As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  “I think I will, that’s why I’m here. But I don’t know.” Stephen looked directly at her. “I’d like the chance to work here, I know that.”

  It was not exactly what Mrs. Waters wanted to hear. But she nodded and pursed her lips.

  “You’d teach all classes?”

  “Yes.”

  “We believe in discipline here. We have school rules.”

  Stephen said nothing, he simply looked back at her, and Eileen Waters could not tell if he was agreeing or not. She was a good judge of men; she often said so. She had judged her husband, Eamon, at forty-three and married at last, congratulating herself on not surrendering to any number of brutish fellows and finding in the assistant librarian in Ennis the quietest man in Clare. He had not disappointed her. She was a good judge. But with Stephen Griffin she was lost. It was a feeling to which she was not accustomed, and to escape the discomfort, she decided on him. He was the best of the three applicants by far, she told herself. That he was the only man and the other two women candidates had both seemed powerful, competent figures who might have challenged her was beside the point. No, this fellow is the best. It was only when Eileen Waters stood up to congratulate Stephen on getting the job that the thought occurred to her that he might be a dreadful teacher. It was only a passing impression, and she drove it, like everything else, resolutely out of her mind by shaking Stephen’s hand forcefully and telling him three times how wonderful it was all going to be.

  In the years before he arrived at the concert in Ennis that Friday evening, time had stopped for Stephen Griffin. He had found the house and moved into it, taken the job at the school, and fit his life into the routine of both of them, paring down his days until they had arrived at a still and unbroken sameness.

  Then time stopped altogether.

  He was the teacher who lived in the house. He was a quiet and shy man. He didn’t go to the pubs at night, nor join the little golf club on the dunes at Spanish Point. The Clancys, who lived in the small cottage down the road, hardly saw him; the word in Marrinan’s shop was that he was writing a book and wanted to be left alone. And so he was. He taught his classes, he lived in the house by the sea and visited his father in Dublin once every month. He felt himself grow old.

  Then one day he was asked to buy a ticket for Michael Mooney’s concert.

  6

  He was called Moses Mooney. He had a great fluff of white beard and walked down the streets of Miltown Malbay with his head held backward to let it flow. He had two coats and wore them both in winter, one on top of the other, so the fullness of his figure as he came towards you seemed a statement of intent. His eyes were blue gimlets. He had sailed the seas of the world for many years, and three times died and lived again according to his own tales. Each encounter with God had left him with the remarkable blueness of his eyes made brighter and the rosiness of his cheeks proof of the health-enhancing properties of resurrection. He was an extraordinary man. Moses Mooney had grown up in a house of music, the notes were in his ears when he was born, for his father, Thomas, was rumoured to have fiddle calluses on his fingers when he arrived in the world and his mother was the singer Angela Duff, who had made men weep in the kitchen when she sang “Spancil Hill.” He had grown up with the music and then left for England and the sea. It was on the third of his meetings with God, when he was fifty-two years old, that Moses Mooney realized what he was to do with his life and returned from the shores of Brazil to Miltown Malbay with the project of building an opera house by the sea.

  At first, of course, it was not an opera house. He told the people who would listen to him in bemused amazement in Clancy’s bar that it was a concert hall. That the sides would be removeable to see the sea, and that in summertime they would lift off to let the roaring of the ocean meet the playing of the music in the fabulous symphony of Man and God. He was perfectly clear about it. Everything about him seemed convincing, and for as long as his vision remained the wildest and least probable of all dreams, the people indulged his fantasy and bought him drinks. Moses Mooney was a figure around the town, that was all. He did not tell anyone yet that the building was to be an opera house, nor that the music he had heard in God’s company was not like any other and that only later when he had arrived back on the shores of Brazil and heard on an old radio the singing of Maria Callas did he recognize that that was the music of God.

  How he intended to build the opera house was not at first clear to him either. All he knew was that he had to come home to Clare, that his travelling days were over, and that this project was what he had to pursue until the day that he died. When he arrived back at his home cottage, the roof had fallen in. There were two cats living in the parlour in a clump of old thatch, and when Moses stood in the doorway, they came to him with such gentleness and affection that he told his neighbour he would name them after his parents. It took him three months to get the house partially repaired. He had money saved from his sailoring, and before he had declared his full intentions, he used what he had left to buy an acre of ground next to the golf course at Spanish Point.

  And there it remained. The west Clare opera house. Grass grew within the barbed-wire boundaries of the field, while all about it were the fairways and greens of the golfers. Every day Moses would walk across the field and imagine the dimensions of the building shaping around him; from the whispering of the sea winds he dreamed the singing of the future, the magnificent music that was as yet unheard by everyone but himself.

  Other than this vision, Moses Mooney showed few signs of oddity in his behaviour. He was a churchgoing man and kept himself comfortably once he had repaired the cottage. He was the owner of a thousand tales and could tell them with such conviction that two priests, three bankers, and one insurance man were among his regular company in the late-evening sessions in Clancy’s. He had gone out into the world and brought more than his share of it back with him, and when he told of unknown tribes in Chile, the bizarre habits of the male cockatoo, or the weird majesty of a communal dream shared by each of eighty sailors one night after a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, no one walked away. He finished a story and sat back, palming his great beard gently, and then sipping his stout as if chastened by the things he had lived to see.

  It was two years after he had bought the field that the idea of the concerts came to him. When he first dreamed the opera house into the space where the tufts of grass blew in the wind, he did not think of how the money would be raised. It was only afterwards, when the emptiness of the field began to spread in his mind like an ache, that he wondered if there was not a serious flaw in God’s vision, or if perhaps he had resurfaced too soon in the southern Atlantic before getting the entire message. With the childlike innocence of the visionary, he had supposed that once he announced his intentions the money would be forthcoming. When it wasn’t and nobody stopped him on the street with the offer of finances, he decided that information was the problem, and stayed awake all the following night making three bright posters with red and yellow crayons, announcing the number of the bank account he had opened and telling the good people that he was going to donate his field and all his personal savings to the cause of building a place for music of the sea. He hung the posters the following day before dawn. The town was asleep and only a brisk salty wind passed along the street. Thomas and Angela, the two cats, had followed him from the house and stood together beneath the lamppost while he pressed home the thumbtacks. When he had done all three, he walked down the empty town with a pure and clear pride glistening inside himself; he was as clean-souled as after Communion, and turned to look back at the announcements with such a blaze of joy that they might have told of the coming of Christ Himself. Moses Mooney walked home and went to bed. He slept with the two cats at his feet and dreamed the town was waking up and seeing the notices, an infection of delight enveloping the people at the whimsical originality, the daring and wonder of the plan, and the queues spreading from Bank Place down to Clancy’s.

  When he awoke he was li
ke a new man, and had the flushed rapture of those who know they are about to see their dreams realized. He imagined the money adding up, he totted the imaginary figures and was able to elaborate the plans for the opera house, extending the balcony and adding a small restaurant, where chamber music could be played in the summertime. He laughed at the miracle of it all, the simplicity of how things happen in the world, of how his seagoing days and nights, the endless blue journey towards the limit of all horizons, had arrived at this, the meaning of his life. He did not go out that day. Nor the next. He let the dreams bank up like snow. It was three days later when he at last allowed himself to go out, to walk down to the town and find out what had happened. He arrived at the bank just before closing and asked to check the balance in the account.

  It was exactly the same amount he had started with.

  He had to lean on the counter to keep from falling. The teller did not look at him, but kept her eyes fixed on the blue light of the terminal screen. Moses heard the water gurgling in his ears like laughter and kept staring at the figures on the docket until he could no longer hear or see anything. The vanity of hope and the mockery of all enterprise flooded through the sluice gates of his brain, bringing with them the hopeless realization that he was utterly alone and carrying away in a single instant any possibility of help. He gripped the counter he could no longer see, he felt his throat tighten and gag him, and then he fell to the floor with a soft thump.

  It was seven days and fourteen tests later before Dr. Maguane could confirm for certain that Moses Mooney was blind. The procedures had been complicated by the patient’s inability to tell whether he could see or not; he sat before charts without a word and kept his blue eyes fixed so perfectly on the letters that at first the doctor was certain he could see them. He sometimes called out the letters with such accuracy that Maguane himself had to walk up next to the board and peer at the smallest of them to be sure that Moses was right. The whole business was complicated even further by the blind man’s declaration that he could see them perfectly clearly in his mind. The examinations of his eyes were not conclusive either, and it was only when Dr. Maguane saw the patient reaching for his fallen stick that he agreed to give the diagnosis and shatter the town with splinters of shared guilt.

  When Moses Mooney was brought home to the cats on the first afternoon of his declared blindness, the balance in the opera house account rose by £600. The following week there were £400 more, and although it was still far short of the impossible goal, it was enough to send Moira Fitzgibbon of the Community Development Association to visit Moses Mooney by the fireside in his house and tell him the good news of how the people were responding.

  What nobody knew was that although Moses Mooney had lost his sight, he had gained omniscience and knew already. On the vast seas of his blindness he sailed now, guided by no stars and not daring to dream. He sat in his house, with few visitors, and retreated to the warm exotic landscapes of his imagination. The world had no place for vision, he told God.

  And yet something had lingered on. For, one year after Moses Mooney had awoken in his blindness, Moira Fitzgibbon had contacted the Italian embassy. She had heard of a touring Venetian ensemble sponsored by the embassy and phoned to ask them if they could play a concert in Miltown Malbay for the opera house fund. The woman from the embassy had never heard of Miltown Malbay, she sounded the name like Milano and told Moira to wait. When she came back on the line she said, Send a letter, we’ll see.

  At any moment the plot might have turned in another direction, the lines left to dangle, disconnected, and the meaning lost. But Moira Fitzgibbon wrote the letter, and when the Italians wrote back, saying that they would not come to Miltown Malbay but would donate one half of the takings from the planned concert in Ennis, there was a sense of rightness about it, like the smallest part of an elaborate puzzle, the sense of things fitting and bringing the unlikeliest of moments together.

  Two days later Stephen Griffin was asked in the staff room to buy a ticket.

  7

  Vittorio Mazza did not want to play in Ennis. He did not want to play in Ireland at all. The day after he arrived in Dublin with the other members of the ensemble, he woke in his hotel and saw with alarm the peculiar greyness of the light. He imagined the cause was the net curtains and drew them aside, only to discover with grim astonishment that the grey was the colour of the sky. A steady October rain was falling, the Dublin traffic was blocked in apparent perpetuity, and the people who moved on the city path below wore the downcast and mottled expression of desolation. Vittorio gasped with the awfulness of it, blinked his eyes, and opened them only to understand that he had arrived in the haunting landscape of his worst dream and that Dublin seemed to be the place that for sixteen years he had been calling Purgatory.

  He lay on his bed and ordered room service. When it did not arrive, he was confirmed in his fears that the city was a kind of prison. The misery of the place was leaking in on him, the massiveness of the melancholia so potent that at first he thought he would not be able to stand, never mind play. He was the lead violin; he was Vittorio Mazza, he was fifty-eight years old and had been playing the violin for half a century. He had played in twenty-two cities in the world, and although he had never achieved any personal fame, he was known as a quality musician, and it was he who had been sought by the impresario Maltini when the Interpreti Veneziani was being founded.

  Now he lay on the bed in his white shirt and wept. The dream of Purgatory had first tormented his sleep sixteen years earlier. It was May, his mother was ill, and Vittorio Mazza was in love with Maria Pecce, the beautiful wife of the baker Angelo. Due to the obsessive jealousy of the baker, who imagined no woman as beautiful as Maria could be faithful to the likes of him, the meetings of Maria and Vittorio were arranged with great difficulty and at odd hours of the day and night. Maria was known to everyone because of her extraordinary good looks and raven-black hair and had to slip from the bakery in a variety of scarves and coats, even during the furnace heat of that Maytime. When she came to Vittorio, she was often naked beneath her coat, and as he pressed her to himself, the vapours of fresh dough entangled with the scent of the rose petals that she scattered on her innumerable baths. He could not believe that she loved him, but ignored as best he could the muted voice in the back of his brain that it was really the music that had brought her into his bed. She had heard him play Rossini in the Gala at Easter, and the moment had fired her with such reawakened passion for the rapturous and infinitely tender quality of life that she could barely sit out the concert and wait until the violinist was in her arms. The passion between them was instant, and remarkable, for they didn’t tire of each other’s body but made a kind of hungry loving, as if trying to devour one another’s limbs and mouth and arrive at the essential stuff of the soul.

  Vittorio knew the affair was doomed, but was helpless to escape. He knew he should tell Maria that he could not meet with her on the morning after his mother had taken another turn in her illness. He should have left Venice and driven to Verona. But when Maria came to his door, the look in her eyes erased his words, and his gratitude for the comfort of her breasts washed over everything else. Later, she lay like a dark cat on the pulled-back sheets of his bed and he played Schubert on the violin over her, not yet knowing that his mother had died.

  When he found out, it snapped him like a Communion wafer. He met the anger of his sister’s eyes at the bedside of the corpse and knew at once there was a judgement upon him. He did not sleep for three nights; he lay in the bed like a ship moored in mid-sea and waited for the horizon of the dawn. He waited through three nights and then came downstairs in his mother’s house one morning to hear on the radio how the baker Pecce had killed his wife with a knife.

  Since that night, Vittorio Mazza had lived sixteen years in the solitude of his guilt. He played music, but found little joy in it. At night he fell headlong into the same dream, over and over again. A grim place and a grey sky. Greyness everywhere. The feeling o
f wet concrete touching his face and the sense of his descending endlessly downward throughout the night, journeying down a slippery and rat-grey pathway where cold rain was falling.

  It was, he knew, the condition of Purgatory that he carried around with him. It was the place his soul had fallen into, and much as he wished that sleep would one time bring him the warm and fabulous caress of Maria Pecce, in sixteen years he had not found it. He suffered the torments of his nights and woke exhausted into the light of the morning, like a swimmer surfacing from a great depth. The sunlight revived him, and he could move through the day briefly postponing his despair. But that morning, in Dublin, Vittorio Mazza awoke and looked out and felt the familiarity of misery smite him with the frightening awareness that the condition of his sin had deepened. This was worse than anything he had known previously. For the city, on that fourteenth consecutive rainy day in October, had taken on the air of a mortally ill patient, and under the persistence of the drizzling sky every man and woman seemed to Vittorio to wear the dulled expression of a longtime heartache. The grief of his own condition seemed to have leaked out into the city in the night, and made everyone and everything the cousins of affliction. Even the buses that shouldered with infinite slowness through the traffic past the hotel suggested the impossibility of hope and progress here, their engines thrumming a despondent music and the passengers, with their faces to the streaming windows, looking out on a journey that would last forever.

  Vittorio lay back on his bed and pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes. He wanted to cry out, but rolled himself over until his face was pressed against the pillow. Why had he come here? He should have turned down the offer; how could he bear this desolate grey place? He raised his head and looked for the wine bottle he had bought the previous evening. He knew that it was empty, for he had emptied a bottle of wine every night before lying down for the last fifteen years, but he still searched the room for it, as if to confirm that it was morning and the umbrageous light was not the vivid dark of his dreams.