“I’ve never been here. It’s like a palace,” Alba said, shaking her light overcoat and hanging it up on a brass hook just around from their table.
“You deserve this, Alba. Last night was a triumph. Today, you will need all the strength you can get.”
“Signora, your selection,” the penguin man said with a flourish, his team of other flapped servers weaving behind him, all looking with ferocity at somewhere in the near distance as they chased cake orders and pots of tea.
Alba turned her gaze toward the tower of tiered plates, laden with fresh sandwiches and tiny cream cakes. “This is for a queen, Elena. Thank you.”
“They do like to pretend they’re in Vienna somewhat. If this place was good enough for Mendelssohn and the rest, then it’s downright good enough for you, I’d say, no?”
Alba’s smile was a tentative line, erased as soon as it appeared.
Signora Elias poured Alba a cup of tea and slipped in a thin slice of lemon. The swirl of steam was comfort in a cup. “Did you manage to sleep?” Signora Elias began.
“Not really. I stayed with Raffaele until he caught the late train back up north.”
For a breath she returned to the darkened piazza where she and Raffaele had sat beside a fountain and shared the same bottle of whiskey after convincing the nearby closing bar to sell them an entire one, something Alba knew from her time at Calisto was a sackable offense.
“I can imagine what you must be feeling,” Signora Elias comforted.
“I think I did all my feeling last night. Now I’m numb and empty.”
“When I last saw your mother she was looking very well.”
“You saw her? At market you mean?”
“Not exactly, no,” Signora Elias replied, swirling a white sugar cube into her tea, watching it dissolve for a little too long. “Your mother came to see me. Fairly often, I suppose. Not every week of course, as before, but perhaps every month or so.”
Alba looked at her, willing her to continue.
“She never stopped wanting to know if you were alright and doing well.”
Alba swallowed but the tea had done little to wet the dryness of her throat.
“Today it seems like the right thing to do. Tell you, I mean.”
“She never replied to any of my notes.”
“Your mother wouldn’t have been able to write a reply without asking for someone’s help. She was too proud to ask me. It made us go deeper into the betrayal I’d committed already, and which she paid for dearly. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you either.”
“Why?”
Signora Elias gave a gentle shrug. “Your mother has fixed ideas about most things, Alba, this we all know. I suppose that way she could ease her conscience without the threat of your father finding out. She couldn’t risk you telling him anything either.” Signora Elias shook her head as if wiping away the thought. “What I’m trying to say is that although it may not have been obvious to you, your mother has never stopped loving you. This, I must tell you.”
Alba took another sip of tea, trying to let Signora Elias’s words slip into her with the same warmth.
“She wanted to be here last night. She’d bought her ticket. Told your father she was visiting her cousins in Genoa, but they had to operate immediately. She gave me this pressed rose for you.”
Signora Elias pulled out an envelope from her bag and handed it to Alba. Inside was a single red rose, flattened and dried. There was a faint memory of its scent clinging to its papery leaves. It was shocking more for the uncharacteristic sentimentality than even the love behind the gesture.
Alba nodded her head, but her lips fought off a reply.
* * *
They walked to Rome Termini station to catch the train to Civitavecchia port, the streets shiny with the fallen rain now gleaming in the return of the summer sun. The air was clear and the tourists had returned to their steady gawking. The train led them through Rome to the west, creaking through Ostiense and then Trastevere. Alba felt a pang as they pulled out of Vittorio’s area, toward San Pietro, and decided to try and give him another call later. She would have liked to hear his voice before leaving. He might have reassured her that she would be back soon, though in truth she knew he would offer his own particular brand of sarcastic swirl about Sardinians and their mammas, which they’d both know not to be true in her case, but they would laugh together anyway. His humor always felt like a mini test. She liked the challenge of it, even if she’d never shake the sense that it was his gauge of people’s intelligence, an armory of defense to monitor the worthiness of a possible friend. Leonardo had passed with flying colors.
They pulled into the port and the passengers disembarked. Signora Elias walked at a measured pace. It made Alba feel anxious and relieved at the same time, drawing out the inevitable. As they approached the ferry Alba spied a line of pay phones. She signaled to Signora Elias and she nodded in reply.
Alba dipped her hand into her pocket for some gettoni, thick coins needed for the pay phone. At last her fingers wrapped around the ridges. She lifted it out, slipping it into the slot, watching the telephone symbol at its center being swallowed into the machine. It rang. She pictured Vittorio’s phone in the corner of the room, surrounded by last night’s bottles no doubt. He’d wanted her to stay with him last night after the performance. She’d wanted to fall into him too. But after Raffaele gave her the news she couldn’t relax into their plan. She’d watched him be swept up with a group from their year, with a loose promise of connecting later, but time slipped away. Raffaele had walked her home. Back in her room she’d squeezed a few things into her bag. She’d reached for the shutters to close up her room properly before she left. The aqueduct had looked resplendent in the rays of the dawn, hitting the tiny bricks against the troubled gray sky full of summer rain behind. A minute angle ensured that water ran hundreds of kilometers along this aqueduct for those ancient Romans. It felt no different with her family and her own trajectory; one shift and she too was trickling away.
She hung up. Then tried again.
Nothing.
She replaced the handset, feeling like she was already walking on a moving deck.
The sun began its descent as the passengers boarded.
“Do let us sit outside before it gets too dark and cold, si?” Signora Elias asked.
Alba nodded. Fresh air sounded good, away from the crowds and traffic driving onto the hold, full of the first loads of holidaymakers at the start of the summer season on the island. They chose a metal bench toward the bow.
As the ship pulled out of the port, the amber light dipped through midnight blues and now etched toward the purple black of night.
“When Celeste and I graduated from Santa Cecilia, I remember coming home under not too different circumstances. It felt like everything I had worked for was at risk of slipping away somehow.”
“That’s how I feel.”
“Whether you’re an eighteen-year-old with rebellion in your heart who doesn’t know how to fight other than through music, or a young woman at the start of a very promising career, or an old woman sitting beside her protégée, feeling like everything she’d ever done had led her to this point—perhaps there’s perfection in every moment.”
“I long to look at the world through your eyes.”
Alba looked across at Signora Elias, the ink of night around them, her eyes twinkling in the soft light of the lamps on deck. The air was brisk now. It made Alba’s eyes water a little.
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Alba. I just try to always steer my ship—if you’ll pardon the metaphor given our current environment—because in our business it’s essential you stay open to surprise.”
“As a concept I kind of understand that, but have no idea what it will actually feel like. Right now I’m trying not to panic about how I’m going to pay the rent next month.”
“Perhaps some things are far beyond our control?”
Alba looked at Signora Elias’s expression. She�
��d missed her wistful smile lit with mischief.
“Why don’t you talk to me about my favorite old chestnut?”
“Music?”
“Actually, I thought I might distract you by asking about love?”
Alba felt her eyebrow lift in mock defense. She wanted not to be thinking about what Vittorio was doing now. Why he hadn’t called to ask if everything was alright. Or swung by her apartment. He knew the situation felt like an emergency to her. He was celebrating her with his friends. Where had he been all day when she’d try to reach him?
“It’s clear that you two are intertwined deeply.”
“Vittorio loved meeting you. I could tell. He’s normally quite aloof when he first meets people. Not with you.”
“I dare say he misses his grandmother or some such. I don’t have quite the effect on young men as I used to.”
She cackled at herself. Her laughter eased and they took a couple of breaths looking at the thin black line of the horizon smudged into the smatter of stars. The sounds of the water rising up against the sides of the ship as it cut through sloshed beneath the silence.
“I fell in love at the accademia,” Signora Elias continued. “I fell into someone with such a force it almost knocked me off course.” She giggled. “I’m sticking firm to my metaphor.”
Alba smiled a soft laugh. It was a tonic to be seated beside her mentor again. It made her forget why she was returning and filled her with the same courage it had taken all those years ago to leave in the first place.
“Tell me,” Alba said, tentative.
“Oh goodness, you don’t want an old woman boring you with her stories.”
“Actually there’s nothing I’d rather listen to.”
Signora Elias reached for her hand and squeezed it.
“I’m excited for you, Alba. For me, love had a way of complicating the business, my practice. I found it so very hard to divide my attention. And there were other concerns too, but primarily sharing my lover with my instrument, and theirs, was, well, in the end, impossible. We stayed friends. For this I am eternally grateful. But at the time, my heart was split.”
Seeing Alba’s expression Signora Elias’s tone softened. “Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying you and Vittorio will necessarily meet the same challenges.”
“I think there’s a price to pay when entering into a love affair with a musician, no?”
“Perhaps. Sometimes they become your secret lover, and they yours, because the true love is music. And we know how much time that requires. It leaves little space for another.”
Her tone dipped into a quiet melancholy, cool, simple. Alba had never heard her speak like this before. Her words were little shards of light illuminating thoughts Alba had witnessed inside herself and hidden.
“What’s he like, Alba?”
“We understand each other.”
“And he is clearly in awe of you.”
Alba tried to let her words soothe but the ferry gave a lurch and her balance left with it.
Signora Elias smiled, giving the flattened hair on top of her head a quick stroke, then adjusting one of the pins in her bun.
“How am I going to face my family?” Alba whispered. “I can’t shift the feeling this is all my fault somehow.”
Signora Elias’s expression relaxed. “You’ll face them with the same quiet courage you’ve always tapped into. You’ll try to accept that their health and happiness is not your responsibility alone. We all have a part to play in our own lives. Your family might try to suck you back in, they might be angry that you have returned.”
“I’m not sure I’ll cope.”
“Maybe only fools believe they are invincible? I believe you’ll do what you came to do without forgetting what you’ve worked for all these years.”
Alba fought her brittle resolve against tears.
“You’re still happy to stay with me?” Signora Elias asked, her voice a gentle embrace.
“I don’t think I could be back in Ozieri without that.”
Signora Elias smiled. Alba watched a trail of unspoken reassurances, thoughts, stories track through her eyes, but her mentor kept them locked on pause, withdrawing, as always, from the desire to offer unsolicited lectures. She stood. “Now, I think that’s quite enough chatter from this old lady for one night, no? Do you mind if I take to our cabin? I’d like to rest a little before I see the dawn over my favorite strip of sea, if you don’t mind?”
They tucked into their small cabin beds, the boat churning through the night, the rise and fall lulling Alba toward a second night of elusive sleep. When she took back to the deck, exhausted from grappling with the hope of getting some proper rest, the sun was rising. In the near distance rose the rocks of home, the spray of turquoise by the shore, the darkening blues of the deep reaching out to her. Three years she’d hidden this view from her mind. Now it greeted her as diffident and beautiful as she’d scarce allowed herself to remember.
Everyone she met in Rome informed her of her island’s beauty, as if, being from there, she might have been too close to notice. Perhaps they were right, but the sensation of being educated about her home by outsiders never sat well with her. Now, in the sun’s ease toward the height of morning, hidden within the metallic slosh of the water below and the rumble of the engine, she allowed herself to cry. All these years her mother had kept her love secret, whispered after her but never let it be known. Alba had left the tyranny of her father, leaving her mother to suffer it tenfold. Without Alba to bully, his rage would have fallen to her mother. Alba felt her heart ache, twisting with guilt, with anger, with that constant need to unshackle herself from the responsibility of his behavior, to escape.
It’s what Vittorio whispered into her ear after lovemaking. Her Faraway, he’d call it. As if this pull were a phantom trailing her, another spirit he’d come to love. He’d honor it even. Sometimes he’d tease her, ask it questions. If they were at dinner he’d ask it what it would like to eat. She’d always reply how did he know it was an it and not a she? That would make his wry smile wrap his face in light and she’d feel adored. He’d run a finger over hers. Sometimes lean over and take her bottom lip between his. It would have been easier to not feel the allure of disappearing with his kisses. It was bittersweet bliss and terror.
Now, the galloping in her chest increased. She thought about her brothers, the look on her father’s face, her inability to picture or plan for the conversations that would need to happen, or the Sardinian silences she’d have to rise over, step through, destroy. A concerto could be practiced, a sonata honed, scales were the ladders toward harmonic heaven. But this? How could she practice for this? There were no rules, no repetitions, no quiet study to be returned to, no solace. She hung on to the unexpected nature of performance. The way she’d leave her practice in the wings. They way she’d let the music carry her, staying in tune with her piano, allowing each moment to ripple through her and escape, without control, or judgment, but with the freedom to let the truth ring out.
Truths on Sardinian land felt far more dangerous.
* * *
Ozieri’s hospital was a disinfected white. The nurses were starched, the floors and walls gleamed the same color. The air was crisp and bitter with ammonia. People talked in hushed tones. The nurses’ white leather clogs squeaked along the plastic underfoot.
Alba turned a corner and then another, feeling like she was treading a labyrinth. A huddle of figures clouded the end of a far corridor. She recognized the two boys in an instant. They were taller, broader, but had the unmistakable profile of her brothers, that familiar shuffle, the hapless hunch. They looked up as she saw them. Her muscles injected with adrenaline. Her footsteps sounded loud, but her bag no longer felt heavy. Marcellino reached her in stunned silence. His eyes were red. He looked ashen, far older than the three years past. She stood before him, wanting to apologize but not sure for what or why, angry that those feelings crept up like ivy, her legs hollow, brittle, desperate to feel the ground
but failing.
He shook his head. Disbelief? Refusal?
His voice was an exhausted croak.
“You’re too late. She’s gone.”
20
Con dolore
with sadness
The sensation of her body falling away like scurries of sand began at her feet. It traveled up her spine, dissipating her form until all she could feel was the thud in her ears and the steady crescendo squeal of a thin high C. The voices along the corridor fogged into muffle. Familiar faces looked up at her now, friends and other family members who held guard outside her mother’s room. She walked past her brother. Zia Grazietta’s face sharpened into view. Alba turned away from her. She stepped into the room. There were hands reaching out to her, consoling or forbidding, Alba couldn’t tell.
Her brother Salvatore looked up from beside the bed and locked eyes with her. His face was wet. Alba looked down at her father, his head buried in her mother’s limp hand. His sobs pierced the violent silence, body shaking. One of her uncles was beside him, holding his shoulder. Her grandfather stood with his back to her, blocking any view of her mother. The room was dipped in a blue light, as it fought through the pale blue curtains. It sharpened the sensation of watching everything unfold before her as if through a pane of glass more tangible still. This was an enactment of grief, someone else’s room, a perfect composition of a family torn. Perhaps if she blinked the figures would disperse, disappear.
Her father looked up. His expression struck her with a brutal blow of sadness. Alba watched the men around him straighten, as if he might charge across the bed, across his dead wife, and send his daughter to join her. Words fired out of his mouth now, sparks of sound that enveloped Alba in a hurricane of grief.
“What are you doing here?” he whispered, taut.
“Mamma,” is all she could manage before her own tears fought out.
A Roman Rhapsody Page 21