And not embarrass me—you unders
tand that much, I hope?”

  “Si, Maestro.”

  He crossed the room. The door snapped shut behind him.

  The two silent pianos taunted her; faint sirens luring her sail toward watery annihilation.

  * * *

  The Piazza del Popolo filled with women as the December sun cut through the frigid air. Alba, Natalia, her sister Francesca, and friends couldn’t feel the cold. There were too many other bodies around them, too much fierce camaraderie to feel anything other than the powerful rush of connectedness. Women with hair hanging at free angles, fists raised in provocation, their banners dancing as the early morning frost melted, breath escaping in steamy defiance. The voices swam together in the air, calls in unison. When the papers and television news reported it later that day, they confirmed numbers had reached upward of ten thousand. Alba didn’t shout out with the others, but the energy around her wove deep inside. The immense vocal power, noise, of sheer space taken up by women made her feel the promise of invincibility, a sense of infinity that she’d only ever felt whilst playing. The idea that there might be an existence beyond her former understanding of life was an icy shower on a scorching day. Her chest felt luminous, light, hot, free. Natalia looked over at her, the chanting percussing the cloudless blue above their heads. “I’ve never been anywhere like this either!” she shouted.

  An unexpected tear ran down Alba’s cheek. The sheer power of the bodies around her, the safety in these great numbers, the sense that nothing was unachievable moved something deep inside her. She too had escaped. She had fled the very culture all these thousands of women were protesting. Without following a manifesto other than that of her music she had become one of them, part of this venerable tribe, trembling with thousands of years of oppression, humans who refused to be held down and now demanded to be heard. She knew firsthand what it was like to feel the smother of a bully, as they attack, fearing their loss of control over a woman. She knew firsthand the violent terror of an oppressor who cannot accept a woman choosing to chase her dream of entering the intangible world of music, its intense power impossible to be strangled, quantified, but able to move, to touch, to appeal to a feeling nature so strangled within themselves. For the first time, pounding the pavements next to these women, unafraid to shout, to use their sound, their hearts, their strength, Alba understood that this daughter was a threat to her father, and one he would always be compelled to obliterate, whatever the cost to either of them.

  But Alba had a voice nonetheless. It was her music. Goldstein’s bearlike coaching growled to mind, amongst the stamping feet, as the voices echoed up the palazzi lining the streets they marched, curious faces peering down from balconies, some waving in solidarity, others looking on, disapproving.

  Alba had been gifted this powerful voice. It streamed out of her when she played. It was time to release the fear of its power. Her piano would set it free.

  * * *

  In the narrow wings that flanked the sides of the auditorium stage, the monitors, other student volunteers, clutched their clipboards. They shifted weight from foot to foot, glaring out toward the stage, their faces blanched in the white sidelights, then shifting back into the shadows where Alba and Vittorio stood.

  “Please show your warm appreciation for Vittorio del Piero and Alba Fresu,” Goldstein announced. A monitor signaled for them to enter. They stepped out into applause. Alba’s noticed how loud her footsteps sounded as she walked across the wooden stage to the piano. Vittorio lifted his cello and took his seat. They tuned up.

  The sporadic coughs and shuffles from the audience softened into silence.

  Goldstein nodded.

  Vittorio straightened. Alba felt her breath deepen. She lifted her wrists and began the opening chime of Fauré’s Elégie, solemn church bell chords tolling a funereal melody, fading over a few measures like a painful memory. Vittorio took a breath and caressed his strings, the melody rising up toward the stone ceiling, a melancholic cry.

  Goldstein clapped his hands. “So let us begin immediately, no?”

  The audience laughed. Alba swallowed the sensation of being an accidental clown orbiting their ringmaster.

  “The beginning, Vittorio—tell me where the emotion lies.”

  Vittorio shifted in his seat a little. Alba was relieved to discover it appeared he was as nervous as her.

  “From the beginning.”

  “No!” Goldstein exclaimed. “It lies in the last six inches of the bow. That is where you will draw out this longing for the deceased. To play this you must know death, Vittorio.”

  Vittorio lifted his bow. Goldstein flicked his wrist for Alba to begin. This time Vittorio’s bow made the string sing with a deeper mahogany sound, the texture of grief without balm.

  “Yes!” Goldstein heaved, stamping over to the other side of the cello now. “And then we move on you see, the next section, tell me about this, Vittorio.”

  “It’s pianissimo.”

  “He reads!” Goldstein declared, twisting to the crowd, lighting up with their laughter. “So we deduce what?”

  Vittorio’s head shook a little, as if he was rattling it for an answer.

  “Vittorio, this is the quiet ebb of a cry, boy,” Goldstein said, his voice dipping into warmth. “It is the out breath when you feel there are simply no more tears to shed. You ask yourself, do you have the courage to tap into those shades of emotions? Or do you choose to stay a young boy who simply wants to pantomime the feeling? We can hear when a musician tunes in or just shows off.”

  He raised his hands. “I want you to reach for a very French vibrato, Vittorio, very close, tight, elegant, this is not minimalist.”

  They began again. This time Goldstein moved them through another few measures, pinging vocal direction as they played, sometimes beside Alba push through here, Alba, sing out now, other times beside Vittorio painting pictures with words, swirling his arms through space, his black eyes glimmering with a passion that both ignited their playing and threatened obliteration.

  “Enough!” he said.

  They stopped.

  Goldstein lifted a hand to a woman seated in the front row. She was wiping her eye.

  “You see, Vittorio?” he said, as the woman laughed at herself, the crowd around her joining in soon after. “Our job as musicians is to allow the people listening to make our music take them to their own grief, their own memories. We don’t want to see your perfection, or musicianship. We don’t care about that. We need you to be a conduit for our own lives. We need you to know that Fauré wrote this for his dead wife. We need you to understand this middle section, which you danced through so elegantly, Alba, is him painting her alive, before we return to his interminable loss.”

  Goldstein lifted Vittorio’s chin. “Look at you!”

  That’s when Alba saw Vittorio’s eyes were wet too.

  “This is the stuff of great artists, Vittorio, yes! If you can allow yourself to tap into the same emotion as the composer and feed it through the instrument, then you can allow their song to weave out—as it should.”

  He tripped them on through the swell of the midsection, a stormy interlacing of the piano and cello, then allowed them to hold a moment of silence before playing the piece once through in its entirety.

  Alba heard those scuffs in the dark, the march through the Sardinian night with the hood over her head, felt Raffaele’s hand by the port, the fading echoes of her father’s tirade as she stepped out of her stone house for the last time. Signora Elias was with her now, urging her on, running a light finger across her tear-stained cheek. A halo of light spread across her back, down her legs, unlocking the knot in her chest like a powerful waterfall. She tumbled in its wake, surrendering to its power without a fight.

  The final note was Fauré’s wounded eternal sigh; a languid caress of the lower string of Vittorio’s cello. Alba spidered her fingers up the keyboard, her piano’s lament one final unhurried minor arpeggio. Vittorio’s bow lifted.

  Their shared grief hung ab
ove them, bleak, powerful, full of truth.

  The audience stood. The auditorium ignited with applause.

  Vittorio laid his cello down on its side and stepped forward. He turned back to Alba and reached out his hand. She slipped hers into his. His fingers wrapped around hers. Alba could feel the tension there, the tendons twitching with relief, with success. Their heads dipped as they bowed. As they rose his hand squeezed hers a little tighter. They turned to each other, a sketch of silence in the dizzying roar, an intense quiet at a storm’s center. His eyes were dancing. The sidelights traced his runaway curls with a metallic outline.

  They turned back to the crowd in unison. It wasn’t the passionate appreciation from the crowd alone that sent refracting light splintering through them.

  14

  Tremolo

  a wavering effect in a musical tone, produced either by rapid reiteration of a note, by rapid repeated slight variation in the pitch of a note, or by sounding two notes of slightly different pitches to produce prominent overtones

  Natalia was waiting for Alba by the main entrance of the auditorium hall where the audience filed out into the night. She felt her friend wrap her arms around her, squealing into her ear.

  “Alba! It was sublime! When my mother hears you, she’s going to adopt you. You have to come and stay with us at Christmas now. No more maybes, and I’ll think about it, yes? Now tell me, you work with Goldstein every week, right?”

  “Got the bruises to prove it,” Alba replied, still riding the giddy crest of the performance wave.

  “Come,” Natalia said, hooking her arm into Alba’s, “Leonardo and I have reserved a big table down by Calisto at Zio Umberto’s. It’s cheap and amazing. A load of us are going.”

  Natalia registered Alba’s expression. “Don’t be doing that I can’t be with loads of people right now thing. You need to adore your public as much as they did you tonight, tesoro. It’s only polite.”