Книга - The Last Concerto

The Last Concerto
Sara Alexander


The perfect summer read for fans of Santa Montefiore, Victoria Hislop and Dinah Jeffries Will Alba find the music of her heart? Sardinia, 1968. When eleven-year-old Alba Fresu witnesses her father and brother kidnapped by bandits, her previously happy and secure family life is shaken to the core. The pair are eventually released, but the experience leaves Alba deeply disturbed, unable to give voice to her inner turmoil. While accompanying her mother to cleaning jobs, Alba visits the villa of an eccentric Signora and touches the keys of a piano for the first time. She is transported to another world, one where she can finally express emotion too powerful for words alone. She takes secret piano lessons and, against her parents’ wishes, accepts a scholarship to the Rome conservatoire. There she immerses herself in the vibrant world of the city, full of heat and passion she’s never experienced before – and embarks on an affair that will change the course of her life forever. But Alba soon reaches a crossroads, and must decide how to reconcile her musical talent with her longing for love and family... Praise for Sara Alexander: ‘Will leave readers riveted until the explosive conclusion’Publishers Weekly ‘This enchanting novel is a delightful read, perfectly suited for a warm beach with a cold beverage. Readers who enjoy Adriana Trigiani’s historical Italian family sagas will adore Alexander’s debut. ’Booklist







SARA ALEXANDER attended Hampstead School, went on to graduate from the University of Bristol, with a BA hons in Theatre, Film & TV. She followed on to complete her postgraduate diploma in acting from Drama Studio London. She has worked extensively in the theatre, film and television industries, including roles in much-loved productions such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Doctor Who, and Franco Zeffirelli’s Sparrow. She is based in London.




Also by Sara Alexander (#ulink_a14a1a14-95cf-5aa4-b265-bf984558aee0)


Under A Sardinian Sky

The Secret Legacy


The Last Concerto

Sara Alexander






ONE PLACE MANY STORIES




Copyright (#ulink_3e7751b2-b115-5b49-957a-5330e1f2ec1e)







An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Copyright © Sara Alexander 2019

Sara Alexander asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008273729




Note to Readers (#ulink_00b58f7f-4dc1-58c6-9735-c3f2328746eb)


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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008273712



For Mum & Dad, thank you for the piano


Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

– MAYA ANGELOU




Contents


Cover (#u791455dd-ea03-5673-b72e-418631816e3f)

About the Author (#ufb9d9e9e-5561-56ee-b927-1a5d4f9f4310)

Booklist (#ulink_2f4b15ec-528d-50f5-96cb-77358320d7d5)

Title Page (#ub225fd78-8d50-5ba5-bde6-86b55c5c0959)

Copyright (#ulink_ea5e0aaa-462c-5af9-a97f-9c85d7abd976)

Note to Reader (#ufa9cd02d-91dc-545f-ad1b-50caf60fbc7f)

Dedication (#u1c55f6d4-d9c8-54ee-8b23-ef0f25732753)

Epigraph (#u2f356c8d-9882-53da-9f25-a158152e2b45)

I MOVIMENTO

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_12650c58-e37b-50d5-a0a2-278ad0bc3cfe)

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_fc64f88d-cd3c-57b3-9c4f-cd1273c1efb8)

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_ecd1c225-055e-56ee-b6ef-17a28bcef594)

1975

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_e8db799c-16c8-57ba-947e-920fa285b134)

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_229c2a17-2fa2-580f-96cc-1d75e364e2f8)

CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_67a78faa-d823-576d-8267-7e0cad4f305e)

CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_2c5137fa-671f-5ba6-bbfc-53de391ea029)

CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_7e04047d-4020-5254-a8f5-ef2d83b37d84)

II MOVIMENTO

CHAPTER 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

1978

CHAPTER 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

III MOVIMENTO

ROME 1988 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 29 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 30 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 31 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 32 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

A READING GROUP GUIDE (#litres_trial_promo)

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)



I Movimento (#ulink_3f26885b-1c02-5b94-b1d2-3fa65499da82)




1 (#ulink_0d2ffb00-6f8d-5b56-b3f1-c66e26e2ce46)


Overture (#ulink_0d2ffb00-6f8d-5b56-b3f1-c66e26e2ce46)

a piece of music that is an introduction to a longer piece

When her brother opened his eyes, Alba was convinced she was present at his wake. Her mother, Giovanna, knelt on one side of his bed, forehead resting on her thumbs whilst they crawled over the worn beads of her rosary. In the corner three wailers sobbed their own prayers in warbled unison, invoking Mary, Jesus and any saint who wished to assist. On the other side of the bed, their neighbour Grazietta held a bowl with oil and water. She told the women that the way in which the liquids mixed confirmed that Giovanna’s first-born, Marcellino, was, in fact, yet another victim of the evil eye. There could be no other explanation as to why he had been kidnapped alongside his father, Bruno, who was still held captive, whilst his son was released by the bandits the night before, after three days of white panic for all their family and friends. Grazietta grasped her wand of rosemary twigs and dipped it into the liquid, dousing the sheets like a demented priest. The wailers let out a further cry, which trebled across the sheets. A droplet fell on his forehead from another swing of the rosemary, this time a close miss of Alba’s eye. With his wince, everyone at last noticed that Marcellino was in fact conscious.

Giovanna jumped to her feet and held her child into her bosom. Alba could smell the reassuring scent of sofritto in the folds of her housedress, even from where she stood at the foot of the bed, those tiny cubes of carrots, onion, and celery fried in olive oil before making Sunday’s batch of pasta sauce for the week, cut through with the sweat of her panic beneath.

‘Biseddu meu,’ she murmured in Sardinian, rocking Marcellino with such passion that Alba knew it would induce a vague seasickness. This was a woman obsessed with omens. If the sauce boiled too fast, three starlings rather than two screeched their morning tweet, or a feather fell unexpectedly from nowhere, her particular strain of logic would portend horrific visions. She sang prayers to St Anthony at the crossroads in their Sardinian town when they needed something specific, accepting that it would lead, by necessity, to her forfeiting something in return. Alba had faded memories of her mother praying to miss her cycle one month because there was extra work to be done, only to be doubled up in excruciating pain the following month. Saints gave to those who prayed, but at a cost: the original protection racket. It sat at an uncomfortable angle in Alba’s mind, this idea of bargaining with a saint, the very thing she’d been taught was the devil’s speciality. Alba’s prodding at this point met only with the stone-setting stares of her aunts at best, physical harm at worst. She chose her battles with care, and made a silent pact with herself never to be indebted.

If something was lost, the Fresus would seek their neighbours’ cousins’ friends who were well practised in a branch of acceptable magic. In return for fresh eggs, home-made wine, or some other kindness other than money, these soothsayers would murmur secret prayers at midday at a crossroads on the second Tuesday of a month and relay a dutiful list of everything they heard on the street in order to find said lost item. One day, when twenty lire had gone missing from her mother’s kitchen drawer, one such prayer had returned with the word Francesco repeated three times. Alba remembers her mother pinning the unsuspecting labourers working on the house next door with her Sardinian glare, black eyes like darts, thick eyebrows scouring a frown, when she found out they were from out of town and all shared that very same name. After that incident Giovanna stitched her cash into her skirts like her grandmother used to do.

None of these accepted manias were woven into the morning of 27 May, 1968. No red sky in the morning to warn the shepherds, no burned garlic, curdled milk, dough that wouldn’t prove, solitary nightingale calls. It was a joyous late spring day, the kind that teases you with the golden kiss of the Mediterranean summer to come. Giovanna had shrieked at Alba to return in time to accompany her father to the vineyard, her brothers Marcellino and Salvatore needed a rest and besides, it was her turn, but the familiar trill of her mother’s voice fell on deaf ears. Alba had lost track of time, or rather decided never to pay much attention to it to begin with, and when she sauntered home at last, was met with the kind of pummelling from her mother that should have been reserved for the making of bread or churning of butter alone. Marcellino had been sent in her place and because of it, he now sat wrapped up in bed with her family facing a daily terror of a missing father.

Giovanna drew back and clasped Marcellino’s face in hers. ‘Eat, yes? Oh my tesoro, did they hurt you?’ More questions tumbled out, but the noise spun around the room like a gale. Grazietta muttered another snippet of a prayer before crossing herself and leaving, oily water in tow. As news spread to the crowd downstairs that the first-born had, at last, awoken, more women came upstairs and filled the room. Alba was shot a look that she recognized as her cue to bring the tray her mother had prepared. She pressed past the well-wishers and returned with the feast in hand, setting it down on his bed: fresh spianata, Ozieri’s renowned flatbread, enough cheese for a small football team, a handful of black figs, two long slipper-shaped papassini biscuits, and a glass of warm milk with a splash of coffee in it. If he wasn’t dead yet, it seemed the army of mothers were to kill him off with overfeeding.

‘O Dio mio,’ one of the wailers cried. ‘His eyes, Giovanna, the look in this poor child’s eyes!’

They took another breath in preparation for a further fervent chorus when a shout tore through the pause. The door flung open. Grazietta reappeared, face flushed, her circular wire glasses askew on her nose. ‘Benito’s on the television, Giova’, beni – come quickly!’

Giovanna followed Grazietta out, with the tumble of others close behind. Alba followed down the stone steps to their small living room. She’d never been in a room with so many quiet Sardinians. Even in church or at funerals words couldn’t fail to escape, a titbit of gossip, a grievance about the lack of flowers or the ostentatious abundance of them, the age of the priest or lack thereof. Now the dozen or more neighbours crammed into their room made Alba feel like the charred aubergines her mother would squeeze into jars throughout the summer.

On the small square of screen in the corner, above a chest of drawers topped with a lace doily, was her father’s brother Benito. The angle of the camera pointed up towards him; beyond, the familiar outline of the Ozieri valley in silver tones. He seemed relaxed, even though Alba was sure the words he spoke were some of the hardest he’d ever have to say. ‘I speak on behalf of all my family,’ he began. ‘The bandits have picked on the wrong man. Our family is not rich. We don’t have the money they are asking. We will not pay the ransom to release my brother Bruno.’

The lump in Alba’s throat became a stone. A murmur rippled across the room.

Then the scene snapped to men signing a form at the police station. The neighbours took it in turns to shout at the screen as they recognized their husbands, brothers, sons. The clipped voice of the Rai Uno journalist began to describe a town in revolt. The scenes flipped between the main square with men huddled in groups, back to the police station where the men were being described as signing onto a counter-army to uncover the whereabouts of Bruno Fresu. Their firearms were being registered. Shepherds from the surrounding hills had come to town to aid the search efforts, citing the fact that they knew their Sardinian hills better than any bandit. All this was happening for her father. The rescue efforts were coupled with a revolutionary protest about to take place, the journalist said.

The noise inside the stone room began to rise, the voices ricocheted over their heads to an unbearable volume. Someone called out from the street and the room began to herd out of the small door onto the cobbles. People lined the road outside her house. A cry pelted down from further up the vicolo just before Alba saw the first of the banners. A sea of schoolchildren from the upper years snaked around the corner, wooden signs above their heads. They were chanting and so were their teachers. There were decrees against the bandits. Someone shouted they had gone too far this time. Another screamed that the Fresus were one of the people, not rich folk. Even Alba’s teacher, the most prim woman she knew, waved a sign high above her head, yelling like she’d never heard her do before. The sea of students and teachers paraded past their house; there were shouts to not give up, to not give in, that Ozieri would stand against the criminal disease eating their island, that the bandits must not be bullied into taking one of their own by mainlanders. Alba should have been with her father when the men jumped out of a vehicle in the twilight. She should have been huddled with him in that damp cave, not Marcellino. A swell of guilt. Her father was the man who made her town revolt. No one marched when the rich landowners were kidnapped a few months back. There was little more than hand-wringing when the fancy American heir was kidnapped on the north-east coast the year before. There were even some hushed whispers that the rich had it coming to them, that their bandits maintained a warped equilibrium in society; the wealthy had no right to run their island as they pleased.

This time, however, they had gone too far. Her father was a hard worker; his father, Nonno Fresu, had accumulated huge debts to gain the first Fiat dealership in town. For this they were captured, for a ransom that none of them had. Bruno and his three brothers worked around the clock at the dealership. There was not wealth to speak of yet; it was swallowed by the bank. That’s why Giovanna cleaned villas in the periphery, took on extra washing, fed the babies whose mother’s milk had dried up, all to keep her own family fed.

Alba’s father was now a celebrity. He had started a revolution. Was it wrong to feel proud? Alba shook off the sharp twist of guilt, because thinking of her father in this way was the only way to stop herself picturing him shot through the head with his blood seeping out onto the fennel-scented dirt beneath him.

Alba woke to find her school grembiulino hanging on the door of the wardrobe she shared with her brother. This apron she wore over her own clothes looked like a relic from a distant past; one in which Alba played in the street, fought with her brothers, and recited poems by memory under the glare of her teacher. Life after Marcellino’s release and her father’s continued captivity was disorientating. Each time it seemed to tease reality, Giovanna would yell at her daughter for picking a fight with poor Marcellino as if his recovery rested on Alba’s behaviour alone. He was served his favourite breakfast every morning. Neighbours would stop their whisperings as he entered the room. It was like living with a celebrity recluse, and Alba suspected that her brother’s ability to mine the situation for all that it was worth, with more than a little performance thrown in, was apparent to no one but his younger sister. Thank God it wasn’t the girl, women would lament over the never-ending pots of coffee bubbled to calm the nerves of the tormented wife, but their voices were a constant reminder that she was not guiltless in all of this. If she’d been home in time, they might have got to the vignia earlier, missed the bandits perhaps. The life Alba once knew was nowhere to be found.

That morning the familiar dread of school awaited. Her black apron with the scalloped white collar a promise of normality. Giovanna took extra time saying goodbye to Marcellino. He walked beside her and Salvatore, only running ahead as usual when his friends caught up with him and enveloped him with their bombardment of questions. By the time they’d reached school Alba was sure that he had embellished his story from how it had begun in half sentences back at the house on that first day, when he’d arrived a scruff, mute in silent shock. Alba stepped through the tall gates of the elementary school, lit by the promise of life easing back to recognizable order. She took her place at the third desk from the front.

That’s when all her classmates stared. Unhurried Sardinian glares. Dozens of dark eyes pierced her. Her own darted across the once-familiar faces, but they seemed waxen, the disembodied type that haunted her dreams, people she thought she once knew who might spin off their axis on their own accord, or shape-shift into monsters.

Somewhere in the distance there was an echo of a familiar voice. Her gaze swiped to the front of the class. Her teacher peered at her over the glasses perched on the tip of her nose.

‘Well, Alba? What do you say to that?’

‘To what, Signora Maestra?’ she replied, trying to ignore the wave of dizziness.

‘Our class wishes your brother well. It’s polite to say grazie.’

Alba sipped a breath. Her whispered thank-you felt like it was warbling out from under water.

When the bell rang for morning break at long last, Alba shot out of the room to her usual spot in the concrete playground. The sun beat down. The noise was deafening; she’d never noticed how much her school friends shrieked. A hand tapped her shoulder. She twisted round. Mario Dettori stood before her, not a soul she despised more, his familiar sideways smile plastered over his face. ‘There she is, boys! The bandit girl!’

Alba pinned him with her hardest stare. He laughed.

‘What? Your brother spends a few nights in the woods and you’ve forgotten to speak too?’

He turned to the pack of snotty boys gaggled around him, cackling.

‘What do you say, boys? I think she looks wilder too now. Surprised you managed to remember how to get dressed. My uncle said they hung Marcellino naked in there!’

A snip-spark of something flamed in Alba’s chest. She didn’t remember throwing him to the ground, or swinging at his face, or breaking the skin, or the wild cries of the other children as they crowded around her.

Giovanna sat beside Alba. Her feet tapped nervously. Her bottom spread over the edges of the wooden child-sized seat. Alba stared down at her bruised knuckles. One of the cuts seeped a little blood as she bent it into a fist. Giovanna slapped them flat. Alba winced.

‘Thank you for coming, Signora Fresu,’ her teacher began, slicing through the room and perching on her desk. ‘Today has been difficult. For everyone. You and your family are under a lot of pressure, I know, but that is no excuse for the violence she instigated.’

Alba could feel her mother stiffen beside her.

‘Let me be blunt, signora. Alba is not a bright child at the best of times. She’s now missed two weeks of a critical time in school. She will never catch up with where she ought to be. And, to be frank, I think the experience you’re all going through is making her a danger to others. Let us recall the tussles back in the spring, the recurring altercations during the winter. Her ability to deal with typical childhood challenges is poor. At the slightest provocation she fights. This is not the kind of behaviour I am trying to instil in the girls in my class.’

Alba’s mind streamed incessant images of all the times her brothers fought her. The way her mother would admonish her for partaking but never them for instigating. She recalled the fights ignored by the teachers between two boys. The way Mario would always get palmed off with a disapproving stare whilst she would stay inside writing line upon line about why she should never fight. Her face felt hot.

‘So we are agreed, yes, Signora Fresu?’

‘Si. I know you know best, signora.’

‘I do. I will make allowances, but only if we expel Alba for this last month and have her retake the missed classes throughout the summer to catch up. If I allow Alba to stay in the class now, what kind of message am I giving to the others?’

Neither Giovanna nor Alba had an answer for that.

Their silence pleased the teacher.

The vice that strangled Alba’s household continued to tighten. Sometimes her mother looked like she was close to breaking, even though a stream of women flowed through the house delivering never-ending trays of gnocchetti, sauce, pasta al forno. Grazietta swept the swept floors, dusted where there was none to remove, and incanted prayers where necessary. Sometimes Alba would find her clapping into the corners of the room, shifting the menacing energy. Her brothers left for school each morning. Her uncles would come by for lunch, when they would update Giovanna on the search efforts. Alba wafted around the house like a ghost, finding comfort in invisibility. Grazietta would give her stitching to occupy her, but needlework was her nemesis, and after a while even Grazietta grew impatient with her.

Everyone’s prayers were answered a week later.

Her father’s release was the miracle the entire island had been praying for. Her town threw a festa in his honour the following day. It was the first time in their history that a captive was released unharmed and without a paid ransom. Bruno Fresu had left an indelible mark on Sardinian history. This, along with him remaining intact, unlike other victims whose ears or digits were cut off and sent to relatives as warnings, gave rise to nothing short of a national holiday. Tables lined the length of the vicolo. Every family cooked something for the feast. Her uncle Benito built a firepit at the end of their street and spent the entire day overseeing a suckling pig, dripping its fat into the moist flesh, caressed with rosemary wands dipped in olive oil, its salty scent curling down the street. The feast was bigger than any wedding any of them had ever been to.

Her father sat at the head of the snaking tables. He was thin. His skin pale. His eyes no longer the sparkling onyx Alba remembered. He shaved away his thick beard that had grown the past month, on Giovanna’s insistence. Without it, his face looked smaller still. Everyone raised their glasses. There were tears. Alba even noticed several of the older men wipe their faces, then place their flat caps on their heads to shade their emotions.

The party trickled through the night till the wine-infused singing began. The men warbled in their thick Sardinian voices. The sound rang up the stone fronts, echoed down the viccoli to the piazza. Alba imagined the valley beyond, plains humming with the distant rumble of their celebratory voices. And beyond further still, the empty caves where he had slept, the damp crevices where her father had been stowed. Her heart hardened, trying to clamp her tears from escaping. Everyone was celebrating now, it was no longer her time to grieve for her missing father. The tears crystallized into a heavy weight in her chest. She wanted to feel the happiness surrounding her, but it felt like she was celebrating a family she knew, not her own. She hated herself for begrudging everyone’s fawning on her brother, or rather, the flicker of infuriating pride she saw in his eyes as they caught her own. Marcellino was crowned the prince after all, and Alba, as always, the disappointing renegade. All the faces along the long table joined in her parents’ disapproval of the girl who should have gone through this mortal test but failed even to show up. Her father seemed happiest that his son had survived, more so even than being reunited with his family and having been released himself. Where Alba grasped for any feelings close to pride, relief or love, only anger surfaced, a bitter taste in her mouth, burned artichoke, singed pigskin.

Her father was closeted in quiet. After his return, the house became a hushed mausoleum. Alba had never seen her mother so stilted, tiptoeing around her kitchen so as not to make any sudden noise. She waved over at Alba, who was on dusting duty.

‘Come on, get a move on, I’ll be late!’ Giovanna whispered, emphasizing every vowel with a theatrical movement of her lips.

‘For what, Mamma?’

‘You’re to come to work with me today. I can’t leave you here. Babbo needs to rest!’

Before Alba could ask anything further, she was bundled out of the door and the two began marching uphill. The sounds of the market awakening clanked up from the main square. Giovanna stomped at full speed. Alba was glad the morning heat had not fully cooked. By the time they reached Signora Elias’s villa, Alba could feel the droplets of sweat snake down the back of her neck. Giovanna gave her daughter’s shirt a tug or two and it curled back into its original shape. She smoothed her work apron. The door opened.

Signora Elias appeared behind it, the doorframe encasing her like a painting of an aging Madonna, black hair scraped off her face into a low bun, streaked with waves of grey. Her face wrinkled into a grin. The tiny woman, with the sharp intelligent eyes of a bird, snapped her gaze from mother to daughter.

‘Buon giorno, signora. Sorry I am a little late today,’ Giovanna said, breathless.

‘Nonsense. Your husband had quite the celebration last night. I fell asleep to the sound of it!’

She stepped back a little to let the two inside.

‘This must be your girl, yes?’

‘Si. She won’t make any trouble, signora.’

Giovanna’s face creased with streaks of worry. Did her mother fear Alba might pick a fistfight with this old lady too?

‘Piacere, signorina,’ Signora Elias said, reaching out a hand for Alba to shake. No adult had ever done such a thing. Alba felt Giovanna flick her shoulder to reciprocate.

Signora Elias’s hand was small but strong. Her fingers were assured, muscular, belying her size and age. She looked straight into Alba, without the pity or mistrust she was more accustomed to receiving from older Sardinian women. They shuffled through the darkened hallway, along the cool of the tiles, which opened out into the biggest room Alba had ever seen. At the far end three sets of double glass doors framed the Ozieri plains. Parched yellows streaked with ochre beneath the graduating blues of the summer sky, and they stood as if floating in the space above it.

‘Stop gawking!’ her mother spat under her breath.

Alba scurried behind her mother as they worked their way through to the utility cupboard beside the kitchen and removed all the cleaning supplies for the morning’s work. Her eyes slitted sideways, registering the paintings on the walls, the huge Persian rug that covered the centre of the room. As Giovanna flew out through the kitchen Alba had just enough time to see the enormous range, the double oven below, the bold, colourful designs on the tiles surrounding it. Giovanna headed to the upper floors only to discover she’d left the broom downstairs. She ordered Alba to fetch it.

That’s when she heard it for the first time.

A golden sound; uplifting like the first light, reassuring as the afternoon sun’s streaking glow through the fig trees. In silence Alba’s feet stroked the carpet lining the stairs, not wanting to interrupt the cascade of notes running towards her, the mesmerizing trickle of a creek as it winds its way around mossy boulders and uncovered tree roots; cooling, comforting, ancient.

At the foot of the stairs she reached stillness. In the far corner of the room Signora Elias sat on an upholstered stool, facing towards the enormous glass-paned doors and the expanse of their burnished valley. Her fingers caressed the keys of a deep mahogany instrument. Its lid was lifted at an angle like a sail, the mirror sheen of the wood reflecting the paintings on the opposite side of the room. Bright yellow notes of birdsong followed by sonorous, melancholic blues. Alba couldn’t move. Signora Elias danced on further carousels of notes till, at last, her fingers eased down onto the white and black; peaceful, heavy. The song reached its final rest. Alba couldn’t quite count all the different tones and sensations that wove out of the piano, but she knew the ending made her think of a sunset dipped in orange and ruby, or the memory she had created of her father before the kidnapping, edged with the silver-grey tinge of a farewell.




2 (#ulink_446b33b0-e27f-5d89-a6b6-7f68f3334857)


Pianoforte

1. formal term for piano

2. mid-18th century, ‘soft and loud,’ expressing the graduation in tone

Alba couldn’t force the following week to pass quickly enough. The days dripped by unhurried, excruciating, as if she were listening to a leaking tap’s droplets echo into a metal watering can till it reached the rim. Her restlessness did not go unnoticed by Giovanna, who admonished her for hurriedly rolling out the gnocchetti from a large lump of dough, sweeping the floor without noticing what furniture she banged against in the process, and eating her food without chewing it first.

For Alba, the sounds around her became a claustrophobic symphony of erratic percussion; orderless, out of time, passionless. Her brothers rushed in from school each lunchtime, with stories of whom they had defeated in the playground, peacocking their self-appointed celebrity status amongst their peers for being sons of a hero. Her father would give them a swift glare, but his eyes smiled. He still spent his days in his room, but somehow the cacophony of her brothers brought him pleasure where the smallest noise of Alba’s broom would make Giovanna wince at best, swing her hand at her daughter at worst.

Alba tried to bury the worm of envy inching around her belly. When the feeling deepened, she thought about Signora Elias. The sounds of hungry boys and crisscrossing conversations then hushed into the near distance as the memory of her song rippled closer.

‘Alba! Do as your father said!’ Giovanna’s voice pierced the reimagined musical haze.

‘What, Mamma?’

‘Clear up. They’ve finished, can’t you see? Bring the cheese from out back.’

Alba stood and reached the cool stone cupboard towards the back of the room where several perette cheeses hung to form a hardened skin. She reached one and brought it to her father.

‘What’s got into you today, Alba?’ he asked, grabbing a knife and wiping it clean on the tablecloth.

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re a wet cloth. This is how you thank your mother? She’s supposed to be taking it easy. Lord knows we’ve put her through enough.’

We. The way he slipped that tiny word into his sentence made Alba feel like she was folding down into a tiny parcel of tight paper. We. Giovanna had wanted her to go. The events had all been, in part, her fault. Bruno gripped the round-ended cheese in his palm and carved a slice. The boys eyed him as if they hadn’t just licked their bowls of gnocchetti clean. Bruno passed each of them a peeled piece, which they prised off the tip of his knife, then started to peel the rind off his own.

‘Well, don’t just sit there, Alba. Go and help your mother.’

Alba left the room for the narrow kitchen beside it. Giovanna was filling a plastic container inside the deep sink with suds and water.

‘Is this how you’re helping him get better?’ Her words were swallowed by the sloshing water. Alba could hear the force of it smack against the side; thwacks of cascading frustration.

Replying was pointless.

At last, Wednesday rolled around. Giovanna’s calls for Alba not to run on so far ahead fell on deaf ears, or rather ears that were attuned to the treble of birdsong, the metallic click-clang of the house at the end of the street whose upper terrace was being rebuilt, or the bee that buzzed close, which Alba watched land on the passiflora creeping up a neighbour’s front door. As they wove further uphill towards Signora Elias’s home, the sun bore down and the cicadas hummed. Alba noticed their perfect synchronization, how their notes shifted but nevertheless sang in unison.

Alba rang the bell before Giovanna could stop her. And Signora Elias’s smile silenced Giovanna before she could yell.

‘Good morning, signora. Alba is with us again today, I see?’

‘Sorry, signora, it won’t always be like this.’

‘It’s been too long since I’ve had children in my house. I’ve been looking forward to it all week.’

She welcomed them inside. This time the smell of the silent house was powdered with a sugary vanilla scent. Alba’s mouth watered.

‘I’ve made sospiri this morning. I hope you’ll have some, Alba. If Mamma says it’s all right?’

Giovanna shook her head. ‘We’ll get on with our work, signora.’

‘Very well, Giovanna, but I want you to send Alba down when you begin with the bleach in the bathroom. Those smells are toxic for young noses. She will sit down here in silence, of course, until you come down again, yes?’

This time Alba knew her mother could not refuse. A victory. She would have grinned if she knew it wouldn’t lead to mild physical harm.

Giovanna raised her eyebrows in unspoken agreement. When Signora Elias turned away to walk to her piano, Giovanna gave Alba a glare. In the utility cupboard Alba found all the cleaning equipment from the week before. This time she took a moment to commit the kitchen to memory. The white-tiled counters stretched one length of the facing wall with a window at the far end, which opened out onto the valley. Beyond lay the purple hills of Tula surrounding Lake Coghinas. A small wooden table beside the wall opposite the range was covered in baking parchment and topped with perfect medallions of almond paste sospiri, dipped in white icing. They were uniform in size and the morning light cast a tempting gleam across the tops of their perfect levelled surfaces.

‘Run on up to your mother before she calls now, won’t you, Alba.’ Signora Elias’s voice made her jump round. Her guilt dissipated on seeing the old woman’s grin. ‘You’ll have some when you come down, I promise.’

Giovanna gave Alba several more chores to do before she at last allowed her downstairs with a squinty-eyed Sardinian glower. Alba left, trying not to look too happy about the fact.

‘There you are at last!’ Signora Elias called out, coming in from the kitchen with a porcelain plate of sospiri. She placed it down on a lace doily, which sat at the centre of a spindle-legged side table, a pink velvet hall chair beside it.

‘Do sit down, Alba, we were never meant to digest standing up, you know.’

Alba took a tentative seat.

‘Those are for you. And yes, I will be offended if you don’t finish them all. You’ve lived on our island long enough to know that, surely?’

Alba wanted to join her laughter, but the corners of her mouth clamped down the impulse, in case her mother heard.

‘This is my practice time, Alba. If you don’t mind, I will carry on as I always do. I don’t do very well if I don’t stick to my routines. I don’t go to church often like the other women my age in town. But if I miss my morning practice my day does go off track somewhat. Perhaps I’m getting old after all.’

Her smile lit up her little face, her eyes a dance of sagacity and infectious childlike joy. Alba took her first bite. It was perfection; sweet, nutty, smooth.

‘Glad you like them,’ Elias said. Alba looked up. The signora must have other magic powers beyond the songs her fingers made.

Signora Elias sat on the piano stool. She turned away from Alba now and let her hands rest on her lap. Alba watched her breathe in and out three times. For a moment she wondered if maybe the old lady wasn’t falling asleep. No sooner had she thought that, the woman’s hands sprang to life. Her wrists lifted and her fingers touched the keys, soundless, elegant as a ballerina’s silent feet.

They gave a twirl upon the keys, followed by a fierce, effortless run of notes. In her left hand, the notes spaced at even intervals undulated up and down towards the centre notes. In her right, her fingers trilled into ripples of watery movements as if the two hands fought to be heard over each other; a heated conversation. The music rolled on, in waves, urgent, chasing, till Signora Elias reached up for the higher notes, spreading her palm wide and playing stacked notes at the same time. The tune from the earlier passage repeated, fuller for the addition of the lower notes, emphatic. The scarlet sounds burst with passion, insistence. And then, as quick as the storm blew over the instrument, it fell back, like a tide fast retreating. The reds were replaced by golden yellow tones, making Alba think of how the sun shines all the warmer after a summer downpour. Yet beneath the hope, Alba heard nostalgia, as if the song harkened to a lost peace. The tune was a bitter balm. An involuntary tear left a wet streak on her cheek. Then the waves crashed in again, Signora Elias’s fingers racing, till, at last, her rocking hands wove an ending, the repetition of the midsection playing over echoes of the tumultuous start, reaching a truce, both points of view sounding in their own right.

And then it was over.

Signora Elias looked at Alba’s face.

‘The first time I heard Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu I cried like a baby. You show remarkable self-control to shed only a solitary tear.’

Alba laughed at that, in spite of herself.

‘That’s the piece which made me want to become a pianist.’

Signora Elias held the silence, unhurried, as unflustered by it as the great splash of sound she’d just made. Then she stood up from her stool. Alba took it as her signal to leave, and she jumped up from her seat and pounced towards the stairs. Elias called out to her.

Alba turned back.

‘My piano. Would you like to play it?’

Alba wanted nothing more than to know how that magic poured out of her fingers, but she stood, frozen between terror and embarrassment.

‘Mamma will be busy for a while yet. I can show you some things. Only if you like, of course?’

Alba glanced towards the stairs, imagining the look on her mother’s face if she came down to see her daughter fingering this magnificent instrument.

‘Here, take a seat and I’ll adjust the stool to your height.’

Alba felt the thickness of the plush rug beneath her feet. She walked to the stool as if drawn to it by an invisible cord of golden thread. She listened to the metallic squeak of the stool as it rose.

‘Now, just place your hands on the keys, see what they want to naturally do.’

Alba did. They reflected back to her in the polished wood; twenty expectant fingers.

‘Have you ever sat at a piano, Alba?’

She shook her head.

‘Goodness. You hold your hands as if you have, my dear.’ Elias reached over and lifted her hands and moved them a little to the right until they seemed to be at the centre of the keyboard.

‘Why don’t you go ahead and play a few notes then?’

Alba turned to face Signora Elias, feeling like a trespasser.

‘Any note at all, any order, doesn’t matter, just feel the weight of them.’

Alba looked down at her hands. She pressed her second finger down. A bright sound rose up from beneath the lid, a fizz of yellow.

‘And another,’ Signora Elias encouraged.

Alba pressed her little finger down. This one was higher, prouder, a more certain sound.

‘What happens if you play one at a time starting with your thumb all the way up to your little finger, do you think?’

Alba felt the smoothness under the pads of her fingers, the thickness of the key, and let her fingers press down on each note in turn. A ladder, stepping-stones, sounds stacked on top of one another like building blocks.

‘Now come back down,’ Signora Elias said. Alba did. Her fingers were hot. They ached to touch every key, to hear the colour of each note, to race up and down like Elias.

‘Very good, Alba. Your fingers look quite at home there, wouldn’t you say?’

Alba looked up at Signora Elias. She hadn’t felt this safe since before her father’s ordeal, or perhaps ever. Her eyes grew moist. This time she swallowed her tears before they escaped.

‘Alba Fresu, what do you think you are doing?’ Giovanna cried, waddling down the stairs with buckets and brooms in tow. ‘Signora, I’m so so sorry – this won’t happen again.’

‘I think it would be criminal if it didn’t.’

Giovanna looked at her, unsure if she was about to be fired.

‘Giovanna, I would very much like to teach this young lady, if you and she were agreeable to the idea.’

Alba looked down at her fingers on her lap.

‘That’s very kind, signora’ – Giovanna flustered a laugh – ‘but right now we must get on and finish your downstairs and get home to make lunch. I’m so sorry if she made a nuisance of herself.’ Giovanna’s gaze flitted to the sospiri crumbs on the doily. Alba’s cheeks burned.

‘Very well, Giovanna, but once you’re finished you’ll take some of these sospiri home to your family, won’t you? No pleasure without sharing.’

Giovanna nodded. Alba jumped up from her stool.

They mopped the kitchen and downstairs bathroom in silence.

Outside, the heat swelled. The cicadas were in operatic form and the tufts of yellow fennel blossoms on the side of the road gave off their sweet sun-toasted anise scent. It was of some comfort ahead of Giovanna’s tirade.

‘What exactly did you make that poor old woman do? Did you ask her to play on that expensive piano?’

‘Of course not, Mamma, she asked me.’

Giovanna skidded to a stop. She pinned Alba with a glower. ‘Alba Fresu, we don’t have much, but I work every hour under the sun to teach my children one thing: honesty. You stand here lying to my face and think you won’t be punished? You wait till your father hears this.’

‘She asked me to listen!’

‘Maybe she did. But that’s no excuse to push your way in like a peasant. You know better.’

Tears of injustice prickled Alba’s eyes.

‘I’ve been waiting for the moment where you show some kind of thanks, for your father being alive, for having escaped this ordeal. But nothing! You float around like you’re invisible. Like a princess. It’s disgusting. You don’t talk. You help, but I have to redo the things after you’ve finished. Is this how I’ve taught you to be?’

Alba would have liked to cry then and there, to spit out that her night terrors were more than she could bear, that the feeling of a cave’s dampness skirted her dreams and waking hours, that she didn’t know how to describe the way her heart thudded in her chest for no reason during the day. That every bush held a secret promise of bandits lurking beneath. That their job was unfinished. That they would return for more. She longed to be held by her mother, told that everything would be fine, that one day she wouldn’t have the sinking feeling of dread trail her like a menacing shadow, that the dusk wouldn’t seep white panic through her veins. Instead, a sun-blanched silence clamped down.

‘There, you see? More sulky silence. Well, this has got to stop, signorina. You hear me?’

Alba swallowed. Her throat was hot and dry. The pine trees further up the hill swished their needled branches. Their woody scent wafted down on the breeze. Alba longed for them to be the comfort they once were.




3 (#ulink_13673ae2-2d99-58ce-b61e-9ba3a9c66ce7)


Fantasie



1 a free composition structured according to the composer’s fancy

2 a medley of familiar themes with variations and interludes


The following week, just as Alba was starting to speed up her run towards Signora Elias, her mother handed her a crumpled piece of paper. On it was a detailed list of vegetables she wanted Alba to buy at the market. Alba looked up at her mother.

‘Don’t just stand there. Get on down before it gets too hot. You can clean the artichokes and cut the potatoes. Get a can of olives from the shop and see at the end of the list I’ve added a few strips of pancetta. I’ll make pasta al coccodrillo for a treat, I know how much your brothers love that. They’ll be hungry after the morning at the officina.’

Giovanna’s words tumbled out in one blast of breath. Alba’s stomach growled. She wanted to think it was because she’d only eaten half a roll with her milk and coffee. Signora Elias was the highlight of her week. Her mother had just robbed her of it.

When they both returned home, Giovanna took her frustration out on the unsuspecting white-skinned onion she massacred into tiny pieces. Next, she launched an attack on the slices of pancetta, thwacked open the lids of passata from their glass jars, and ripped into the can of drained black olives that turned into little discs in a brusque breath or two. Alba was instructed to chop the slab of semi-soft fontina cheese into tiny cubes whilst her mother whooshed a pan with warmed olive oil and the softening onions. Pancetta was thrown in soon after, and the smell in their galley kitchen would have filled it with the promise of a comforting lunch if it wasn’t for Giovanna banging every pan on the range. Alba knew better than to ask what the matter was. Instead she eased her knife down through the cheese, taking her time so that she wouldn’t have to lay the table yet. Each blade slice, Alba half expected her mother to tell her how Signora Elias was that day, what she’d played, if it had been a swirling piece like the others. No descriptions of her morning were offered, but the way Giovanna threw a fist of salt into the boiling water of a deep stockpot for pasta made Alba worry she’d been fired for her daughter’s impoliteness after all.

Alba’s brothers returned soon after to bellows from their mother to scrub their hands. Alba carried the huge pot of pasta to the table. The fontina cheese had melted over all the pennette mixed in with the red pancetta sauce and olives. As she scooped the spoon down towards the base and up onto one of her brother’s bowls, strands of fontina oozed off it.

‘Coccodrillo, Ma?’ her elder brother, Marcellino, yelled from the other end of the table. He reached out a hungry arm for his bowl. He had entered his teenage years in earnest and Giovanna moaned about having to cook almost two kilos of pasta for their family these days. His thick black hair was like his father’s, and his crooked smile, and the way his eyes twinkled with unspoken mischief. His voice was deep and broad and he held the weight of an heir upon his wide shoulders with pride. Beside him sat their younger brother, Salvatore, who had their mother’s moon-shaped face and never fought to step out of his elder brother’s shadow. Salvatore had his grandfather’s patter and a speed of speech and reaction to match Marcellino. Neither measured the volume of their voices.

‘It’s a treat for you all today!’ her mother cried from the kitchen.

When all the bowls were full and Giovanna and Bruno took their places, silence replaced the gaggle of voices. The boys were sent out to play after lunch whilst Alba helped clear the table. Her father took his time to peel an early peach and chop it into tiny cubes, which dropped into his tumbler. When it was almost full, he reached for a slice of melon and did the same. Then he poured wine over the fruit-filled glass and began to swirl the mixture, pressing the soft fruit down with a gentle spoon until it was submerged. He scooped up his first spoon of wine-infused fruit. The smell made Alba’s mouth water. She found herself, as always, hanging to her place waiting for him to cast her a story, share a secret. Since his return home, none came. He was in his faraway place that Alba was instructed to never interrupt.

‘Let your father eat his macedonia in peace, Alba, and finish up inside.’

Alba followed her mother’s instructions. Her parents’ voices became muffled all of a sudden. It made her tune in through the doorway; when adults whispered there was always information that would be better known than not.

‘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 (#ulink_7590019b-74e5-5be9-ac5d-4d03943c6577)




4 (#ulink_4fa498a2-1d8e-516f-8239-3bda859399b2)


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.’

Alba nodded. She scooted the stool a little way from the keys and rolled the knobs at the side up to where was comfortable. She’d never played for anyone else. Signora Elias was right. Doing so was the hardest thing. At once she was exposed, filled with doubt without knowing why. She turned back to Signora Elias, annoyed for seeking reassurance. Signora Elias responded with the calm and clarity Alba needed; an effortless smile, as if Alba playing for a stranger was the most natural thing to do this morning.

Alba took a breath. Mario’s face crisped into focus. She blew away the picture, though it remained at the fringes, like a spider’s sticky silk. ‘Clair de Lune’ was one of her favourite pieces. She allowed mind to be soothed by the fact. She began, fingers light, silver tones sparkling in a starry Sardinian night, silent, fragrant with sun-cooked rosemary and myrtle. She wove towards the midsection, letting her body move into the melody supporting her fingers. Mauves and violets replaced the metallic shimmer from the opening and then returned home, like waking from a dream. Alba lifted her fingers off, unhurried.

She turned towards the women.

Celeste was nodding her head. Signora Elias was a sunbeam.

‘My second piece is a Chopin.’

‘I should hope so too,’ replied Celeste with a twinkle.

The further two pieces wound out of Alba’s body like a story she’d lived and retold a thousand times. Then the final staccato of her last Bartók piece leaped off the soundboard with the perk of a vibrant orange. The energy of the frenetic rhythms hung in the air when she turned back to the women.

‘That’s all I have ready to share just now,’ said Alba, thrumming with a mixture of elation and relief.

‘No “just” about it, signorina,’ Celeste replied with a grin that stretched her thin crimson-painted lips. She stood up, wafting her silk kaftan behind her as she did so and planted two kisses on Alba’s cheeks.

‘And what, may I ask, do you intend to do with this talent? And the years of service my wonderful friend has invested in you?’

The question was so absurd Alba almost chuckled. Catching sight of the woman’s serious expression she stopped herself.

‘I don’t really know. I’m not sure how I could ever repay my debt.’

‘No debt to me, Alba,’ Signora Elias said. ‘Celeste is asking you whether you think you would pursue a life in music. Should you have the chance.’

Alba’s mouth opened then shut again.

‘You have undeniable talent, Alba,’ Celeste began. ‘You have a light inside you and it streams out when you play. It is unfettered. Unaffected. I listen to a great deal of young people play and very few have this, an affinity with the instrument. A respect. A lack of desire to be watched, but rather an ability to communicate with brutal honesty. Believe me when I tell you how rare that is.’

Alba longed for words, expression, something other than the numbing silence fogging her body.

‘When Signora Elias and I met at the Accademia of Santa Cecilia in Rome we were told the same thing.’

Signora Elias chuckled now.

‘It is a great responsibility – talent,’ Celeste said. ‘You were born with something to honour, nurture, share. And this fabulous woman Elias saw it right away. I can see that. She’s not as much of a fool as she looks, no?’

The women laughed in unison now. Celeste’s laughter tumbling out like a scale, Signora Elias’s voice warm, like papassini fresh from the oven.

‘It is so wonderful to meet you, Alba dear.’ Celeste stretched out her hands and held Alba’s. ‘Tell me one thing. How do you feel when you play?’

Alba took a breath. Signora Elias nodded.

‘I’ve never been asked really.’

‘I’m asking you now. And I want to see if you can be as honest with your answer as you are when you play.’

Alba let the words reach her like a lapping wave.

‘I’m not sure I can. I’m not a person who likes to describe things too well. I think that’s why I love the piano.’ Alba longed to be able to form her sensations into sentences, but the words slipped away like rivulets of water at her fingertips. She longed to explain that when she sat at Signora Elias’s instrument she had a voice to express feelings and thoughts it was impossible to in real life, when she was Bruno Fresu’s daughter, the sulky girl who couldn’t control her temper, or get through school without coming from a family that grew in influence each year. That when she played she felt protected by the music and ripped open at the same time. That the music told her things, secret stories, coded messages of what it meant to exist, in all its brutal unfathomable glory. That it lifted her into blissful invisibility. That feeling was what she loved most. Powerful because of what the music fed her. But instead of sharing her tumbling thoughts, Alba felt her expression crinkle into an awkward frown. ‘I love the piano.’ Her voice slipped out plain, without ornamentation, like a starched linen tablecloth before the plates and crystal glasses have been laid.

‘Music is mathematics and heart,’ Celeste replied, ‘it can’t just make sense nor can it be just emotional. It’s a tender, intoxicating balance. That’s why so many people give their lives to it.’

Alba let her words reach her like a longed-for promise.

‘I suspect you ought to, too.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s been a great honour to meet you, Alba.’

‘You too, signora.’

Up till this very moment Alba had no inkling of what she was capable of. Each time Signora Elias encouraged her, she never shook the feeling that it was an act of kindness, that her playing was good in context, for a girl who knew nothing of music, and learned in secret against the wishes of her parents, listening to the recordings on a loop till her body knew the tunes better than anything that had happened to her in real life. Did Signora Elias know that she ate all her meals, attended all her school classes, finished her chores at home with the carousel of pieces and exercises spinning in her mind; weaving incessant patterns, articulations, melodies, countermelodies?

‘You’d better head off to school now, Alba. I would hate for you to be late,’ Signora Elias said.

Alba felt she had overstayed her welcome. Her cheeks flushed in spite of herself.

‘I’ll see myself out, signora. Thank you so much.’

She left feeling that the heat and light scoring her chest as the door closed behind her had little to do with the sun batting down from above.

Alba swung her class door open so fast that the wood banged against the concrete in the same spot as the week prior when she was sent out of class for arguing with Mario.

That morning, her teacher, Signora Campo, was not in a mood to let her inappropriate entrance slide. She slashed through the clatter of students setting out their thick textbooks onto their desks, staccato thuds echoing in the stone-walled room. ‘Why are you late, Fresu?’

Alba twisted back to her teacher’s squawk, answerless.

‘Well?’

‘She’s doing shows at the old witch’s house, signora! Thinks herself quite the little maestro!’ Mario called out from his desk next to hers. The boys around him fell into confused whispers. Alba shot him a look. It made everyone but him avert their eyes.

‘I will speak to your mother if this continues to affect your school day in this way, mark my words.’

Bullseye. Alba sank.

‘Does she make you play for all her cronies?’ Mario whispered out of the corner of his mouth as Alba swung onto her hard chair. His friend on the next desk sniggered. She gave an extra lift of her backpack and it missed Mario’s face by a hair.

‘Go to hell,’ Mario spat.

Alba let her biology textbook thud onto her desk, hoping she wouldn’t be the first one called on.

‘Fresu, you may come up for interrogazione, seeing as you wish everyone to notice you this morning.’ Alba felt her shoulders heave an involuntary defeat. She stood up, ignoring Mario’s smirk. The teacher took a breath, pulled down her light brown sweater over the mounds of her breasts and abdomen, peered over the rim of her glasses, and launched her assault. As Alba returned to her desk, relieved she had memorized the chapter on osmosis better than she had expected – much to the frustration of her teacher, who was looking forward to having an excuse to send her out – she couldn’t ignore the smart of shrapnel left by her threat.

When the bell rang at one o’clock, the concrete building thrummed with the swagger of sweaty adolescence, corridors thick with hormonal bodies pushing for escape. Alba adjusted the strap on her backpack, feeling the weight of her textbooks pull down on her shoulders. The throng was an unbearable cacophony, walls of intersecting discordance pushing in like a vice. A familiar panic bubbled in her abdomen. Her fingers raced up and down her thigh, clinging to Bach like a mast; the quicker they scurried, the louder the music in her head rose above the din like a white light.

The music came to a violent stop as a boy was pushed towards her, falling onto her back. Her knees buckled. The concrete met them with a painful blow. She reared underneath the weight with such force that the teenagers around her pressed back against the corridor walls. Her jet-black hair flung out in all directions, a horse flaying against the stable door. She twisted underneath the boy. He fell beside her, banging his head on the ground.

That’s when she recognized her only friend.

‘O Dio, Raffaele – I’m so sorry.’ They stood up, sniggering teenagers pushing around them.

‘Look at the lovebirds,’ someone shouted.

‘Don’t talk shit!’ Mario yelled from the opposite end of the corridor by the door to the yard. ‘He wouldn’t know where to stick it even if you told him!’

Thunderous laughter now. Alba’s cheeks deepened.

‘Don’t listen to those cretins, Alba,’ Raffaele whispered, scratching his head. Alba watched a few flakes of dandruff tumble down from his scalp over his forehead.

‘Did I break anything?’ Alba asked, feeling the sea of hormones wash behind her, blotting out the crackling voices, loose coins jangling in a pocket. Raffaele looked down at her, his huge black eyes sullen in his white face, small eruptions of acne threatening his cheeks. He launched into typical high-gear chatter. It reminded Alba of the passage she’d practised that morning. As always, he deflected the situation with a long explanation of algebraic logic from his morning’s math class. His familiar patter was reassuring. His rhythm rambled, sprouting shoots of tangential thoughts like weeds, filling the air Alba left bare.

‘So I decided that if I switched my approach, I could actually unpick the correct calculation. I think it just proves that maths is inherently a creative art. Like people always like to split us into artists or scientists, don’t you think? But it’s all bullshit because when I’m asking myself “what if”, it’s just the same as someone dreaming up something. Because that’s what I’m doing. Seeing an imagined list of outcomes and calculating which one is going to get me the result I need. You following?’

Alba watched Raffaele pull a skim of skin from around his nail with his front teeth.

‘Want to walk?’ she asked.

They crossed the forecourt, cutting through the cackles of the young girls and the clattering jeers of the boys. The noise grated, treble, discordant.

‘Hang on a second,’ Raffaele said, swinging his backpack round and reaching inside for a panino. Despite near constant eating, the boy was a spindle. He ripped the bread in two, a flap of prosciutto hung out the side beneath a thin slice of fontina cheese. He reached it out to her. ‘You want?’

Alba took it and sank her teeth in.

‘Mamma won’t stop checking my food. I swear she knows when I throw it away. Which of course I don’t because that’s a waste but what do I do when I’m not hungry? Seriously, feeding you is the only way I can stop Mamma launching into her lecture about the dangers of calorific and vitamin deficiencies in adolescence.’

Alba laughed. He was the only person who could make her do that.

‘Algorithmically speaking it’s complete nonsense. But she’s a Sardinian mother and she doesn’t care about the fact that I love numbers more than her. Correction, she is in fact threatened by that. She doesn’t even try to understand that. But she wouldn’t because she’s a doctor and she fixes things. And so do I. Only with my pencil and my brain. I got top marks for calculus today. There are people who do that all day. Did you know there are people who do that all day, Alba?’

They fell into hungry silence for a moment, chomping down on their halves of crusty roll, flicking off the flakes crumbling onto their sweaters as they strode downhill from the high school. Its large yellow concrete façade rose up behind them, overlooking a small park space with a rusting slide and metal seesaw. They reached Piazza Cantareddu, where the buses pulled into take students back to the neighbouring smaller towns. Raffaele ran a hand through his floppy hair and sighed. ‘I don’t want to go home yet. Absolutely don’t want to be home.’

Alba drew to a stop and wiped her mouth of a final crumb. ‘Come to mine?’

‘What will your ma say?’

‘Eat.’

‘I could – is that OK? I mean, is that a bit weird or maybe rude just showing up again? Are your brothers going to give me that look like I’m-the-boyfriend look because I don’t know how to deal with that look like they’re going to eat me or kiss me or both or worse, I don’t like that look. Mamma’s visiting a hospital down in Nuoro. Dad’s in Sassari at the office.’

Alba pictured her mother’s face if Raffaele turned up on her doorstep. She made it no secret that she loved the boy. The fact that his mother was a doctor and his father a lawyer only served to cement her affections. Alba ignored the sensation that her mother had crafted secret plans for him to become her son-in-law at the soonest opportunity.

Alba grinned. ‘My brothers share a brain. My mum loves you.’

‘I thought you loved me for my physique.’ He pulled a face then and curled his bicep, which peeped up under his shirt in a feeble half moon.

‘I love you because you were the only boy in kindergarten who didn’t try and mutilate my toys.’

They began the climb behind the main square, passing several schoolmates. One girl looked them both up and down, scanning for gossip; she leaned into her friend and whispered something. They giggled. Then both of them, catching the eye of someone beyond Alba, separated, lengthened, and pushed their chests further out, displaying their breasts as a prize. It made Alba feel nauseous. The facile rules of adolescence were exhausting and surreal. She scanned the kids hanging out in groups waiting for their lifts, picking up the whispers in the air: who kissed whom, which eyeliner was best, which Levi’s showed off their hips. Another girl threw a look her way as she passed them with Raffaele, checking for make-up and chosen style, both a drawn blank. Alba wore whatever lay on her chair in the morning from the day before, ran an impatient hand through her hair, and left the house. The other girls’ expressions told Alba that such an intimate friendship with an awkward boy like Raffaele was beyond their understanding.

A voice yelled out from behind her towards the peacocking girls.

‘You asked her out yet?’

Alba swung round to see Mario jeering at Raffaele with a group of friends. She heard the girls simper pathetic laughter, high notes on a piano played with too frothy a touch.

Alba shot him a look.

‘Lover girl sticking up for her man. How sweet!’ Mario caressed his cheek with a girlish giggle. The pack of boys around him chuckled, thwacks of broken voices bracing boyhood.

Raffaele straightened. ‘Don’t talk to her like that.’

‘What you going to do? Write a calculation to shut me up?’ Mario snapped back, delighted his bait had been bitten.

The girls’ laughter spiked.

Alba watched Raffaele’s cheeks turn.

‘Don’t look at me like that, nerd,’ Mario jeered.

Raffaele’s frown creased in confusion.

‘I said, don’t look at me like that!’

Mario pounced from his throne at the metal table outside the bar where the teenagers congregated for soda, waiting for their buses home. He pushed off with such force that it tipped, sending the glasses smashing to the floor. In a breath, he was on top of Raffaele, pounding his back. Two of Mario’s friends jumped up and began kicking into his side. Alba watched her only friend being pummelled. Her chest burned. The sounds tunnelled into a pounding silence undercut with a familiar echo of scuffing feet, men’s voices. Her hand reached out to a large glass bottle on the table beside Mario’s. Her fingers tightened. She swung. The glass smashed against the back of Mario’s skull. A splat reached her face. Water? Blood? She didn’t care. Her arm cut through the air again and again. A hand on hers clamped her to stillness. The silence became a bass note, slow vibrations waving through the heat. The wetness on her hands turned red. A drip on her trousers blotted crimson. Someone held her.

The smash of the half bottle as it slipped from her hand onto the cobbles brought her attention down to Mario at her feet. There were men around him now. Some hollers. There was a cry, a beige blur of confusion.

Alba didn’t remember getting into the car until she noticed the heat of her grandfather’s passenger seat. The leather squeaked as Raffaele scooted into the back. They wound the vicoli to her house in silence but for the metallic simmer of the engine. As they stepped inside, Giovanna’s expression blanched into panic.

‘Found them in the square, Giovanna, killing each other like dogs.’ Her grandfather’s voice was a scrape of sandpaper.

Giovanna disappeared into the kitchen and came out with a bowl of warm water and some cloths. She sat Raffaele down and lifted his chin. He winced. He tried to swallow a tear before it tipped over his lashes but failed.

‘Which cretin did this to you?’ Giovanna puffed in between blotting. ‘You tell me who and we’ll sort him out.’

‘It was Mario!’ Alba cried out. ‘Who else?’

‘We will discuss this when Bruno is home,’ her grandfather interrupted. ‘You just get on and clean him up. Don’t want his father to think we’d sent him home without that. The very least we can do after what your child did.’

Alba didn’t meet his eye.

The door swung open. Alba’s brothers bounded in ahead of their father from the officina. Marcellino undid the two top buttons of his shirt; at nineteen he’d become the newest executive of the officina. His hair was black and thick like Alba’s, but his eyes lacked the probing intensity of hers. To him, life was a game and one that was sure to deal him a good hand. Her younger brother, Salvatore, flung his tie and shirt off to sit in just his vest, throwing the discarded uniform to the sofa in a thoughtless crumple. He ran his hand through his floppy light brown hair.

As he caught her eye his expression changed. ‘Christ! What the hell happened?’

‘O Dio – who did this?’ Marcellino bellowed, seeing Raffaele’s face. ‘Tell me his name and I’ll crumple his face for you.’

‘Back off,’ Alba hissed, her lips opening into a thin line.

‘That’s enough from you, Alba,’ her grandfather overruled.

‘What’s happening?’ Bruno asked, his voice urgent as he stepped in by the table.

‘I caught your wild daughter attacking our mechanic’s son, Mario, in the middle of the piazza just now. Any more swings with that broken bottle and she’d near enough have killed the boy.’

‘He’s a cretin!’ Alba blurted.

‘Quiet!’ Bruno spat. ‘Every week you have to make a fool of yourself. Of us!’

‘She’s hurt, Bruno,’ Giovanna eased.

‘You’ve spoiled this girl and you see how she turned out? I’ve told you and I’ve told you again, but, no, you let her do as she pleases. And now look! Running around town like a demented urchin, picking fights. She’ll be at Marcellino’s wedding next week looking like this!’

‘Take it easy, Bruno,’ Alba’s grandfather murmured.

Giovanna’s hand began to shake. She pressed the cloth a little too hard onto Raffaele’s face. He took a sharp intake of breath.

‘Scusa, Raffaele,’ Giovanna whispered, ‘are you all right?’

He nodded biting his lip.

‘And the boy?’ Bruno bellowed a breath away from Alba’s face. ‘Don’t tell me you hit him too, for God’s sake?’

Alba’s head didn’t move. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

‘Say something, for Christ’s sake!’

Bruno’s shouts ricocheted against the surrounding stone walls, creeping closer with every hot second that pounded.

‘What you asking her for, Babbo?’ Marcellino jeered. ‘You think she’s going to answer for once?’

‘I’m not talking to you, Marcellino,’ Bruno replied, ‘or you, Salvatore.’

Alba noticed her younger brother swallow an interjection.

‘What in God’s name is this family coming to? You know what I do all day for you at the officina? What we all do? And you just float in and out of this house as if you weren’t here. You run out of the house before dawn for that old lady on the hill, doing her every whim like a servant girl, and in here you’re like this! What am I supposed to do with someone like this at work?’

A knock at the door. Everyone turned towards it. Salvatore opened it. Their neighbour Grazietta poked her head around the wood. She took a breath to begin her usual prattle but the angry eyes pinning her at the doorframe stopped her train of thought in an instant.

‘Raffaele! Dio! Who did this? This boy needs a hospital! Giova’, I’ll come with you to the hospital,’ she flapped. ‘My nephew is on shift today, he’ll help us.’

‘Stay where you are,’ Bruno interrupted. ‘My lawyer’s son is being looked after just fine.’ Grazietta turned pale. ‘Sick and tired of you women telling me how to look after this stupid child! Alba did this. All this. You women have no idea how to bring her up. You bring shame on all of us!’

He reached for the jug of water and filled a glass, emptying it in two gulps. He set it back down too quick and it almost cracked. His eyes drifted over to the wide dish of fresh ravioli, fast cooling as the argument steamed on, the pecorino hardening to a congealed mess.

‘Bruno,’ Grandfather stepped in, ‘eat your lunch, then decide what needs to be done. And something drastic. You can’t get away with this any longer, Alba, you hear me? Time you learned how to behave as part of this family. People respect us. We’ve all worked our guts out to give you children a good life. You don’t throw it in our faces like this, you hear? Your father got taken by the bandits and we fought against them. I won’t stand here and watch my granddaughter become a spoiled brat. I won’t let you ruin my name, do you hear?’

Bruno yanked a chair out from the head of the table; it screeched along the tiles. ‘Eat with us, Papà.’ He flicked a look at Giovanna. She pulled the cloth away from Raffaele’s face.

‘I’ll stop by later then?’ Grazietta squeaked into the charged silence.

‘And before you go,’ Bruno snarled, ‘and think about going around the rest of the street telling them what you just saw, just remember this is me when I’m calm. No one wants to see me angry. Hear me?’

Grazietta scurried back out onto the street.

The boys sat down in the shadow of their father’s suffocated ire.

‘You going to help Mamma or what?’ Marcellino hollered at Alba.

She stood up. Her fingers gripped the ladle.

‘Talk to that old woman Elias, Giovanna,’ Bruno called out to her as she returned to the kitchen for a basket of bread. ‘Tell her Alba has to stop working for her immediately. No knowing what she’ll do.’

His words tore right through Alba. A thin line of high-pitched whir in her head grew in volume. Alba scooped up three plump parcels of ricotta and spinach. Marcellino lifted his plate. She pulled the spoon over past the rim and let the ravioli fall onto his lap. Marcellino jumped up, yelping. Giovanna rushed out of the kitchen. The room skewed, piano strings twisted out of tune. Alba didn’t remember flinging the door open, the cries of her mother, the sound of her feet pounding the toasted cobbles as she dragged her friend behind her and ran towards the road for the pineta. She remembered only the salt of her angry tears wetting her lips and the sound of her brothers like hungry hounds, echoes swallowed up by the distance.

It was Alba’s favourite time to be in the pineta. The shade didn’t hum with the fringes of summer, there was a pleasant cool. They found a stump on the needled floor and sat in silence fighting to catch their breath.

‘I don’t know who’s going to kill me first. My father or yours,’ Raffaele murmured.

Their breaths eased towards normal.

‘What are we going to do, Alba? I mean we can’t just sit here. And when Mario sees me tomorrow, he’s going to kill me completely, I mean not just like this, I mean absolutely no breathing, as in dead, do you hear me? And dead is not what I want to be right now, can you understand that? Do you have any idea how terrified I am right now?’

Alba picked up a dried needle and started twiddling it between her fingers.

‘Tell me what to do!’

Raffaele’s tears fought for their freedom and won. Alba reached for his hand and squeezed it. The bruises on his face were starting to form, blushed bougainvillea pinks, crushed grape purples.

‘I don’t know,’ she murmured.

‘You have to.’

‘I don’t remember any of it.’

‘You saved me.’

His eyes warmed into an expression she didn’t recognize. Her brow creased.

‘Are you going to kiss me, Raffaele?’

He swallowed. Neither moved.

‘You’re my brother.’

‘I know,’ he replied. His stillness unnerved Alba.

‘Don’t you just want to get all of this out of the way? I mean, it’s like I don’t care about any of it and just want it done. Cleared up. Is that weird? It’s a bit weird maybe. I just want to stop feeling like I should be having feelings about it? And I do want to kiss you. Well not really, but you’re sort of the only person I could if I had to. Not that we have to. I want to get some sex out of the way before I fall in love with someone. Sorry. I mean, not sorry, but sort of.’ His fingers reached up for a pimple on his cheeks and started twiddling. ‘Help me anytime you want, Alba. I’m drowning here.’

‘Sort of how I feel, I think.’

Raffaele looked up.

‘That makes us both weird, I guess,’ Alba added, smoothing the hair off her face. He was the only person she could be honest with. It was an orange glow in her belly.

‘We could try?’ she began, feeling the absurdity of the moment heat her cheeks.

‘Really? I thought you were about to hit me.’

‘Make sure you get out before you – you know.’

Raffaele swallowed. ‘Yeah, course.’

‘Will you know when?’

‘Think so?’

They looked at each other. Alba moved her face towards his. Raffaele sneezed, splattering his T-shirt. A speck of saliva flecked Alba’s wrist.

‘Sorry,’ he murmured, wiping his arm across his face.

He took a breath and Alba knew he was about to launch into a punctuation-free sentence. She stopped him with her lips. He didn’t move. After a moment, their heads switched incline. The kiss was stilted and angular. It dissolved the hissing red in her ears. She twisted out of her jeans and he out of his. She felt his penis harden on her thigh. It felt like two friends marking their hypothesis ahead of a scientific experiment. He eased himself inside Alba. They stopped for a moment.

‘Is it awful? Does it feel weird?’ he stammered. ‘Does it hurt? I’ll stop if it’s hurting.’

‘Stop talking.’

An expression streaked his long face. Alba reached up with her hands. ‘I’m not saying it’s not nice. Try moving.’

He did, slowly at first, tentative whispers in his hips, reluctant, stiff. His breath quickened. His eyes closed. He looked like he was listening to a far-off call, a pianissimo section. Alba thought about the ferocity of a demanding measure of Liszt, her hands defiant, full of longing. But as her friend became urgent on top of her, it was like watching him through glass. The sounds and feelings muted, an echo reaching her, diluted and distorted. He pulled out. His semen spilled in spurts across the needled floor.

It was over.

They lay upon their backs gazing up at the pines above them, crisscrossing lines of green against the pure blue.

‘I don’t know how I’m feeling, Alba.’

Their silence creased. The cicadas raised their cry. Congratulatory or mocking, Alba couldn’t tell.

‘I don’t know if I want to do that again,’ he said.

‘Me neither.’

Alba propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at her friend’s face. ‘Your face looks awful.’

‘The idiot staring at me saved me. That’s all I care about.’

His narrow chest rose and fell as his breath deepened towards normal.

Alba smiled. Her headache had gone at last. ‘I love you.’

He smiled with relief. ‘No one I would have liked to get all that out of the way with other than you. It’s a minty freedom.’

Her face spread into a grin. ‘One try at sex and you speak poems, not algorithms.’

‘No,’ he replied, his voice dipped in a sudden seriousness. ‘Love does that.’

Alba laughed and fell onto her back. She reached her hand for his.

When they returned to their spot the next day, Raffaele broke down whilst revealing his love for his neighbour Claudio. Alba held her weeping friend as he described wanting to suffocate his desires by having sex with her. Her strong fingers wrapped around his shuddering arms as sobs spilled from him. Their foreheads touched. His tears streaked her cheeks. His secret was out and safe. Would she ever be able to say the same?




5 (#ulink_11448613-4c95-594f-9434-c84eaed7cdbc)


Accelerando, accel.

accelerating; gradually increasing the tempo

At last, the week from hell reached its welcome end. Both daughter and parents stood firm, retreating into stubborn silences. Alba was accompanied to school by Marcellino, and returned flanked by Salvatore, both instructed not to let her out of their sight. The notes she’d written to Signora Elias in her mind would never reach her. Raffaele tried to talk with her but each time one or other of her brothers would intervene, as instructed. Alba ignored her mother at her own peril, because if she’d paid more attention, she may have noticed Raffaele’s father at the house more often. She might have thought that Raffaele’s mother coming round was odd. But she didn’t. She baked the papassini as her mother asked. She sliced melon thin upon a plate. She poured the coffee when asked and attended to all her usual duties, trying to mask her bitterness so as not to give them the satisfaction of seeing how much they hurt her. She returned from school that Friday to find her mother leaning over her father with a needle in one hand and a red thread hanging from it. She mimed stitching her father’s eye, as if joining both eyelids together. The thread lifted through her father’s thick eyelashes several times. He had another sty. This was the tried and tested remedy.

‘Good, you’re back. Your father has come home to talk to you before your brothers get home. Sit down.’

It was the first time Giovanna had looked excited about anything other than Marcellino’s wedding, or directed anything to her, for that matter.

Alba’s suspicion peaked.

‘Your father and I have been talking.’

Bruno patted her mother’s hand. They smiled at each other. Their loving moment should have filled Alba with relief. Had they decided to let her work for Signora Elias again? Had they mistaken her sullen quiet for obedience? Something stirred in her stomach.

‘I’ve been asked to give permission for you to marry,’ Bruno said, taking over the exposition of wonderful news.

Alba sat motionless.

‘Say something,’ Bruno murmured. ‘A smile would be a good start.’

‘By who?’ Alba blurted, her cheeks creasing, making the bruises from the fight still ache.

‘Who?’ Bruno asked, perplexed. ‘How many are you leading on at once?’

‘It’s perfectly normal to be nervous!’ Giovanna piped up. ‘I was a wreck when your father asked me. It’s what girls do. It’s a big step. You’re young, I know. This week has been difficult, yes. But having children young is better. And I will help of course with the children so you can keep up your job at the officina. All the modern girls do that now. You don’t have to stay at home like I did. You can have it all, Alba. Freedom! And such a good family. I’m going to cry.’

Alba watched as her mother lived her proposal on her behalf. All the tears she ought to be shedding, all the excitement for a life revolved around work at the officina and babies. A delightful seesaw of obligations to guarantee fulfilment.

‘I said yes, of course,’ Bruno added, trying to steer the conversation back.

Alba looked at her father. Whose betrayal was worse? Hers for sneaking out of their sight under the guise of aiding an old lady or theirs for coordinating the rest of her life? She couldn’t protest because she was too guilty. She couldn’t accept because the thought was absurd. Why had her friend done this to her? He was saving them both from the fate of small-town living, but had he not stopped to think that their fate was inscribed in the stone streets of the very place they needed to career away from? Was his love for Claudio so deep that he would do something as stupid as this? Love was not blind, thought Alba. It was sheer self-destruction.

Giovanna’s arms wound around her now, squeezing what little hope there was left. Celeste rose into Alba’s mind, her dancing eyes, her voice filled with spring and floral celebration. That room felt like a place she’d touched in a dream.

A knock at the door tore the trio’s attention away from the absurd plan. Alba opened the door, more to escape the enforced celebration than anything else. Signora Elias stood on the street. She looked smaller somehow. Without words Alba tried to describe what had happened. She watched her teacher look at her face, still marked with the fight, registering the cuts and bruises.

‘I couldn’t come,’ Alba said, feeling tears sting her eyes, watching her teacher read in between her breaths.

‘It’s quite all right, Alba,’ she soothed. ‘You’re not to worry. I had to come now though. I have a letter for you which you must read.’

‘Signora!’ Giovanna called out, stepping in behind her daughter. ‘Please, come in, you need coffee? An aperitivo, maybe?’

‘Grazie, signora, but I can’t stay. I have a shopping order to pick up at the butcher. Actually, might Alba just help me carry it to my car? I won’t keep her more than five minutes. I know she’ll be helping you with lunch.’

‘Bruno is here, he can help. I’ll call him!’

As Giovanna turned to call for him, Signora Elias insisted. Alba suspected she was the only woman who might do that to her mother. ‘I won’t have you trouble him. I know how hard he works, Alba will do just as well.’

Alba tried not to look excited at the prospect and it appeared to serve as enough to convince her mother that running the errand would not upset her father. She gave a terse nod and Signora Elias didn’t waste any time.

Alba hadn’t realized how fast the old woman walked until they were striding downhill. Anyone who might have seen would have been as confused as her father as to why this nimble woman needed a young girl to run her morning goods up to her each morning. It made Alba love her even more than she already did. Nothing stood in the way of Signora Elias’s will; on top of her playing, this was a dark art in and of itself.

Signora Elias led them to a bench in the small Piazza Cantareddu, where next week the fires would be lit for St John’s celebrations. Alba and Raffaele would always leap over the embers together with the other teenagers. This year would be different. If she didn’t strangle him before then for not stopping this harebrained idea of marriage before it got out of hand.

They sat beneath the acers, sheltered in their mottled shade. Alba knew better than to ask about the butcher. There was no shopping to collect. Signora Elias had prised a little privacy for them, that was all.

‘I have something important to tell you, Alba.’

Alba’s heart lurched.

‘I have a letter here.’

Signora Elias was about to elucidate when Alba’s tears compelled her attention.

‘Dio, whatever is the matter, child? What I have to say is the most amazing thing I’ve ever had to say to any of my pupils.’

Alba looked up.

‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Signora Elias asked again.

‘They want me to marry,’ Alba sobbed, hating herself for not being able to talk like a sensible person, to stretch her back, deepen her breath, hold some kind of centre. She was behaving like the very girls she never longed to emulate.

Signora Elias wiped her tears. Her thumbs were smooth and firm.

‘I didn’t know you were courting.’

‘I’m not. He’s my best friend. It’s not our idea. It’s all so stupid I can’t believe I’m even telling you. I’m so sorry, signora.’

‘Nonsense. I would be hurt if you didn’t. Here.’ She handed over a neat folded tissue from her pocket.

‘Grazie.’

They sat in silence for a moment. Alba grew aware of the sauntering teenagers beginning to fill the piazetta, still parading after the end of school before returning home. It would be better if none of them saw her like this, even if Signora Elias had picked a bench a little way from the main drag.

‘Perhaps when they find out what I have to say everything might change?’ Signora Elias soothed. ‘You may want to cry again, and that is absolutely fine with me, do you hear?’

Alba nodded, but her words were a dying echo. Signora unfolded a letter. It was cream paper, embossed at the top, which Alba could make out from the sunlight hitting it from behind Signora Elias. Her teacher began reading.

When she finished she looked up.

Alba could hear nothing but the galloping thuds in her chest.

‘Do you understand what they’re offering you, Alba?’

‘I want to but I don’t think I believe it.’

‘A full scholarship, Alba. This is only offered for exceptional students at the accademia. Celeste has also offered that you might take a few classes at the conservatorio, the adjoined school, which prepares pupils from the basic level up to a standard where they might try out for the accademia. These extra classes would only be for the first few months, just to bring you up to speed on the theory side of things. I’ve covered most of what you need but she thinks it would help you. Only a handful of piano students are chosen each year.’

‘What?’

‘My dear friend is the head assessor at the Accademia of Santa Cecilia in Rome. What she says goes. It is highly unusual, which means your first year will be very important. As with all students, there is no guarantee that you will stay for the whole three years unless you maintain a high standard. If you do not keep up the work it will be within their rights to ask you to leave, you understand? Especially with such an atypical admission process.’

‘I’m trying to hear what you’re saying but it’s like it’s so sunny my ears are blocked. Does that even make any sense?’

Signora reached forward and wrapped her arms around Alba. She wasn’t sure which one of them was crying now. As Signora Elias pulled away, her face lit up. ‘I knew it from the very first moment. Something about the way you sat. Something about your curiosity, humility, power, passion; even you don’t fully understand just yet, I suspect. And I don’t mean that in a patronizing way – it’s not a reductive remark, I mean that you are just at the start of your potential and it fills me with grace and hope and pleasure that has been lacking in my life for too long.’

Alba watched her wipe her eyes, feeling waves of gratitude and embarrassment and grief and excitement.

‘I will be happy to let your parents know. You won’t do this alone. This has a lot to do with me and I will take the responsibility, you must trust me on that, yes?’

‘How?’

‘All you need do is play. You must leave everything else to me, si?’

Sunday arrived and the Fresu household became a tense allegro. Alba’s fingers ached for the instrument in the house she’d been barred from. Her heart raced with the prospect of when and how Signora Elias would explain her offer to her parents, which they’d decided to delay till after Marcellino’s wedding. Giovanna ran up and down the stairs remembering and forgetting, her feet stomping the stone as she switched scarves, exchanged earrings, begged her sons to wear what they had agreed the night before. In one hand she clutched a cloth bag of grains and in another a basket of rose petals. She and Grazietta had stayed in the previous evening, plucking them from their stems, listing the wrongs of the neighbours and the fanfare with which Marcellino’s prospective mother-in-law had dealt her demands for his wedding to her daughter Lucia. Alba noticed her mother’s streaming thoughts had more in common with the discarded thorny stems than the petals as they released their delicate scent between the women’s tugging thumbs. At last it was the morning of the largest wedding in town to date, a triumph Alba’s mother bore with pride and panic.

Alba heard her mother fly up the stairs one more time and took the chance to step into the kitchen for some water. Marcellino leaned against the tiled counter.

‘You look like a ghost,’ she said.

He glanced up and gave a half smile. He sighed, ran his hand over his black hair, cemented with gel.

‘Break the habit of a lifetime and say something nice,’ he replied.

Alba noticed his skin was salty with nervous sweat. She returned his half smile in reply. Marcellino ruffled her hair, nearly pulling out the flower Giovanna had insisted she wear. She felt like a hedge trying to dress as a rose. Her mother had painted over her bruises, but they still blushed through the make-up.

Bruno poked his head around the doorframe. He reached out a small shot glass to his first-born, filled to the brim with acquavite. There were no words to accompany the gesture, only a complicit silence. Marcellino’s eyes widened with the fire coursing down his throat. Bruno laughed and took his son’s cheeks in his hands. Alba couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her father so happy. Would he do this to her once he heard her music? Would he understand the gift Signora Elias had given her? It was the first time Alba could remember seeing his smile take over his face with complete abandon. Her heart twisted into a knot. Bruno shot her a glance. A warning? She would have liked to find the words to reassure him that she wouldn’t be starting a fight at the party, but a stubborn silence froze her face into well-rehearsed diffidence; the night before, she’d heard her parents argue over where Mario’s father, Gigi, and the family would be seated to make sure that Alba wouldn’t cause unnecessary problems.

The men left and bundled into a large black sedan Fiat. Giovanna, Grazietta and Alba scooted onto the leather back seat of a smaller vehicle. At once the line of cars waiting outside their house started sounding their horns. The caravan of trumpeting cars wove through Ozieri, announcing to the few people who were not invited that the son of one of the most successful families in town was about to marry the love of his life. The narrow viccoli were filled with the bombardment of metallic orchestration, the rumble of the engines, the treble of the obnoxious klaxons. The cars filled every nook around the cathedral, a metallic cluster of ants upon the cobbles. Cars were eked into narrow spaces at angles, double-parked, a breath of space between them, whilst the Fresu clan headed up to Lucia’s flower-strewn house for Marcellino to collect his bride. Lucia’s mother greeted Giovanna with two kisses. Wine was passed around. Voices collided like currents bouncing off the marble floors and up the stone walls and concave ceiling. The eldest aunt threw flowers over Lucia’s head, a face floating in a meringue of lace and tulle. Grains were thrown over Marcellino for fertility. A plate was smashed. The cheers were an assault on Alba’s ears, but her mother’s face was streaked with tears and Bruno’s infectious smile made everyone believe him to be the proudest of fathers.

Violent happiness thundered around her. The claustrophobic energy reminded Alba her music might swerve towards unavoidable disappearance. Her father made no secret that her destiny lay behind the counter at the officina, learning from Mario’s father no less, overseeing the parts and books. Alba decided it was his prolonged punishment for what she’d done to his son. Every Saturday from now on was to be spent beside him learning every detail of the job. What pleasure would be found in the quiet order of nuts and bolts? The idea of listening to the customers and their mechanical needs made her heart ache. To Mario’s father, customers’ car stories elongated into detailed descriptions of domestic concerns, delivered with mechanical precision. He oiled their worries, wiped them clean off their conscience, and then replaced them with new thoughts. Alba couldn’t picture herself doing the same. The knot in her chest twisted a little tighter.

In the cathedral, the priest intoned a mass they all knew by heart whilst the echoes of the crowd rippled whispers up the stone like a September sea caressing the white sands of the shore. The couple were blessed, then stepped out into the glare of the mid-morning sun, where they were showered with more grains of rice and petals and cheers. The snaking parade of cars then curved through the valley, pumping out their triumphant cries with a further blast of horns vibrating the sunny stillness towards the plains. When they reached the new headquarters of the officina, waves of people flooded the hangar where the cars were usually stored, now moved and parked outside, filling the surrounding tarmac, to allow shelter of the seven hundred invitees. Tables stretched from one end to another with a central one heaving with food.

Vast trays offered every kind of salad, sliced meats and cheeses, which the guests dived into as if everyone had refrained from eating for the entire week in preparation. Servers swarmed the tables after that with trays of fresh gnocchetti, linguini with bottarga and fresh ravioli. The king prawns that followed were almost punishment, but the guests soldiered on, plates heaped with discarded pink shells, fingers sticky and happy with parsley and garlic juice. Wine sloshed between glasses, onto tablecloths, onto some men’s shirts. When the roasted suckling pigs were pushed in on a trolley, they were met with cheers.

Alba watched the town before her from her seat at the head table, ignoring the knowing stares at her bruised face beneath the layers of pink blusher. Her father swayed between tables, shaking hands, laughing full-bellied, her mother’s feathers sprayed with pride, her brothers among the guests greeting everyone like princes. Several tables beyond theirs, Raffaele sat beside his parents looking his usual pale self, his own face a healing map of surface wounds. Alba shot him a look, counting the seconds until she could get him outside and lay into him for being in any way complicit with the obnoxious plan for them to marry. They had to stay visible at least for the meal before she could find a quiet corner for them to talk.

A chorus of glass tinkling rose from the tables, to yells for the couple to kiss. ‘Bacio! Bacio!’ the guests belted, a canon of bass and tenor, soprano laughter. The tempo quickened, till it galloped towards consummation. Marcellino and Lucia leaned into each other, pressed their lips together, and the room exploded with applause.

Once the first feast reached its end, Alba took the opportunity to escape. Outside, the air was hot against her skin. The sun was beginning its golden descent towards the mountains, their purple silhouettes rising into focus.

‘I’ve been going crazy not being able to talk to you!’ Raffaele called out, breathless.

Alba turned. He stood a few steps behind her, his vanilla skin turning amber, the sun streaking across the healing scrapes on his forehead.

‘You’ve lost your mind!’ she blurted. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I want to hurt you.’

‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks, my friend, how are you?’

Alba shook her head. ‘You’re the insane one here, not me.’

‘Actually, I’ve accepted our escape route.’

‘For someone so clever your common sense has some seriously arrested development.’

Raffaele grabbed her shoulder. ‘You want to die here?’

‘No dramatics, Ra’.

‘We get married – we get to do what we like with our lives. Real lives. What town do you think we’re living in, Alba? We both know what plans they’ve made for you. And they don’t involve Elias.’

Alba stiffened.

‘You don’t think I’ve put two and two together? The way you speak about music. The way your face lights up like a flame when you’ve played me some of the records she gave you at my house? Come on. You don’t have to be a detective to know that spending every morning with a music teacher insinuates you are her pupil.’

‘Save your smart-ass for someone else, Ra. They stopped me going after the fight. Why do you think I’ve had my brothers following me like shadows?’

‘And it’s killing you. Alba, this is me. Not some idiot. I’m not going to tell anyone. Obviously. Crazy that we’re even having this conversation.’

Alba pinned him with a stare.

‘Don’t be like that. I’m just …’ His voice trailed off for a moment.

‘I thought you were my friend,’ she whispered, fighting tears of frustration and almost winning.

‘I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.’

Alba turned her gaze away from him, playing chess manoeuvres in her mind to escape her corner.

‘My parents will be expecting a good match for me,’ he said, undeterred, releasing his hands from her. ‘I don’t want to spend my life with another woman. It makes me feel like I’m dying. You don’t want to spend your life behind the counter of an officina – so why don’t we cut our losses, do the stupid thing, and then move away from it all?’

Alba turned to him, eyes stinging. ‘You’re talking shit.’

‘At least I’m talking.’

Her breaths rose in her chest.

‘I got the acceptance letter from the University of Cagliari yesterday. I don’t know how I’m going to cope without you, Alba. We know each other’s secrets.’

Not all of them, Alba thought.

‘I don’t think there’s a soul out there I could trust like I do you. And it terrifies me.’

Alba held her friend’s cheek in her hand. His skin was soft where he had shaved. She took a breath to tell him about her offer from the accademia. Mario’s sneer interrupted before she could. ‘People normally go someplace private to do that shit.’

The pair twisted round to him as he threw a cigarette into his mouth and lit it.

‘People normally don’t interrupt conversations they’re not part of,’ Alba snapped.

‘Planning on swinging for round two, Alba? Your papà would love that. At your brother’s wedding of the year and all.’

Alba pinned him with a stare. Mario flicked his ash down onto the dusty earth by her shoes. ‘Don’t know what you see in her, Raffaele,’ he jeered.

Raffaele didn’t return his glance.

‘Your dad’s pissed as a fart, Alba,’ Mario said, flicking her a diagonal grin.

She watched Mario take a deep drag on his cigarette, the orange-ruby light dipping his skin a richer olive, the thick mass of eyelashes potent shades for his jeering eyes.

‘Anyway, get back to your necking. Your dads will be organizing your big day in no time.’ He scuffed the dirt. ‘What?’ he asked, taking another drag. ‘Frustrating to have to hear it as it is and not be able to throw a bottle at me?’

He turned back to the hangar, which hummed with song now, a call-and-response chant, each verse interrupted by the throng in unison.

‘He likes you,’ Raffaele said.

Alba shot him a look.

‘I know you’d like me to say he’s straight out terrified of you. But when you’re a stupid boy choked by the feelings you have for someone you behave like him. Pretty much how I deal with Claudio on a daily basis. Either that or I act like I’m totally indifferent.’

Raffaele’s smile was fringed with sadness.

‘The next few months are going to be intense. I know it. Dad’s got big plans for me. I’ll do anything to take the heat off.’

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘That’s what we’re doing,’ he replied, just as Salvatore came bounding out of the hangar.

‘Alba, Raffaele! Babbo says to come in, they’re about to toast you!’

Alba couldn’t get her response out before they were dragged inside to deafening applause.

‘Please God, these two will be the next!’ Bruno shouted. The crowd stood, gleaming eyes that Alba felt were seeming to wish imprisonment on them both. Her bones felt brittle, as if they’d never felt the response of a piano’s song beneath them, calling out all that was hers to utter in secret, filling the air with melodic freedom, nor never would again.

She tried to swallow, but her mouth remained dry.




6 (#ulink_2e906292-748e-5d41-95c0-89d8228f94c7)


Fuoco

a directive to perform a certain passage with energy and passion. Con fuoco means with fire, instruction to play in a fiery manner

A few days later, Signora Elias dropped by to speak with Giovanna and offer a cordial invitation to come to hers for coffee, an official thank-you for all the time she and Alba had worked for her, she’d said, in a way that Giovanna was left with no power to refuse. The date was set. During the weekend, after school had reached its end, Alba and her parents would come to her house. Never had five days felt so close and far away.

Now, at the beginning of the week, all of Ozieri crowded around the huge bonfire in Piazza Cantareddu to celebrate St John the Baptist. Beside the fire, people sat upon wooden benches drinking wine and carving slabs of cheese from enormous pieces, wrapping them into blankets of bread and toasting the feast. Applause began from one end of the square and rippled up to where Alba sat with her mother and Grazietta.

‘Abaida!’ Grazietta called above the din. ‘Isn’t that Gigi’s boy? I didn’t know he was singing with the men now!’

Alba shot a look across to where a group of men were tightening into a circle intoning a chord before their song. She scanned the familiar faces and there, beside his father, was Mario. His flat black hat flopped over one ear, his white shirt billowing out from beneath a black tunic. Their voices vibrated with a warm, burnished sound, glistening copper tones. Then they stopped, took a breath in unison, and began to sing. She listened as Mario’s voice lifted up above the group, the purest column of sound she’d ever heard. His timbre woody yet crisp, golden and bright, full of yearning. It was impossible to match this voice with the imbecile she loathed. This couldn’t be the arrogant boy flicking ash towards her feet. Where was his snarl, the sideways grimace, the unattractive swagger? He took a deeper breath and his voice rose higher still, enhanced by the earthy bass chord beneath, the crowd hushed at the sound. The other men’s voices glowed blood red and ochre, and above, the sky blue of his love song. Alba felt the tears in her eyes but stopped them from falling. Her mother mopped her own with a frenetic hand. Grazietta wound an arm around her.

‘People are born with this gift, Giovanna,’ Grazietta whispered, thrilled. ‘You can’t teach someone that. God bless him. What a voice. From God I say. What a sound.’

His eyes lowered from his upward gaze and found hers. She watched, her stare impenetrable. It was her turn to gaze through a crack and he knew it.

The crowd burst into cheers. Gigi’s friends patted him on the back. Some of the boys in their class knocked Mario’s hat off his head and whacked him with it. Then the group merged towards the other end of the piazza where a smaller fire edged towards embers. The children lined up on one side. One of the parents belted out instructions most wouldn’t hear above the noise. The first child burst into a sprint, then leaped over the flames. The crowd cheered.

Raffaele slipped in behind Alba. ‘We have to do it, you know, it’s our last year.’

‘I think we need more than a leap over flames to get us out of our mess.’

‘Now who is being dramatic?’

‘Pragmatic.’

‘We’re officially not kids next year, Alba. Besides, you want Mario to think you don’t have the guts?’

‘Why would I care what he thought?’

‘Saw you watch him singing.’

Alba thwacked an elbow into his side. He grabbed her wrist and ran them on, pulling her behind, Alba laughing in spite of herself, till they fell into line. Mario and his mates were coercing one another with shoves and pelted insults. One of the parents screamed to the younger child ahead of them, stay away from the embers and impervious to the kerfuffle behind them.

The music from the other side of the square was louder now, belting through the speakers. Alba thought she caught sight of her parents waltzing. All of a sudden, she was at the front of the line. Raffaele’s voice hummed in her ear. ‘Remember, you’ve got to think of stuff you want rid of! St John will sort it. Take away the bad.’

‘You don’t believe that shit and I know it,’ she screamed back.

‘And you love it more than you’d know, pagangirl.’

He knew her better than she’d like to admit. Besides, there were only a few days between now and her parents discovering her daughter had received the most prestigious invitation they could have ever dreamed up. A marriage to a local wealthy boy was nothing compared to that. And yet. She brushed off her unease, losing herself for a breath in the fire as it burned, insistent, free.

A snatched breath, then she charged towards it. The summer air kissed her cheeks as she cut through. Her legs felt powerful. Excitement rose up through their fibre, her chest light and free. She leaped. Time melted. Below, the dancing flames. The sounds of voices swallowed up by the dark. There was only the red lick of the light beneath her. She rose higher. The amber glow upon a face on the opposite side of the circle huddled around the leapers met hers. The moment hovered, hot, hidden. Mario’s eyes were inscrutable. Then the cobbles rose to meet her with a thud as her gum soles landed. Ozieri crashed back into her ears, a fanatic crescendo, a sforzando chord full of authority, defiance and rebellion. Mario disappeared into the crowd.

Signora Elias’s piano room smelled of vanilla and almond. Giovanna agreed to let Alba go ahead of her, whilst she waited for Bruno to accompany her a little later. Alba arrived to practice to find the kitchen counters topped with several baking trays. There was a neat parade of fig jam–filled tiricche, fine white pastry twists cut with a serrated wooden wheel leaving edges like lace. In a ceramic dish Signora Elias’s famed sospiri were laid in a circle with a tiny space between each so that the heat wouldn’t melt them and make them stick together. These were Bruno’s favourite, but Alba knew no amount of sugar would sweeten the betrayal they were about to reveal.

‘Don’t hover in your nerves, Alba. You leave this all to me. All you must do is warm up and play. Everything else rests on my shoulders, do you understand?’

Alba wanted to but she knew her father better than that.

‘At some point our secret had to come out, no? This is the nature of secrets. They have a lifespan of their own. Eventually they too must die, as they shift from the dark into the light.’

Alba felt her eyebrows squeeze into a frown.

‘Goodness, my metaphors will do nothing to ease your mind I’m sure. Off you go, I have things to do here now.’

Alba let herself be shooed back out towards the piano. She took her seat as she had done for all those mornings up till today. Her scales began a little slower than usual. Her mind began to percuss the fragment of space between the notes, the middle quiet where one note ends and another begins, the subtle shifts in frequency urging her towards the instrument and away from her rattling nerves. As her fingers spidered up and down the keyboard Alba felt the warmth of that wordless place, one she was always being criticized by her father for living in most of the time but the very strength this instrument required. She didn’t hear the bell ring until it jangled for what must have been the fourth time. Her fingers lifted off the keys as if scalded. Signora Elias appeared at the kitchen doorway wiping hers.

‘You stay exactly where you are, signorina. I will let your parents in.’

Every sound thrummed like a chord cutting across a silence: the creak of the door, its solemn close, her mother’s footsteps along the shiny floors, tentative clips towards the piano room. Giovanna entered. She registered Alba seated upon the ottoman.

‘Please, do get comfortable, Signora Giovanna,’ Signora Elias said, leading her into the room she cleaned once a week. ‘The coffee is just about ready. Alba, do help me with the sweets, si?’

Alba was relieved to be asked to do something other than sit beside her mother, who looked stiff. She scooped up two plates and returned to the table in front of the ottoman. Giovanna gave her a peculiar look, swerving embarrassment or perhaps pride, Alba couldn’t decide which.

‘And Signore Bruno?’ Signora Elias asked without a trace of emotion, though his absence made Alba feel more uneasy than before. She placed the coffee pot on a holder and poured Giovanna a dainty china cup and handed it over.

‘He’s got caught with a terrible customer, signora,’ Giovanna replied, breathy. ‘I stopped by at the officina. It’s awfully busy. There was simply no way he could get away. He sends his apologies. It’s just us women together. Probably best. You know how he is, signora.’

Signora Elias smiled, unruffled. Alba shifted along the velvet, which prickled her bare legs below the hem of her cut-off shorts.

‘Do have a sweet, Signora Giovanna, I made them especially. It’s wonderful to have someone to bake for. Try one of each.’

Signora Elias and Giovanna performed the ritual dance of refusal and insistence, and, as always, age won out and Giovanna ate as ordered. Watching her mother do as she was told filled Alba with hope that what was about to happen might not be the disaster she anticipated.

‘Very well, Signora Giovanna.’

‘Please, signora, just call me Giovanna.’

‘You’re not working today, signora, today you are the respected mother of this wonderful young woman. What I would like you to enjoy now is the fruit of my time with Alba. She has helped me a great deal, and I know there have been times over the years where you have considered taking her job away as punishment, an understandable measure considering, but first of all I want to thank you, from the deepest part of my heart, for not doing so. When I came to you after the Mario debacle you listened to my plea, and, as an old woman living alone, I can’t tell you what that meant.’

Giovanna shifted in her seat. Alba saw her eye the sospiri. Signora Elias lifted the dish right away and insisted she take another. Giovanna had let Alba believe that she’d permitted her to continue working for Signora Elias out of the goodness of her heart, and for a while, Alba had believed her mother understood her friendship with Signora Elias was the most important part of her life. Now she watched the subtle shadow of betrayal cast a grey over her mother’s face. It made her own lighten for a breath.

‘But enough prattling from me. I invited you and Signore Bruno to hear something quite marvellous this morning and I can only say that I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do. It is my wish, that when Alba has finished what she has prepared, you will understand what a wonder it has been working with your daughter.’

Giovanna took a breath to speak. Signora Elias interrupted. ‘Do get comfortable. And enjoy.’

Signora Elias nodded at Alba. The metallic ache in her stomach piqued. She stood up and took her seat at the stool. As she pushed it a little further away with her feet she caught sight of her canvas pumps. They were the ones she’d worn that day she’d had sex with Raffaele in the pineta. Giovanna forced her to scrub them clean once a week, but Alba felt like a little of the pine dust always remained. No amount of water could take that away.

She caught Signora Elias’s eye. It sent a wave of calm over her. She let her breath leave her chest and deepen into her lower back. The soles of her feet rooted onto the floor. The room shifted into her periphery. Her fingers sank down onto Chopin’s notes she had played countless times. A purple melancholy swept over her. Wave after wave of measures rolled on with ease, the notes a cocoon around her and the piano, dancing light. The mournful melody swirled out from her, weighted, familiar, describing the longing and silence she could not articulate with words alone. The ending trickled into view, an unstoppable tide urging towards the shore.

And then it was over.

Alba lifted her fingers with reluctance, holding onto the space before reality would have to be confronted. She placed them on her lap and looked at her mother.

Giovanna’s eyes were wet. Her breath seemed to catch somewhere high in her chest. Signora Elias didn’t fill her silence. Alba looked at her teacher. Her eyes glistened with pride. Whatever happened now, that expression was one Alba would cling to. In the golden gap between this moment and the next, Alba felt like her mother cradled her life in her lap, petals of possibility that might tumble and crush underfoot if she rose too quick, or be thrown into the air, fragrant confetti of celebration.

‘Signora Giovanna,’ Signora Elias began at last, ‘in return for all the errands your daughter does for me I offered what I could, besides money, in return. You see, the moment she sat at my instrument I knew I would be failing my duty as a teacher if I didn’t protect and nurture her talent.’

Giovanna opened her mouth to speak but her thoughts remained choked.

‘Your daughter has become an exceptional student and pianist.’

‘I’ve never heard anything like that,’ Giovanna murmured.

‘Alba has been offered a full scholarship in Rome to pursue her studies further. She has what it takes to become a professional, Signora Giovanna.’

Her mother’s expression crinkled through confusion, pride, concern, a troubled spring day between showers.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Giovanna replied after a beat.

‘I can’t tell you what to say, signora, but in my professional capacity I would urge you to permit her to go. I have friends there who will be able to arrange her accommodation; it will be simple, of course, but clean.’

‘In Rome, you say?’

Signora Elias nodded.

‘Alone? A girl alone in Rome? She’s going to be married.’

Alba’s eyes slit to Signora Elias, the prickle of panic creeping up her middle.

‘Take some time to think about it, signora, but I can reassure you that I know people who can help her in the early days and that many young people make the same pilgrimage every year. For their art. For talent that they have a duty to share with the world.’

Giovanna looked at her daughter. Alba persuaded herself that the flicker she caught in her eye was one of a mother almost convinced.

Giovanna said nothing on the walk home, nor as they prepared lunch. She cut the cured sausage into thin precise slices without a word. She handed Alba the six plates to set the table without even looking Alba in the eye. She washed the fresh tomatoes and placed them in a bowl without the slightest evidence of emotion of any kind, other than a robotic repetition of their regular rhythms. Only when she tipped the salt into a tiny ramekin for the table and it overflowed onto the counter did Alba spy any nerves. When Giovanna made no move to clear up the salt flakes, Alba’s sense of impending storm peaked. She gave the linguini a swirl in the simmering water.

Salvatore came in soon after, world-weary and hungry as he always was after Saturday mornings at the officina. He slumped onto his chair.

‘Why all the plates?’ he grumbled.

‘Marcellino and Lucia are coming,’ Giovanna shouted from the kitchen.

‘When’s Babbo back?’ he called back.

‘Didn’t he say at the officina?’ Alba said, laying down a bowl of chicory on the table.

‘He wasn’t at work today.’

Alba wanted to check her mother’s face for a reply as she brought out a hunk of Parmesan and a grater, dropping them onto the table with a thud, then thought better of it.

The door opened. Marcellino and Lucia strode in, taking over the space as they always did. Lucia stepped towards Giovanna and greeted her like her second mother. Then she swished over to Alba and gave a dutiful kiss on each cheek, almost touching the skin.

‘Nearly ready, Ma?’ Marcellino harangued his mother.

Lucia gave him a playful tap on his belly.

‘What?’ he guffawed. ‘A boy’s hungry!’

‘Not a boy for long,’ Lucia purred, her blue eyes flashing with something Alba struggled to identify. She did look different today, but it was hard to pinpoint why. She sashayed across the tiles with her usual perky sway, her jet-black hair lustrous even in the dim light of the shady room.

Giovanna yelled for Alba and handed her the pasta pot. The family took their seats. Bruno stepped in just as the first bowl was filled.

‘Buon appetito!’ he called, his walk a playful swagger.

‘Get changed, amore, si?’ Giovanna insisted. Bruno stopped and grinned at his daughter-in-law. ‘Don’t get any ideas now, Lucia? You see how old married men are? Do what their little wives say at all times, si? Watch out, Marcellino, it’s the beginning of the end.’

Alba thought her father sounded a little drunk. It wouldn’t be unusual for him to have an aperitivo at the bar with his cronies after the morning at the officina, or to drum up more business over a Campari and soda or two, but there was more sway than usual about him that afternoon. Only when he turned for upstairs did Alba spy a fleck of lipstick on his collar. The clang of the metal serving fork upon the bowls as her mother tipped another portion of the pasta brought her back into the room. She watched the steam ribbon off the strands, fragrant with anchovy, garlic, chilli, and fresh tomatoes.

Just before the figs were brought out at the end of the meal, Lucia asked for everyone’s attention and announced she was pregnant. Alba’s father needed no excuse to crack open a bottle of moscato and the sweet wine frothed six glasses like it was Christmas. When Lucia was asked her due date, she shied around a direct answer. It wasn’t until Alba brought out the coffee that she understood Lucia’s pregnancy was almost five months along. Women on the cusp of marriage were granted different rules, it seemed.

When everyone left, the house dipped into a sleepy quiet. Bruno snored upstairs. Salvatore lay on the couch. Only the percussive sloppy grating of Giovanna washing at the tub outside cut through the stillness. Alba stepped outside into the narrow courtyard garden. Above, a canopy of wisteria wept purple blooms. Giovanna plunged a shirt into the sudsy cement tub, then lifted it and began attacking it along the ridges of the washboard, which lifted out at an angle. Her mother’s knuckles were red.

‘When are you going to tell Babbo?’ Alba asked, before realizing that it was her father’s shirt Giovanna was waging war on.

Her mother looked up at her, eyes bloodshot from dried tears.

‘Leave me now. I’ve had quite the morning, don’t you think? Sending me up there to be shamed by my daughter who has become a charity case? Have you any idea how I felt? I told you loud and clear what I thought about imposing on that kind woman. After everything she did for me when we were struggling? All those years when she would give me extra cleaning work to help us? Meanwhile you start pretending to run errands for her when all you’ve been doing is plonking that instrument. And now you stand here, silent as a cave, telling me to tell your father. You’ve got another think coming.’

She plunged the shirt into the tub again, though Alba sensed Giovanna was picturing submerging something, or someone else.

‘That’s it, stand there like a rock. I’m used to it now. I could have lost my son that night with your father. Do you know that? Or was it just a game to you? You think you’re the only one who has nightmares of that time? I did everything I could to raise you right. Do you know what your little secret means for me?’

Now her mother wrung the shirt as if it were her daughter’s neck. Alba stepped inside. She sat at the deserted table fingering her letter. When her father came back down an hour later, dressed in a new shirt and smelling of sandalwood, she asked him to sit down. He did. Alba put the letter in front of him.

When he finished, he folded it and handed it back to her.

‘Giova!’ he yelled.

She stepped inside, wiping her suds on her apron.

‘What do you know about this?’

Giovanna looked at the letter and then at her daughter.

‘I haven’t read it.’

‘Tell him, Mamma,’ Alba interrupted.

‘You be quiet, I’m talking to your mother.’

‘It’s what Signora Elias wanted to talk to us about today,’ Giovanna replied. ‘I know you were busy. I told her that.’

Bruno twisted away from Giovanna and ran a hand over his beard.

‘Why did they write to you, Alba?’ he asked, flames flickering the fringes of his tone.

Giovanna stepped in and took a seat.

‘Tell your father, Alba.’

She looked between her parents’ faces. For a moment a spark of optimism; a fast-fading firework.

‘I have had lessons. They want me to study in Rome.’

‘I can read, Alba, I’m asking you to tell me the truth.’

Alba’s swallow felt hollow. ‘Signora Elias taught me.’

Her father’s smile was crooked. ‘Took pity on the poor town mute, did she?’

Alba took a breath, but her stomach clasped tight.

‘And you sit here, telling me you’ve spent all these years studying music, wasting your time at the old woman’s when your father has been building a business that will take care of you and your unborn children? Is that what you’re saying? Are you actually telling me you think it’s a good idea to run to Rome and play an instrument? Now I’ve heard it all. You are even crazier than they tell me. What do you have to say about this, Giovanna? You sitting there wringing your hands? You going to sit there mute as well?’

The corners of Giovanna’s lips stretched as if she were clamping whatever words were fighting their way out.

‘This is all your fault, you know that, don’t you? I said so when she nearly killed that boy! And did you listen? You both sit there with no words! You’re the most stupid women I know! My own family, imbeciles! What happened to this family? Everything I do, and this is how you thank me. Selfish, stupid little women.’

‘I had no idea!’ Giovanna blurted.

‘Even worse!’ His voice rose, a crescendo, sweeping treble notes that ascended into a painful octave. ‘The girl’s mother not knowing what’s going on under her eyes! How did that feel? Watching that old woman shame you like that?’

Giovanna took a breath to speak, but Bruno swung his hand across her face. She cried out. Alba stood up. Bruno grabbed her chin.

‘See what you did? That’s all you. You and your surly little game. Over my dead body you go. You’re not going to make a mockery of me like that.’

He pushed her down. The wood thwacked the crease between her calves and the back of her thigh.

‘I won’t hear another word of it.’ He scuffed his chair back, swung his sweater over his shoulder, and slammed the door shut.

The silence could not suffocate Giovanna’s swallowed sobs.




7 (#ulink_85ea44f4-05e9-530a-a51a-d46b04345275)


Piu mosso

a directive to a performer that the music of the indicated passage should have more motion, it should move more quickly

Rena Majore was a small town tucked inland of a blustery, rocky coast and a winding drive north of Ozieri. Alba and her family had visited many of the smaller sheltered coves along the eastern coast before Bruno and his brothers had settled on this place for their shared second home. The sea was rough, unpredictable and uninviting. The town was sleepy and woke up, groggy, during the summer months with a half-forgotten piazza that whispered the promise of a town centre. It was a town that attracted those in search of shelter from holiday crowds. Alba hated the place, more so now, because it was where her parents had decided to celebrate Alba and Raffaele’s engagement and graduation.

‘Go on, Alba!’ Giovanna called from the kitchen window that opened out onto the terrace. ‘Go and have fun! You’ve worked hard enough! This is your day too, you know!’

The words were ridiculous droplets of forced maternal altruism, an impeccable performance enjoyed by everyone, it seemed, apart from the person to whom it was directed. Her mother’s gushing happiness held the same violent edge as the woman’s disappointment. Since her parents put a definitive end to her visits to Signora Elias, the offer of her place at the accademia had not been mentioned again, and Alba couldn’t help feeling that the whole experience was a warped dream, or a memory she had been taught to remember. But her fingers ached. They hadn’t played since the letter was torn up in her kitchen. The deeper she sank into the numbness, the more alive her mother became; her own fading life force was feeding her. The music had spun out of Alba and into her mother; she sang of summer and love and weddings and feasts. Her pans and pots and ladles and spoons percussed joy and hope.

A towel landed on Alba’s face. She looked across at Raffaele, who was grinning, performing on her behalf. A wan smile threatened her lips. Marcellino took the helm in Bruno’s newly acquired British jeep, delivered from England by one of his cousin’s foreign husbands. The teenagers crammed into the back, some on the metal benches that lined the sides, others on the space between them. Mario’s sister sat on his lap, Alba sat cross-legged on the metal floor by Raffaele. Lucia, clutching her protruding belly, yelled at Marcellino as he bombed down the white roads oblivious to the bumps and his wife’s discomfort. After passing the scant smattering of shops, edging open for the season, onwards through the pineta, they arrived at the beach at last. Tall white dunes rose into view as the party negotiated the steep incline and skidded down towards the coast. As always, the wind whipped, and the fine sand prickled Alba’s calves as it flew across the beach. The other people on the beach had long since given up on their umbrellas and laid them down, closed, beside themselves as they worshipped the glaring sun above. Nothing about this section of the coast was an alluring invite. The others in the group yelled in the water now, dashing towards the edge and diving into the deep. Lucia planted herself onto the sand, propping herself up on her elbows.

‘I’m surprised your mother let you out for once, Alba.’

She looked down at Lucia beneath her huge sunglasses. Two miniature concave Albas reflected back to her on the glass.

‘Enjoy your freedom while you can, no? Soon you’ll be making babies like me and then all this jumping around will feel like a story your grandma would tell you at bedtime.’

A blank space formed where the image of a kind grandmother ought to materialize. Alba nodded, to close the start of a conversation she could not relate to, if nothing else. The older women in Alba’s family shared whispered gossip, dabbled in magic and superstition in equal measure. They did not weave soporific fairy tales.

‘For heaven’s sake, Alba, go and have a swim. You stand there like the world’s ending already. I’d do anything to have just graduated from school again!’

And with that Lucia let out a breathy laugh and eased herself down onto the warm sand beneath her towel.

Alba peeled off her T-shirt and shorts and let them fall to the ground. She slipped out of her flip-flops and felt the grainy heat under her soles. The white sand slid away underfoot till she reached the water, waves rushing up to her, white foam curling into clear. She dived in, feeling the cool envelop her, head racing to the bottom, desperate to drown the noise around her. Her body rushed to the surface for air and then her arms beat through the surface without pause. Three strokes, one breath, repeat. The turquoise rose into view for a snatched intake of air, then down into the sloshing blue, pounding a beat in her ears. Her arms wouldn’t stop. All these weeks without her music had built up an avalanche of physical frustration, more than she could bear. Her hand cupped like the shape of a pianist’s diving into the water, pulling it away from her. The repetition was the closest way to reach her scales, to sense the symmetry of those exercises in her muscles, to feel the pulse that had greeted her every morning and now lay buried in a not so distant past.

She may have heard voices, which she chose to ignore; the shouts of her brothers, their cousins, Raffaele, Mario, all unnecessary interruptions. The ache for the solitude and complicit dance of music burned. With each stroke, each tension and relaxation of her muscles, her body fought to drive the feeling out further like a tide. She reached the first curve of rocks and pulled herself up onto them, the sun pounding down, drying her salty skin. Raffaele swam over to join her.

‘Need company?’ he said, hauling his dripping body beside her. ‘Well, you don’t have the choice right now, sorry. I’ve had just about as much as I can take of your cousin’s ball throwing. Mario’s swum out to catch squid so at least I don’t have to listen to him for a bit.’

Raffaele stopped mid-flow. ‘Alba?’ he murmured, watching her fat tears roll down her face. ‘Have I bored you to tears already? I’ve got to stop doing that. I think it’s becoming a habit.’

Alba snorted a laugh.

‘OK, a glimmer of hope in the dark, no?’

He reached his arms around her wet shoulders.

‘You can tell me. Right? Of all the people here today, you can talk to me. If I actually shut up, that is.’

He smiled at her second laugh. Her sobs ebbed.

‘They’re killing me,’ she whispered.

Raffaele held the silence. It caught Alba off guard. She took a deeper breath.

‘Mamma. Papà. This insane wedding talk.’

Raffaele interlinked his fingers in hers. ‘Only until we get to do what we want with our lives. We don’t have to stay here, do we? We get to be who we really are if we’re together.’

He lifted her chin with a gentle finger of his other hand.

‘I love you, Alba. I don’t want you to be that wife in the kitchen. We know that. Our marriage is a refuge. From all the things they’ll force on us if we don’t stick together.’

‘I don’t want to be a wife. I want to be a pianist.’

Alba withdrew her fingers from inside his hand.

Her words splatted out in starts, competing with tears. ‘Signora Elias taught me more than I can describe. She passed on magic, in secret. Mamma and Babbo found out after the Accademia di Santa Cecilia’s in Rome offered me a full scholarship. They burned the letter. I’m still not out of their sight for a minute. I’ve started full-time at the officina, but you knew that already. I haven’t played for weeks.’

Raffaele held her. Alba caught the slosh of turquoise water rise up towards their feet upon the ochre rock.

‘I feel like I’m disappearing,’ she said, shuddering.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘It was my hidden life. I’m dead without it. Can you understand that?’

His smile was a silver streak of grief.

‘The only person who can help me now is you, Raffaele.’

‘How?’

‘Help me get to Rome.’

Raffaele’s face was struck with disbelief.

‘I need to buy a ticket for the boat. Once I’m there I’ll be OK.’

‘You want me to help you escape?’

‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, Raffaele. We can’t stay here and wither away. Is that what you really want? For yourself? For me? I love you, Raffaele. I don’t want to destroy your life with a fake marriage. I want you to be free. I want us to set me free too.’

Raffaele dropped his head onto his hands. Alba’s chest creased with spidering panic and the intoxicating liberation of unburdening her secret.

Mario’s head appeared around the rocks. He pulled his snorkel mask up to the top of his head, his eyes reflecting the glint of the sun-kissed water. He pedalled water and reached his full net of squirming squid overhead.

‘Full catch!’ he yelled, triumphant.

Alba watched him register the tears drying on her face, Raffaele ashen.

‘Don’t look so sad! They didn’t feel a thing, si?’

Raffaele offered a half-hearted laugh, to make Mario go away if nothing else.

‘Your ma’s going to be happy, no?’ Mario asked, flicking his mask back onto his face and racing back to the shore to show off his hunt.

Raffaele and Alba waited for him to be out of earshot.

‘Your parents are one of the wealthiest families in Ozieri, Alba. You’ve been working for Signora Elias for years – you can’t find the money?’

‘Mamma took everything. There’s no way she’ll give me a single lira towards this. You’re crazy to even suggest me asking them.’

‘How much do you need?’

‘About two hundred thousand lire. That will be enough for the fare and my first week. Just till I find a job. Signora Elias and her friend told me my accommodation and tuition is all covered by the scholarship. If I don’t go now, I will never play again. I can’t live like that.’

Alba watched Raffaele’s expression spin through a spectrum of colours: uncertain blues, doubtful greys, flecks of amber hope.

‘You’re my last hope, Ra’. If we love each other then let’s do the right thing for each other.’

He held her. She could feel his heart pulsing beneath the thin skin of his chest.

‘So you’re asking me to raise a load of money, in secret, without rousing suspicion, so that you can live your dream and I’ll never see you again?’

Alba looked at him square. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Ra’.’

‘You are.’

When the party returned to the beach house, salt-crusted, sun-toasted, the table was laid with ramekins of gherkins and tiny pickled onions, olives, trays of sausage and cheese, piles of pane carasau, thin crisp bread, drizzled with olive oil and a sprinkling of coarse sea salt. Mammas shooed their overgrown offspring towards the outdoor showers, hurrying them up. Fathers put their worlds to rights around the fire, passing around bottomless glasses of wine, clinking towards the embers whilst Bruno eased the flesh off the skewers and onto large trays of cork, with stems of wild myrtle upon it, letting the tender meat and its juices soak onto the fragrant platter. Ceramic troughs of culurgiones were paraded towards the hungry guests once everyone sat, at long last. The little pasta parcels, pinched-together dough in the shape of wheat, filled with creamy ricotta and spinach drizzled with fresh tomato sauce, arrived to cheers and clinks and the promise of happiness and wealth and health. The guests congratulated her parents’ generosity, their hospitality, oblivious to the fact that the person they appeared to be celebrating was their mute prisoner. The hypocrisy of this pounding celebration made Alba’s throat scratch. A swell of salty water popped in her ear.

Dinner was an indeterminate age of gluttony. At last the watermelon arrived and the eaters stabbed the red flesh, poking out the seeds, some cutting perfect staircases of sweet crisp fruit, others vertical splices. Alba ate half of hers before the teenagers and younger adults were urged to leave the elders in peace and make trouble someplace else.

‘Come on, Alba, you’ll come out with us, right?’ Raffaele asked. ‘Please, God, don’t leave me with all these cool lot. It’s like sending me to purgatory. Dear God, don’t do that. They’ll all be eyeing up the girls in the square and jeering me on. I’d rather not commit social suicide without you beside me, si?’

Raffaele filled her hand with his and led her from the table. They shuffled towards the back of the pack, slow stroll widening the gap between them and the group.

‘Have you thought about what we talked about?’ Alba asked.

‘You ask just to make me cry on the street in front of these lot?’

Raffaele’s voice eased away from his nervous tempo. They walked a few silent steps, the scuff of the dusty white road underfoot, the streets dark save for sporadic streetlamps, surrounding bungalows alive with the clinks of other parties.

He drew them to a stop in the dark between two streetlights.

‘I love no soul in the world more than you, Alba.’

Alba swallowed.

‘It terrifies me to help you leave.’

The cicadas’ warbled beat intensified. Alba smelled juniper and wild myrtle on the whisper of breeze. ‘It terrifies me to stay.’

‘What will I do?’

‘Follow your own dreams.’

‘Since when do you talk like those stupid movie girls?’

Alba shrugged.

‘Our marriage plan was our escape. Now you go off to your music and I’m here marooned.’

An ending and beginning opened up in the breaths filling the space between them. She could hear his muffled tears in the dark. Her arms wound around her best friend.

‘I love you, Ra’.’

‘I want to help you. I’d be a shit if I didn’t. And the thought of you hating me for not doing it is worse than being abandoned by my best friend.’

Alba held his hand.

‘Who will I talk to about Claudio?’ he asked.

‘You’ll write. Long letters. Gory details.’

Raffaele’s smile was wan; the streetlamp caught its fade.

‘When do you need the money by?’

‘Late August.’

He looked towards the darkened end of the street where it reached the piazza. ‘Do I look like a magician?’

They joined the others in the piazza, eating gelato, watching the visiting clowns warble through a half-rehearsed comedy routine, which delighted the younger children of out-of-towners and left Alba longing for solitude. She slipped away from the crowd. Her body needed to move. She didn’t notice the houses fall away in her periphery, the darkened woods didn’t fill her with fear. The dunes rose before her after a while and at last the moonlit water. She sat down, feeling the sand peel away beneath her, tipping downhill. The waves lapped in rhythm like a sleeper’s breath.

‘You should be careful running about alone like that in a strange place, Alba.’

Mario’s voice startled her. She twisted round to him. He was seated, far enough away to not have noticed him, cradling his knees, watching the water.

‘You should be careful scaring young women who need to be alone for a change,’ she called out.

‘Sarcasm is a killer. Probably the only fact in this world, I’d say,’ he replied.

Alba watched his chin raise into a smug grin. His humour was more disarming than his aggression.

She sat in defiant silence. So did he.

‘What’s all that stuff about music college they were on about?’ he asked after a while.

Alba shook her head.

‘Alba, we’re alone now, no one has to know that we’re actually able to talk without a fight. You don’t have to let anyone see the fact that you can answer a real question with a real answer.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

He retreated into her imposed silence.

‘I never forgot about that time, you know.’

His tone dipped burned ochre. She turned to face him.

‘When I heard you play at Elias’s.’

They looked at each other for a breath.

‘You going to pretend to forget?’ he prodded.

She turned to face the water. They watched the curling laps disappear into the dark.

‘Never heard anything like it in my life.’

He stood up. Alba waited for a further snide gibe to follow his unexpected admission. The water rushed up to the sand fighting the pull, then acquiescing. Her breaths followed their rhythm, an incessant seesaw of advance and retreat. Whose battle was to be won?

She turned back.

He’d gone.




8 (#ulink_acb2e370-83dd-5079-a3f2-bb9f1c4f4cd6)


Nocturne

a composition inspired by, or evocative of, the night, and cultivated in the nineteenth century primarily as a character piece for piano, generally with three sections, often slightly melancholic in mood

After the party returned to Ozieri from the coastal town of Rena Majore, Alba waited a few days and used her parents’ siesta to run to Signora Elias. She arrived, as planned, thanks to a note Raffaele had passed to her on Alba’s behalf.

‘You look like a ghost, Alba,’ Signora Elias cooed as she ushered her inside, closing the heavy door behind her against the heat.

‘I haven’t slept properly in a week.’

‘Understandable,’ Signora Elias replied, whilst leading her to the kitchen table where she poured Alba a glass of cold water.

‘They won’t change their mind.’

‘That’s their prerogative. What does your mind say?’

‘I have to go to Rome.’

Signora Elias took a long sip of her water. ‘What if I said that’s what you must do then?’

Alba’s face creased with desperation. ‘Mamma has all the money you ever gave me. I don’t have a lira.’

‘And what will you do about that?’

Alba’s eyes lowered. She summoned a breath to say what had been eating at her the entire journey home. ‘I need help.’

‘I know. Raffaele told me so. Actually, he asked me to.’

‘For help?’

‘For money, yes.’

Alba shifted in her seat.

‘If you want to make decisions on your own, Alba, and for yourself, you will have to work for them and then, the hardest part, stand by them. I could give you the fare and be done with it, yes. But what kind of betrayal would that be of your parents? We’ve already come this far. They’ve been very clear about how they feel. If you want this, I mean really can’t live without this, you are going to have to put in the work. Choosing this life is a huge commitment. Not just hours of practice, but all the other real responsibilities around it. The work starts now.’

Alba felt her eyes sting with tears she refused to let fall.

‘I’d pay you back,’ Alba whispered.

‘I know you would. I don’t think I can buy your ticket, Alba, send your parents’ girl away like that. This has to be your decision. All the way.’

The next day Alba begged Mario’s father, Gigi, to give her extra shifts on the pump. She nagged him to let her work through lunch even though there were no customers, asking to sort parts ahead of the next day, clean some of the ones brought in for repair, any little extra he would allow her to do.

‘Why all the hours, Alba? I’m not expecting you to pay for your own wedding, you know that, right?’ Bruno joked, loud enough for Gigi to hear and be forced to laugh.

‘Your father’s right, Alba. You look exhausted.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, trying to suffocate the panic bubbling.

‘You can today, but then I reduce the shifts. Doesn’t look right, a girl on the pump.’

Alba knew better than to start an argument then and there. Once her father left, she would convince Gigi by herself. She watched Bruno walk away and headed straight for the pump. Mario was already standing there.

‘Go home,’ Alba called out, ‘your dad’s put me on today.’

‘Says who?’

‘Who does it look like?’

Gigi stepped out of the showroom with a fresh cloth for Alba. ‘I told you about the shift change, son.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘I’m not going to argue. You’re on the late shifts.’

Gigi turned and walked back inside.

‘What the hell has got into you, Alba? You hate the pumps, you hate me, now you’re like some kind of gas junkie. Anyways, shouldn’t you be looking after your piano fingers? Lots of accidents can happen around here if you’re not careful.’

Alba willed herself to ignore the snarl creasing his lips, but it was impossible. Another day she might have smacked the nozzle she was cleaning over him. She was desperate to save up enough for the fare to Rome. If she carried on at this rate, she still wouldn’t make it. That’s when her expression gave away more than she would have liked.

‘Someone told me they’d heard you were going to that fancy music school anyways. What you hanging around here for?’

‘Shut up!’

‘I won’t, as it happens, because I know you’re not going to lose it here.’

A car pulled up, much to Alba’s relief. The driver rolled down the window and she set to work filling the tank, offering a clean of the windscreen too, which didn’t interest the driver until Mario piped in with his patter and convinced him of a quick clean wash. He paid Alba, handed her a five thousand lire tip, and drove off.

‘Fifty-fifty, right?’ Mario asked.

‘What?’

‘You’re desperate for money and I don’t know why, but I’m enjoying the look of desperation on your face.’

Alba felt anger surge through her bones.

They worked in brittle unison for the next two weeks, sometimes even through the lunch hours to catch the odd stray traveller or commuter returning to town for lunch and siesta. Tiredness crept around Alba, tightening like a vine, but she charged on because the alternative was incomprehensible. Dizzy from the heat and lack of sleep she slammed the pump back into its slot and caught the tip of her finger. Blood spurted out. Panic bolted through her as she examined the tip, then unexpected tears followed. Mario came over to her.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘Nothing!’ she spat.

‘You bleeding?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

He left and returned with a crushed clump of toilet tissue and threw it at her.

‘Don’t thank me,’ he said.

‘I won’t.’

She blotted her hand and watched the droplets spread along the fibres. When she saw the cut looked superficial, her panicked tears became those of relief, and then smarting embarrassment. She tightened the knot of tissue.

‘You look like crap. Go inside and clean up before your dad thinks I did it.’

‘I’m fine,’ she managed, just before more tears fought their way out. The tarmac heated underfoot; she longed for it to become molten so she’d be swallowed inside.

Bruno walked across the forecourt. He looked down at his daughter’s hand.

‘Get home, Alba.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re a mess. Get home. Now.’

Alba refused to look at Mario’s victorious expression. She walked over to her dad. ‘Please let me stay,’ she begged under her breath so Mario wouldn’t hear. ‘I’ll be more careful. The customers like me. I’m doing well.’

Bruno leaned in. She could smell aqua vitae on his breath. ‘Be happy we’re not at home so my hands can’t say what they’d like. If I say go home, you go home. You want to work? You’ve got to listen to your boss. You barely know what you’re doing inside in the office. I’m not having any child of mine make a fool of me outside too. Do you get that into your thick skull? Walk with me into the car. Now.’

Alba felt his hand on her elbow, pressing harder than he needed. He slammed the door after her. Alba could picture Mario’s face now. They stepped into the cool of the house, Alba’s face oil-smeared, her overalls damp with gas stains, her hands still smelling of the metal pump.

‘O Dio, look at the state of you. Go and get clean, child!’ Giovanna yelled.

‘And don’t come down until we’ve finished lunch!’ Bruno added.

Alba shot a look to her father.

‘You heard! You should have seen the way I had to drag her away, Giovanna. Talking to me like I’m some idiot. You think that’s all right, do you?’

‘I just want to work!’ Alba blurted.

‘Why? You have a house! You’ll have a rich husband soon enough once he graduates with his finance degree. What is wrong with you?’

‘Nothing is wrong, Bruno,’ Giovanna interrupted. He swung back to her so fast Alba almost didn’t see him take his hand to her face. ‘Shut up! The girl is not right. Never has been!’ He switched back to his daughter. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re trying to save up to get the hell out of here!’

‘That’s crazy,’ Giovanna whimpered, her cheek red. ‘She’s going to be a good girl now, aren’t you, Alba? Everything is planned out.’ Her begging descended into sobs. Bruno grabbed her chin. ‘I told you quiet!’





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