As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  Gabriella sat with Goldoni. Sickness came in waves, and when she went to the window for air, the familiar mildly bitter scent of the canal water turned her insides with a swift churn. She gasped and held on to the rail, feeling both the illness of her pregnancy and the stronger, older malady that was the returning loss and disappointment of her childhood. She caught the air and gagged as if it were brown water. There she was, herself at nine years of age going to the window as if it were a portal of escape from the sharp censure of her father, who sat at the table asking questions of geography and knuckling her brothers' heads when they failed to answer correctly. Gabriella had only just slunk back into the armchair when the angular face of her cousin reappeared through the doorway. Maria saw the pallor of the other woman and supposed it to be sisterly shock at the news of Giovanni. She sat down on the hard chair opposite Gabriella and gave her a glass of mineral water.

  “They arrested him last Tuesday,” she said.

  She was a thin yet strong woman, whose bones might have been made of an assemblage of the wooden handles of farm tools with skin drawn over them. Her lips were so used to tightness they held her expressions unfreed in a clamp which dared not release the yearning for all the unlived love her life had missed.

  “I didn't think it was right,” she said, “Christmas.”

  Gabriella smiled a half-grimace. She had not known and took the news like the latest in a long line of defeats above which the ghost of her father was laughing bitterly.

  “They said Giovanni had done terrible things. He has been implicated in …” Maria stopped when she saw the wound open in her cousin's expression.

  “I cannot help him,” said Gabriella, “it is his own life. I don't know what I could do.” She raised her hands and let them fall with uselessness.

  “No, of course,” said Maria Feri, and reached with the large fingers of her hand to touch Gabriella's knee. “You must be tired. Will you come and see if the room is all right? I can change anything you don't like.”

  And then it was Christmas in Venice. Rain that was falling in Dublin fell, too, into the Canal Grande and emptied the narrow streets, bathing them in a flowing melancholy until they seemed sometimes awash with the waters of sadness. The buildings perched lofty and aloof from each other, as if they could ignore entirely their lower beginnings and the certainty of their sinking to the victor of Time. The city closed in on itself, and in the sitting room of the house of Maria Feri the two women sat on either side of despair. Gabriella had not told her cousin of her pregnancy. She had given her as a Christmas gift the two bottles of bath powders that Nelly Grant had concocted as a complement to love, but Maria had put them safely away in a dry press, where all her treasured things awaited the arrival of happiness. She sat and made coffee and read long novels and fussed over her visitor. She fed Goldoni French biscottes and carried his cage away from the draught of the window when she realized he had not sung in three days.

  Gabriella did not know what she was doing there. She did not know yet that she could not repair the past, and so her mind brooded on the failed pregnancies of her mother, the miscarried sisters who, like some treasured but lost luggage, had never appeared, and left her gaping at a revolving emptiness. Gabriella questioned herself with the rigour of her father. She interrogated Love until it could not answer and broke down in choked-up confusion that could only mean there was none: she did not love Stephen Griffin. Time and again, she sat under the glare of examination and, while her cousin whistled at the bars of the caged bird, she turned over in her head the impossible questions. What should she do? How could she be in love with that man? He did not love her either, did he? He loved her violin. He loved the idea of her, and had fallen in love with his own imagination.

  But now the child, the child was not imaginary, she heard her father chide her: “It's irresponsible and stupid. You're a fool like your brothers. There are laws, there are rules for living and we follow them,” he said, “whether we like them or not.” He stood across the room from her and leaned his disgust against the wall. He held his head angled backward to aim the shot of his anger like spit.

  “Andiamo a pranzo?” Maria Feri asked, and at once he vanished.

  Under a black umbrella then, they went through the grey and green wateriness of the city for lunch. The air blew cold. Many places were closed, and they had to make do with the brasserie-birreria of Antonio Renato, who had opened for the few tourists and to escape the madness that was his family upstairs. He served the cousins a pizza primavera with a small nod and a kind of quiet and restrained decorum, as if attempting to make himself invisible. He polished the counter and gazed regretfully at the street outside.

  “Will you be staying for long?” Maria Feri dared at last to ask her cousin, and then flushed with embarrassment. “Of course you are welcome for as … I mean, well, I am very glad.”

  “And you are very kind.”

  Maria smiled and looked down at her lunch, hoping that her schooled air of politeness concealed her desperation for Gabriella to stay.

  “I don't know exactly. I have to decide some things. I would like to stay a few weeks if I could.”

  “Oh, a few weeks, yes. Of course.” The older woman lifted her glass of wine with a shaking hand and held it tight against her lip, lest it show her disappointment.

  While the rest of the city greeted the New Year with a mixed response of religion and carnival, the cousins lived with the quietness of convalescents and waited for the cold rain to lift. Gabriella played the violin for herself, and in the other room Maria listened and experienced the astonished awe that those with undiscovered talent sometimes feel for the gifted. The music was played not with sweetness but with a sharp and quickened intensity that even Goldoni the bird recognized was the playing of the heart. Gabriella played it for herself; she played it in the city where her music had begun, and in the playing revisited the rooms of her home; she played it for the child not yet born, and for the thousand unanswerable questions of its future. She played the music for its own order, for the pleasure of its form, which was in itself the one perfect thing in her life. And when she had finished, and the door of her cousin's room creaked and the bird began to sing, she lay on the bed in the kind of exhaustion that makes do for peace.

  It rained on. When the rain lifted, the mist clung in the sleeves of the streets. Venice dripped into itself. Short damp days passed moments after they had begun. Gabriella awoke with the door closing behind her cousin going out to work. Then she turned over in the deep blankets of the bed and it was afternoon and the grey light of another day was sliding softly into the waters. She rose and walked around the apartment in her nightgown. She watched from the window, throwing a cloth over the birdcage when the manic gaiety of his chirping stitched like a needle along the soft rim of her brain. Gabriella returned to her bed. With her hands on her unborn child, she turned into the pillow and became her mother. She became the woman giving birth to grief, to loss, and to the failure of hope. Sweat ran down her face, her hair matted in wild short ropes, her mouth dried, and her tongue wore a white fur. She cried without tears, and, in that room in Venice, felt pressing down on her the terrible loneliness of those who seek like saints to know and do the right thing. Oh God, she thought, closing her eyes for clearer vision and looking in the darkness for a sign, Oh, God, what am I to do?

  4

  When Philip Griffin waved Stephen goodbye from the edge of the front garden, he felt a weight lifting in his spirit and looked down to see that his shoes were still touching the ground. It was the day after the Feast of the Epiphany. There was a sense of slow waking in the drizzling air, as if Christmas like a reluctant guest was only now leaving the suburbs; the streets were drowsy with aftermath.

  Knowing that Stephen was leaving for Venice, both men had woken up mute and spent breakfast with the studied concentration of wordless monks. Stephen wore his father's suit, with the tickets and his passport next to his breast. The bigness of his feelings kept colliding wi
thin him. The round enormity of his gratitude rose in his gorge like a ball cock. He could say nothing. His fingers twisted in knots of yearning that kept coming apart beneath the table and leaving him feeling the emptiness of air with a free-falling panic. He thought of Gabriella vanished into Venice and, in the suit of Philip Griffin, was briefly courageous, balanced on a thin and heroic belief like some latter-day Icarus moments before he chanced the waxen wings and leapt into the air. I will find her, he thought. I'm sure I will. He gulped his tea. The sweat ran off his shoulder blades into the small channel of his back. He took leave of his father with the delicate and mismatched embrace of a crane above a small building, then walked out across the weather to his car.

  Philip watched him drive away. He watched the emptiness after the car had gone and then let the wordlessness of his morning escape in a low groan. He opened his mouth to let his relief float out and followed it immediately with the quick prayer: “Oh God, Anne, I hope it works out.” Then he went back inside the house, where he climbed the stairs to his bedroom slowly, gripping the bannister like the nearness of his last days, ascending, going to take out the bank book, where he could recheck the balance of his account and calculate anew the cost of living.

  5

  Beneath the powders with which she tried to smooth away some of the wrinkles of her life, Maria Feri's face bloomed crimson. Her cousin was pregnant. Gabriella was sitting in the dim light in such a fallen torpor that Maria had to disguise her delight when she was told, and she turned instead to Goldoni in his cage. She tapped him the news until his heart was fluttering. She wanted to share with him the extraordinary vision of it: a child, a child could be born here, right here. And in the vastness of her loneliness a pure joy flew, white as a dove. Maria did not think of the father, of the missing man; she had lived her life in the company of that absence, moving from the days of promise, when any moment he might appear, to a slow, sad reckoning that was like the slow and unannounced fall of petals from last week's flowers; she did not think to ask Gabriella. Instead, she turned her back momentarily and tapped the birdcage to see if Goldoni could sing her mood. Her cousin had come to live with her and now was going to have a baby. For Maria Feri it seemed as if everything in her life might have been waiting for this; it was the arrival of significance. Here was a meaning that washed clean the smudge of ordinary days, weeks, and years. Here, after all, was discovered purpose; she was to be the child's other mother. Goldoni sang. Maria regained the composure that was her learned manner with the world and turned to her cousin.

  “You are run down,” she said. “We must take good care of you. Of course you should have told me sooner. My bed is much more comfortable. I will move you in there tonight.”

  “No, please.”

  “Yes.” She touched a fallen ash-grey hair back from her eye and had the brief dizzy sensation of feeling pregnant herself. “Mia cara cugina. Gabriella. You are my guest here. Please let me make you welcome. It is my happiness.”

  She left the room and went to the kitchen, from where she could still hear the bird singing. Then she cooked the first of several meals that were her prescription to enrich the iron in her cousin's blood. The scent of liver with onions and polenta travelled the house like an upbraiding nanny.

  Gabriella had told Maria only when the weight of her uncertainty threatened a kind of madness. She had told her she was pregnant to explain the discourtesy of not wanting to go out to hear concerts or visit relations. She had told her in desperation, not with shame or upset, but with the calm resignation of those who have no idea what is supposed to happen next. While the pots were clattering and the onions sizzling in oil, Gabriella lay back in the armchair and drifted in a half-dream of Kenmare. How unreal it seemed now. The days and nights of loving blended in a blue memory. What had happened? She turned to the long, narrow window that looked across the street at the ochre wall of the Passinettis' and tried to see there the face of Stephen. Then she shut her eyes and held her lips tight together, as if one kissed the other.

  And there he was. He was that long white figure standing by her bedside. He was the man she had reached out to in the morning and who had come onto the bed and been careful to keep his shoes sticking out in the air not soiling the covers. He was the man who shook like tin foil when she touched him. Gabriella's heart opened with memories of him: how he looked at her with disbelief, how he reached across the space between them each time, as if the journey of his fingers towards her skin were the sailing of some intrepid armada voyaging towards a dream continent. She lay back in soft memories all afternoon, until darkness fell, and then, for no reason other than that it was the learned habit of years, her mind sliced into them like a knife: she diced them into nothings. Love wears off like cheap perfume, she heard her father say. A child, marriage, a life together, these were different things from a passion in the Irish mountains. Gabriella heard her father, she heard the harshness of his voice and saw the vanquished look of his eyes, and then with a sudden chill understood that his voice was her own. It was she who was unable to believe in love. She had been able to sustain no relationship in her life thus far; there was some flaw in her, she believed, some fracture that ran deep below the surface of her soul and made the reality of loving seem a fairy tale. Stephen loved her, she knew that, and knew, too, that she had loved him in Kenmare. But in the dull melancholic weathers of Venice, trapped in the dry rooms of the apartment of Maria Feri, Gabriella lost belief in the future.

  A return to Ireland seemed suddenly impossible. She could not imagine herself a mother, and fell into naps feverish with nightmares of miscarriage and blood. Her hair matted and her eyes burning, she woke in the dawn with pressure on her soul and banged on the birdcage to get Goldoni to stop singing.

  6

  When Stephen arrived off the airport bus in the Piazzale Roma, he had no idea where to go. The afternoon was chill and grey and empty. He had less than fifteen phrases in Italian and had never been out of Ireland before, and yet with the blind innocence of lovers, imagined he would find his way to Gabriella. He did not have an address for her or the slightest clue other than the name of her old music teacher, Scaramuzza, who he knew might be dead. He stood in the piazzale with his bag and waited until he could sense the unseen canal to his left, and then he crossed to the floating platform to await the vaporetto.

  Venice on that January afternoon was unlike the pictures of itself. When the vaporetto came and took him in a steady tugging round the bends of the Canal Grande, Stephen saw the palazzi grimly shuttered against the winter and had a sense of the city turning its back on the progress of time. Greenly brown watermarks lined the lower walls of the buildings; the colour of everything was faded, there was a worn air of enormous fatigue in that winter afternoon, as if some long and brutal enemy had been exhaustively endured and barely defeated, leaving the stonework of the city itself cracked and dismayed in a way that to the summer tourists would seem antique and elegant with grandeur. Still, it was Venice. It was like nowhere else, and as the vaporetto moved down the green waters of the canal, the very frailty of the city, its watery divisions and myriad narrowly bridged islands, struck Stephen as being clearly the city of Gabriella. He could imagine her there. He could imagine the childhood she had described to him in those narrow ochre buildings that rose from the waters. He could see her as a girl and felt in the foolish hopeful way of the romantic that in some way he could heal her past by coming. He leaned on the side rail of the boat and watched the slender street-ways they passed as if he would suddenly see her.

  He got off at the Ponte Accademia and found his way with the small tourist map in his guidebook to the Hotel San Stefano. His father had chosen it with the same purpose he had chosen Stephens Green: to remind God to keep an eye on his son.

  After Stephen had settled in his narrow room and opened the shutters that looked out on the Campo San Stefano, he got a phonebook and checked the listings under Castoldi. He knew that Gabriella's parents were dead, but imagined that he might
find one of her brothers or relations and learn where she was. On a small piece of paper he had written down the phrases he needed.

  “Mi scusi, sto cercando Gabriella Castoldi.”

  He rang seven different numbers and grew familiar with the exasperated tones of Venetian voices telling him he was calling a wrong number.

  “Ha spagliato numero.”

  “Gabriella Castoldi.”

  “Chi e? Non I'ho mai sentita.”

  By the following midday he had called them all.

  There was no violin teacher Scaramuzza either.

  It rained coldly. He had come ill prepared for the weather and wore a sweater beneath the blue suit his father had made for him while he walked through the chill city looking for her. He began after breakfast. He crossed the empty square of San Stefano, where no pigeons flew, and took different sestieri each time, walking through the labyrinthine alleyways, stopping to read carefully the posters of concert performances, and then pacing on while his symptoms of flu worsened. His nose streamed. The cold made his ears burn and his eyes water. Within five days of pursuit through the puzzle of the city, he was a shattered, wild-looking shell of himself. He imagined the awfulness of chance lurked everywhere, that he might miss the opportunity of meeting her if he stopped somewhere for lunch, that if he rested for the afternoon she might be that very day passing by the hotel. It was the madness of the unrequited, and in the city of Venice for ten days that January Stephen Griffin succumbed to it, walking from morning until night the twisted street system, where the sudden turns and blind alleys might have been invented for avoidance and secrecy.