A Roman Rhapsody

by Sara Alexander

  “Of course!” he yelled back, charmed by this young conductor’s attention to timing.

  Vittorio came over to the piano and leaned his elbow on the side.

  “What are you playing at, Alba?” he asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “You’re holding back, trying to slow me down. We’ve talked about this. And still it’s like mud. I can’t keep us from the Russian saccharin of this piece if we do it this way. You want to have your freedom in the midsection? You need to earn it here at the beginning. Why are you resisting?”

  “I won’t resist if you talk to me like this. Don’t give me notes in front of everyone, yes?”

  “Keep your voice down, they’ll think we’re not grown up enough to do this in the first place.”

  Alba felt her lips tighten.

  His voice dipped into a conspiratorial whisper. “Plus, I’ve just found a delicious spot beneath the stage where I’d like to make love to you.”

  Alba didn’t let his gaze penetrate her. His finger traced hers.

  “Stop it,” she whispered, urgent, rising from her stool. “I’m going for a little air.”

  He caught up to her.

  “Alba, tesoro, forgive me—I’m so giddy to be here. I’m like a boy at Christmas. More, even!”

  He stepped in front of her. “I want you to shine. Don’t misunderstand me out there. It’s all about the piece.”

  “I hope so,” Alba said, easing away from her impatience. He slipped his hand into hers and led her toward an unknown door in the corridor that ran the length of the back of the stage, glancing behind to make sure no one was following. The darkness beneath the stage wrapped them in a conspiratorial quiet.

  “What are you doing?” Alba said, pulling back against his hand.

  “It’s fine, no one’s here.”

  “This is totally unprofessional, Vittorio.”

  He stopped and faced her, cupping his hands around her face with unexpected tenderness. “I just wanted you to see this. Before it gets crazy up there. Before we don’t have a second to even talk to each other. I wanted to feel you here.”

  He eased her skirt up over her thighs, she pushed his hand down. “I’m working, Vittorio, not thinking about this.”

  “When I hear you play, I can’t think of anything but this,” he replied, easing her against the brick wall beneath the stage, slanting strips of light fighting in from above.

  “Vittorio, stop!”

  He did.

  “Sorry, Alba. I thought you’d find making love under the stage delicious.”

  “It would be. But we’re guests here. Someone walks in? Then what?”

  He planted a soft kiss on her cheek. His tongue slid down her neck a little. “I want to share what we have, out there,” he whispered.

  She kissed his neck. “That’s cheesiest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  He pulled away and looked into her. “I would make love to you all day. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  He kissed her, his lips pressing hard on hers, fleshy and ardent. She didn’t need him to tell her in words, the feel of his mouth expressed everything she wanted to know.

  “Twenty minutes is almost up,” she murmured with a smile.

  “You’ve always kept perfect time.”

  Raffaele Sanna

  Via Ambrogio Spinola, 27

  87349 Milano

  September 3, 1978

  A good luck note for your Parisian adventure! I’m so jealous it’s untrue. Most especially because I’ve just fallen in and out of love with a French guy and I can’t get the idea of swanning around that beautiful place out of my mind. Send me a letter with all the gory details. You and Tchaikovsky were born for each other. Hope lover boy does you both proud. Lap up every moment, my beautiful friend!

  Miss you!

  Ra

  xxx

  The performance was electricity. Vittorio’s body swung with the music, the rhythm effortless through his bones, and she let herself be led this time, not fearing his lead, not fearing the orchestra but melding as one big breath of music. They eased into the mellow center of the piece, Vittorio affording Alba extra freedom of tempo, his body angled always toward her seated at the grand piano in the central front of the stage. The end of the piece approached, Vittorio silenced the orchestra, Alba raced her hands high up the keyboard stretching her palms to reach the challenging octaves, zigzagging up and down the white and black, streams of crisscrossing currents of arpeggios, a plethora of waterfalling notes cascading down toward the final refrain which Vittorio eased the orchestra back in with seamless effort alongside Alba. The final measures were bold, beautiful, startling the audience into an impromptu standing ovation at the end.

  Vittorio walked over to Alba and kissed her hand, then looked up at her. “I love you, Fresu.”

  The deafening applause would have drowned any reply. He turned away and led them to the front of the stage, where a young girl rushed on from the wings with a huge bouquet of red roses for Alba. She bowed to thundering applause. Vittorio squeezed her hand a little tighter. Alba scanned the smiling audience. As her eyes flitted to the wings she saw Dante nodding with pride.

  A few weeks later Vittorio convinced Alba to move out of her room at Signora Anna’s and into his studio so that they could form a bona fide Love Nest, as he called it, or Hive, depending on her mood. Alba felt like they were beginning the story of their lives together in earnest at last. Perhaps there was room for both them and their music to harmonize together after all.

  * * *

  New York deafened her with an assault on her senses so violent Dante had to insist she explore only a few hours a day. Between the oppressive humidity and the dubious smells emanating from the trash cans lining the streets Alba didn’t know whether she’d just stepped onto the set of a movie or a warped dream. Dante spoke of jet lag, but Alba knew that with more distance from Europe her grief had time to permeate her with brutal determination. The discombobulation of being so far away from anything familiar made her feel lost, unanchored. Dante ensured there was a piano in her suite, air-conditioning, and a steady supply of fresh fruit and chilled drinks. Whilst she practiced her thoughts were silenced into oblivion, but as her fingers lifted off from her regimen the waves of nauseous memories filled her. The adrenaline soaring through her after the performance at Carnegie Hall so soon after the euphoria of the concerto with Vittorio merged into the delirium of travel so much so that Alba couldn’t shake the sensation of being several steps behind her body.

  “My fingers are slow,” she told Dante.

  “It’s normal to feel this way, Alba,” he’d reply, without concern, defusing her anxiety with a smooth wave of his manicured hands. “Don’t practice for the next hour and return to the instrument after that.”

  She heeded his advice to the letter, watching him harden when she spoke of Vittorio.

  “You don’t like him, do you, Dante?” she asked one afternoon, biting into a piece of fresh melon so cold it made her teeth hurt. The honks from impatience along the streets of New York below reverberated up the walls to the fifteenth floor.

  “He is a talented young man.”

  “But you don’t like him.”

  “That’s not for me to say, Alba. As long as he doesn’t affect your professional life, he can be as lovely or as nasty as he wishes.”

  She took a sip of coffee, missing the tar espresso of home. “They have offered him a placement in Paris. For the next year.”

  “I hope he thanked you.”

  Alba laughed. She had grown to love Dante’s spice, the way he could dissect anyone in a quip or two.

  That evening when she and Vittorio spoke, he sounded distracted as usual, funneling his attention deep into the piece he was working on, monosyllabic about the composition they had commissioned him to create.

  “You sound far away, my love,” Alba said, her voice sleepy, trying to quash the feeling that she wis
hed him to congratulate her for playing one of the most important stages in the world. Somehow the conversation had steered back around to him.

  “I’m several thousand miles away. And there’s an ocean.”

  “You want to hear how it went?”

  “I know how it went. You’re a star. They loved you. Never heard the Romantics played with such honesty. You’re a breath of fresh air.”

  “You’re a snarky twit.”

  “I know what’s good for you.”

  “Do you miss me?”

  “No.”

  Alba listened to him chuckle. “You really are a fool.”

  “Yes. It’s my saving grace.”

  “Good night, lover.”

  “Good night, starlet. I’d love to kiss you now.”

  “Good,” Alba murmured, then placed the handset back before she said anything more.

  * * *

  Dante tried to suggest she needn’t surprise Vittorio in Paris the following day. He gave a list of reasons, money and sense being top of the list, but Alba knew she’d earned a few days’ rest and she wished to spend it beside Vittorio, underneath his covers, hidden from the world, which was becoming an increasing loud and blurry place.

  The plane touched down in the early morning, just in time for her to swing by his local bakery and pick up some fresh pastries. She spent the last hour of her flight choosing what she would wear to greet him, a new folly that seemed to have crept up on her with the aid of Dante, who had some strong opinions about how she would best describe her form to her ever-growing public. He respected her lack of desire for revealing outfits and supported her taste for classic lines, sharp blacks, demure purples, anything that left her body free to express how it needed to when she performed. As they traveled, fashion houses approached Dante, wishing Alba to wear their garments. Now she rifled in her hand luggage for a shirt that didn’t reek of travel and tiredness. She went to the bathroom and applied a little eye makeup, buoyed by the anticipation of feeling Vittorio against her, of retreating from the merry-go-round of schedules and performances to the quiet of their hidden world.

  Pastries and luggage in hand Alba swung down the Parisian avenues to his apartment on the third floor of a beautiful block not far from the opera house. She rang his bell twice. No reply. It was early after all. She found jet-lagged patience for a moment or two, then rang again. The door swung open and a neighbor ushered herself out, hair blow-dried in impeccable waves, her makeup applied with an artist’s hand, her shoes the exact same maroon shade as her leather handbag. They exchanged nods. Alba held the door open and stepped inside. She tapped up the wide marble steps to the fourth floor and stood before his door. She rapped at the door. After the third attempt, she heard the click shift and the door opened. Vittorio looked more beautiful than she remembered. His black curls zigzagged with sleep, his light skin smooth alabaster.

  His eyes squinted into focus. His expression fell.

  “This is me being a romantic, Vittorio!” She laughed at herself, giddy with the travel and the plan well executed.

  A figure stepped in behind Vittorio.

  A sheet wrapped around her naked body, auburn hair crinkled in a messy mass.

  Her smile faded with his.

  “Que se passé t’il, Vittorio?” the woman purred.

  He almost shook his head. Alba felt her bones harden.

  Was it Vittorio’s voice ricocheting down the hallway as he jumped two steps at a time, a towel around his waist? She couldn’t hear the words, the tone, the desperation woven inside. It was a wash of out-of-tune strings, twangs of a clumsy hand. The sun was glorious outside, as her feet percussed the sidewalk, as she stepped inside a taxi, as she boarded the fast train to Rome. The weeks of phone calls, letters, pleading apologies, poems written with a tired sleep-deprived hand, in her honor, in praise of everything he knew her to be were not kept. Alba burned them on his stove. She finished his whiskey. She stopped herself from smashing all his plates and glasses, his beloved remnants of his mother. All the terror she’d felt now came blasting forth, burning black, hot treacle.

  Dante helped her relocate to a quiet suburb of Rome and she ensconced herself in her new hideaway of Prati, in an apartment that looked out onto a lush courtyard beyond her living-room window. When Vittorio fought for attention in her mind, she looked out there and counted the fringes on the palm until she sank into sullen silence convincing herself that he, like everyone she’d loved, was nothing but a murmur of memory.

  III Movimento

  Rome

  1988

  22

  Cadenza

  in a concerto, a brilliant, unaccompanied solo section, once improvised by the player, now more often already composed. It enlarges on the themes set forth in the work and exhibits the player’s technique.

  Vittorio’s betrayal sent Alba flying toward her music with a fervor that reviewers described as one they’d never had the delight to witness before and doubted they would again. Over the decade that followed, Alba brought a flair to the Romantics the public had never heard, an improvisatory quality, playing with a ferocious passion that breathed exciting, fresh energy into the classics. In academies across the classical world, the Fresu Style was talked about, described, assigned as a bar against which brave new students should set themselves up. Professors would lecture that Fresus only happened every decade or so, should the classical world be lucky enough, and that her virtuosity was nothing short of ethereal in quality.

  Dante, on Alba’s request, kept her reviews from her. She didn’t want to start living for the kind words, she didn’t want to live in the shade nor sun of their remarks. It made the act of playing less creative, less personal. She chased a schedule that would leave even the most prodigious player out of breath. The pressure fueled her, thrilled her. The silences of her quiet hotel rooms were deafening, and whilst she abhorred the frothy conversations she had been expected to become good at in the gala nights and suppers hosted in her honor, it was always better than real life. Music was her safe place, the only time she welcomed solitude and connection. It reached people, but at both a safe distance and with a brutal intimacy. It was a heady concoction, one that wove into her like a lover, whose touch she yearned for, always leaving her needing more.

  Goldstein’s favorite trattoria was tucked down a side street close to Rome’s Parliament. He knew Gino, the owner, on a first-name basis, and whenever he’d taken Alba there, he had swayed his arm as if he were swatting flies, which signaled to the waiter that Gino bring him whatever he thought best that day. There was a picture of Goldstein with his arm wrapped around Alba behind the cash till beside the front entrance alongside other stars of the opera and television. This was the almost secret hangout for the most successful music stars in the city. Goldstein chose a table in the far corner. He could spy all clientele entering and leaving from there. Their conversation meandered through Alba’s commitments, she filling Goldstein in on Dante and his impeccable handling of her schedule. They feasted on carpaccio and tortorelle, wide, hollow spaghettilike pasta, creamy with cacio e pepe, the quintessential Roman sauce of oozing pecorino and cracked black pepper, followed by the most tender steak Alba had ever tasted, flanked with charred vegetables and bitter chicory sautéed with caramelized garlic. It wasn’t until they were sharing a tiramisu and coffee that Goldstein brought the conversation around to the real reason he wanted to treat her to dinner.

  “The academy needs a new piano maestro. I’m pretending I’m not too old to do it. I’m pretending I’m grieving for the lack of Fresus in this world. This is the sorry truth. My Greek-Jewish melancholy has broken through the thirty-year dam and I can’t do anything to stop it.”

  He flicked his gold lighter and lit his pungent cigarette. He took a deep drag and breathed it out in a plume of smoke toward the ceiling.

  “I think you’re what the institution needs.”

  Alba heard her cup clink to the saucer.

  “It’s a wonderful post. You will be ab
le to keep up your concert commitments of course and teach a maximum of one hundred and fifty hours a month. It’s been the hardest and best job I’ve ever had.”

  “I’ve never taught. I don’t know if I know how.”

  “You’ve had the best to set an example, no?”

  He smoothed his beard with his unmistakable grin.

  “That’s what worries me,” she replied, mirroring his expression.

  “Don’t answer before you’ve finished your coffee. I’m not dying just yet. I can hold it down another few months. But don’t beat around the bush. You either want to have a go at this or tell me no, but I have a feeling you would make a fine mentor to some unsuspecting rat out there. It may be the tiramisu talking, but teaching you was one of the highlights of my playing career, make no mistake.”

  Alba licked her spoon. It was sweet with a few fading granules of sugar and the bitter cream of the end of her coffee.

  “I think that is flattery.”

  “You know me better than that, Fresu.”

  They stepped out into the mellow warmth of the Roman night. The quiet was an antidote to the cavernous noise of the trattoria, satiated voices ricocheting across the vaulted mural-adorned ceiling.

  “You’ll let me know next week, yes?” Goldstein asked, lighting up another.

  “I thought you said I could take my time.”

  “Time is something concert pianists gamble away, no? I know Dante’s in favor of you doing this.”

  The idea of Dante being so in charge of her schedule made a crackle of claustrophobia bristle up her spine. Between the recording contracts and performances it felt like time was an illusion gifted her once. Goldstein was offering a respite, a chance to further her development. Perhaps this was the perfect moment to add another dimension to her relationship with her instrument. Give something back to the place that made her what she was today?

  “It would be an honor to become a maestro, Maestro,” she said, the decision slipping out before she had a chance to change her mind.