The Last Concerto

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.