Changing Heaven

by Jane Urquhart

  What comes bearing down on him after several splendid moments of utter engagement in the pastime of distributing equal doses of fear, hope, and pain to the bird, is a furious woman who is intent on giving him a broom for breakfast. He bounds over the garden wall and runs off onto the moor, domain of field mice. Ann stands, breathing deeply, looking stupidly at the spot on the top of the wall from which the cat has disappeared; the bristles on the bottom of her broom soaking moisture from garden earth, the bird turning heavily at her feet.

  She brushes the hair from her eyes and looks down. John calls from the doorway. “Leave it,” he says, “it’s probably just stunned. It will fly away in a few moments.”

  She is not so sure of this, but pivots, nevertheless, in soft earth away from the tragedy, the sleeve of her sweater catching on a thorn in the rose bush as she starts to move away. As she unhooks the wool, the letter sails on the wind and is stopped a second time by the dark stone wall. Instantly, she knows what it is and by whose hand it was written. As she returns to the house she hides the envelope in her snagged sleeve.

  The next morning the cat will return, as though no acts of violence have been committed, as though nothing whatsoever has changed.

  The bird dies a slow and painful death.

  “HE WAS YOUR shadow self. He was ‘the former of your shadow self.’ Part of you was drained by him, practically annihilated, and another part sprang into being, energized and whole. It’s as though he gave you order and its chaotic opposite all at the same time. All of this he gave to you. But he needed something white and empty for himself. Do you understand?”

  “No, Emily, I wanted pleasure and warmth from him. Surely, eventually, he wanted that too … he understood that, I think, when he began to love me again.”

  “Oh, Arianna, oh, Polly, don’t you see? He had only discovered a new approach to whiteness and emptiness.”

  “But we don’t know that, because I died before his new love for me could express itself over time. Such is the irony.”

  “Such is the actuality … the inevitability.”

  “I shouldn’t have died.”

  “It was, for what you wanted … his love … inevitable.” Emily looked around, all over the soft white moor. “This is storm’s aftermath,” she said, “storm’s legacy. How smooth, eventless, comforting. Sometimes it’s enough just to know this quietness, if it’s a quietness born of tempest. Then it is like evidence; a letter full of small, unexaggerated words describing a disaster in the passive voice. A letter like a sigh, filled with resignation and reconciliation.”

  “Every jagged edge is gone,” said Arianna. “I can see nothing of the rocks, or stiles, or even blades of grass. And there are no paths at all. Travellers would be lost in this.”

  “Travellers, yes. But not ghosts. Ghosts always know exactly where they are.”

  SHE COMES TO Venice unencumbered by the details of her journey there, by the interiors of trains and ferries, the expressions of ticket agents, the shaved necks of cab drivers in major cities, the changing railway stations. Unencumbered by the landscapes that stream past windows, the border police stamping her dark Canadian passport. All this she sloughs off as her mind returns like a trained bird to the idea of Arthur, his residence in a city where she knows, at last, she can find him. She is bringing light with her, and air. She is bringing clarity. She will remove the fear from him, remove the dark, heal him as she has been healed. And then he will place his inner self in her uncomplicated hands. She is lit from within by this concept. It is the electricity operating the trains that carry her there. It is the energy.

  John, sensing the energy, the unstoppable forward momentum, silently packed a bag for her, and drove her to the station in his old grey van. On the platform he looked hard, for a moment, into her face, and seeing the idea glowing there, he said quietly, sadly, “It suits tha’, this gypsying about.” Her suitcase hung heavy, like a growth that had suddenly sprouted on the end of his left arm. And for just a moment as he stood before her, Ann saw his suffering. “I will come back … I’ll be back,” she said, not knowing whether or not she spoke the truth, pausing for several seconds in the midst of obsession to place her face against his.

  Now, as she enters Venice on the Grand Canal vaporetto, she can barely hear the roar of the churning engines, barely see the night-lit water. The famous architecture parts like an inconsequential curtain, allows her to pass through, to get to Arthur. She remembers a ground-floor room on a highway, herself entering by a sliding glass door, fumbling with the heavy motel curtains in a panic to get to the other side. Here, palaces touch the top of her head, slide past her shoulders while she stands straight, ignoring them. She is propelling herself through the exotic night towards Arthur, while everything around her repeats itself in swaying inky water; this inappropriate distracting outer life, these buildings with other histories, people with other appointments to keep. She is not on a boat, she is a boat-clear sailing, number four on the wind scale, the admiral relaxed on deck enjoying the breeze, land sighted just minutes ago through his telescope.

  In the small hotel room Ann does not sleep, still feels herself moving towards Arthur, the wind pushing her across a liquid surface. She must not rest, even after she finds him, must gather him up in the arms of this breeze and take him with her into clarity, into a new morning as spiritually nourishing as white bread and communion wine. One sweeping, graceful gesture will lift him up with her into this clear river of air.

  She sails through the dark hours, past the unvisited islands of the rest of her life. She is breathing the air that fills her lungs and stretches her sails. She begins to construct the beautifully simple life she will give him, the order of appropriately filled daylight hours and nights rich with rest. She hears their two sleeping hearts drum uncomplicated messages into the air of some future room.

  Outside the hotel, the city reeks with assignations. Plans are being made or carried out, strangers occupy café tables, dogs lick spilt ice cream in the corners of campos and the seams of calles, waiters bend and scurry. She knows none of this and cares even less, is conscious only of her voyage to Arthur and the form it is taking, this easy, joyful drift. She considers, as her eyes stare wide and dry into the dark, Emily Brontë’s sleepless nights, her poems concerning “the visitant of air,” “the wanderer.” Who was he? Who was he? Who held the nineteenth-century, housebound girl transfixed, entranced? Who created the ghost, the weather in her?

  The weather in Ann is calm all night long: untroubled, unchanging. The ship she has become is like a vast open sky sailing across the night looking for the perfect spot over which to settle, the perfect man. She can barely remember what Arthur looks like, how his face changed during the act of love, but can recall his hesitant hands, how rarely he used them. And his beautiful mouth, speaking.

  When she walks out into the first light of dawn she is startled in the midst of her own transparency to find fog, and everything she disregarded the previous evening veiled, secretive. Across the Grand Canal one decaying palace is displaying all its chandeliers; boasting of an all-night dinner party. She is transformed by purpose. Turning a map in her hands she follows the maze of canals and calles that leads to the Scuola San Rocco, passing cats absorbed by garbage and the odd dog-walking dawn person. Occasionally, her own fixed concentration is interrupted by the staccato sound of early merchants flinging up the metal curtains that protect their shops.

  It is a long way from the hotel to the Scuola San Rocco and there is much of which Ann is not aware as she walks. She is unaware that she has caught the attention of an elderly lady who watches her pass from an upper-storey window; that as she steps over a bridge a soccer ball lost elsewhere in the city floats beneath her, heading east, its destination the Adriatic; that in one dim, watery garage three empty, floating hearses nudge and scrape each other. She is unaware that the morning mist has invaded her hair, is causing it to curl in peculiar directions; that from the back of a dimly lit, as yet unopened café, a moppin
g padrone has eyed her lustfully and has whispered the word “Americana” under his breath. She is unaware that certain individuals who visit Venice often are pushing open hotel-room shutters and saying to themselves, “Ah, … a misty day … this is when it is best. …”

  For Ann there cannot be any best or better, locked as she is in the perpetual present of her own emotional landscape, and the path through it to Arthur. It is as though she were bringing with her all varieties of event and weather into a city that has held itself alert and frozen until her entry and her search.

  Her inner voice is conversing with him. I’m coming, it says, I will find you. It will be pure now. A clean wind is moving me.

  Something colder than her imagined wind blows across the surface of a canal. She keeps walking.

  Every morning for three weeks she repeats this journey, her mind never once losing the focus of her intention: to find him in the correct setting and then to place herself beside him in its light. And still she registers no details of the approach. Only her legs remember and guide her, with confidence earned by repetition, up steps, across campos, around corners.

  Every day, inside the Scuola, she is handed a mirror by a man whose name, she has learned, is Carlo. “For looking at the ceiling,” he explained, that first morning.

  Now she knows how to operate the mirror; how, depending on where you stand and at what angle you tilt the frame, the glass will allow you to concentrate on details or to hold the whole ceiling in your hands. When she swings it back and forth, like the flat top of an adjustable drafting table, she is able to move angels, devils, storms, rapidly towards her, or fling these same entities hastily away.

  Carlo, who greets her cheerfully each day (“Giorno Signorina”), stands discreetly in the corner of the vast upper room, the buttons of his guard’s uniform glowing on his round belly, while Ann engages in hours of this activity. Not knowing that her absorption is merely the cover for another form of absorption, he is amazed by her concentration.

  “Maybe you are a scholar …?” he asked some time after the first week.

  “Oh, no … not at all,” she replied.

  After the second week he walked up to her and announced confidently, “Now I see you are a sister, a nun, who is studying the Old Testament prophets and wearing, as they do now, no habit. I am correct … yes?”

  Ann surprised herself by laughing loud enough at this remark to make the empty room ring like a bell. Carlo retreated, puzzled, to his corner.

  Now, at the end of the third week, Carlo is friendly enough to speak to her constantly of Signore Tintoretto. While she gazes into the height of the mirror he abruptly leaves this topic, makes a pronouncement that causes her to look directly into his dark eyes.

  “You are looking for something else altogether, then. This is what I now know is true.”

  “Yes,” answers Ann, unaware that her mirror, relinquishing its hold on the ceiling, has caught a sun ray and is sending fiery signals to each of the four walls.

  “I am not a wise man,” says Carlo thoughtfully, “but it seems to me that if you cannot find it here you should put the mirror aside and examine, for a while, the paintings on the walls of the ground floor hall. Perhaps, whatever it is, you will find it there.”

  Ann smiles at him, but tightens her grasp on the mirror. As he returns to his corner, sighing, she looks into her own obsessed eyes. She examines her face and head and hair and all the painted wings of angels that seem to extend from her curls. She walks around the room one last time, moving her face across miracles and tragedies, across brutalities and acts of unspeakable kindness. Then she hands the mirror to Carlo and prepares to leave the room.

  She meets Arthur on the stairs.

  “I have never seen so many angels,” she eventually says to him, “they’re all there … the Rockettes … all the ones you told me about.”

  Arthur stands, one foot poised on marble, silent.

  “But now I’m finished up there …” Ann continues, “I’ve given the mirror back to Carlo. Do you know Carlo? He has a grandson in Toronto.”

  Still he does not speak.

  “I’ve been looking at the miracles … for days and days now. They seem … I don’t know … different, not what I thought they would be … darker. Somehow I never associated darkness with miracles, and you didn’t say anything about the darkness. The miracles up there are like storms … the manna … you know, the manna, it really is like a bad hailstorm. How can this be?”

  “I don’t know, Ann,” Arthur says quietly.

  “And it’s true about the lightning … absolutely everything is struck … you described that perfectly.”

  They haven’t moved one inch on the stairs. Ann feels perspiration forming along her hairline. She does not look at him; looks at the patterns in the different colours of marble instead. She runs one hand along the cool stone wainscoting and leans her forehead against the damp wall.

  “I came here for you,” she whispers, and the clarity begins to disappear down the deep well of his silence. “I caught the train because of your letter. I knew I would find you here.” The marble pattern against which she has rested her face is out of focus, foggy.

  Arthur says, “I know,” and nothing else. Ann can hear Carlo pacing back and forth on the upper-floor parquet, waiting out another afternoon, imprisoned by Signore Tintoretto. She wishes that he would walk over to the edge of the staircase, is certain that unless he does, she and Arthur will never be able to break their pose: a man arrested forever in the act of ascending a magnificent marble staircase, a woman with her face pressed against a marble wall.

  There are centuries contained within this moment.

  Then Arthur says, “Would you like to go now, Ann?”

  On their way through the ground-floor hall they pass by Annunciations, Adorations, and Assumptions without pausing to admire. Arthur stops, however, for a moment in front of each of two painted female saints. “I never spoke to you about these,” he says to Ann, “I knew you would have to see them.” Both women hold books and are seated in tempestuous landscapes. “There is an Emily Brontë for you, two in fact. Solitary women of words.”

  He doesn’t speak again until they reach his room.

  ONCE SHE IS indisputably in his company, Ann is unperturbed by Arthur’s quietness. She is clear, again-full of what she feels is love for him. She will break his silence. She is certain of this. The city clicks into life around her now that she is with him, delights her. “Look,” she says to him, “look, look!,” pointing out details, showing off her splendid eye as if she, not he, were the expert. She brings large bottles of cheap red Italian wine back to his room, day after day, hoping to open him, to release words. We are here, she tells him in an orgy of speech to which he is barely responding, we have a setting. Look out the window, see what we will have to remember.

  “We already,” he replies bitterly, “have more than enough to remember.”

  She beats back the pain statements such as this cause, drowns it in a sea of red wine as she talks and talks. She tells him of the letters that she wrote to him and didn’t mail, how mentally she called to him and called to him, knowing, just knowing, that eventually he would reply.

  “And you did,” she says, smiling at his blank face, “didn’t you?

  “It isn’t that I can’t live without you,” she says, “it’s just that I love you so much I don’t want to live without you. I should have known this in Toronto. I would go home after we met and it would be as if I hadn’t gone home at all, as if we were still together, which is funny because at the same time I would feel so abandoned. Nevertheless, you were there with me, weren’t you? You must have been because otherwise how could I have thought of you so constantly? And I never stopped, you know, even in Stan-bury. Sometimes, there I thought I had stopped, but then you’d walk into a dream I was having, and it was just as if you’d touched my shoulder to remind me, as if you didn’t want me to forget you. Were you trying to remind me?”

  “
No … Ann.”

  She pours herself more wine. “Well, then,” she says, after a long swallow, “I must have been trying to remind myself, because of the truth of this. You see what I mean; the truth is unkillable. I tried, yes, I did try to kill it, but that was foolish, almost wicked of me. What I should have done was try to show it to you instead.” She begins to pace up and down the hotel room’s patterned rug. “I was afraid you’d reject me, but then I realized that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I would never reject you. I remember every single shirt you ever wore when you were with me. When I got home, I mean back to my apartment, I would imagine those shirts hanging in my closet.”

  “Ann, you knew that wasn’t …”

  “Oh, no.” She pulls aside the curtain and looks out to a canal bubbling under forceful rain. “No … that’s not what I meant, not that. Just the shirts. I suppose I wanted a museum of you. Just those shirts … not any others. I didn’t want any part of you that didn’t concern me. But I wanted more of you to concern me. For instance, now the way you sleep concerns me … it didn’t then. I didn’t know that you cross your arms when you sleep and you look stern … like a genie. Yes … that’s how you look, like Aladdin’s genie; proud and slightly disdainful. As if you knew that any and all of the wishes that you might be about to grant were really trivial, inconsequential. As if there couldn’t really be a wish worthy of the enormous power you have to make it come true.”