“Go home, Alba.” A friend beside Bruno placed a gentle hand on his back.
“You’ve come to gloat?”
His tear-stained face folded into a grimace that made the volume of Alba’s drumming heart pound louder in her ears. Her tears felt cold on her cheeks. Someone moved in front of her now, blocking her mother’s body further still, forcing Alba into a web of memories that interlaced through childhood, the silence of her time in Rome, the look of Giovanna’s face when she’d first heard her play, the realization that her mother never deemed her enough, always less than what a daughter should be. The thoughts cloyed; a spider’s sticky silk.
She was ushered outside the room. “Your father is very upset, Alba,” she heard a voice say. “Leave him now, you’ll have your own time to say goodbye.”
The door closed behind her.
“You should go, Alba,” Marcellino murmured.
Alba looked at him, the stubble prickling his chin with newfound manhood, which he wore with as much grace as his adolescence.
“I came as soon as I knew.” Her words trickled out, the last droplets after a tap has been twisted shut.
“She never recovered after you left, Alba. You should leave now before Babbo starts into you. It’s only a matter of time.”
Grazietta pulled on her arm now. Alba’s body was being walked away from her father, her limbs like thin matchsticks balanced with precarious hope, click-clacking away from her dead mother.
Outside the sun blinded her with a mocking life-giving white light.
“I would have you stay with me, Alba,” Grazietta began, “but you know your father. I don’t know what he’d do.” Alba turned toward the little woman. Her round wired glasses perched on the middle of her nose, her hair scraped back into a low bun, streaked with more gray than Alba had remembered. She saw that Grazietta was carrying her travel bag. She reached for it now.
“I’m so sorry, Alba,” her voice fought out in scratches, breaking through the simmer of throaty tears. “Oh, my poor friend.” Her cry loosened. “They said with the aneurysm she suffered it was quick. She wouldn’t have been in pain for too long. I dreamed this all last night. I just knew.” Her fingers clutched the wooden rosary beads in her hand, the silver figure of Jesus swinging in time with her breath. She fished out a tissue from inside her dark gray apron, which lay above her layers of skirts and cotton petticoats. Alba watched a droplet fall on her long sleeve shirt, tiny white daisy patterns speckling the black cloth.
“I have somewhere to stay,” Alba replied, wondering why she did so, as if this woman needed to know, when everyone would rather she’d not appeared in the first place. Perhaps it was her way of assuring Grazietta that she had no intention of doing whatever her father asked her to do. That his grief appeared to leave her untouched when in reality that vision of him fought for her attention like a skipping record scratching over a two-measure refrain. Grazietta kissed her on each cheek and left Alba standing blanched in the scorching morning sun.
A sound of hurried steps drew her round. Mario was squinting beside her, panting from running.
“I’m so sorry, Alba,” he puffed. “I got your dad here just in time. We got the call at the officina. Scrambled over. I’m so, so sorry.”
She sniffed his words for the snide she’d once been accustomed to hearing from him. There wasn’t any. She hadn’t noticed her own slide toward adulthood as much as she did his.
“Grazie.”
He looked down at her bag.
“Where will you go? I heard he wasn’t too pleased to see you.”
She shook her head, as if waving off the memory, a dog spraying off water from its drenched coat. She wished she wasn’t crying. “I just want to see her.”
She felt his arm reach around her. Her body crumpled toward the tarmac beneath her. She didn’t remember how long she stayed down there, her breath wheezing out through tears. She wished he’d been colder, snubbed her like the rest, then the tears wouldn’t have come, then she could have walked away in silence. Saved this collapse for the privacy and safety of Signora Elias’s home.
“We’re all at the house tomorrow of course. I can keep your father upstairs maybe when you get there. Give you some time with her?”
Alba nodded, disoriented. She stood up, furious for accepting his comfort, embarrassed, snot salty on her lips. She wiped it away with her hands, her cheeks puffy to the touch.
“You want me to walk with you?”
She shook her head before he’d finished the question. A young woman approached him from behind and snaked her arm around him. Alba took in her bright face, a cascade of curls reaching her shoulders, an effortless lightness to her gait. It came as no surprise to see Mario with a girl like this. She leaned her head in toward his chest.
“This is Antonietta, Alba,” he said, trying to hide his pride in light of the situation but failing.
Antonietta held out her little hand and Alba shook it, wondering what the point was in these perfunctory motions of politeness. All she wanted was to curl up in Signora Elias’s spare room, caring nothing for her tear-matted hair, her stinging eyes, the vulnerable puffiness of her face.
“I’m so sorry,” Antonietta added, her voice resonating with a youthful innocence. She looked back up at Mario as if the statement needed qualifying.
Alba picked up her bag.
“I meant what I said, Alba,” Mario added, urgent.
Something flickered across Antonietta’s face. Perhaps it wasn’t customary for her boyfriend to have conversations without her at any time.
“Grazie,” Alba said, then turned and left without a goodbye.
* * *
A line of people stood outside number 27 Via Galvani the next day. Some hushed as Alba walked past them. She ignored their mutterings about whether it was her or not, whether she’d be allowed in or not as the sounds rippled into the air underscoring the women’s murmur of rosary. Her brother Salvatore saw her as she approached.
“Babbo’s in there. He’s not in his right mind,” he warned, shifting from foot to foot nervous of the inevitable fight ahead.
“I want to see Mamma,” Alba answered, feeling her eyelids blink over her eyes, rubbed dry of tears, aching with the night’s elusive sleep.
“Maybe wait a little while?” he answered.
“I’m going to say goodbye to Mamma.”
“He’ll kill you.”
“Alba!” She turned toward the voice. Mario was weaving through the crowd. “I thought I might be too late. Let me go in and Salvatore and I will take your dad upstairs with some of the men.”
“What are you talking about, Mario?” Salvatore asked, fearful.
“Let your sister say goodbye, for Christ’s sake.”
Before Salvatore could argue back Mario strode forward and into the house. He peeked out of the doorway soon after and nodded to Alba. She stepped toward the door she didn’t know if she’d ever see again. She crossed the threshold, prayers incanted in her periphery. Within, the atmosphere was still. She entered their front room. There the table, the sofas, their lace doilies untouched from when she left, the stone walls that had suffocated her. In the center two trellises topped with a thick light blue velveteen drape hung toward the tiles. On top was the casket. The lid was removed. Behind the coffin another drape hung, an embroidered image of the Madonna on a golden shield-shaped piece of material was sewn onto the center like a crest. The gray light rippled along the softness of the folds, alternating light and shadow. Two tall candleholders stood either side of the head of the coffin and two more toward the feet. The stands reached up toward the top of the casket and the candles rose high above that, topped with determined, unmoving flames.
Alba stepped forward. Her mother’s skin was smooth, eyes closed in a gentle sleep. The corners of her lips turned up at a near imperceptible curve. It was like looking at a statue of her mother, admiring the craftsmanship of the sculptor’s hand without comprehending that the figure described truth. This was the
artist’s impression of a woman named Giovanna, who spoke too quickly, thought a beat too late, was cowered and bolstered by superstition, threatened by anything new, fortified by wealth, betrayed by her daughter. Alba’s chest grew tighter, clawing into a blistering crimson sting. At once the sensation of watching the scene from a step outside her body invaded every particle of her being. The feelings rose and broke away, like a tide failing to reach the shore. In its place, a displacement, a quiet disappearance. The piercing guilt was muffled, happening to another Alba, a discombobulating emptiness in its place, a thoughtless floating feeling. The silence was heavy and horrific in its simplicity. Inside the wooden box was someone posing as her mother. A body, no more. The act of acknowledging the stark reality signaled the start of a rush of heat from her feet up to her chest, like the virtuoso runs of a Chopin, or the intricate unstoppable recapitulations of Bach’s fugues, melodies returning, overlapping echoed in new forms, rippling out from the original into new versions that held the core of the initial but permutated into something else, like a mother and her daughter, who begin at the same place but twirl into opposite directions. I was inside her once, Alba thought. She couldn’t have played without her, couldn’t have described the brutality of diffidence upon the keyboard without having betrayed her mother, without having rebelled against her wishes she wouldn’t be on the precipice of her concert pianist’s trajectory. Alba wouldn’t understand superstition, paranoia, God-fearing witchcraft wanderings without this woman. The body that was her mother offered no reply to her thoughts, no further suggestion of where her mind should land, how to understand what these bitter sensations were. Anger? Fear? This couldn’t be grief. It was too ambiguous. It wasn’t torrents of tears, loss, yearning for a sweet past that was no more. This was silence, brutal, nature’s impossible vacuum. Alba stood in it, gazing at the face that would once growl at her, switch-blading from ferocity to maternal overfeeding, to panic, to pride and back through the spectrum of her mother’s contradictory colors. A reeling guilt filled her bones. In her chest, a licorice black, bitter, furious.
The door opened.
“Hurry, Alba, he’s coming down,” Mario said, breathless.
Alba made to move but it was too late. Bruno was inside. He froze.
“What’s she doing here?” he whispered through clenched teeth.
“I came to say goodbye to Mamma, Papà,” she answered, without moving, her voice firm, belying the terror in her legs, the quivering in her stomach.
“You left this family. I watched your mother wither in front of me. Every day, a little piece of her changed. Her hair turned gray in a week after you left. This is what you did.”
“Come on, Babbo,” Marcellino murmured, “we’re all broken.”
“You won’t tell me what to do, you hear?”
That’s when her angry tears fell, currents running across her cheeks.
“I’m her daughter.”
“You left her. After all she did for you.”
Marcellino placed a quietening hand on Bruno’s shoulder. He flinched it off.
“Leave. Now.”
“She heard me play, Papà. She knew. You can’t take that away. However much you try.”
A few more men stepped inside. A priest followed them.
“Signor Fresu,” the priest began, “we must move to the cathedral now. It’s time.”
Bruno nodded, the men turning him away from the room. They filed out. Six other men stepped inside and Alba moved back toward the wall. She watched them lift the cover onto the coffin, then her mother onto their shoulders and out onto the street. Another came in and snuffed the candles. The singing began, a rhythmical rosary that followed the casket all the way to the cathedral, along the uneven stones of their vicolo, around sharp corners where the houses lined the streets close enough for neighbors to almost reach across the alley into the opposite window.
The cathedral was heaving. Everyone in Ozieri needed everyone else to know that they respected the Fresus. Her mother disliked many of the people inside, this Alba knew. What would she think of them all gaping at her now, eyes bowed, heads shaking, thanking the grace of God that they did not pass in her place.
The priest began the mass. Her brothers and father sat in the first pew. Alba scanned the crowd along the back of the cathedral filtering down the steps beyond the entrance of the piazzetta where more stood to pay their respects. Signora Elias was in one of the last pews. Alba slipped in beside her. Signora Elias reached for her hand and squeezed it. She’d dressed Alba that morning in the black clothes she had, rather than the shorts and T-shirts Alba had packed in haste before the crossing. Alba could smell Signora Elias’s perfume on the collar of the shirt she now wore.
A group of women sang beside the altar steps, their Sardinian melody haunting, simple. Alba felt the notes reach her like a memory. Her eyes scanned the congregation for Raffaele, who caught her eye from the opposite side. His wan smile was a brief tonic. On the opposite side stood Mario, beside Antonietta, her hand cradled in his.
The mass ended. The people left the pews and lined the church aisle, shuffling toward the Fresus at the far end by the altar, touching the hand of all the well-wishers, receiving the river of condolences, hand after hand. That’s when Alba saw the piano to the side of the altar steps hidden earlier by the singing women. She broke off from Signora Elias. She walked the side aisle of the cathedral, past the mini chapels of the once wealthy landowners of Ozieri, along the marble swirl underfoot. Past Madonnas, laughing Jesus, dying Jesus, mournful Jesus. Past the frescoes in the style of the Renaissance masters, others with the pomp of baroque, beneath the priest’s lectern, up narrow marble steps to a wooden perch, ornate with carved wooden frames, till she reached the instrument at last.
She lifted the lid. Her fingers ran over the silent notes. She pushed the stool a little farther back. Her wrists lifted. Her fingers eased into the nocturne she’d played to her mother that morning at Signora Elias’s. Her left hand rocked arpeggios like moonlit waves, the melody stark above. Onward the piece undulated, hopeful major chords, sinking back into the minors, flecks of grief. The sound rose like a crystal light, toward the high stone ceiling of the cathedral, echoing over the rumbles of voices that hushed to the sound.
The crescendo began, the melody yearning to be heard, swallowed into the left, rising above in octaves now, insistent, falling into echoes of the same, quieter, unanswered questions trebling into the stone. The left hand somber, a return to the quiet loss of the first simple rhythm just before a brief cascade of notes from high on the keyboard, a run of chords, tumbling with an inevitable, scurrying flow toward the base. Another chord followed, until at last, the unavoidable conclusion; simple, stark, pure, honest.
Like death itself.
Alba lifted her hands, her mother’s eulogy complete.
The silence filled with warm applause and tear-stained laughter. She looked up at the unexpected sound, feeling interrupted, revealed, craving the applause to stop. This hadn’t been her performance, it was the dedication she was banned from giving.
Raffaele was near her, his eyes glistening. She saw Mario across the opposite side of the aisle. She recognized that expression: the same as the one he’d revealed when he’d spied her practicing that day at Signora Elias’s. The frame was older, but the eyes shone with the naivety of that afternoon, as if they hadn’t quite understood what they’d seen, a quizzical curiosity. He held her gaze for a moment. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned away.
Then Alba’s eyes landed on her father’s. For a moment he may have been the man who told her stories to stop her being swallowed by fear in their wilderness. For a moment he might have been proud even. Then his eyes hardened, shiny onyx stones on the shore. Chopin couldn’t undo the years she’d chosen to be away, the years Giovanna had been too scared to reach her, the years Bruno had held fast to his belief that Alba’s choice to follow music was a deep snub against everything he’d worked to achieve for his family. Yet the
measures brought them to an equal plane of vulnerability. For a breath, father and daughter acknowledged what they had both lost. It wasn’t Giovanna alone. Alba watched the briefest hint of regret streak her father’s face. Then Bruno nodded at his audience. The moment dissipated as quickly as it appeared, droplets of rain evaporating after the storm.
* * *
That afternoon Signora Elias’s doorbell rang. She stood up from her seat on the terrace beside Alba where they shared a pot of tea with lemon. Silent sips, no hurry to mop up Alba’s grief, rather a simple seat inside it.
Raffaele followed Signora Elias onto the terrace after a little while. The friends held each other for a moment. He sat down beside Alba. “How long will you stay?”
“I don’t know. Everything feels frayed.”
“Of course.”
“I’ve paid a high price for following my music, Raffaele.”
“You’re not responsible for your mother’s death.”
“In my mind I know I shouldn’t feel that way. I don’t have anything but my music, Raffaele. If I leave Ozieri now I don’t know if I can ever return. Not with how my father and brothers are.”
“Sardinians don’t forget easily. We know that. But you didn’t take all that risk and stand on the precipice of success just to leave it all. Not now. That would be the real betrayal. You think that’s what your mother wanted?”
“Your friend speaks sense,” Signora Elias added. Alba watched her pour a cup for Raffaele. “Alba’s been asked to participate in the Chopin competition next month. I’m so very excited for you. The Signor de Moro called again this morning, I told you, didn’t I, Alba?”
Alba nodded.
“You must feel dizzy,” Raffaele began, “everything is coming at once.”
They drank in silence for a moment.
“Did you see how you changed that cathedral this morning, Alba? I’d never felt the atmosphere in there like that before. It was electric. Beautiful. Better than any speech a person could make. We all felt the love for your mother. Your hands spun a poem. I can’t do it justice.”
A Roman Rhapsody Page 22