A Roman Rhapsody

by Sara Alexander

  Dante’s voice dipped. “Alba, people will understand. Shifting it back a day or two is not going to ruin everything.”

  “Not for you, maybe, but these past weeks have been all headed to this point. Are you asking me to compartmentalize my grief? Run back, cry a bit, and then fly back and finish the shoot? It’s not like running out to a bakery, Dante. I don’t know how I’m going to get through today, let alone a live performance!”

  Her tears spurt now, a brusque swipe of anger and frustration.

  Dante knew better than to rush. “I hear you, Alba. Do you want me to come down? Would that help?”

  Alba wasn’t ready for anything from her life outside this world to interfere.

  “I owe Raffaele more than I can express.”

  Dante swallowed. Alba knew he was scrolling through ways to come to her aid, as always.

  “Take today to think about what you need,” he soothed. “Let me know and I’ll make it work.”

  “For once, Dante, I have to not do what I need. My needs are secondary to the entire team resting on me. I won’t be one of those prima donnas.” For some ridiculous reason Vittorio’s wife, Clare, sprinted to mind. The night before, Francesco had described one of her latest outbursts to Alba, as relayed to him by a colleague working at La Scala in Milan. The picture Vittorio painted started to sound much closer to what the woman was like in real life after all.

  “If you need a day or two you will not compromise your professionalism. Francesco will understand.”

  “I don’t want to make him understand. I need to finish what I promised to do, after much persuasion. I’m not a flake. I can handle this. But I can’t promise I can go back home, with all that entails and on top bury my best friend—that will break me, in more ways than you’ll ever understand—then zip back and finish the most courageous project I’ve ever agreed to take on.”

  Another pause.

  “Whatever you decide, Alba, will be the right decision.”

  “Yes.”

  She let her clipped answer hang in the vague white noise of the long-distance connection.

  “I’m sorry I snapped, Dante. Raffaele loved me more than you can know. I’m terrified.”

  Dante made a reassuring hum. “If you want to talk I’m here. You know that. I’ll support you whatever you need.”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  She placed the receiver down. Giulia stepped inside. If she had been her usual breezy self, Alba might not have cried, might not have crumpled into her arms, sobbing away Marianna’s work, makeup dripping off her face in blackened streaks. The young woman sat beside her, holding her with a wisdom beyond her years, Alba sensing neither embarrassment nor panic from her.

  “Thank you, Giulia,” she whispered, wiping her face with the tissue she’d given her moments ago. “Someone’s guided you well, Signorina, you’re seated with a woman collapsing but it doesn’t seem to faze you in the least. Certainly makes me feel a lot less pathetic, I can tell you that!”

  “I’ve told Francesco that you need some extra time this morning. The First’s rescheduled a few shots so they can accommodate that.”

  “Grazie. That was thoughtful.”

  “After everything you’ve taught me these past few weeks I think it’s the very least I can do.”

  Alba looked at the young woman and let her in a little more. What would her life have been like if she’d been able to be so open and composed with her elders?

  “Where’s Vittorio?” Alba asked, straightening. “I’d like to let him know what’s going on.”

  “I’ll send him to you, Maestra, when he gets in, I’ll tell Marianna to expect you too.”

  “You’re a sunbeam, Giulia. Thank you.”

  Once Marianna and Luigi had reapplied the image of made-up Alba to her face, she waited in her trailer. Not long after, Vittorio arrived. He stepped inside and wove his arms around her without a word. She buried her face into the space at the base of his neck.

  “I don’t want to cry again,” she murmured.

  “I don’t think it’s up to you, is it?”

  She pulled away and looked at him. There was a knock at the door. They stepped apart in an instant. Francesco popped his head around the frame. “Tesoro, I’m so so sorry, Giulia just told me. My darling, if you need to go, you need to go.”

  “Come on in, Francesco, please,” Alba replied. The three took seats upon the two sofas within.

  “I’m not going to do that to you, Francesco,” Alba began. “You’ve been so wonderful to me these past weeks, everyone has, there’s no way I’m putting that in jeopardy.”

  “He was your best friend, no?” Francesco asked.

  “And he would have understood. Of all people. Being there at this time won’t bring him back. If I’m to get through the performance I need to stay.”

  “I don’t want you to get through it,” Francesco replied, “I want you to feel comfortable, free, not clenching your teeth for my sake.”

  Alba met his eyes. The blue looked close to a pale gray in the suffused light of her trailer. She was touched by his genuine concern.

  “Grazie, Francesco, really,” she began, “but I know what’s best for me. That means sticking to the schedule. I’ve never let anything get in the way of my performances. I’m not going to start now.”

  She noted the men seated at an awkward angle to her decisiveness. If there had been any whisper of doubt, it evaporated then.

  “You are a consummate maestra,” Francesco cooed, kissing her hand. “I won’t forget this. And I am in debt. Of this there is no doubt.”

  Francesco stood up. “Take today to rest, Alba, we’ll reconvene tomorrow.”

  Alba rose to meet him. “I would like to go ahead as planned. The idea of being alone at the hotel fills me with dread. Keep me busy till I have to believe it. Please.”

  Francesco took her face in his hands and planted a soft kiss on her forehead. “You are a warrior. I don’t think I could do the same.”

  Alba felt a wan smile lift to the surface and retreat. Francesco left.

  Vittorio’s fingers traced a line across her shoulder blades. He kissed the back of her neck. “I’m here,” he said, his voice warmed honey. “Do you need to be alone?”

  “Not sure what I need other than to stay on track.”

  Her voice wavered then.

  He pressed her back onto his chest. She could feel his heart beating behind hers.

  Life pulsed on.

  * * *

  The day of the final performance arrived, proving to be the bolstering distraction Alba needed. Every fiber in her body was alert. There was no space within for a thought for anything other than the music, than the glorious finale of Vittorio’s composition, a powerful celebration of love in all its brutality and tenderness. This section of his composition described the years they’d been apart, Alba’s utter rejection of their relationship, a love kept sepulchred till now. Tonight she would be the conduit, and fill in the blanks with her own poetry, twisting the bravura of her interpretation around his celestial melodies so that the audience would alight with her.

  She’d asked Vittorio to not visit her in her dressing room. However much the past few weeks had thrown her off all recognizable rhythms, the habits before a performance were fixed. She took her time to warm up her entire body, easing into her usual stretches. Marianna and Luigi sprang into action after that. A crushed velvet gown hung upon the clothes rack beside a window that looked out onto the sea, easing toward sunset, the water purple-blue, the surrounding hills rising up to frame it. The neckline of the dress swooped across her clavicle revealing more skin than she was used to when she’d first tried it on at the initial fittings. It was cinched in at the waist and then escaped toward a moderate train. As the lights of her dressing room caught it, violet undertones crushed in the beams. It was the most glamorous thing she’d ever worn to perform in. No one but Francesco and his stylists could have convinced her to wear it.

  There was a knock
at the door. One of the backstage managers apologized for inconveniencing her and placed a green box on her table. “I’ve been asked to leave this for you, Maestra.”

  She nodded. He slipped back out. Tonight, an army of local crew ran backstage, adept at hosting concerts there. They were the regular team in charge of the summer seasons in Taormina and led the proceedings with a flurry of efficiency. She opened the box, thinking it would be a gift from Dante, alongside the copious bouquets he’d already sent to the hotel, the masseuse he’d arranged to visit her room, and the baskets of fresh fruits, luxurious piles of dates and figs and prickly pears ripened to perfection. She and Vittorio had eaten most of them after they’d made love last night, his mouth sweet and tangy when she’d kissed him afterward.

  Inside, a solitary glinting diamond sat on a bed of black velvet, refracting the bare bulbs surrounding her mirror. Beside it was a tiny scroll of paper.

  She unfurled it and read the message.

  Not an ultimatum, not a fence.

  Nothing other than how you make me feel;

  sparkling under pressure.

  Your,

  V.

  She’d promised to save all her flow of emotion for her piano. She promised she wouldn’t cave in to the wave of gratitude muddled in the murk of grief. She rose to her feet, as if the air would be thinner there, easier to breathe. She checked the clock upon the wall. There was plenty of time before she’d enter her preperformance concentration. Why did she forbid him from seeing her? It was ridiculous, superstitious, childish even. After all, in a moment they would be side by side, he upon his podium, unleashing the orchestra, setting the dancers alight with his music, she at his side singing out above the rest. She tied her silk dressing gown around her waist and left her room, winding down the corridors to his, which was one among the several trailers set up for the other musicians and dancers.

  She knocked at the door. No answer.

  He wouldn’t mind if she slipped in. She turned the handle and pushed the door open a little. His lights were on, his suit hung on the rack. She could hear the patter of water coming from his shower. She brushed away her instinct to step inside with him, that would be no way to repay Marianna’s and Luigi’s attentive creations. She hovered for a moment, waiting to surprise him.

  The sound of a woman’s laughter lifted from the bathroom.

  She froze.

  A jealous imagination spidered out of control. His murmurs now. She knew those tones. They sang in her ear, under her sheets, cut through the dark inside and out. She needed to leave but her body had short-circuited a breath ago.

  Then the door flung open.

  A naked Giulia tumbled out.

  Clouds of soapy steam fanned around her; Venus emerging from the waves.

  It wasn’t until Vittorio followed that the couple realized they had a visitor.

  Alba’s mouth opened without sound. Giulia grabbed a towel. It covered one breast and part of her abdomen but little else.

  A clumsy snapshot.

  Giulia started babbling something like excuses, apologies, embarrassed whispers filling the air Alba left behind her, as her body led her out of there, back past the huge columns rising up toward the far end of the performance space, as she wove through the walkways past the costume trailer, the dancers’ dressing-room trailers, bubbling with excited chatter, the silhouettes of stretching limbs inside. She didn’t answer when several of the local crew asked her if she needed anything, forgotten echoes in a distant past. Her heart pumped vicious beats, a runaway orchestra; the juvenile handling of an allegro, out of control, full of manic bravado.

  Two women from the costume team stepped her into the gown and zipped it up. Several stage managers came in to tell her Signor del Piero was wishing to talk to her. She refused his audience, thankful that the barricade of crew was working—he didn’t attempt banging on her door.

  After half an hour a stage manager led her out of her room. He stood beside her in the darkened wings. Vittorio walked on from the opposite side of the stage. The audience was electric. It sounded high on the glorious evening, hugged in antiquity, gazing at the stage illuminated like a jewel, and beyond the wave of coast, a glassy sea, and the red ball of sun dipping into it sending streaks of gold across their faces. When the stage manager nodded for her to enter the applause drowned her like a wave. The lights glared in her face, making her feel more pale than she did already. Behind her the columns rose, their red brick deepening in the rays.

  Thousands of people from all over the island and the mainland had come to witness this glorious illusion. Vittorio lifted his arm toward her, the ringmaster to his trained lion. She felt her spine prickle to pounce. His eyes shone black against the light, malevolent marbles. The applause swelled, tightening the vice, as she sat caught between the orchestra and the crowd. An A note was twanged, hummed, plucked, as the strings and wind instruments tuned toward the same destination; many versions of the same tone, a collection of half-truths.

  They stopped on Vittorio’s command.

  A wave of silence rushed over the audience.

  Alba sat inside the quiet, a breath outside herself, willing her shell to perform. The music was not their love affair. It was the seduction and obliteration of Alba Fresu. It was her greatest hopes and fears naked for all to rake through. The ones she’d offered to him beneath the sheets in his moonlit studio, now woven through incessant melodies, coded into unusual harmonies that made the listener’s heart swell and recoil. It was the seduction of a Sardinian girl innocent to the ways of those who seek to sap the very life force that compelled her first love toward her in the first place. It was the score of the woman who was Vittorio’s soul food and whom he’d prefer to destroy rather than being shunned from the deepest, guarded parts of her.

  His composition was betrayal. Her performance, revenge.

  Vittorio looked at her. She held his gaze, allowing herself to see the calculating mind within, the genius used to lure her back into his warped world, clawing to be as good as her, something she now understood had fueled his attraction in the very beginning. She was never the one person who wove deep inside him, she was the lover he’d never managed to conquer, and his life had led him back here through a sheer hardheaded determination. The unswerving focus she’d found so compelling was the very thing that would crush her; he’d played a very long game indeed.

  The orchestra wheezed into bolstering sound that ran up the brick side of the amphitheater like a river, rushing back to the stage in waves. The dancers filled the space at speed, their limbs throwing lithe shapes, twirling around one another, passion scoring through from the tips of their fingers to the tops of their heads.

  Vittorio lifted his arm to bring Alba in.

  She followed.

  They both knew she had no choice.

  Her body played the melody, this time colored in shadow, this time scored with a ferocity the reviewers would salivate over the next day. And as Alba watched her fingers scurry through the lie, the image of them reflected back to her on the shiny black veneer was like looking at a mirror of herself both in front and behind, endless permutations of an Alba refracted until it was impossible to tell which one was real.

  All life flew out of her, through the music, into the air, until there was none left at all. Until Alba stood behind herself, a listless phantom watching the adulation reach her from the audience, feeling the hand of Vittorio within hers, observing her entire world hover like an illusion before her. Tonight she’d given the pinnacle performance of Maestra Fresu. One she had honed for twenty years, one that had been reflected back at her. One fed to her by Dante, by Goldstein, and now by Francesco.

  The audience stood. Flowers cascaded to her feet. It was the cheers of a wake, and the petals crushed under her feet as she curtsied for the sixth time. A dark hole opened up beneath her, just beyond the lip of the stage. The earth beckoned. The sounds at once treble and grating, snapping in her head like splintering glass. Vittorio took another bow. He h
eld his hand out for her to follow. She turned to look at the faces. Tears coursed down her cheeks. Involuntary streaks leaving tracks of confusion. The applause deepened. Here was their artistry lifted to ecstasy through the sublime music. The dancers were standing, clapping too, and now the orchestra rose to its feet.

  The amphitheater was a deafening light; Vittorio’s victory charge.

  Backstage the shadows filled with a sea of adrenaline and congratulations. Francesco was beside her at once, his voice a froth of compliments, his entourage giddy. A flute of champagne was placed in her hand. Responses to the inundation of delight fought to escape but without success. Her mouth remained mute. Someone told her she looked pale, it may have been Marianna as she applied some more rouge, or perhaps it was Luigi with a puff of a powdered sponge. The noise wove around her like a tornado, a forceful blur of delight, whirring until the sounds creased into a singular brown dirge of confusion.

  She awoke in her dressing-room chair. Francesco held her hand. He fused into focus after a few blinks. “Tesoro, are you alright? That was the performance of your life. I think you pushed yourself too far.”

  Alba looked at him. Francesco had played his marionette well, now the strings were cut, the thick fingers of the puppeteer idle. Dante rose into view behind him and beyond, she could make out the black curls of Vittorio. She looked at her life through thick glass, her voice clamped far away, beside the real version of Alba, seated somewhere by the sea, alone, cushioned by the shore and nothing else.

  When she let out a guttural cry they tore back. She lunged at Vittorio. Half of the clutter upon her dressing-room table flew to the floor, the carpet a crush of powder and petals. Somewhere at the center a despised gem. She watched Vittorio’s face turn red as her hands tightened around his neck. She was in Ozieri now, the market square, the scuff of dusk dirt, the disorientation of utter loss of control, the shifting axis of defeat, blind-white wings of fear, flapping to nowhere, crashing a bird against the hard walls then twisting to thwack the same painful spot.