A Roman Rhapsody

by Sara Alexander

  Alba smiled, feeling the heat of the fire on her cheeks.

  “Time and place for superstition, don’t you think, Alba?”

  Vittorio’s voice was a warm murmur behind her. She inclined her head back toward him.

  “This light on your face,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  He shrugged. She turned back away from him.

  “It makes me ache to kiss it.” His whisper wove through her, down to her feet.

  She stiffened into their stilted silence.

  “You know the only reason I’ve left my family in Florence for the Epiphany is so I can be near you.”

  Her heart thudded into a hidden gallop; the thrill and dread of the chase. She couldn’t decide which sensation was the dominant, like the fifth note of a scale, the most important anchor of a piece, the one harmonic that leads the ear to the resolution. All of classical music theory rested on this dominant. Now her flailing to pinpoint her own made her feel like an unfinished piece, a composition scribbled in haste without grounding knowledge, without ease. She was an amateur in this game. That was the feeling after all, a stab of pride; the assumption that his desire was by necessity an eagerness to consume her, to make her appear brighter than before and disappear at the same time. He whispered the promise of her being desired. He would rob her of something more. He’d already taken more than she’d wanted, under the guise of giving her something. He’d peeled back her mask. The very shield Goldstein was at a constant bark at her to dispel.

  She turned back. He’d moved away.

  After a while, the Cicchettis and their guests wove a relaxed stroll back through the night. The feast was as delicious as it promised to be. After they couldn’t eat any more Violetta summoned everyone into the living room, threw a few more logs onto the fire, and brought her cello down from upstairs. Giacomo sang a folk song, but his voice left no doubt he was classically trained. Violetta accompanied him and Natalia harmonized. It was a luscious lullaby, the words of which Alba couldn’t fully understand because of the northern dialect, but Giacomo explained before starting that it was about a lost love, a mountain herdsman who left for the hills promising to return and wed his sweetheart.

  Next, Violetta insisted Vittorio play. He made a peacock show of modesty, which Leonardo mocked him for, and then they tuned up together. Violetta invited them to improvise a little something and called Leonardo and Anna to join. They knew better than to refuse. Violetta signaled for Alba to take her seat.

  “If the others are in you hardly have the right to refuse now,” Francesca teased from her prone position on the sofa, twisting into the best position for a clear view of Anna.

  Alba sat and let her fingers ease into the simple chord changes, following Leonardo’s lead as he twirled through a phrase harmonizing with Natalia. Alba looked up from the keys. Vittorio gazed straight at her. His face was warm, golden in the light from the fire. He pressed the hairs of the bow evenly onto the strings of Violetta’s cello. It was a different tone than his own instrument, but the same elegance rang out, a melancholic call from somewhere deep inside the wood, inside the player. His touch seduced the instrument until it vibrated with a yearning, which drew the family into a tight quiet.

  Giacomo, Violetta, Francesca, and her brother looked on, drawn deep into the sound. It was all so easy for this family, to sink into this simple pleasure, to allow themselves to feel. It made Alba fill with the sensation both of being very much at home and grieve for what she may never have.

  Vittorio’s expression softened. Their eyes met again. A challenge? An invitation? Both perhaps?

  The applause was genuine and unhurried.

  “You always get your way, Mamma!” Natalia cooed. The family jeered and cheered. More brandy was sipped until Violetta and Giacomo left for bed. Alba stayed up with the others for a while, around the warmth of the fire, bottomless glasses of brandy in hand, doing everything in her power to pretend she couldn’t sense Vittorio noticing her every move, a penetrating heat. An oscillating desire to fight or flee bubbled inside her.

  “I think I’ll head up,” she said, rising from the soft squash of the red velvet sofa.

  “You’re not going to practice tomorrow too, are you?” Francesca asked.

  “Of course she is,” Anna interrupted, wrapping Francesca’s arm around her stomach as she stretched out across the other sofa beside Alba’s. “That’s why she sounds so bloody amazing.”

  “You sound amazing to me,” Francesca whispered.

  “I’ll head up too,” Silvio said, “before I throw up.”

  Francesca threw a cushion at his face. Alba stepped outside and wove up to her room.

  * * *

  Sleep taunted Alba, dancing evasive tarantellas around her bed. She looked at her clock. The second hand ticked toward everywhere and nowhere. The little hand cut to three.

  There was a soft rap at the door.

  Alba froze. A second rap. She considered ignoring it. She knew who she wanted it to be and wished she didn’t. A third rap. She flung the eiderdown away from her and stepped her bare feet onto the floorboards. One of them creaked as she reached the door. She opened it. Vittorio stood in the dark.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” she replied.

  Neither moved.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to wake anyone.”

  Alba stepped back. He stepped in. His hand pushed the door closed.

  They stood in the blackness save for the square of silvery light from the window stretching across the bed.

  “Alba, I need to talk to you.”

  “So talk.”

  “May I light the fire?” he asked in a whisper.

  “You planning on staying that long?”

  “Give me a break—I’m standing here freezing.”

  Alba bent down and placed a squat log into the stove, then lit a twist of kindling. The flames lifted. They watched the light flicker across the low uneven white ceiling.

  “Why are you acting like I’m about to pounce?” he asked.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  Alba looked into him, willing her expression to belie the nerves rattling around her ribs.

  “You’ve been dodging me since that night.”

  Alba turned her face toward the flames.

  Vittorio knelt down by the fire. Alba didn’t move.

  “It’s really hard to put all this into words,” he said. “Impossible perhaps.”

  “Try.”

  He looked up at her.

  “Are you going to tower over me while I struggle down here? At least let’s start on a level playing field, no?”

  She crouched down and sat opposite him, hugging her knees into her chest.

  Vittorio took a breath. “That night was exquisite. I think I terrified you. Or embarrassed you. Or made you feel uncomfortable for whatever reason and I feel horrible. And I ache to feel you again. And I think you hate me. Which makes me hate myself.”

  The flames licked a little higher.

  “This is where you get to say what you’re thinking, Alba. Or just leave me floundering.”

  Alba looked at his dark eyes. There was no malice there. She knew she should feel safe. “I sacrificed everything to come to Rome,” she said, stiff.

  He nodded, opening up the space for her to talk.

  “I’m not going to have anyone rob me of that.”

  “Me neither,” he replied. “Music is my life.”

  The conversation hit another patch of silence. They turned toward the light in the stove.

  “That’s why we get each other,” he began, unhurried. “You think I can’t sense you intuit my thoughts? You want to kid yourself I don’t do the same for you?” A sardonic laugh sighed out. “I thought I’d met people I’d been connected to on a profound level, but now I think they were boyish impersonations of love.”

  The word punctured the thick air between them.
/>   He watched her for a moment.

  “I was seventeen,” he began, his voice dipped in bronze tones, warm, burnished, “she was in her thirties. I didn’t know it. She lied. Told me she was twenty-three. I tumbled into her. Soul suicide. It was delicious. And fake. And beautiful. And carnal. And all the things it had to be. When we broke up it took me a year to even notice another woman. And when I did, aged nineteen, I tried to have sex with anything that moved. I stalked my prey. And it felt good, for a time. And then I got into the school I’d been dreaming about since my aunt first took me there to listen to a concert when I was ten. And I meet you.”

  He stopped, looking at her as if he was breathing her in. “Your music flew out of that piano on that first day. You were inside me before I could stop it.”

  He fell silent.

  Alba felt her heart speed up, an urgent scherzo between her ribs.

  “And now I’m making you uncomfortable again.”

  Alba watched him, admiring the way he’d found the courage to say these things.

  “One of us has to say things as they are, no?” he asked, his voice lighter now.

  “Usually the man?” she answered.

  He turned toward the fire. He didn’t rush a reply. The idea of his vulnerability being closed away again made fear strike through her with brutal force.

  “I don’t want you to make me disappear,” she whispered.

  “I don’t want that either.”

  “I don’t know why you did what you did. I was confused. Am confused.”

  “You’re allowed to feel how you feel.”

  “You don’t have to tell me what I can and can’t feel.”

  “I did it because I want to know you. Deeper than I know myself.”

  “My music comes first. Before anything. Anyone. I’m not your prize.”

  Alba watched him pull in a deep breath. His shoulders grew wider, his spine lengthened. There was the natural élan, which had caught her attention from the first time she’d seen him. It was softer now, braver, more open. He was more beautiful for it.

  “Do I want you to let me in? Of course I do,” he murmured. “That night was like a dream. You left and I couldn’t decide if it had happened or not.”

  “I’d never felt those things. Not like that.”

  “And that makes you feel like I’m setting out to destroy you? What did I do to make you sense I was entering into battle? That it was a trap?”

  She felt her chest tighten. “I’m terrified by the feeling that I wanted it again and again. I wanted you never to stop. That’s dependency. That’s the same as disappearing.”

  His eyes glistened. “That sounds like good practice. It sounds like how we feel about our instruments, an obsessive return to them, which are by their nature like an extension of ourselves, a way for us to see ourselves, no?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Practice makes perfect. Or as near as any human can get.”

  She watched the flames twist shadows around the small room. His expression melted away the aching fear she’d felt moments before. Her doubts were rooted someplace else, the silencing of her childhood, the clouding numbness since the kidnapping. She had disappeared already. The intense pleasure Vittorio helped her reach spun a light around the quiet shadows of suffocated invisibility. That was what had terrified her. If she let him in again what was she inviting? A world of uncertains, a distraction that might lead her away from the one thing she lived for, had left everything for: her music.

  They looked at each other. He eased forward.

  His face inched closer to hers. One breath between them now. Neither moved, but hovered, on the precipice of the other. He eased closer still, till his mouth was soft on hers, reassuring, tuning into her shift toward him; a peaceful, playful, present kiss. Then he pulled away. “I’m as scared as you. And as ambitious. Meet me halfway?”

  Alba felt a droplet blot her collar. He wiped her eyes, her cheeks, then cradled them in his hands. His gaze took on the patient watchfulness as when he tuned his strings, everything was blotted out now, but her.

  “Let me in a little?” he asked, his voice a murmur, a forgotten pianissimo note at the far end of the keyboard sustained into a fading ring with a press of the pedal. “We can be tourists around each other together?”

  She laughed then, at the thought of them bumbling around each other, cameras strapped to their necks like the hordes she’d crush through near the Pantheon or huddled around the Trevi fountain throwing coins after harried wishes.

  He leaned forward and kissed her again. This time her mouth opened. His arms reached around her and pressed deep into the muscles of her back. She felt herself arch. His touch spun in like a thread of gold. Alba felt her body rise up to the surface of itself. Her hand reached for his trousers. He stopped her.

  “I don’t want to rush,” he said, easing her off him.

  He stood up and led her to the bed.

  She watched him take his shirt off, then his cotton pajama trousers. He slipped out of his socks. His movements were assured, relaxed. He bent down and fished a small foil package out of one of the pockets.

  Alba looked at him.

  “I don’t think either of us want an immaculate conception, do we?”

  He walked over to the side of the bed and reached down for her face with his hands. “I’ve dreamed of this. With you. The person I hear when you play. The person you keep hidden away at all other times. But I heard her. And it’s impossible to get her out of my head.”

  She felt her hips tighten, then ease.

  She watched him cover his penis with the contraceptive. He cradled her in his arms. Alba reached for his lips. Their tongues flickered around each other.

  Their bodies shifted into a new and familiar dance. Not musicians, but instruments, played by a power far beyond their control; frightening in its complicit intimacy, sending shards of light through from the tips of their feet to the top of their skulls, sparks of harmonics, notes beyond aural comprehension, vibrating at a faster frequency than could be contained by their bodies alone.

  The sun rose.

  They turned toward the light, Vittorio’s chest pressed against Alba’s back, hearts thudding a gentle tempo into the dawn.

  “My grandfather used to bring us to a place like this,” he began.

  “A musician too?”

  “A frustrated one. His father didn’t let him study, so he went into law instead. Built a house on a lake to keep his hands and mind busy. Loved wood, making things. Mamma says he was quite the violinist. Beautiful voice too they say. But I remember his smell clearer than anything else. Always a hint of tobacco. He taught me to whittle when we’d stay with him by the water. I loved the feeling of that sharp blade in my hand, forming a piece of tree into something else. Like our instruments, finely honed pieces of nature. We rip the raw materials from the sublime, our trees, and return there. Transcending the place it came from only to return. We arrive armed with code—black dots on a page. All so we can feel that original wisdom fly through us. Interpret something unspeakable. Alchemical mechanics.”

  He stopped short.

  “Please, don’t let me stop you. Clumsy poetics suit you so very well,” Alba said, a smile in her voice. “Did they catch you off guard too?”

  He kissed her ear. “You make me want to talk like that.”

  She swallowed.

  “And you’re self-conscious right now because I just said that. You may want to attend to that bad habit.”

  They surrendered to sleep. His arms wound around her, sheets twisted with pleasure and the delectable discovery of an unsung melody. Alba couldn’t shift the sense that like any piece, however powerful, however stirring, it was bound to end. She pushed the thought away but it returned, like the persistent resonance of a final chord as the pianist keeps steady pressure upon the pedal, so that without any fingers dancing the keyboard, the piece sings on.

  1978

  17

  Crescendo


  a directive to a performer to smoothly increase the volume of a particular phrase or passage

  For the three years that followed a world opened up at Alba’s feet. Her repertoire grew beyond her expectations and her relationship with Vittorio fueled both musicians’ ambitions. Their love didn’t sap their focus, but rather pushed each toward greatness that they had only dared dream of. Their conversations were lively, stretching her mind and soul in ways she never thought possible. Natalia teased them for being the king and queen of their year where she and Leonardo mumbled behind like the pauper versions. Alba didn’t notice the way others looked at her beside her lover, she was oblivious to their glances of admiration and barbed jealousy. Her and Vittorio’s bubble was impenetrable, the cocoon they carved out in the middle of Trastevere, in the sheltered musical warmth of his studio where she spent a great deal of her time was her world now. She’d rebuilt her universe, one that replaced the haunting resonance of her estranged family and the Alba she’d relinquished long ago. She spread into her new identity.

  Now, in the early summer of 1978, her graduation grew imminent. Three years of dedication, unswerving focus, edged toward its apex. Soon the real world would beckon. Alba postponed thinking about the woman she might become beyond the safety of the accademia. The uncertainty was too daunting. Perhaps it might not be so easy to keep on pause the return to memories of leaving home? Three years of not having anyone come to hear her play. Three years of pretending with a fiery determination that it wasn’t agony to see spare seats in the auditorium for invited family.

  Celeste scheduled a final one-to-one ahead of her students’ graduating performances, which had thrown the entire year’s intake into a state of deep electric focus seeing a steep drop in social engagements and a reclusive desire for personal perfection. “So, Signorina Alba Fresu,” Celeste began, “I am three years older and you are three years wiser, no?”

  Celeste’s expression crinkled into her mischievous twinkle, the sparkle in her little green eyes lighting up the fine wrinkles that framed them. She eased back deeper into the leather armchair of her office.