The Last Concerto - Sara Alexander

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1

Overture

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 seasick- ness. 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 sta- tion. 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 rico- cheted 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. hen 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 remain- ing 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 enor- mous 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 inter- rupt 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.