The Last Concerto. Sara Alexander
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.