“It is, Fresu. You will touch our students deeply. Whether they like it or not, is none of our business, that’s their own journey. You will show them the road, but they will have to walk it.”
“If I can teach them half as well as you did me, that will be a bigger achievement than watching the audience in Milan stand for my version of Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto.”
“I can’t promise that, Fresu. But it is a good choice you’ve made. We’ll talk soon.”
He kissed her on both cheeks, leaving his Gauloise-scented breath in the air as he did so. Then he turned and raised his hand for a taxi. As he climbed in, Alba noticed his movements were more angular than she’d remembered, his age apparent all of a sudden, his shoes large ones for her to fill.
Raffaele Sanna
Via Corso
Emmanuele, 19
28763 Milano
18 August 1988
Darling Alba,
How was Zurich? I sent two colleagues to watch you. They said your playing was sublime. I told them you still owe me commission for helping you all those years ago.
I’ve met The One.
His name is Luca. He’s from Switzerland. I’ve been able to tell him things I’d have been too terrified of doing with others. The drug trial doctors have altered my dose now and they’re really happy with how I’m reacting. Still early days, but they’re really hopeful. I celebrated the fact, obviously. With said Swiss-man. When do I get to see your face next? You need to meet him.
All my love,
Ra
x
Alba picked up the pot with one of Natalia’s handmade holders and poured them both a generous shot into two mismatched cups. They took them back out into the living room. The Roman afternoon was warming toward Alba’s favorite time of day, the laid-back bronze light of those early summer evenings, that delicious time between afternoon and evening where the bars would line with aperitivo drinkers taking a moment to slip with ease toward dinner. She loved that hiatus, it was the time she’d stop her daily practice and afford herself some fresh air, either on her terrace or in the courtyard below, sometimes, if time allowed, sipping an aperitivo herself at one of her locals. It was a syrupy pause, like the edge from sleep to awake, the golden breath before the start of a new movement during a piano concerto.
“When do you go away next?” Natalia asked, leaning on the counter.
“Next month, after the concert here.”
Natalia stepped over and wrapped her arms around Alba. Their hug was unhurried.
“It’s so good to see you. Are you going to fill me with stories of the Austrian audiences? Tell me about that awful rich guy in New York who keeps hounding you? No, what about that one in Madrid you told me about?”
“No stories to report.”
Natalia untwisted her bun and wrapped a new one off her face. “Shall I pretend I don’t want you to meet the kind of lover who will sweep you off your feet?”
“Please.”
“Shall I pretend I don’t notice you not sharing all the gory details because you think I can’t cope with them, and secretly I feel really left out?”
Natalia pulled out the sugar from the cupboard by the stove.
“That would be nice, yes,” Alba replied, feeling the warmth of familiarity fill her. This was the only home where she felt she belonged. Even after all these years, the gaping hole left by her family could only be filled here and it ached that she couldn’t come over as often as she’d like, sometimes for several months at a time.
“Fine, I’ll blame it on the oxytocin,” Natalia continued. “I swear when I feed Matteo, I literally feel high, woozy. It’s a pretty addictive sensation I have to say.” She spoke of her youngest son and her face took on that blanched tenderness it always did when she did so. He was the fourth of the brood, and, Natalia had promised, the last. In the room down the corridor, Alba could hear the other three squabbling through play.
They flopped down onto Natalia’s huge sofa, plump with cushions of various shades and fabrics. Something sharp poked into Alba’s leg. She pulled out a windup toy from underneath it. Matteo’s eyes lit up. He charged across to her, grabbed it, and then drove it over every piece of furniture.
“I’m so excited to play with you, Alba,” Natalia began. “How long has it taken for this to actually happen?”
“Too long,” Alba replied.
“My orchestra has been great,” Natalia added. “Schedule-wise we’ve actually managed to make it work this time. Leo’s so busy at the conservatorio and with his orchestra that sometimes it feels like we’re long-lost relatives.”
One of their daughters’ cello music swelled, doing little to drown the bubbling conflict in the next room or Matteo’s gurgling sounds of a motorbike engine.
“Your home makes my apartment seem like a morgue when I go back.”
“Swap for a day or two anytime you like, my friend!” Natalia gave her cup a swirl and downed the contents. “So Goldstein just laid it out like that, out of the blue?”
“Exactly.”
“So does this mean I get to cook for you more often?”
“You can twist my arm.”
The sounds of the front door heaving open sent the children running out into the corridor. Leonardo stepped into the living room, small children attached to him like barnacles.
“Look who it is, famiglia! Zia Alba has arrived at last! Do you have any idea the musical royalty in this room, my friends? Of course you don’t! You just care about whether I brought you cakes from our favorite bakery, no?”
Squeals in the affirmative.
“Which I did!”
More shrieks.
“I spoil them, Alba, so that I get to be the favorite,” Leo said, kissing her on each cheek. “Natalia is wrangling all day and I swan in like one of those cowboys who’s found Californian gold. Cheap, no? Works a treat.”
His face creased into his olive-skinned grin, eyes twinkling more than before, as he swung his viola off his shoulder and placed it down with care in a safe corner by the piano at the far end of the room. The children ran after him into the kitchen, then reappeared with fresh crème puffs in hand, marching back to their various stations. He placed the cardboard tray of the remainders down on the coffee table, moving aside a pile of books and the fruit bowl loaded with medlars and tangerines.
“May I sit between my two favorite ladies?” he asked, plonking himself down and taking a big bite of his puff. A little icing sugar powdered the tip of his nose. Natalia signaled for him to wipe it. He kissed her instead and left the remains on hers.
“You really are a pig, Leo,” Natalia said, through a giggle. “Those children will not eat their dinner now.”
“Just scoring points because I’m feeling guilty I left them for a few days for work last week, right?” Leonardo looked over at Alba with mock guilt.
“You’re going to let me cook for you tonight, si?” Leo said, rubbing his hands together.
“The two of you seem to be fighting over the challenge.”
“Did you read that huge spread on Vittorio the other week? The article was like five pages long.”
Natalia shot Leonardo a look.
“Come on, Natalia, enough time has passed now. He was a shitty boyfriend, yes, but that can’t take away from his talent, no?”
“You think he’s saying the same about you, Leo?” Natalia prodded.
“I try not to care. I do miss him sometimes.” He twisted back toward Alba. “Am I being insensitive?”
“It was a long time ago,” she replied. “Besides, I love it when you get all soppy.”
Alba almost believed her laid-back performance. That much was true. It had been hard to ignore the rise of Vittorio. She liked to think it was just as hard for him to ignore her own. She ought to thank him in part perhaps; his betrayal had fueled her commitment to her music even deeper than it already was.
“Ignore him, Alba, he just wishes he had a four-page spread too.” Alba smiled at her fri
end. Her cheeks were rosy despite the rambling mess around her, seated beside a man who did everything to make sure his family was happy and well cared for. Behind her, the walls were lined with snaps of her and Leonardo in various exotic and remote places of the globe where they’d traveled to share, teach, and learn music with children. Alba’s favorite was of them in the humid forests of South America, surrounded by a crowd of grinning, budding musicians. She remembered receiving their postcards throughout their travels, an almost ignored twinge of envy of their freewheeling adventures whilst her schedule became ever more full and demanding. They’d set their own timetables, taken time to explore the world, expanding their comfort zones, and returning deeper in love than they’d left. They wore their lives with honesty, a breezy acceptance of life’s fluctuating rhythms. She admired them that, and always left their home bolstered, replenished somehow, even if she didn’t give voice to those secretive lurks of jealousy that pierced her mind, not for a family that she’d never wished to have, nor a domesticity she never chased, but because unlike her, they still held control of their daily lives, despite the mess, the anarchy, the never knowing whether the bills would always match their income; their buoyancy was never threatened.
In contrast, Alba clung to her packed schedule, the pressure of having to deliver: The tight turnaround between concerts was addictive, it made her feel like she was in a race and winning. Yet after the drastic dip of adrenaline that followed the ebb of celebratory dinners and drinks after a concert, a recurring emptiness threatened. Little anchored her beyond her music. Without its song, her closeted memories fought for attention, the silent, brutal rejection from her family ached, quashed only by a passionate return to work and the music that provided the sole way to express all that was too painful to revisit away from her instrument. It propelled her to chase more commitments. Freedom lay onstage alone, by her keys; through the paired-back preludes of Ravel, or woven into Bach’s thoughtful melancholy, complex intertwining of crisscrossing themes, a mathematical breakdown of life in all its brutality, pain, and beauty. There it was safe to visit these feelings of quieted grief that she kept cloistered with fastidious care. In contrast to the music she lived onstage, real life could feel like a bland white wash.
Matteo drove his truck over the precarious pile of magazines on top of the table. They tripped onto the floor, the center one opening to a large glossy picture of a man standing by a window of an opulent palace.
“There, you see!” Leonardo laughed, pulling himself off the sofa and grabbing the picture. “Speak of the devil. Always had that knack of popping up, no?”
He twisted Vittorio’s portrait toward him. “You’re right, Natalia. I am jealous. Tell me I can do the brooding thing as good as him, no?” He switched the picture back to the two women and pulled his hammy version of sultry. They laughed. Alba loved pretending she didn’t notice the way Vittorio’s age had brought out the best in his features. She loved pretending that she hadn’t read every word of that article before throwing it away, recording the name of his opera star wife, Clare Veritiero, the British-Italian starlet taking the opera scene by force, an elfin woman with the voice and charisma that made reviewers quiver. Her eyes lingered on the headline and subheading:
VITTORIO DEL PIERO ON HIS MOST REWARDING ROLE TO DATE: PLAYING ONE HALF OF THE OPERA WORLD’S ADORED POWER COUPLE
23
Da capo
a directive to the performer to go back to the beginning of the composition
Alba stepped inside the large double doors of the accademia. The receptionist called out to her as she reached her window.
“May I help you, Signora?”
“Yes. I’m here for Dimitri, he’s expecting me.”
“Are you Signora Fresu?”
Alba nodded. The receptionist’s cheeks flushed, perhaps with embarrassment for not having recognized her. Alba was familiar with the look. It was a caged knowing, a gaze with a childlike openness and closeted masking at the same time. It hadn’t become a comfortable sensation to witness even though over the past decade it was a regular occurrence. Nevertheless she gave the receptionist a polite smile.
“He’ll be waiting on the first floor, Signora,” the receptionist replied, placing down the handset from her ear after calling him.
Alba walked on through the next set of double doors, which opened onto the courtyard. The familiar patch of grass greeted her. The space reverberated with sounds from the adjoining conservatorio. Celestial marimba from the percussion rooms on the ground floor ran up the pinkish stone toward the sky like invisible footsteps racing up the plaster, vibrating the air with pentatonic glissando. Hands on an upper floor flew over a short passage upon an organ. Cutting through it all, the vibrato of a young opera student from the smallest rooms on the uppermost floor rose like a streak of silver.
It was good to be home.
Alba took a left and walked up the wide staircase, forced to take in the iron gated lift where Vittorio often jammed the cubicle on purpose by trying to open the door a little before it reached the requisite floor so he could kiss her, whilst furious grumbles of other students trying to fix it echoed down from the upper floors. The memory smarted. She let it evaporate; a half-hearted phantom worn to nothing, its host killing it with a gentle but determined rationing of regret. With each step that wound around the shaft Alba felt the pictures slip away, back into the neat pile snapped shut inside the metal case she’d fashioned somewhere upon the forgotten shelves of her mind, the place everything was stored for some other day, some other life. Not the one she had now, the world-trotting existence she’d enjoyed these past years, the lovers she relished like delicious meals, for sustenance, with reverence, appreciation, but void of the cloying claustrophobia of intimacy, not a whisper of the delectable marriage with her music, that ephemeral place where she lived in fullness. Her lovers didn’t drink her essence as Vittorio had. That was something that she’d made a pact to never repeat.
The office to the accademia entrance stood before her now. She opened it and a woman with an explosion of black curls greeted her with open arms and a warm but firm handshake.
“An honor, Signora Fresu, we are so happy to have you here!” Her tempo was brisk, excitable. “Maestro Goldstein has spoken so highly of you. Welcome.”
Alba nodded in thanks as another man came out of an adjoining office, his glasses perched on the end of his nose, extending his hand in welcome alongside his colleague. Then Goldstein appeared, triumphant.
“So she decided to show up on time for once, yes?”
His staff laughed loudly.
“Manuela,” he began, talking to the lady con brio, “bring in some coffees to my office, yes? Let’s ease the signorina into the day, no?”
He turned toward the room and opened the double doors into it. Alba had never been in here as a student: the secret meeting room of professors only. Large framed pictures of all the past presidents hung at regular intervals along the fabric-lined walls. The raised golden patterns upon it caught the light from the window at the end streaming the space with sunbeams. At the center of the pristine parquet floor stood a vast mahogany table, its top polished to gleaming, high-backed chairs around it.
“Rather grand, yes? I remember sitting around this talking about you, Fresu.”
Alba looked up at the chandelier, crystals dripping with sparkles.
“This is where we will meet regularly with other members of the accademia, yes? We schedule it to coincide for when you are here teaching so it won’t interfere with your scheduling, don’t worry. Follow me.”
He led them back out through the reception and down the corridor to his corner office. She stepped inside. The familiar blue walls greeted her, the smell of his smoke engrained within them. The window was open to the sounds from the street below rising up to smudge with the strings that could now be heard from the practice rooms above.
“It’s good to be back, I see,” he said, reading her inscrutable expression in the way only he
knew how.
“It’s like yesterday and once upon a time all at once.”
“Careful, we’ll be mistaking you for a quantum physicist.”
“I should like that,” she replied with a broad smile.
Manuela entered with two little porcelain cups of coffee.
She placed the tray down on his desk with care. Goldstein nodded and she left, flicking Alba a sunny smile as she passed.
“Without Manuela, Alfonso, and Alessandra, this place would be sinking. They are special people. Treat them with care and they can’t do enough for you. Here, down this coffee, it will stop me talking to you like it’s the first time you’ve been here.”
Alba sprinkled a little sugar into her cup and twisted it in to dissolve. She drank it in two sips.
“The students are eager to meet you. We have an interesting selection. Some very serious types, they’re traveling from different cities once a month to be here, starting out in the business, you know, a few concerts here and there of course, a little teaching maybe. One of our graduating class has decided to relocate to Rome. Quite an interesting young man. Born in Russia, raised in some industrial town in the States, no less. He makes my hair stand on end sometimes but he urged me to let him have a few sessions with you, and, perhaps a little selfishly, I agreed because I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to have you work with a few people before you start properly in September? He could do with some guidance from someone with a quiet rebellion inside.”
Alba raised an eyebrow. Goldstein chuckled.
“So you are awake, I thought I’d talked you into silence.”
“I have missed you, Goldstein,” Alba replied, “more than I care to admit.”
“Excellent.”
“And I’d be happy to start with this Russian.”
He opened his office door and they climbed to the next floor toward his main practice room. They stepped inside and he pushed the shutters wide open, just beyond the familiar terraces that flanked her and Goldstein’s lessons. The two Steinways gleamed, as if expectant.
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