A Roman Rhapsody

by Sara Alexander

  “Remind you of anyone?” Elena asked.

  Alba smiled, feeling it slip away as quickly as it appeared, a surface ripple in water.

  “Mario does a wonderful job with them. I’m not saying he didn’t need some convincing to let them learn with me. I told him it was as much for my benefit as theirs. I miss teaching horribly. I don’t have the energy I used to, but I love watching children develop. Always have. There’s a simplicity and a passion that we learn to tame as we grow. Some of us fight it better than others, of course.”

  She flicked Alba a sideways grin.

  “If you want to talk about the meeting with your father, I’m happy to listen.”

  “I’d like to know where to start. I think grief is a self-fulfilling prophecy and a bottomless pit.”

  Elena nodded without comment. Alba heard the girls call for Mario.

  “I tried to believe him dead for so long,” Alba said at last, “I don’t know what I’m grieving for exactly. It’s like a drone.” She looked at Elena now, her vision blurring with tears. “He masked everything he felt with a rage that lasted till now. How many times do we have to hear the idea that we hurt the ones we love the most? It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t speak for your father,” Elena began, easing toward Alba, “but I do think he ached more than we’ll ever understand. It doesn’t justify the way he expressed it, but we know he never wanted to harm you as much as he couldn’t live with the idea of not being able to protect you, not here, not in Rome, not from your mother’s death.”

  Alba took a deep breath and looked out toward the plains. The girls stepped in from the kitchen before she could carry on. It forced her to swallow her tears. Now she could see their startling resemblance to Mario. They had that same quiet sagacity about them, Chiara perhaps more than her sister, and their physicality was similar too, assured, centered, strong.

  “You look like you need help with that, Signorine,” Alba said, walking across to Donatella before the sospiri met a sticky end upon the floor.

  “Grazie,” Donatella said, relieved to have had the responsibility abolished.

  Out in the garden Mario was putting the final touches on a toolshed beneath the shade of a couple of almond trees.

  “You’ve made that shed into quite the chalet, Mario,” Alba said, feeling the earth crunch beneath her feet.

  “It’s what Elena wanted,” he replied, taking a couple of sospiri and downing the glass of water from Chiara.

  “This lady is famous, Papà,” Chiara said, swinging herself up into a nearby tree and sitting in its crook. Her sister followed, hanging upside down along another branch.

  “Pay attention, Donatella. I’m not rubbing your flat head again today,” Mario said, taking a seat upon one of the two stumps he’d placed on the shed’s porch.

  “Mario, they’re sunbeams. Complimenti.”

  He nodded a silent thanks.

  “And they’re into music, no? Wonder where that comes from?”

  Mario gave a heaven-bound shrug.

  “Don’t give me that Sardinian shoulder, Ma, you forget that I heard you sing your heart out at the Festa di San Giovanni.”

  “What’s that?” Chiara asked, leaning back against the trunk to size Alba up at a new angle.

  “We got to jump over the fire. Your papà had spied me at practice with Signora Elias and I was terrified he would tell my father, which would have got me into a lot of trouble. The next day I saw him sing with the male choir. He had a solo no less.”

  “Sing it now, Babbo!” Donatella squealed, swinging like a bat.

  “Sit up when you eat,” he replied. Chiara yanked her up.

  “Can Alba come with us to the sea tomorrow, Babbo?”

  “Will you come, piano lady?” Donatella echoed.

  “I don’t think that’s up to me, ladies, sounds like your papà has a day planned for the three of you.”

  “Please, Papà?” Chiara asked.

  Donatella echoed with her own version of puppy dog, which looked more grimace than she intended.

  “Can you put up with these two for longer than five minutes?” Mario asked.

  “I don’t want to interrupt your time with your girls, Mario, I know it’s precious.”

  Chiara jumped down off the tree and stomped over to them. “Now you’re just being polite, Signora, Babbo makes the best barbecue in Ozieri. Signora Elias always says so. She always comes with us. I think you should eat it too.”

  “That is a hard offer to refuse,” Alba said, smiling at the chef in question.

  His face eased into a modest grin.

  “We usually leave early, don’t we, Papà?” Chiara plowed on.

  “I don’t love the heat,” Mario answered, half turning toward Alba.

  “It’s settled then,” Chiara announced, skipping back to her perch, victorious.

  * * *

  The next morning Mario arrived with two very excited girls to pick up Alba and Elena for a day by the sea. Alba sat behind with the girls, who sang the entirety of top hits at the top of their lungs, including several in English. Their version of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” delighted Alba for its blissful, passionate delivery, in spite of dubious pronunciation. They arrived at Lu Impostu beach, greeted by a sheet of breathtaking turquoise stretching out toward the rock of Tavolara. Mario turned right, away from the beach, and they parked beside a tiny house just on the bend of the cove, sheltered by pine trees and facing an uninterrupted view of the water. They clambered out of the car, the girls dashing toward the hammock that hung between two pines at the far end of the garden.

  “Mario, this is stunning,” Alba whispered, the strips of darker blue cutting across the water pinning her gaze to the cerulean horizon, mountains rising up to the left.

  “Grazie.”

  “You told me your great-grandfather built this before the rich moved in, no?” Elena asked, sitting down on the seat Mario brushed down for her. “It must have been marvelous coming here as a child, I bet there wasn’t another house around?”

  “You’re right, Signora,” Mario answered.

  The girls dashed back up to the narrow strip of tiled porch where the adults were.

  “Can we go to the beach, Babbo? Can we go now?” they frothed.

  “Give me a moment, girls, I have to start the fire.”

  “I’ll go,” Alba said.

  “I didn’t bring you both here to babysit my girls.”

  “I thought you’d brought them to babysit us, Mario!” Elena replied, taking their hands and walking down toward a little gate beside the hammock. “Its this way, isn’t it?”

  Mario shouted back. “Yes, come and get your towels, girls!”

  Alba walked over to the car and reached in for their beach bag. “My pleasure, Mario, honestly,” she said, waving it at them to signal they didn’t have to come back to fetch it.

  “Grazie, Alba,” he said, heaving a bag of chopped wood from the boot and carrying it on his shoulder toward the brick barbecue just beside the house.

  The two women and girls spent the morning afloat. Elena’s swimming belied her years as much as everything else she did. Chiara and Donatella ran rings around Alba and by the time they prized themselves off the beach for lunch they had become firm friends. Chiara had pummeled her with questions about her job, Donatella had swung on her arm, shrieking to be thrown in from her shoulders over and over again.

  “That smells divine, Mario!” Alba called out, wrapping her towel around her middle as she reached him by the head of the table. He was stood cutting several chops into manageable sizes, sprinkling the meat with a generous amount of coarse salt.

  “Ribs for me!” Chiara yelled, reaching over her sister to grab some.

  Mario swatted her hand away and began chopping the sausage. Alba watched the juices seep into the flatbread beneath it all, which lay upon a wide slice of dried cork bark. The table was set with paper plates and cups and a bowl full of fresh-cut vegetables, which everyone helped
themselves to.

  When they had filled themselves with Mario’s barbecue, he brought out an enormous slice of watermelon and divided it into smaller pieces. After an espresso, the party slipped into a much-needed afternoon slumber, the girls reading on the hammock, Elena snoozing on the bed inside the singular bedroom of the cottage.

  Alba wrapped up the paper tablecloth and cleared the final remnants of lunch whilst Mario put the leftovers in the fridge. She lay back onto the deck chair facing the water below.

  “Absolute heaven,” she said.

  “Grazie,” Mario answered. “You may come again.”

  Alba sighed a smile. “I’m honored. I bet not everyone gets to sample the Mario hospitality that often then?”

  “No.”

  Alba pulled the deck chair up a little straighter. Mario unfolded one next to her.

  “I wish they’d told me about Papà,” she said.

  “I tried to.”

  “Yes.”

  They looked at the water for a moment, the lazy ripples catching the afternoon sun. The shade of the garden enhanced the luminous celeste of the sea at this time of day.

  “I should have asked more questions,” she began. “It was easier to cut it all out from my life than deal with it. I stayed away for as long as I needed. To survive. I couldn’t face the rejection a third time. I won’t take responsibility for what he did but I can take responsibility for what I do now.”

  “Makes sense,” Mario replied, unhurried, without prying.

  His silence invited trust. “The thing that moved me most?” she asked. “I saw the frail human in there. One that was guarded for a very long time. One that was protected by rage for so very many years. I made him feel more vulnerable than any parent can bear.”

  “Probably,” Mario replied.

  “Have you ever screamed at your girls after they hurt themselves?”

  “Most parents do.”

  “You scream at them for not being more careful. What you’re actually fighting is your own failure to save them in time. You take it out on them. My father went through that on a scale that I can’t fathom. And I saw him at his weakest, overpowered by those strange men, and I think he never could forgive himself for that. Not ever. He protected me as well as he could, but he couldn’t protect me from his weakness and that nearly killed him. And it might have killed me too. So I escaped. Now all his self-loathing, his pride, his fear, can’t hurt me anymore, because that person is gone. That was a man-child I saw yesterday. Vulnerable. Dependent.”

  Mario nodded, his body relaxed, a person who had found his own way through his own thistle relationships.

  “He doesn’t know who I am, Mario.”

  Alba watched him reach into his pocket for a tissue. He handed it to her. She wiped her face.

  “I didn’t want to cry just now. It creeps up on me when I’m not expecting it. Raffaele, Babbo, the way I left the mainland. Now I sit here today, looking at this slice of heaven, and I think I was running away from the one thing I had the power to shift myself. You ever want to swap heads?”

  Mario laughed at that.

  “You know what I mean. I want to take myself off the hook. I want to start again. And I want to build my life where it all started. Here.”

  Mario turned to face her, his cheeks a deeper brown than that morning. “You’ll walk away from everything you’ve worked for?”

  “No. I’ll do it on my terms. I’ll travel to Rome once a month for my accademia duties. I’ll take on one or two concerts a year.”

  “And in between?”

  “Grow olives?”

  Mario shook his head with a fading laugh.

  “What?”

  “You’ll be bored after one season.”

  “Is that a challenge, Mario?”

  “People don’t change as much as they’d like to.”

  “Exactly—I’m as hardheaded as I was when I left. If I set my mind to buying that dilapidated villa down the road from Elena to turn it into a music studio for the musically starved children of Ozieri and the surrounding villages, then you can bet I will, Signor Cynic.”

  His eyebrow lifted and sank back down. “I don’t think anyone could stop you.”

  * * *

  The following summer the Fresu School of Music opened for its inaugural summer camp, which attracted over fifty children from Ozieri and the surrounding towns. The Raffaele scholarship was in place and gifted to three children whose parents could not afford the nominal fees. Alba had hired Mario to project manage the renovation, which had hammered through the dank winter and reached completion a week before the camp. Alba’s days throughout had been divided into visits to her father, at a set time, on the advice of Teresa. His health had deteriorated at a rapid pace. Alba paid for round-the-clock care, though her brothers refused to allow him to move into the rooms above her music school despite her pleas.

  One morning she sat opposite him, sinking into his oversized throne, swallowed in blankets and daytime TV and wiped memories. Then he shook his head, as if a sudden recognition crashed into focus.

  He straightened. His eyes were haunted. “Where do you live?”

  “Here. I used to live in Rome.”

  “Rome?” he asked, the edge of confusion fraying the tone of his voice. “Your mother let you go by yourself? Who’s your mother?”

  Alba opened her mouth to speak. Teresa stepped out of the bathroom with a metal tray loaded with his morning’s doses. “Are you alright?” she asked, putting the tray down and reaching an arm around Alba.

  “No,” she replied, fighting for breath. Teresa sat her down by the hearth.

  “I didn’t know what to expect,” Alba began.

  “He’s very happy, the meds keep him comfortable.”

  “My father is not here.”

  Teresa rubbed Alba’s back, a clinical sweep away of tension.

  “Stay until he’s eaten? Then I must ask you to leave while I get him to bed.”

  “Grazie,” Alba murmured, watching Teresa begin her lengthy rituals of injections, drops, pills, and syrups. She hooked her arm underneath Bruno and walked him around to a place at the end of the table where he could still see the television. Alba sat opposite him. Thirty empty chairs stretched out around them as Teresa placed a bowl of broth and pastina before him and tore in some pane fino, giving it a swirl of Parmesan.

  “Bruno, lunchtime now, si? ”

  She tapped the spoon a little harder than was necessary and it hooked his attention toward the task at hand. Alba watched him slurp a few spoons into his mouth, trying and failing to find the man. All these years she’d fled the shadow of the bully who now sat hunched over the gingham tablecloth before her, drinking the soup like an obedient small child.

  Bruno looked up and saw her staring. She held his gaze.

  “They didn’t give you any?” he asked.

  Alba shook her head.

  He slurped another two spoonfuls. “You should eat all the food they give you.” He concurred and bowed his head toward his bowl.

  Teresa wiped his mouth, switched off the television, and asked him to say goodbye to Alba who had come to visit him and wasn’t that nice of her and shouldn’t she come again soon? Alba kissed her father on each cheek. His skin was cool, clammy. He smelled different.

  “Please excuse us now, Alba,” Teresa explained, “he needs it quiet to get to sleep.”

  “I can let myself out,” Alba said, feeling the air seep out of the room faster than she could stop it. “Will Babbo be well enough for the performance, do you think? Tell me what additional help you’ll need and I’ll arrange everything, okay?”

  “Grazie. I’m looking forward to it very much,” Teresa replied.

  Alba watched them shuffle the length of the table, around the far end and into a room off the hallway room. The door closed shut without a noise. Alba stood for a moment, searching her body for a feeling where none would surface. A pervasive numbness spread through her limbs. Her father had died. In his pl
ace was a meager impression, a hollow puppet, frail, lost, lines half learned and mumbled.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, before all the families took to the sea and whilst the heat was still manageable, Alba directed the children in an end-of-camp performance to mark the achievements of her students. Excited parents filled the lower room, which she had divided with sliding doors to enable the space to enlarge or reduce to suit the requirements. All the doors were folded back against the walls for the show and the large windows were thrown open to the view of her olive grove. At the center stood her grand piano. Alba rose to her feet from her stool and signaled for the children to stand up from the benches that lined the farthest wall. She would conduct them whilst accompanying.

  Chiara and Donatella stood at the center, flanked by their closest friends and responsible for the success of this starting project, so insistent were their selling techniques that it didn’t take any time for most of their classmates to sign up to study with the famous concert pianist who once beat up their dad and used to live in Rome.

  They took a breath in unison. Alba nodded. The concert began. Alba made a new arrangement of a typical Sardinian folk song, “Non Potho Reposar,” the lyrics a swoon of longing for a true love left behind, which she then blended into a medley of livelier songs till her studio was thrumming with the beam of children’s voices, lifting like a flock of birds, angling together, swooping and diving and rising in unison. The audience stood and filled the room with applause. After three bows, the children sat back on their benches.

  Alba faced her piano. She took a breath and let her hands retrace the piece she had played for Celeste and Elena that afternoon when she’d slipped into an audition without even knowing it, when the wheels of the next twenty years of her career were set in motion. Not a sound filled the space, but the gentle waves of Chopin’s Nocturne. No breath, but the space between the phrases, the hush of anticipation where one arpeggio sank and another surfaced.

  The tides of that first tune had brought her home.

  When the audience cheered, she didn’t hear them, she didn’t see their grinning faces, their reverence for one of their own who’d brought the music home. She saw only the small man in the wheelchair in the front row with a dutiful Teresa on one side and a proud Elena on the other. She saw his unmoveable body, inexpressible thoughts and feelings locked somewhere deep inside, betrayed only by a singular tear that ran down the thin skin of his cheek. She felt only the golden heat of forgiveness, but not forgetfulness. She felt the hot remembrance of all things past, the importance and futility of it all.