The Last Concerto

‘And Signora Elias wants Alba to go every day to do this?’ she heard her father say.

‘Yes. I don’t know why. She has a car. She likes to walk into town every day. But she says it would be a big help. And the extra money wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Get Alba out of the house doing something too.’

Her father harrumphed.

‘So shall I tell her yes, Bruno?’

‘Is this some kind of charity bone for us poor down in town, Giovanna? You be sure that Alba works for every one of those lire, you hear me? We’re workers not takers, you hear me?’

Alba heard her father’s feet climb up the stairs for his siesta.

Giovanna didn’t mention anything more of that conversation for several days. At last, over breakfast one morning, Giovanna looked up from her little coffee cup, which she had been stirring without stopping for several minutes. Alba couldn’t remember if she’d even put sugar in it yet.

‘Signora Elias would like you to do a job for her over the summer, Alba.’

Alba looked up. The bit of bread she’d dipped into her hot milk and coffee split from the roll and fell into her deep tin cup with a plop.

‘You will collect her morning rolls from the panificio and newspaper from the tabacchi each day. She wants you at her house by seven and not a minute later.’

Alba blinked. The woman who forbade her to go with her was now sending her to that house on daily visits. It was better than any Christmas.

‘Well, say something, child. ‘Thank you for the job. Yes, Mamma I’ll do that.’ Anything!’

Alba nodded.

‘I’ll take that as agreement to do the best job you can. Now, you and I both know that the poor lady is taking pity on me. Everyone knows what I’ve been through. Now my only daughter, the girl who is going to look after me in old age, who will make me a grandmother, doesn’t speak? That’s not how daughters are to behave. From the boys I’d understand. They need their father. But you? A shadow.’

The tumble of words were hot, like the boiling water that wheezed through the packed coffee grounds of their morning pot. Alba held onto the hope that her own silence would be like lifting that screeching pot off the gas ring.

Her mother stood up. ‘You start tomorrow.’

Alba jumped out of her bed the next day, prepared the coffee pot for her mother, set out the cups for all the family, and ran out of the door for the panificio, across the cobbled street that ran in front of their narrow four-room house, clustered in the damp shade between a dozen others behind the town’s square. Down the viccoli, washing draped in waves of boiled white flags of surrender across the house fronts. After a few hairpin turns along stony streets, meant for donkeys and small humans, not noisy cars, she reached the main road, which funnelled around their town, snaking out towards the hills that encircled the valley. The baker gave her a milk roll on the house and filled a small thick brown paper bag with a slice of oil bread and two fresh rolls. At the tabacchi, the owner, Liseddu, handed her a copy of La Nuova Sardegna over the counter, and then told her, with a wink, that she could have a stick of liquorice for herself. With her load underarm, she swung up to Signora Elias feeling like the plains opening up below were a promise. The cathedral steeple shone in the morning light, its golden tip gleaming at the centre of town. The huddles of houses, narrow town homes, clustered together straining for height, top floors encased with columned terraces, now gave way to firs and pines as she climbed towards the pineta, the pine forests of the periphery, the cool sought by young or illicit lovers, shadows protecting their secrets, their desires permissible for a snatched breath or two. Behind them the piazzette of the town, the greengrocers hidden within the stone ground floor of houses, the shoe and clothes shops for which the town was famous sheltered in the crooks of shady alleyways. Up here, in the fresher air beneath the trees that lined the hills surrounding her town, the men traipsed the ground for truffles or edible mushrooms. And in the unbearable heat of August, families would climb to seek respite from a punishing sun.

Alba loved the smell of this part of town. She turned her face out towards the trees, feeling their spindled shadows streak across her face, her mouth open now to the pine air, its earthy scent whispered over her tongue. On she strode, her feet crunching along the gravel that led to Signora Elias’s front door. She pulled down on the iron handle. The bell rattled inside the hallway. Signora Elias appeared. Her face lit up.

‘As I suspected. Your timing is, indeed, impeccable.’

‘Grazie, signora,’ Alba replied, and handed her the packages.

‘Lovely. They smell divine as always.’

Alba had never heard the daily bread described with such delight.

‘Do bring them into the kitchen, Alba, yes?’

She knew better than to do anything other than what she was asked. The kitchen was laid for two. At the centre were two porcelain dishes, one with a white square of butter and a smaller one with jam. A large pot of coffee sat on the range. The windows were open. The room filled with birdsong.

‘Grazie, Alba. Now, do sit down and have some with me. I’m sure you’re thirsty after your climb, no? Judging by the shine on your forehead I’d even say you ran.’

‘I did.’

That Alba knew something about this woman’s house made it easier for her to breathe, to speak, though it was impossible to decide whether it was the crisp, clear air, the light that flooded in from the surrounding gardens, or the peaceful silence of the home itself.

‘Here, do sit down after you’ve given your hands a wash, yes?’

Alba hesitated.

‘You won’t be late home.’

Alba watched Signora Elias light the pot and cut her roll, butter it, and smear it with jam. She handed half to Alba.

Maybe it was the home-made fig jam, the sound of the medlar tree leaves twirling in the light breeze just beyond the window, or the sensation of being in this lady’s kitchen, but Signora Elias was right: it was divine.

Once the pot simmered to ready, Elias poured herself a cup and signalled for Alba to follow her into the next room.

‘I think we ought to learn your first scale today.’

Alba looked at her, trying to mask the thrill soaring up her middle.

‘Only if you’d like, of course?’

‘I would love that, signora.’

She took her seat. They repeated the stool dance from the other day. Alba looked down at the shiny keys. She’d remembered where Signora Elias had placed her thumb last time and laid it back there.

‘Very good, Alba. You have a keen memory. That is wonderful.’

Alba turned her head to look at Signora Elias. She looked a little younger today.

‘Now, like the other day. Just five to start. Then we’ll reach up a little more.’

Alba was soothed by Signora Elias’s voice, firm yet gentle, like being under the protection of a queen. It felt far safer than the constant dodge of evil eye, that quiet but incessant terror that trailed Alba now that at any moment things might change, or be lost.

Signora Elias’s voice turned mahogany, rich tones that guided her up the familiar notes and then directed her thumb to scoot beneath her third for her to trace further notes still. Her fingers spidered across the new and familiar sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the double doors and lighting up the backs of her hands as if they too had been dipped into a little of the golden magic that overtook those of Signora Elias.

Throughout the summer Elias spun tales about numbers, their families, the way the notes were grouped together and why. Elias painted pictures with her voice and hands that described a cosmic symmetry. The mathematical patterns bewitched Alba, and the more Elias explained the more Alba yearned to know. At night, her terrors ebbed away as her fingers tip-tapped upon her sheets; up to five down to one, up to eight, down to one, one, skip to three, skip to five, down to three. She made up her own patterns too, which she showed Elias with great enthusiasm the next day. When the white notes sang out with confidence under her fingers, Elias introduced a few black ones too. This time the scale shifted mood. Here was a moonlit forest, a bad dream, something hidden in the dark. The scales peeled open like the pages of books, unfolding pictures of far-off places, imagined worlds, miniature stories of heroines in the wilderness. Elias showed Alba how to recognize the key notes within the scale, how they were all linked by intrinsic tone, vibration and mathematics. How it repeated up the keyboard, each eight notes resonating at double the speed as the same note eight notes below. Alba hung onto every word, every nuance, sepulchring the musical secrets, as if she and Elias were standing before an enormous map of the universe feeling her reassuring hand at her back that told Alba it was safe to sail.

1975

4

Battaglia

battle. A composition that features drumrolls, fanfares, and the general commotion of battle

For the seven years that followed, Alba’s fingers were in perpetual motion. Giovanna gave up yelling at her to cease their incessant tapping. Over time the compulsive movement paled into mild irritation because Alba performed her duties at home. The silent melodies became just another tic to join her other obsessive behaviours, like wiping a clean counter, scouring a gleaming range, or checking the taps were twisted tight. The more her fingers percussed, the less Alba spoke. The silence cloaked her in a guarded invisibility, a cocoon from which she could witness the world at a safe distance. After dinner, she would sit beside the record player and piano albums Signora Elias had lent her and play them without stopping. When Giovanna started moaning about the constant music, Signora Elias also let her borrow some headphones. The pieces she studied wove into her mind like a dance, and after listening for an evening, several sections would escape from her fingers onto the keyboard with ease. It was like repeating a conversation, almost word for word, and where discrepancies remained Signora Elias took time to make the necessary corrections, of which there were often very few.

Each morning Alba rose with the dawn she was named after, striding down to the bakery and back up through the hills of obsidian and crimson-streaked winter sunrises and the peony-orange haze of the summers. Signora Elias greeted her like a cherished granddaughter each of those days, never once forcing conversation, nor prying. The space they created every morning was a secret Signora Elias and Alba held close, clasped in complicit trust like the two photographic faces of a snapped-shut locket.

When her teachers crowbarred their way into Alba’s personal and mental space, yelling from their desk, haranguing her out of her self-imposed silence, Alba replayed minute details of Signora Elias’s mornings on a loop. The images squared into view, ordered, yet singular, like the family slides her neighbours would project onto their white walls, the mechanical clicks between each image a metronome chasing time; scales, morning light, gleaming floors, fresh coffee, arpeggios, the taut strings of the piano, their vibration, their frequency, their power.

May of 1975 was in full bloom. The grasslands surrounding Ozieri were splattered yellow with blossom. In the crags between the granite along the roadside leading up to Signora Elias, rock roses grappled with gravity, their fuchsia-purple blossoms widening to the sun. Giant wild fennel swayed on the gentle breeze, scenting the air with anise. Tiny orchids appeared in the cracks between the boulders; Alba gazed at their petal faces, minuscule mournful masks. By Signora Elias’s gate, tufts of wild poppies greeted Alba, and each day she visited, another unfurled its bloodsplat petals.

Shafts of morning light cut through Signora Elias’s large room and across the open piano lid, striking a golden gleam across its polished top. Alba could feel its heat trace her outline and light up her fingers. She looked down at the keys. Her fingers sprang into action.

Signora Elias interrupted at once. ‘You took a breath, yes, but it was high in your chest, snatched. You cannot expect to be able to keep up with this Bach fugue in this way. Bach is stamina, precision, absolute clarity. He is the source.’

Alba tilted her head back, blowing a puff of air out from her lower lip, which lifted a few strands of hair that had fallen onto her forehead.

‘And there’s no use in succumbing to frustration either. We can’t create or practise from that place. Sorrow? Yes. Feel the pain of those notes escaping from under you. Then simply work out what you must do to fix it.’

Alba wanted to say sorry, but the words stuck in her throat, a knot of silence.

‘Don’t apologize,’ Signora Elias continued, as always, intuiting what Alba longed to say but couldn’t, ‘this is the work, Alba. This is the constant reminder that you are merely human. What Bach is laying out for us is the entire cosmos, layers of mathematics, interweaving with glorious symmetry. Then he twists it in on itself, revelling in the asymmetry of those rules. It’s a kaleidoscope of patterns. We know this. So we honour this.’

Alba was accustomed to Signora Elias’s tempo increasing as she charged through her corrections, sometimes striding beside the piano, then drawing to a curt pause when the pinnacle of her thought was reached, a mountaineer charging towards the peak. She stood still now, in the spotlight of the sun’s glow. ‘Will you return to the beginning?’

‘Slower.’

‘And?’

Alba swallowed. ‘Then I’ll play these first few measures, repeating at speed, playing with alternate rhythms.’

Signora Elias raised her eyebrows, waiting for the end of the thought.

‘Until my fingers play me,’ Alba whispered.

‘Until there is no space between those patterns and you,’ Signora Elias added. ‘I don’t want to see Alba Fresu play with her fingers. I want to see the music ripple out of you. That’s when we know that you truly know the piece. When we have stripped it to its core, asked what it is, why it is, what it needs to tell us, and then step inside.’

Alba looked at Signora Elias and allowed herself to smile in spite of a sinking in her stomach. When would these exercises become instinctive?

‘It’s about learning to control every minute movement of your body to produce the precise tone the piece requires,’ Signora Elias began, ‘and then, in performance, being able to shift that focus on control alone, and simply allow your technique to be in place, so your musicality can soar. We want to hear the music, not the practice. Music is about control and the loss of it at the same time; a beautiful contradiction. At this moment, from your flushed cheeks I see you are still grappling with the sensations of losing control in the first instance.’

The past seven years Signora Elias had sat beside her each and every morning leading her down these waterways of her music. Now, at eighteen, as Alba approached her final year at school, their lesson together was a cool balm before class. After it, Signora Elias would permit her to practise unguided.

‘I want to apologize,’ Alba replied, her voice dry.

‘I know. Hold onto this thought – my corrections are leading you towards your music, Alba, they are never criticism alone, however it might feel.’

Signora Elias invited the silence for a moment, as if it were an unexpected yet welcome guest. Alba lost herself in it. Her breath dropped down into her abdomen, warm, deep. She felt her lower back unlock, each vertebra separating a little, rising up out of the top of her head. Her fingers lifted back onto the keys. As she exhaled, they became heavy, assured, curious. The first few measures tumbled out effortless, precise. Alba stopped, then began again, each time her breath deepening a little more, each time her feet finding the reassurance of the wooden parquet rise up to meet them. As the cascade of notes became equal, controlled, her hands began to relax, speeding up without tension. Her fingers sank into the ivories, weighted but free. The glorious symmetry of the sounds and patterns washed over her, shining light. She was no longer in Ozieri. She was far beyond the plains, above her turquoise coast. She was deep in the forests of Gennargentu, beneath a gushing waterfall, icy cold electrifying her body. She was everywhere but here. And the feeling lit her up from her feet and lifted up out of her head. She was inside her body and far beyond it at the same time.

The final run descended and landed, in perfect alignment, both hands announcing the last chord. The vibrations lifted out of the piano thinning to a faint blue glow somewhere in the air above the strings.

And then it was over.

She returned to a stark awareness of the room, once more a piano student surrounded by the landscape paintings on the wall around her, the promise of the spring morning outside sketching hope. She looked over at Signora Elias. Her eyes appeared wet, or perhaps it was the morning light, which caught a spiral dance of dust motes in the space between them.

‘You and I both know our lessons will reach their end after the summer. Your father has made it quite clear that you will be working at the officina. That will leave little or no time for you to be coming here.’

Alba nodded. The thought of the minutes ticking away towards a time when the piano wouldn’t be part of her daily life made Alba feel like she was suffocating.

‘It’s time at this crucial point in your training that you are allowed to perform. At the very least once. Every performance I gave taught me something I needed to learn, and stayed with me forever. I want to give you that.’

Alba felt her chest crease into a tight knot.

‘Don’t look so terrified, Alba. Perhaps in preparation you might play for my friend first? She is staying with me at the moment and her favourite thing is to listen to piano music. Would that be all right? After next lesson would be the perfect time.’

Alba nodded, though the idea sent a sliver of terror scorching through her.

Signora Elias looked into her. ‘When you practise in the way you have today, Alba, anything is truly possible. When you can acknowledge that fire and channel it with humility and passion, this instrument, and you, will sing.’

The next morning Signora Elias instructed Alba to use their lesson time to warm up and run through her repertoire. ‘Take all the time this morning to repeat whatever you need. What have I told you?’

‘A piece soars only when it’s shared.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s then that we find out what we really feel about it, how much careful time we’ve given it. Whether our practise has been well directed.’

‘Which, of course, it has. You have the most wonderful teacher, I hear.’

They laughed at that.

‘We’ll be down in a little while so you aren’t observed during practice. I have a gentleman coming to work on my car shortly, but he shouldn’t make too much noise; I’ll look out for him so he doesn’t ring the bell.’

‘Grazie, Signora Maestra.’

Signora Elias closed the door behind her as she left. The doorbell clanged soon after. ‘I spoke too soon! I’ll see to it, you carry on.’

She thought about the anticipation brewing in her house for Marcellino’s upcoming wedding. The way her mother insisted they practise her make-up. The way every breath of life seemed to be directed towards their first-born, the boy who could do no wrong, now set to marry the most beautiful young woman in town. The town was electric with the imminent nuptials. Alba was tired of the incessant talk of it after the first day back in the freezing fog of January, when all of a sudden, both families had agreed the marriage should go ahead sooner rather than later. Her mother clawed at her attention now, the picture of her demanding she return at a good hour today to help set up the luncheon with the closer family members as they sampled all the food the caterer was planning on providing. Giovanna, Grazietta and several other women would already be at their vignia now, setting up a long table in the one-room cottage, the wood heaving.

With a breath, Alba wiped her thoughts clear. In her mind’s eye, she pictured the surrounding vines, the gnarled rows that grew to eclipse the terror of what first happened there. The grapes had exorcised those memories and now the vignia would be the centre of more celebration for the boy who was kidnapped in place of his sister. She pictured the cottage behind her as she walked through the vines, down the hills towards the plains, across them, past the Nuragic towers, onto Lake Coghinas, its glassy surface urging her to step in. She imagined turning around in the water with the jagged mountains surrounding her, breathing in the juniper and toasted thyme air.

Her breath fell deep, down into the watery bed of her thoughts. Her hands lifted. Her fingers stretched along the piano keys. Her left hand began a wave rolling deep currents of passion and longing whilst her right soared above. She was a bird swooping towards the lake from above, ripples shooting out from the flick of her tail upon the crystal liquid. The music tugged her deeper into thoughtlessness. She was diving into her sea, unfathomable, powerful, free. Her skin flushed, her arms hot and fast as they stretched up and down the keys. Now she was the lover yearning to be understood, to be forgiven, to be heard, to be loved with every fibre, to be touched, tasted, savoured, honoured.

The door creaked. Her fingers lifted.

A shattering silence: Mario’s face was in the slit of the opening.

Splintering currents of electricity fractured the space between them. She felt naked. Stinging vulnerability crawled up her calves. He didn’t blink. Neither breathed.

He was the last person in town she would have liked to be spied on by. Now he had the ultimate arsenal for his incessant attacks. Alba snapped into panic. The person she trusted least was privy to the biggest betrayal of her parents. She sat, motionless in cloying dizziness, as if her feet were sticky in almond brittle before the tacky molten sugar sets.

Signora Elias and her friend swept in, and she watched Mario tumble a clumsy apology for being inside the house rather than outside with his father. The women closed the door behind them. Mario’s face disappeared.

Signora Elias’s friend was a reed. Long, thin, with an elegant bearing about her. A woman Alba desired not to cross. Yet as she spoke, her voice wove out like a clarinet, woody and warm. Her face lit up listening to Signora Elias, crinkling the wrinkles on her thin white skin deeper still. The many colours of her dress undercut her poise. Here were washes of blues and reds, a scarf swooped across her with a tropical print. Geometric earrings clasped her earlobes in colourful anarchy. She reached a hand out for Alba’s. The nails were painted fuchsia. Her hand was firm, unapologetic.

‘I’m Celeste. So very lovely to meet you, tesoro. Elena has told me so very much about you. I’m terribly excited to hear you play.’

Alba flushed, embarrassed by her embarrassment. She was about to play for a lady who appeared to value confidence and Alba wished she could find some. It was impossible, having just heard that Signora Elias had already spoken about her to a distinguished friend. It made their lessons at once less private. A secret had been divulged elsewhere too.

‘I would absolutely adore it if you would play?’ Celeste asked. Signora Elias turned towards her too. There was a different buoyancy to her this morning. Perhaps she was lonelier than Alba had thought?

‘Si,’ Alba replied. ‘Do you have a preference on which one I play first?’

‘Not at all,’ replied Signora Elias. ‘You must play what you feel is right for you this morning.’