As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  16

  Gabriella Castoldi walked with Stephen Griffin into the night, unaware that it was the transforming moment of her life or that the farfetched and wildest happenstance could sometimes be the inevitable. She took his arm when they reached the night air. He is shaking like a tree on fire, she thought, and steadied herself against him, walking out through the grounds of the hotel to where a river waterfall was lit brilliant and white, the last expression of mountain streams as they jabbered in the swollen throat of the river running down into the free translation of the sea.

  They were mismatched: his long legs and arms, the extra foot of his stride he had to keep shortening, the loom of his head over hers that made him seem craning, crooked, slowing and then towing her, all combined to make them seem oddly paired, a knee- and an ankle-sock out walking. The spray came up to meet them. Immediately their faces were wet.

  “I love this,” she said and, letting go his arm, stepped towards the bank of the rushing water and opened her mouth wide to meet the spray. She was a slight figure in a grey wool coat. Her hair was pulled back and lost in the collar, and the light off the water found the vulnerable places above the angles of her cheekbones. She stood and he waited three feet behind her. He had no idea what to do. Gabriella looked back at him.

  “What are you thinking?” she said.

  “That you are beautiful.”

  She turned away from him.

  “There is a walk down here,” she said, and stepped ahead.

  She was still not sure why she had come, why she had invited him, or where one moment would lead the next. Gabriella Castoldi had abandoned the fantasy of true love; the rigour and perfectionism of her character, which had been gifted her by her father (a man whose ceaseless but muted anger at the world had found expression only in the three warts that ran in a line on the left side of his forehead), meant that she could not envision happiness for herself longer than an instant. So, as she stood by the river's edge in the late evening, where the falling fog smelled of the mountains, she did not think of love; she did not imagine that the awkward man with the long arms and bare head could have a long and lasting role in her life. She considered none of this. She was there with him simply because of the way he was, because of how he had listened to the music, because of that quality of intensity and seriousness in the white puzzle of his face that suggested a dumbfounded amazement and wonder at the same time as the long-suffering knowledge of woe.

  Gabriella walked ahead of him down the gravelled path by the river. She heard his footsteps crunching unevenly behind her. It was dark and drizzling. They had moved beyond the reflected light of the floodlit waterfall into a place where the pine trees grew thickly and the scent of the night air was held low upon them by the overhanging branches. Gabriella stopped and Stephen came close to her.

  “Shush. Listen,” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  Nothing. Stillness. Their breaths slowed until the entangled sounds of the woods and the water rose like raised volume, those soft crashings and whisperings that were the life of the night, revealed and shared like a secret.

  “I love this,” she said. “This is why I like to stay here, in Kenmare. In the mountains.”

  They stood a time with nothing to say.

  “The world is simple here, isn't it?” Gabriella said at last. She looked into the darkness of the river flowing past the trees. She looked at the outpouring and onrushing river that was the river of her own life and felt its sadness teem; here was her childhood in Venice, firstborn of the policeman Giovanni and Christa Castoldi, the child of their earliest loving, upon whom fell the unsaid yet subtly broadcast disappointment that she was not a son, and whom her father, Giovanni, could not hold for more than five minutes without passing her back like a strange fish netted in the murk of the lagoon; her mother, who was always pregnant and miscarrying, who passed to Gabriella the understanding that girls clean and cook, and who made her from age six the second in command of the narrow brown rooms of the house in the Calle Visciga, where already her two brothers were lords; how her duties mounted, and how frequently she stayed in the kitchen with the caged bird that did not sing to prepare the meals which might garner love in her returning father's quick praise as he gorged himself closer to death; how she had heard the violin teacher Scaramuzza when he moved into the apartment below them and managed to persuade her mother to let her take lessons; how there, too, was reinforced the already solidifying belief that nothing she could do would ever be good enough, and that the brutal music she made was a sorry and discordant insult to its composers; and yet how she had continued, playing only when her parents were out of the house, and then, when her mother, after six miscarriages, was taken to bed with the early stages of liver failure, gradually daring to bow the notes in diminuendo in the farthest room; how she had become the mother then, years before she had been a lover or known anything but the dreamt caresses that visited her sleep like the princes of fairy tales; the years of her father's pent-up and brooded-upon horror as his sons became vivid and frightful mockeries of his once most cherished machismo fantasy of the Castoldi boys, who were to be policemen like their father, cleansing the plaguey corruption that soured the air of Venice like grey spores, but who became instead the very same small villains with open shirts and silver chains whom he spent his life jailing; how Giovanni Castoldi did not get to retire, but whose spleen had ruptured and exploded inside him with hot rage in the police motor launch on the Canal Grande when he found himself chasing the slippery and evil shadow of himself that was Antonio Castoldi, who had fired three shots at the man he did not know was his father before crashing at full speed into the vaporetto station at the Ponte Accademia; how the music had taken over then for Gabriella; how the violin had become her father and her mother and her family; and how even Scaramuzza had admitted her progress, scratching the dryness of his right ear and clearing the wet cloud of his chest phlegm to acknowledge her with the single word bene; the years of her university then and the approach of those not yet men who saw in the cool remoteness of her playing something to be conquered, a woman too much in her own kingdom who they imagined needed bringing into the tight prisons of their smaller passions, and whose fumbling and filmy-sweated version of love left Gabriella Castoldi feeling there were no emotions as pure as those she played in the music; and then the poet Pollini, who arrived in her life with the surprising abruptness of grace, when beneath her eyes was already the colour of pale plums; the season of that happiness that then like everything else fell down and withered. And left her there in Kenmare.

  She saw it in the night river. She saw it and felt the grief and loneliness of her world grow immense and cold inside her. She stood motionless, and Stephen stood behind her. There were no stars. The mountain fog lay on the treetops. Thin veils descended wetting their hair. Gabriella turned around.

  “I don't know your name,” she said.

  When he told her, she nodded, as if the sounds of it revealed something that she had already known.

  “Stefano,” she said. “Hold me.”

  17

  Early the following morning Gabriella lay on the bed with the covers half across her and her feet hanging over in the cool air. She was midway between waking and sleep, and lingered in that warm place where time slows and holds still the not quite vanished dreamlike quality of the night. She was lying on her back and her hair fell to the right across the pillow. She kept her eyes closed and held behind them the astonished and rapturous kisses of the night, the white tremoring of Stephens body when he was undressed, and his loving that was first infinitely hesitant and slow, each touch like a terrifying adventure—this place on her bow arm, this firmness in her neck where her violin fit and where his mouth tasted her—until, in the clockless time of two bodies learning each other like a language, he had loved her more wildly, and they had rolled back and across the bedclothes in each other's held embrace, in a way that had sometimes seemed as if from the unseen and enormous tide of loss,
grief, and despair, each was rescuing the other.

  Gabriella was not in love. She was not ill or delirious for his presence, she did not feel she needed him to be able to get out of the bed and imagined she could live through the day without seeing him and have no balloon of longing inflate in her chest. She had nothing of the schoolgirl's flushed excitement and ran no fever. But the emotion she felt for Stephen Griffin was the baffled and uncertain beginnings of love nonetheless.

  She lay in the bed and listened to the sounds of morning. Stephen had gone to the shops for milk for her coffee. When he returned with the milk and two punnets of strawberries, he entered her cottage with the deep hesitation of a man unsure if this was the place where he had left a dream. She stirred in the bedclothes, and he went to her kitchen, opening her presses like privacies and finding that she drank no tea, only coffee from grounds. He looked at the cups she had, at her sugar bowl and milk jug. He ran his hands on the countertop, as if fingering a hidden keyboard where there played the music of all her time there in Kenmare. He looked at everything that was hers, and then made a muddy coffee without a paper filter, carrying it in to her bedside and then sitting down in the chair beside the window like a visiting uncle, with his hands on his knees.

  Gabriella sat up, and the bedclothes fell down. She looked at him and laughed.

  “You are so sweet,” she said, smiling at his attendant heart sitting beside her and passing through another wave of her own disbelief that such a man existed. She held out her arms to him, and in his jacket, shirt, and trousers he stretched himself across; he did not reach for her with his hands, but closed his eyes as he craned forward like a finishing sprinter and was an instant there in that invisible place of long-imagined arrival, until her fingers touched his face and drew him toppling onto the bed. She was laughing. She drew him against her breasts and rose her body against him, caressing him with the fullness of her so his face travelled the length of her skin and tasted the perfume that was herself and did not come in bottles. He shook again in spasms. He clung to her as she moved now beneath now above him, now turning him over like a shipwreck in the churned-up waters of a passion that she could not fathom. She undressed him with a quick and flashing urgency, not thinking that her actions were like those of a saviour or that the dampness of her mouth finding his was the ageless, time-honoured way in which the world was resuscitated and gasped anew the miracle air. She thought nothing. She kissed the white and shaking wreckage of his body and swallowed his tears that spouted and rolled; he wept and tried to cling to her, embracing in this woman for the first time in his adult life the possibility of happiness and feeling at the same moment that the wave might crash, drowning him in that strange foreknowledge and expectancy of suffering which every day had taught him. He held her so tightly she arched and cried out, the breath squeezed from her in a thin red-and-yellow ribbon, and she was pressed onto him like a transparency. Their loving was thrown about; it rose up and fell down, it tumbled off the bed and arrived on the carpet among Gabriella's shoes. It squirmed and burned. She took handfuls of his skin and closed them tightly within her fingers, letting go and taking another even as he held hers. He hooped her, she enwrapped him. She rolled him over and shook him. She pressed his face hard to her breasts, she pulled his shoulders against her, as if the wholeness of himself might enter there; as if each of them had somehow forgotten their sex organs or forgone them as some hopelessly inadequate apparati of conjoinment, as if they wished not to be joined at all but to be one another, to blend. They wrestled and tumbled within each other in a way that sought transcendence and to make their bodies one as air or spirit.

  “I love you,” Stephen said.

  Gabriella touched the smooth moon of his bare head where he lay across her. But she did not say she loved him.

  18

  And so there was then a brief season before Christmas, a time which glimmered with the quality of fables and made for Stephen Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi the single most enduring memory of what happiness could be like on earth. The sun stayed between the mountains. When Gabriella told Stephen that the cold dampness of the weather in winter depressed her, he made the characteristically rash promise of the first-time lover that he would not let it rain on her. Within a few days, when the pine needles of the town's Christmas trees were drying and falling and the sun still warmed Kerry like Maytime, he began to believe, like a child, that love had more powers than he supposed and that the force of wishes sometimes made things true. His gift was one of pure sentimentality and he wanted so deeply for everything to turn out right that, in that brief season of sunlight, he imagined it would. He lived at Mary White's and visited Nelly Grant and carried to Gabriella's cottage the bags of fruit, honeys, and jams that fed pleasure and rapture. Sometimes she played for him. She stood beside the bed, and having bargained that he lie long and naked while he listen, she bowed a light quick music whose notes came like birds and sang through the cottage air. She played more easily than she had ever done, not yet knowing that the quality she had discovered was forgiveness and that in the secrecy of her spirit a healing had begun.

  It was a season of love in the afternoon; of slow time and long caresses, of strawberries (that had been flown from Africa and bought in a market in Cork) passing from mouth to mouth like the wet ripe and softly bruised essence of pleasure itself. It was a season of nothing else; the world had been made small and sunny. Everything else had been lopped away, had in a single kiss been rendered meaningless, and while the days passed by, Stephen did not think of returning to Clare. He did not think of the letter that he must have known would come (and did) from Eileen Waters, the threat she did not quite have the authority to make that unless she heard from him at once he would be dismissed from the school, and that further, he would not get work from the department again; he did not consider tomorrow nor the diminishing funds from which he paid Mary White as Christmas approached. But neither did he hear the voice that whispers insistently beneath the surface of all our happiness, that urges you to gather each moment like a small stone and store it in the deep pockets of your soul, that knows what lies ahead and offers only the wisdom of living fully and cherishing like the briefest dream this season of loving, for these are the instants of passion which will later become those diamonds of memory that will cry out: Here, there, look, in these moments I lived and knew a boundless joy, I loved.

  Stephen did not hear it. He did not think, A day will come when this will end, when I will sit in a room and turn over these moments like the story of another man's life. But rather, in those three weeks before Christmas, he awoke and loved and listened to music and clung to the thin belief that the things of the heart endured and mattered and were the secret magic which could entangle the varied and ingenious knots of life like the fingers of an ancient mariner. At thirty-two years of age, in love for the first time, Stephen was an early model of romance. He withdrew money from the bank and bought flowers from Mary Mungovan's shop on the lower street, which specialized in wreaths and funeral accessories. He carried the chrysanthemums in the crook of his arm like an infant and brought them to Gabriella as a lesser declaration of the inexpressible. It was in the character of his love that he could not describe it and tried instead to deliver it through an entire inventory of small gifts and gestures: he made her thick, undrinkable coffee every morning and brought it to her in her bed, he washed her dishes, he tidied the clothes it was her habit to leave on the floor, he brought her the Cadbury's chocolate bars she said she loved, leaving them in half-hidden places about the cottage, and telling her she was beautiful when she stood before the mirror and mockingly said he was fattening her into a Madonna; he wrote her small notes, he bought books and left them by her bed, he emptied Nelly Grant's shelves, buying every kind of fruit and fresh juice, carrying bottles of elderberry wine up the hill to the cottage in a string bag that Gabriella had brought from Venice.

  Stephen did not suffer greatly from the fact that Gabriella Castoldi did not tell him that she
loved him. He had the visionary blindness of a saint and wanted only for her to let him love her. He did not expect nor even imagine that she might requite his love. Life had imbued him with a deep humility and then nourished it with a Catholic sense of his own unworthiness. He was the lesser for not being beautiful, for possessing no gift, and for the flawed understanding with which he had grown up that fate had chosen him for misfortune. He was dazzled by her, and did not care how he appeared to anyone in the town, carrying her groceries, bringing her flowers, hanging her strawberry-stained sheets on the line. It was enough for Stephen Griffin that the great airy burden of love he had discovered inside himself could be given to Gabriella. He felt she was the saddest woman he had ever met, and wanted to heal her, to caress her, and to remake the world around her with tenderness in that earliest and most redeeming of our instincts that is the deep-felt and inexplicable longing to make another happy.

  They took walks in the December mountains. They told each other's lives like stories. She dared him a dozen dares and he took them on for her, taking off his clothes and sitting screaming in the icy stream while she laughed and clapped, rushing to him with their blanket and drying him gently like some astonishing new proof of God. He jumped off rocks and climbed trees, clambering slippingly among the wet branches, losing his footing, cutting his chin, triple-scratching the top of his head, and arriving forty feet above her, where at last he could answer her question and tell her what the view was like from up there. Neither did he mention his fear of heights, nor the swimming world below him, where her face seemed to bob and waver like a watery moon.

  A season of tests and provings. To Gabriella Castoldi it was the unlikeliest thing; her experience of passion had taught her mistrust, and as she did not believe that she was beautiful or truly gifted, she first imagined Stephen Griffin's loving as something with the tender insubstantiality of a dream. It would pass in its own time. But when the days ran on and the strange sweetness of his presence lingered longer, Gabriella found herself waiting for the moment when he arrived at the door. He had left his kisses in her imagination, and they lived like exotic roses, blooming wild.