“I don’t know about wiser,” Alba replied.
Celeste let out her breathy, knowing laugh, wafting from another world, a place where time wandered without aim nor end.
“I would say so, yes. Certainly your playing has deepened in a way I sincerely hoped it would. Now that we’re just a little way away from your graduating concerts, I can say that when my dear friend Elena told me about a girl in her town who could play a phrase exactly after hearing it only once I didn’t believe her. I certainly didn’t need to tell you that you have one of the most astonishing talents I’ve known.”
Alba felt a familiar sensation of claustrophobia. She could hear the words were positive, but all the compliments and encouragement she’d received these past three years made her feel put on the spot somehow, vulnerable, naked. Describing her playing was like an imprisonment that deadened the act. It became a subjective, once removed from the composer and then from the player, when all she craved was to disappear into the music, as if she weren’t there at all. Descriptions of her playing style never came close to how it felt to play. That’s why, she realized, listening to Celeste that morning, the words always felt like a betrayal.
“I know how much you hate me talking like this, Alba, I just need you to know. Because the next few months will be grueling. The business side of our art is not the cocoon we’ve had here. There will be people out there who will want a piece of what you have, of that I can be sure. And you can be sure that I am always here for advice, like a compass, if you’ll excuse the whimsy, should the seas become choppy.”
Alba tried to land somewhere inside her body rather than watching it all from a step beside herself, like a translucent memory of herself, a blur in a mistimed photo, snapped moment in a haze with several others preceding, stuck somewhere in no-time space. “Thank you.”
“Your personal life may witness some shifts too,” Celeste added, her tone dipping into conspiratorial, signaling she knew it wasn’t within her jurisdiction to mention in the first place, though Alba and Vittorio’s relationship had come up in their conversations with regularity.
“This place gave me life,” she replied, the words slipping out without effort.
“I am glad.”
The conversation floated on a pause. Alba’s eyes traced Celeste’s shelves and scores and noticed a smaller photograph upon her wall of her seated at the piano next to another woman. The profile looked familiar, but Alba couldn’t say why she recognized her from where she sat.
“I was very much in love when I graduated,” Celeste began. “It’s not easy for two musicians married to their art to allow space for anything or anyone else sometimes. Not impossible. Just not easy.”
Alba watched the brief flight of images soar through Celeste’s mind, feathering away as fast as they appeared.
“Thank you for all your wonderful work, Alba,” she said, straightening, “and for making sure the faculty could find no fault in my decision to grant you our scholarship.”
There was a knock at the door. Celeste cleared her throat. “My next student, Alba. I won’t see you until your concert performance. I will be thinking of you.”
“Grazie.”
Alba stepped outside into the corridor, a polished world away from the disorientation of that first week. The three years had sped through sonatas, composers, repertoire that spread from early music to modern classics, the Romantics and the Impressionists. All the pieces stayed with her well after she’d been assessed, like family members with their unforgettable quirks, idiosyncratic poetries, and the stories that led to their creation. Soon she would be leaving this family of the accademia, but she would take this other family with her.
Every step along this corridor, once a quotidian rhythm, now took on new meaning: every scuff one more farewell, like ever-increasing circles rippling in water around the weight of a plunging stone. The building fizzed with an electricity she’d never felt before, or perhaps never noticed. Her year group was about to graduate, performing their final pieces for an invited audience and assessment. Despite what the teachers told her, she felt like the adrenaline scoring through her wouldn’t by necessity mean she would run headlong off this cliff and take flight. Nerves might take her in the end, her self-belief might fail her and all the other branches of anxiety might strangle her.
“Didn’t it go well with Celeste?” Natalia asked, stepping in beside Alba.
“It was lovely. As always.”
“Why the long face?”
Alba stopped and turned toward Natalia. She looked at her, open and available as she always was, the light blue of her eyes like a pale breeze-kissed sky. Alba longed to not envy her that, the freedom she’d known all her life, the ease of family, their unwavering support. She wanted to tell Natalia that there would be no one in the audience who had come especially to see her and it was breaking her heart. Three years of shunting her family out of her mind had reached its end. The return to facts was brutal.
“Is it Vittorio? Leo has been like a bear the past few weeks. We’ve decided to not see each other every night until after the concerts.”
“It’s not Vittorio.”
Natalia took an unhurried look at her friend. “You’ve excelled these three years without your family. They can’t stop you now, right?”
“I want to believe that.”
“You’re hurting today.”
Alba nodded.
“Gift yourself that? We’re always taught to be so stupidly happy. Your music wouldn’t be what it is if you didn’t feel things like you do. It’s a kind of superpower. I envy you that. Everyone does.”
Alba sighed a fading smile.
“Come to mine for dinner? I’ll cook something light. We can eat outside—the new boys renting upstairs let us come through and sit on the flat roof.”
“I’m working late tonight.”
“I know. Just know my door’s open, si?”
Natalia blew a wisp of hair off her face. Nothing about her demeanor suggested that she was preparing the hardest concerto for her final assessment.
“If you need company I’m there, okay?” Natalia added, off Alba’s silence.
She wrapped her arms around Alba and gave her a squeeze. Her patchouli scent was as pungent as always. It would always remind Alba of their Christmas together. She watched Natalia stroll down the corridor toward her practice room, violin case in hand, the world light upon her shoulders.
* * *
“A little more vibrato here, Alba,” Goldstein said along the puff of smoke, the gray clouds like wafts of dragon’s breath. “Don’t look at me like I’m talking nonsense. We return to the same idea that it’s never true that once you’ve played a note you’re committed to that sound. Let it ring further. And here”—he walked over to her from the window and traced his fingers along the score upon the music stand on his piano beside hers—“I want to hear absolute pathos. Beethoven wrote these first chords as a sforzando, like a sharp consonant, then we have the far-off echo. Make it a voice, Alba.”
She repeated the measures, striking into the keys on the opening chords and reaching deep into the sound for the pianissimo answer, rolling her fingers with deft precision.
“Yes!” Goldstein exclaimed. “This is the place, Alba. Now lean into the improvisatory adagio when it appears. Let us really feel you too don’t know what you will play next. Beethoven writes this sonata, ‘The Tempest,’ with some liberty deep into the score. Honor this.”
Alba returned to the same measures, coloring the first chords darker still, filling the echo with yearning and sorrow. He stopped her again. “So tell me about dynamics with Beethoven.”
Alba no longer feared his questions in the same way she did in her first year. In fact, she’d come to long for them because it made her feel like she was never still, but probing for further information. She’d lose hours deep in reading at the school’s library, a cocoon of knowledge that brought the world into her mind and kept her shielded from it at the same time. Inside th
e rows of books the composers’ lives unfolded, intertwining with their music, clues to how passages could be interpreted, liberating her ideas of what she could bring to them, how honestly she could share their vision. “We know Beethoven only wrote four types of dynamics, very loud, loud, very quiet, and quiet,” she replied.
“And?”
“And it’s up to me to choose what happens in between. Sometimes, like here”—she let her fingers caress through some of the fast descending groupings of notes—“the lack of direction is enigmatic. I can paint my own color.”
Goldstein took a drag on his dying cigarette. “It’s good to know that I haven’t wasted my breath on you after all.”
Alba allowed herself to smile. A mistake she knew better than to do. He always pounced harder when he spied too much relaxation.
“You grin like an imbecile. Remember this: You can be feeling anything you like, but if we don’t hear it, it’s just smoke and mirrors. A detestable performance of performance.”
He stubbed his cigarette out on a porcelain saucer and knocked back the final dregs of his espresso.
Alba began again, this time launching into the opening chords like an arrow darting through space, focused, direct. Then she broke off, and the treble answer whispered from the higher notes. Goldstein didn’t stop her this time so she brushed on through the slurred pairings, remembering how he had directed her to not give even sound to each, but, as in the words of Beethoven, dusting the keys, a flip-flop flick of the ivory, not equal groupings but casual, some notes more important than others, like the natural patter of speech where not every syllable holds the same weight or tempo. In the adagio section she let her hands grow heavy, the chords echoing the first melody, now played as if underground, ominous, pressing her foot down on the pedal halfway to sustain the rumble. An allegretto finished the piece. Alba looked over at Goldstein.
He shook his head. “It is a great responsibility, your talent. I hope it doesn’t kill you.”
It would be impossible to become accustomed to his unexpected darts, however much she’d tried.
“It may not, because you’re stubborn enough to finish things,” he added. “Hold on to that, Sardinian girl, always hold on to that. Keep working. Keep asking questions. Keep hearing me in your ear, when you start to get comfortable, when you start to believe what people tell you about your playing, that’s the danger zone and all of us are lured by it. Don’t go there. Stay with the text. Stay true to what is written in front of you. That’s when you will make music.”
Alba hooked her hair behind her ear.
“Are you ready for next week?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“Say more.”
Alba pressed her lips together and rolled them back out. She took a breath. “It’s what I’ve been working for all this time.”
“No one said it wasn’t. I’m asking if you’re ready.”
“As ready as I can be. Ready enough to forget my practice when I’m in front of everyone. Ready enough to see what happens. Ready enough not to expect anything.”
He nodded, answerless.
She waited.
He flicked open his packet and popped another cigarette into his mouth. Then he stood and walked to the window.
“All will be as is,” he said, with a snap of his lighter.
Alba looked at the clock. It was time to go.
“Yes, Alba, our lessons are done.”
She stood up and walked toward the door. Before she opened it she turned, knowing that any thanks would be returned with a stiff silence at best, a cutting remark at worst.
“I wish my family wanted to hear me,” she said. Alba watched the statement land with the tiniest shift in Goldstein’s rounded shoulders, his regulation light blue short-sleeved shirt poking out from his red cotton woven vest. She left before he could answer, snapping shut the door behind her as her eyes filled up with tears she would not let fall.
* * *
The bus was late, as always, and the warmth of the June evening did nothing to relax her. She dashed out of the bus as it approached Trastevere and ran along the cobbles toward the main square. That’s when she saw a swarm of police cars. There was a crowd gathering around the front tables and officers yelling for people to stand back which fell on deaf Roman ears; in her five years in the city she hadn’t once seen anyone do much of what an official asked of them, in any capacity.
Across the group she saw Dario. He waved at her. She wove through the muttering bodies till she reached him.
“Remember what I told you when you first started?”
“I don’t know,” she answered.
“Get yourself home and wait for me to call you, got it?”
“What’s happening?”
“Police got wind of Antonio’s little meetings. Turns out the Red Brigade have quite the cozy home upstairs. Or some story like that. I knew stuff was going down, didn’t know he was so high up in it.”
“Are you talking about the group who assassinated the prime minister?”
“Well, I’m not talking about Mickey Mouse.”
“There he is!” she said, seeing her boss being frog marched out of his bar, hands clamped behind his back and being bent down into the police car.
“Get out of here, Alba,” Dario said, raising his voice over the sirens.
“See you tomorrow?” she yelled back.
“I think we both know we’ll be looking for another job by that time. Go home. I’ve been told to lock up and give them the key.”
Dario turned away from her and moved toward the bar. She watched him slip inside. Alba squirmed out of the crowd, thudding in her chest, heading for Vittorio’s, pounding away the creeping panic on how she would pay the next few months’ rent. Her heart was racing. She didn’t need this extra pressure as she began her career. Vittorio would ease away her worry. Perhaps he’d rustle up a quick feast, bring her back into her body and back down out of her squirreling mind.
* * *
He answered after the third ring, creaking open the door looking like he’d just woken up.
“Hey,” he croaked. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“Boss got arrested.”
Alba waited for a response. He ran his hand through his hair.
“Can I come in?” she asked, “I feel a bit shaky.”
“Not a great time, Alba.”
She felt her jaw clamp.
“I mean, sure, I’m at a critical point in the composition.”
“I won’t stay long. Just a bit of a shock, seeing that.”
He turned and walked toward his apartment door and she followed him.
His room was an explosion of manuscripts, which on careful observation were stacked in apparent order but left little space on the floor. There were several whiskey glasses perched on various flat areas, upon the mantel, his desk and the coffee table among them.
He let out a frustrated sigh. It put her on edge.
“Alba, I’m fucking drowning here!”
She walked over to him, wrapped her arms around him. “We’re all tense. Even Natalia didn’t look her complete self.”
“This isn’t just about the projects, Alba, we’ve worked this whole time for this moment. The walls are inching closer. I can’t breathe.”
Alba interlocked her fingers into his and ran her other hand up the muscles of his forearm.
“What, did you just run round here for sex? Got a fright and think if we make love everything will be fine? It won’t! This is our fucking lives at stake here.”
He snatched her hand out of his.
“Why are you being like this?”
“Why? Does it suit you for me to always be available? You come around when you like, never mind if I’m deep in something.”
“I’m not going to stay long.”
“You want me to smooth your back and say you’ll find another job? You’re about to start your career as a pianist, who cares about a shitty waitressing job?”
“
Some of us have to work to eat, Vittorio.”
“Is that why you’re here?” He let out a louder sigh. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
Alba considered replying, but when Vittorio began twisting through his whirlwinds there was little to stop him. She turned for the door.
He pushed his hand onto it with a thud. It gave her a fright.
“That’s it? Interrupt my flow and then leave?”
She turned to face him. He didn’t move his hand.
“I just—I don’t know what I wanted. I’m sorry.”
His eyes softened with remorse. “My God, I’ve become a stereotype. Does it happen that quickly?”
Alba watched a wry edge of a smile unfurl.
“I want to kiss every inch of your body, Alba.” His hands rushed up inside her shirt. It made her breath catch. His fingers wrapped around her breasts. He licked her neck without haste. It sent shivers over her body. When he moved inside her, pressing her against his wall, his breath almost blocked out the tumble of thoughts fighting for attention, the way he’d received her, the way he’d accused her of using him, the way she felt invisible as he moved inside her with smooth strokes. He pulled out, rolled off the contraceptive with a tissue, and chucked it into the bin in the kitchen. She tossed on her clothes and watched him kneel down before his manuscripts upon the floor.
“You got what you wanted. I suppose you’ll go now,” he said without looking up.
Alba felt the heat rise in her chest.
“Why the pout? You want more?”
She knew she should walk out right then.
He stood up and walked back over to her. Unzipped her jeans and eased them down her legs. He buried his face into her pubic hair. She pushed his face away.
“What?” he said, looking up with the familiar gleam of mischief.
“I don’t want that.”
“Let me in, Alba.”
She retracted her hips from his mouth.
“Please?” he asked, sinking back onto his heels.
She bent down and pulled her jeans up.
“You come here but you’re not here,” he murmured.
She looked at him without moving.
A Roman Rhapsody Page 19