The Last Concerto. Sara Alexander

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