A Roman Rhapsody

by Sara Alexander

  Alba sighed a laugh.

  They walked in silence for a while. Then they reached a level ground and Vittorio stopped. Before them the entire panorama of Rome opened up, ancient metropolis scattered with streetlights, antiquity and modernity intertwined in chaotic beauty, a grand improvisation.

  “Now, this is worth a Tuscan stopping and ordering a Sardinian to appreciate.”

  “You always order people around like that?”

  “You’d know more about that coming from bandit country, no?”

  Alba’s stomach struck with steel.

  “Whoa—don’t be so sensitive, everyone knows what you lot are infamous for. Should I be scared?” he teased, running a carefree hand through his black curls.

  “Don’t talk about stuff you know nothing about.”

  “Nerve hit.”

  Alba wished she’d realized the relaxed Vittorio would expire no sooner had it appeared. “I know my way from here,” she replied, turning away from him and starting to walk down toward the Villa Borghese gardens, huge Roman pines twisting up toward the moon, undulating silhouettes crossing the night sky.

  She heard his footsteps catch her up.

  “Christ, Alba, it was a joke.”

  Alba didn’t reply.

  “Come on, you’re stomping right into the stereotype you’re trying to escape, you know. Don’t just run away. Defend yourself!”

  “You know nothing about where I’m from!”

  He upped his pace and stepped in front of her.

  “So tell me.”

  Alba paused for a moment. His face danced in half shadow, moonlit tricks across his high cheekbones. She stepped around him and quickened her pace, angry that he had lured her into a false sense of relaxation back at his studio only to return to his typical snark.

  “Alright—you want me to go first then?” he asked, unwilling to let her go without an argument after all. He walked backward to stay in front of her, stumbling on a stray root but regaining his balance straightaway.

  “My mother died when I was ten. That’s why I cook. That’s why I play—she sent me to my first lessons even though I didn’t think I’d like it. She taught me how to practice. She was a Roman. Carbonara is in my blood.”

  Alba refused to reply.

  “She taught me to walk backward too.”

  Alba stopped then, out of breath, as he crowbarred laughter out of her.

  Their eyes locked. Their breaths synchronized.

  “My father was kidnapped when I was ten,” she said, the words spilling out without a plan, a collapsed tower of cards. “The piano became my safety.” Embarrassment clawed up her throat as she witnessed her admission escape.

  He didn’t race a reply. Their truths hung in the cool night air, stars twinkling in the broad gaps of the huge trees curling their branches to the moon.

  “Perhaps,” he murmured, “we’re not quite as different as we’d like to believe?”

  The cluster of trees stood stoic in the silence, barky majesty rising like emperors around them. The singular sound was his rhetoric, weaving through the dark air along a thread of electric blue between them. His voice reached her, measured, vulnerable, and woody, like the deep resonance of his A string.

  12

  Staccato

  with each sound or note sharply detached or separated from the others; “a staccato rhythm”

  Mid-November brought the first spray of autumnal rain, streaking the ancient ruins with dripping grief for the distant memory of summer. Natalia and Alba ducked into a bar to dodge the start of a further downpour. Natalia signaled for two espressos and gave her wet locks a shake. A droplet fell on Alba’s cheek.

  “So do you think Giroletti and his mob are going to mark us for heart or technique?” she asked.

  Alba smiled and tucked her black hair behind one ear. “As long as we pass. That’s all I care about.”

  “That’s not all you care about.”

  Two espressos landed on the granite counter with a clang. Natalia tipped three spoonfuls of sugar from a metal pot into hers, the gyrations increasing in speed as she spoke.

  “We worked hard, no? You and Vittorio sounded divine. Truly. What on earth did you do?”

  “Practice.”

  Natalia rolled her eyes. “When are you going to let go of this sultry Sardinian performance, Signorina? Seriously, between the two of you I don’t know how you would actually use enough direct communication to conduct a rehearsal. I think that’s exactly what Giroletti was on about.”

  The young women sipped their coffee. Natalia lifted her hand for the waiter and ordered two small crème puffs.

  “Don’t be silly, Natalia, I’m fine with just the coffee.”

  “You’re not, Alba. Their sweets are from heaven. You will eat.”

  The puff arrived, dusted with a snow of fine sugar. The crème pâtissière melted in Alba’s mouth. Her friend was right.

  “And you can put your purse away immediately. It’s not a crime to partake in pleasure, you know. You’re always so serious, Alba.”

  Natalia’s soft laughter tumbled out one eyebrow raised in jest. “Let’s run up to my apartment for a second. I left a manuscript there I should bring in today before we check our results.”

  Alba followed her out and down a twist of back streets till they reached her palazzo where Natalia rented a room in her sister’s apartment. Wide stairs wove through the center of the hallway with a lift that rose up a metal caged shaft to the sixth floor, enclosed in an ornate wrought-iron cubicle with tiny double doors that the women had to skim sideways to fit through.

  Natalia opened the three locks of their heavy wooden door and they stepped inside onto the black tiles. A comforting smell of minestrone greeted them. Alba had never been inside when there wasn’t a pot simmering on the back burner. Today it was clouded with the pungent smoke of a patchouli incense stick weaving its scent from underneath Natalia’s sister’s door, a wail of music pumping out from beyond. The door flung open sending a further thick ribbon of smoky herb out into the hallway. A woman with a cropped head of jet-black hair appeared, smudged kohl around her eyelids and beneath her lower lashes, several earrings puncturing her ears like trophies.

  “Ciao, Francesca,” Natalia gushed, kissing the vision of defiance. “This is my friend Alba, from the accademia. Only the best pianist I have ever heard in my life. Truth. It’s sickening, to be frank.”

  Francesca held out her hand and gave Alba’s a tough squeeze, which she couldn’t decipher as challenge or welcome.

  “Francesca is my sister,” Natalia said, filling in the gaps.

  “It would be cool if we didn’t have to say that every time you introduce me.” Her voice was throaty with a faint rasp of someone who smoked and shouted. Natalia lit with an apologetic smile, then rolled her eyes at Alba once Francesca’s back was turned to slope toward the soup smell.

  Alba followed the corridor and stepped into their living room while Natalia commenced battle on the heap of belongings that was her small room. Two bookcases heaved with knowledge, Francesca’s manifestos aching the shelves. The floorboards were covered with old sheets. All along them, banners lay face up, their wet paint drying. Rally cries for women’s rights for autonomy over their bodies sat beside demands to make abortion legal. Alba could imagine Francesca shouting them as she traced the fat sticky font.

  “Don’t step in there, yeah?” Francesca’s voice rose in a rumble from behind.

  Alba turned toward her. “Of course.”

  “Natalia told you about the rally yet?” she asked, dipping her spoon into the hot thick orange liquid inside her bowl. Alba had never seen a soup that color before. Her mother’s minestrone was always an earthy swirl of cabbage and root vegetable, the same soupy brown as a spectrum of paints drowning together.

  “It’s made from squash and lentils,” Francesca said, finding Alba’s obvious ignorance lift an oblique smile across her face. “You want?”

  Francesca ate a couple of spoonfu
ls in silence.

  “The demo is on December sixth. It’s going to be big. If you care about the situation of women in our country right now, you’ll be there.”

  “The situation?”

  Alba felt the awkwardness of asking questions, but Francesca’s spikes softened her own.

  “In our country, Alba, women can get raped and are forced to keep the child. They’re tied to their homes, housework essentially an accepted form of patriarchal slavery of which we are all victims, either by succumbing to it or turning a blind eye. Your mum work at home all day?”

  Alba nodded.

  “She get paid?”

  “No, it’s home.”

  “So you’re blind to what’s really happening. Most of us have been or choose to remain so. The fact is, women are locked out of the labor force but at the same time are forced to work twenty-four hours to keep that labor force going. It’s slavery. We’re fighting for the government to pay us as they do the men, for all the work we are expected to do without reimbursement. We’re demanding that the laws are changed to make abortion legal. It’s time to say that the crimes against women must stop and laws be put in place against the men who commit them.”

  Francesca’s unexpected sermon finished with the same unannounced abruptness as it began. She took another slurp of her soup. Alba’s crème puff was the first thing she’d eaten since a sandwich at lunch the day before and she wished she’d accepted the offer of a bowl herself.

  “So you know, if you care about having a voice, if you’re sick of the way men in your life treat you like a second-class citizen, you should join us.”

  The memory of her father crowbarred into view. The way he’d yelled about the Red Brigade in Rome, the anti-fascists causing havoc around the country with their assassinations, their demonstrations, their ridiculous attention-seeking bombs, throwing their country into chaos, an imminent toss to the dogs.

  “I’d love to,” Alba said.

  Francesca nodded, as if she’d scanned right through Alba’s mind and watched the replaying of all those pictures too; Alba’s stone house echoing with the bitter rage of her father, the cynical snide of her brothers, her mother refusing to assert herself or contest their decisions, using herself as a physical buffer for her daughter and failing, leaving Alba stranded, unsupported, alone, with only the received message that she was and never would be right, or good or enough. That somehow her nature was formed with missing essential components and their anger at failing to train it into her could only ever be expressed through violence, spoken, and unspoken, in those vicious silences where love, acceptance, and encouragement might have breathed hope. Alba hadn’t traveled all this way to let these phantom memories suffocate her still.

  Natalia’s face popped around the door. “Isn’t it amazing? There’s been all kinds of meetings here. I’ve learned so much. Mamma is coming down to join us too. I’ll tell you about it on our way in, yes? Take my mind off our results.”

  Francesca sighed a condescending laugh with a shake of her head. “Go ahead and run back to your music. You still haven’t answered my question from the other day, Natalia.”

  “Which one?”

  “How many female composers are you studying?”

  Natalia took a breath. “I don’t have time to go into all this now, Francesca.”

  “Figures.” Francesca slunk around them, swallowed back into the patchouli haze of her room.

  Natalia bubbled through a stream of consciousness as they dodged the puddles along the walk toward the accademia. Alba twisted Francesca’s question around in her mind, toying with it from different directions, a cat swiping its shadow.

  “She has a point,” Alba said, cutting through Natalia’s patter.

  “Who has? I’m talking about Giroletti.”

  “Francesca.”

  “What did she say this time? She’s always upsetting my friends.”

  “She asked me how many women we study.”

  Natalia’s expression crinkled curiosity.

  “I’ve never thought about it at all. Take Clara Schumann, we talk about her as the woman Brahms was infatuated with, but we don’t play her concertos as much as we do his, even though she was a phenomenal musician, better than her husband for sure. There’s Fanny Mendelssohn. Her brother gets all the accolades, but her compositions have an intricacy that can’t be matched by his work, and we barely hear of her.”

  Natalia stopped walking. “That’s the most I’ve ever heard you say in one go.”

  Alba smiled, unguarded. “I suppose I wait until I have something important to say.”

  “If I didn’t adore you so much, I would feel completely offended right now.” Natalia hooked her arm into Alba’s. They walked on in comfortable silence.

  * * *

  The corridor by the student board was rammed with anxious bodies. Several students ahead of Alba peeled away, tears in their eyes. Others stepped by her, inscrutable, not wishing to share their reactions with their competitors. At last the two women were before the typed list of names and grading. Natalia ran her fingers down the list until she reached their quartet. She traced the dotted line across toward the score.

  “Not bad for beginners!” Leonardo’s voice cut across the noisy milieu behind them.

  Natalia twisted round. Alba heard their lips meet in a kiss, trying not to let her surprise register.

  “What are you talking about?” Alba recognized Vittorio’s voice swimming in between them. “The guys from the other section got two marks more.”

  “That’s because their cellist was half decent,” Leonardo teased.

  Vittorio raised an eyebrow. “Like you could tell anyway.”

  “I love it when you get emotional, Vittorio,” Leonardo laughed, kissing him on each cheek.

  Vittorio almost blushed and a resigned smile lit his face for a breath.

  The four of them moved away from the throng who lapped to the front, a shifting wave. Natalia and Leonardo disappeared behind the corner. Alba made her way toward the practice rooms.

  “Your sound was perfection.”

  Vittorio’s voice caught her off guard as much as the words themselves. She twisted around to him.

  “It’s a compliment, Alba. Most people don’t look like thunder on the rare occasions I give them.”

  “That’s most likely because you follow it with sarcasm like that.”

  “You’re the one uncomfortable accepting praise. I’m giving it freely. Your playing was sublime.”

  He held her gaze. She matched it, wondering who might win this battle. Any second now he would glance away, like he always did. Alba was accustomed to him behaving as if he were always almost late for something, on his way to a better use of his time. The memory of him cooking flooded her senses, his confident, yet delicate movements inside his kitchen. It was soon followed by the memory of it feeling as if she had imposed on his private ritual, rather than him feeding an expected guest, however delectable the food.

  “There you both are!” They twisted toward Goldstein’s rasp. A draw. Their teacher’s sunglasses were firm on the bridge of his nose, cigarette unlit in hand. “Serendipity—the Greek word for sublime, cosmic timing. They knew about it way ahead of those stuck-up Romans. That’s why I’m here I suppose, to try and drill it into you imbeciles.”

  Vittorio glanced at Alba, then back at their teacher.

  “I’m leading an open master class,” Goldstein began, “and I’m recruiting some of our most exciting players. Before your heads explode with hubris, I add that two of them have had to pull out because they are representing our school at a competition in Turin so I’m asking if you’d like to step in instead?”

  “What’s the plan?” Vittorio asked, unwavering in Goldstein’s shadow. Alba made a mental note to try and affect the same attitude at her next lesson.

  “My plan is to pick Fauré’s Elégie for piano and cello to pieces.”

  He’d be tearing her and Vittorio apart, rather than Fauré, Alba thought
. Goldstein pecked at his protégés and this time he was threatening to do so before an audience.

  “Alba and I have already worked together,” Vittorio replied. “Do you want players who are new together?”

  Alba bristled at Vittorio’s precocious negotiation, as if Goldstein was the kind of professor to say anything other than thank you to rather than begin professional bartering.

  “Cocky son of a whore, isn’t he, Alba?” Goldstein asked, looking through her to see if Vittorio’s peculiar brand of charm had disarmed. “It would be my absolute pleasure to dissect you two, I mean Fauré, for the benefit of our esteemed audience. We have people coming from Florence and Milan, and other students of course. But perhaps I should change the name to The Vittorio Spectacular?”

  Vittorio’s lips pressed together a little tighter.

  “I’ll call the printers and ask them to reprint the program.”

  He laughed at his own joke and pulled out a lighter from his pocket, lifting the flame toward his cigarette. “I’ll leave a copy of the score in your pigeonholes at reception. You’ve got a few weeks to prepare.”

  He left, a waft of gray in his wake.

  “Shall I take that look as a threat, Alba?”

  “If you like.”

  Vittorio shifted weight to his other foot. “We’ll stick with the same day as last time?”

  Alba shrugged.

  “I’m not cooking every time you step inside my place, you know that, right? To be frank I think it made me a little heavy. We’ll stay easy on the wine too.”

  Alba watched him retract the spontaneous hospitality of their rehearsal. Their snatched confessions under the stillness of those Roman pines dismissed. Her Sardinian upbringing held fast; she couldn’t imagine threatening a visitor into her home with a promise like that. Then again she couldn’t imagine having her own home. Francesca’s banners rose into her mind, her arch smile, her goading politics, followed by the echoes of Celeste’s advice, clear and free and as insistent as a morning church bell.

  “Your hospitality is overwhelming, Vittorio,” Alba replied, walking away from him. “See you Tuesday!” she called out, without turning back.