The Last Concerto. Sara Alexander
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.
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