A Roman Rhapsody Page 3

“Now, just place your hands on the keys, see what they want to naturally do.”

  Alba did. They reflected back to her in the polished wood; twenty expectant fingers.

  “Have you ever sat at a piano, Alba?”

  She shook her head.

  “Goodness. You hold your hands as if you have, my dear.” Elias reached over and lifted her hands and moved them a little to the right until they seemed to be at the center of the keyboard.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and play a few notes then?”

  Alba turned to face Signora Elias, feeling like a trespasser.

  “Any note at all, any order, doesn’t matter, just feel the weight of them.”

  Alba looked down at her hands. She pressed her second finger down. A bright sound rose up from beneath the lid, a fizz of yellow.

  “And another,” Signora Elias encouraged.

  Alba pressed her little finger down. This one was higher, prouder, more certain of a sound.

  “What happens if you play one at a time starting with your thumb all the way up to your little finger, do you think?”

  Alba felt the smoothness under the pads of her fingers, the thickness of the key, and let her fingers press down on each note in turn. A ladder, stepping-stones, sounds stacked on top of one another like building blocks.

  “Now come back down,” Signora Elias said. Alba did. Her fingers were hot. They ached to touch every key, to hear the color of each note, to race up and down like Elias.

  “Very good, Alba. Your fingers look quite at home there, wouldn’t you say?”

  Alba looked up at Signora Elias. She hadn’t felt this safe since before her father’s ordeal, or perhaps ever. Her eyes grew moist. This time she swallowed her tears before they escaped.

  “Alba Fresu, what do you think you are doing?” Giovanna cried, waddling down the stairs with buckets and brooms in tow. “Signora, I’m so, so sorry—this won’t happen again.”

  “I think it would be criminal if it didn’t.”

  Giovanna looked at her, unsure if she was about to be fired.

  “Giovanna, I would very much like to teach this young lady, if you and she were agreeable to the idea.”

  Alba looked down at her fingers on her lap.

  “That’s very kind, Signora”—Giovanna flustered a laugh—“right now we must get on and finish your downstairs and get home to make lunch. I’m so sorry if she made a nuisance of herself.” Giovanna’s gaze flitted to the sospiri crumbs on the doily. Alba’s cheeks burned.

  “Very well, Giovanna, but once you’re finished you’ll take some of these sospiri home to your family, won’t you? No pleasure without sharing.”

  Giovanna nodded. Alba jumped up from her stool.

  They mopped the kitchen and downstairs bathrooms in silence.

  * * *

  Outside the heat swelled. The cicadas were in operatic form and the tufts of yellow fennel blossoms on the side of the road gave off their sweet sun-toasted anise scent. It was of some comfort ahead of Giovanna’s tirade.

  “What exactly did you make that poor old woman do? Did you ask her to play on that expensive piano?”

  “Of course not, Mamma, she asked me.”

  Giovanna skidded to a stop. She pinned Alba with a glower. “Alba Fresu, we don’t have much, but I work every hour under the sun to teach my children one thing: honesty. You stand here lying to my face and think you won’t be punished? You wait till your father hears this.”

  “She asked me to listen!”

  “Maybe she did. But that’s no excuse to push your way in like a peasant. You know better.”

  Tears of injustice prickled Alba’s eyes.

  “I’ve been waiting for the moment where you show some kind of thanks, for your father being alive, for having escaped this ordeal. But nothing! You float around like you’re invisible. Like a princess. It’s disgusting. You don’t talk. You help, but I have to redo the things after you’ve finished. Is this how I’ve taught you to be?”

  Alba would have liked to cry then and there, to spit out that her night terrors were more than she could bear, that the feeling of a cave’s dampness skirted her dreams and waking hours, that she didn’t know how to describe the way her heart thudded in her chest for no reason during the day. That every bush held a secret promise of bandits lurking beneath. That their job was unfinished. That they would return for more. She longed to be held by her mother, told that everything would be fine, that one day she wouldn’t have the sinking feeling of dread trail her like a menacing shadow, that the dusk wouldn’t seep white panic through her veins. Instead, a sun-blanched silence clamped down.

  “There, you see? More sulky silence. Well, this has got to stop, Signorina. You hear me?”

  Alba swallowed. Her throat was hot and dry. The pine trees farther up the hill swished their needled branches. Their woody scent wafted down on the breeze. Alba longed for them to be the comfort they once were.

  3

  Fantasie

  1. a free composition structured according to the composer’s fancy

  2. a medley of familiar themes with variations and interludes

  The following week, just as Alba was starting to speed up her run toward Signora Elias, her mother handed her a crumpled piece of paper. On it was a detailed list of vegetables she wanted Alba to buy at the market. Alba looked up at her mother.

  “Don’t just stand there. Get on down before it gets too hot. You can clean the artichokes and cut the potatoes. Get a can of olives from the shop and see at the end of the list I’ve added a few strips of pancetta. I’ll make pasta al coccodrillo for a treat, I know how much your brothers love that. They’ll be hungry after the morning at the officina.”

  Giovanna’s words tumbled out in one blast of breath. Alba’s stomach growled. She wanted to think it was because she’d only eaten half a roll with her milk and coffee. Signora Elias was the highlight of her week. Her mother had just robbed her of it.

  When they both returned home, Giovanna took her frustration out on the unsuspecting white-skinned onion she massacred into tiny pieces. Next, she launched an attack on the slices of pancetta, thwacked open the lids of passata from their glass jars, and ripped into the can of drained black olives that turned into little disks in a brusque breath or two. Alba was instructed to chop the slab of semisoft fontina cheese into tiny cubes whilst her mother whooshed a pan with warmed olive oil and the softening onions. Pancetta was thrown in soon after, and the smell in their galley kitchen would have filled it with the promise of a comforting lunch if it wasn’t for Giovanna banging every pan on the range. Alba knew better than to ask what the matter was. Instead she eased her knife down through the cheese, taking her time so that she wouldn’t have to lay the table yet. Each blade splice, Alba half expected her mother to tell her how Signora Elias was that day, what she’d played, if it had been a swirling piece like the others. No descriptions of her morning were offered, but the way Giovanna threw a fist of salt into the boiling water of a deep stockpot for pasta made Alba worry she’d been fired for her daughter’s impoliteness after all.

  Alba’s brothers returned soon after to bellows from their mother to scrub their hands. Alba carried the huge pot of pasta onto the table. The fontina cheese had melted over all the pennette mixed in with the pancetta red sauce and olives. As she scooped the spoon down toward the base and up onto one of her brother’s bowls, strands of fontina oozed off it.

  “Cocodrillo, Ma?” her elder brother, Marcellino, yelled from the other end of the table. He reached out a hungry arm for his bowl. He had entered his teenage years in earnest and Giovanna moaned about having to cook almost two kilos of pasta for their family these days. His thick black hair was like his father’s, and his crooked smile, and the way his eyes twinkled with unspoken mischief. His voice was deep and broad and he held the weight of an heir upon his wide shoulders with pride. Beside him sat their younger brother, Salvatore, who had their mother’s moon-shaped face and never fought to step out of his elder brot
her’s shadow. Salvatore had his grandfather’s patter and a speed of speech and reaction to match Marcellino. Neither measured the volume of their voices.

  “It’s a treat for you all today!” her mother cried from the kitchen.

  When all the bowls were full and Giovanna and Bruno took their places, silence replaced the gaggle of voices. The boys were sent out to play after lunch whilst Alba helped clear the table. Her father took his time to peel an early peach and chop it into tiny cubes, which dropped into his tumbler. When it was almost full, he reached for a slice of melon and did the same. Then he poured wine over the fruit-filled glass and began to swirl the mixture, pressing the soft fruit down with a gentle spoon until it was submerged. He scooped up his first spoon of wine-infused fruit. The smell made Alba’s mouth water. She found herself, as always, hanging to her place waiting for him to cast her a story, share a secret. Since his return home, none came. He was in his faraway place that Alba was instructed to never interrupt.

  “Let your father eat his macedonia in peace, Alba, and finish up inside.”

  Alba followed her mother’s instructions. Her parents’ voices became muffled all of a sudden. It made her tune in through the doorway; when adults whispered there was always information that would be better known than not.

  “And Signora Elias wants Alba to go every day to do this?” she heard her father say.

  “Yes. I don’t know why. She has a car. She likes to walk into town every day. But she says it would be a big help. And the extra money wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Get Alba out of the house doing something too.”

  Her father harrumphed.

  “So shall I tell her yes, Bruno?”

  “Is this some kind of charity bone for us poor down in town, Giovanna? You be sure that Alba works for every one of those lire, you hear me? We’re workers not takers, you hear me?”

  Alba heard her father’s feet climb up the stairs for his siesta.

  * * *

  Giovanna didn’t mention anything more of that conversation for several days. At last, over breakfast one morning, Giovanna looked up from her little coffee cup, which she had been stirring without stopping for several minutes. Alba couldn’t remember if she’d even put sugar in it yet.

  “Signora Elias would like you to do a job for her over the summer, Alba.”

  Alba looked up. The bit of bread she’d dipped into her hot milk and coffee split from the roll and fell into her deep tin cup with a plop.

  “You will collect her morning rolls from the panificio and newspaper from the tabacchi each day. She wants you at her house by seven and not a minute later.”

  Alba blinked. The woman who forbade her to go with her was now sending her to that house on daily visits. It was better than any Christmas.

  “Well, say something, child. ‘Thank you for the job. Yes, Mamma I’ll do that.’ Anything!”

  Alba nodded.

  “I’ll take that as agreement to do the best job you can. Now, you and I both know that the poor lady is taking pity on me. Everyone knows what I’ve been through. Now my only daughter, the girl who is going to look after me in old age, who will make me a grandmother, doesn’t speak? That’s not how daughters are to behave. From the boys I’d understand. They need their father. But you? A shadow.”

  The tumble of words were hot, like the boiling water that wheezed through the packed coffee grounds of their morning pot. Alba held on to the hope that her own silence would be like lifting that screeching pot off the gas ring.

  Her mother stood up. “You start tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Alba jumped out of her bed the next day, prepared the coffeepot for her mother, set out the cups for all the family, and ran out of the door for the panificio, across the cobbled street that ran in front of their narrow four-room house, clustered in the damp shade between a dozen others behind the town’s square. Down the viccoli, washing draped in waves of boiled white flags of surrender across the house fronts. After a few hairpin turns along stony streets, meant for donkeys and small humans, not noisy cars, she reached the main road, which funneled around their town, snaking out toward the hills that encircled the valley. The baker gave her a milk roll on the house and filled a small thick brown paper bag with a slice of oil bread and two fresh rolls. At the tabacchi, the owner, Liseddu, handed her a copy of La Nuova Sardegna over the counter, and then told her, with a wink, that she could have a stick of licorice for herself. With her load underarm, she swung up to Signora Elias’s, feeling like the plains opening up below were a promise. The cathedral steeple shone in the morning light, its golden tip gleaming at the center of town. The huddles of houses, narrow town homes, clustered together straining for height, top floors encased with columned terraces, now gave way to firs and pines as she climbed toward the pineta, the pine forests of the periphery, the cool sought by young or illicit lovers, shadows protecting their secrets, their desires permissible for a snatched breath or two. Behind them the piazzette of the town, the greengrocers hidden within the stone ground floor of houses, the shoe and clothes shops for which the town was famous sheltered in the crooks of shady alleyways. Up here, in the fresher air beneath the trees that lined the hills surrounding her town, the men traipsed the ground for truffles or edible mushrooms. And in the unbearable heat of August, families would climb to seek respite from a punishing sun.

  Alba loved the smell of this part of town. She turned her face out toward the trees, feeling their spindled shadows streak across her face, her mouth open now to the pine air, its earthy scent whispered over her tongue. On she strode, her feet crunching along the gravel that led to Signora Elias’s front door. She pulled down on the iron handle. The bell rattled inside the hallway. Signora Elias appeared. Her face lit up.

  “As I suspected. Your timing is, indeed, impeccable.”

  “Grazie, Signora,” Alba replied, and handed her the packages.

  “Lovely. They smell divine as always.”

  Alba had never heard the daily bread described with such delight.

  “Do bring them into the kitchen, Alba, yes?”

  She knew better than to do anything other than what she was asked. The kitchen was laid for two. At the center were two porcelain dishes, one with a white square of butter and a smaller one with jam. A large pot of coffee sat on the range. The windows were open. The room filled with birdsong.

  “Grazie, Alba. Now, do sit down and have some with me. I’m sure you’re thirsty after your climb, no? Judging by the shine on your forehead I’d even say you ran.”

  “I did.”

  That Alba knew something about this woman’s house made it easier for her to breathe, to speak, though it was impossible to decide whether it was the crisp, clear air, the light that flooded in from the surrounding gardens, or the peaceful silence of the home itself.

  “Here, do sit down after you’ve given your hands a wash, yes?”

  Alba hesitated.

  “You won’t be late home.”

  Alba watched Signora Elias light the pot and cut her roll, butter it, and smear it with jam. She handed half to Alba.

  Maybe it was the homemade fig jam, the sound of the medlar tree leaves twirling in the light breeze just beyond the window, or the sensation of being in this lady’s kitchen, but Signora Elias was right: It was divine.

  * * *

  Once the pot simmered to ready, Elias poured herself a cup and signaled for Alba to follow her into the next room.

  “I think we ought to learn your first scale today.”

  Alba looked at her, trying to mask the thrill soaring up her middle.

  “Only if you’d like, of course?”

  “I would love that, Signora.”

  She took her seat. They repeated the stool dance from the other day. Alba looked down at the shiny keys. She’d remembered where Signora Elias had placed her thumb last time and laid it back there.

  “Very good, Alba. You have a keen memory. That is wonderful.”

  Alba turned her head to look
at Signora Elias. She looked a little younger today.

  “Now, like the other day. Just five to start. Then we’ll reach up a little more.”

  Alba was soothed by Signora Elias’s voice, firm yet gentle, like being under the protection of a queen. It felt far safer than the constant dodge of evil eye, that quiet but incessant terror that trailed Alba now that at any moment things might change, or be lost.

  Signora Elias’s voice turned mahogany, rich tones that guided her up the familiar notes and then directed her thumb to scoot beneath her third for her to trace further notes still. Her fingers spidered across the new and familiar sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the double doors and lighting up the backs of her hands as if they too had been dipped into a little of the golden magic that overtook those of Signora Elias.

  Throughout the summer Elias spun tales about numbers, their families, the way the notes were grouped together and why. Elias painted pictures with her voice and hands that described a cosmic symmetry. The mathematical patterns bewitched Alba, and the more Elias explained the more Alba yearned to know. At night, her terrors ebbed away as her fingers tip-tapped upon her sheets; up to five down to one, up to eight, down to one, one, skip to three, skip to five, down to three. She made up her own patterns too, which she showed Elias with great enthusiasm the next day. When the white notes sung out with confidence under her fingers, Elias introduced a few black ones too. This time the scale shifted mood. Here was a moonlit forest, a bad dream, something hidden in the dark. The scales peeled open like the pages of books, unfolding pictures of far-off places, imagined worlds, miniature stories of heroines in the wilderness. Elias showed Alba how to recognize the key notes within the scale, how they were all linked by intrinsic tone, vibration, and mathematics. How it repeated up the keyboard, each eight notes resonating at double the speed as the same note eight notes below. Alba hung on to every word, every nuance, sepulchring the musical secrets, as if she and Elias were standing before an enormous map of the universe feeling her reassuring hand at her back that told Alba it was safe to sail.