Then perhaps time passed the two of them by. The light was lost in clouds of smoke. Gabriella and Maria sat there silently, with the strange unity of people waking together to the disappointed endings of their separate dreams. At last Maria spoke.
“It is not the city,” she said with the sudden bravery of the vanquished.
“What?”
“It is a sad thing, but that is not the pain in your heart.” She stepped away from the press towards her cousin. Goldoni flitted onto the high bar in the cage. Maria reached the place where the shallow bar of light fell, and almost at once the things she had come forward to say were unsayable, were swiftly rendered mute and unnecessary as Gabriella turned towards her.
“Oh God,” Gabriella said. Instantly her hands flew like birds to her lower lip, and in that strange way that one tragedy trapezes to the next, she was torn apart by the terrible uncertainty of her ability to sustain love.
“Oh God, Maria,” she said, “what am I to do?”
And in that moment, as Maria Feri approached to put her arms around her cousin, becoming briefly the mother of the child, and held her with strength and tenderness in the nourishing faith that mothers know, Gabriella Castoldi changed her life and surrendered to that embrace, and wept. Her face flowed, the way water might flow from a rock. In Maria's arms her ferocity was gone and she allowed herself to be gently guided into the big armchair.
“I'm sorry,” she whispered.
“Stop. Please, Gabriella.”
Maria knelt down beside the armchair and stroked her cousin's hair.
“Do you love him?” Maria said.
“Oh God. Oh God Oh God Oh God.”
“Gabriella, tell me.” Maria could not see her face. She stroked her hair. She drew a scented paper tissue from the sleeve of her beige cardigan, but Gabriella did not take it.
“Gabriella?”
“How can I know? I can't. I might. I think I do. I don't know.” She raised her wet face and swollen eyes. “I don't know.”
“Does he love you?”
Gabriella brought her fingers to her cheeks; she touched them as if she were another.
“He thinks he does. If I go back, if I tell him I have his child, he will tell me he loves me, he will marry me. He is a good man. His goodness will love me.”
“And what is wrong with that?”
In the cage the bird sang six notes in echo.
“Look at me, Gabriella,” Maria said. “I missed my chances. I did not know. I waited. I waited, thinking, A day will come, Maria, and you will know. And do you know what? It did not. It did not come and he went away.”
“Maria.”
“Listen, Gabriella! I know. I have missed out. I have missed love because of pride, nothing else. It was my own fault. You think I don't know, I do. I know. I know what I am and how I am and how my life will be. I have given up thinking a day will come and I will know. For it will not come now. No matter how many prayers climb to heaven or how deeply my knees mark the floor. Please, Gabriella. I won't speak of it again. But please, don't wait to know. Go.”
Maria pressed on the armchair to raise herself from the floor. She walked away from Gabriella, put on her low-heeled brown shoes, and powdered over the pale face of sorrow with another that was rouged with hope. When she looked at herself in the mirror she was ten years older, but respectable with a reserve that was a finer mask that any made in Venice. She practised a thin smile. Then she left the house in her sensible shoes and entered the streets that smelled of the burned opera house, raising her chin from defeat and redeemed in the not small triumph of knowing herself so well.
She went on her way to work.
It was the middle of the morning.
12
Twelve hours later Gabriella phoned Stephen.
He was lying on top of his bed in the blue suit. When he stood in the moonless dark, the right sleeve of the jacket came loose and fell down his arm.
His phone had not rung in days. He had returned from Venice two weeks and had not yet called his father. He had imagined the disappointment the old man would feel and waited each day, hoping to find a way to tell him. Finally, he could wait no longer and decided he would drive to Dublin the following Saturday.
The phone rang. In the time it took him to cross the bedroom to answer it in the blind dark of the hallway, the certainty that it was bad news made his throat tight. He was stooped forward, guilt weighing his shoulders, and imagined even as his hand found the cold receiver that it was his father or, worse, news of him.
Then he heard her voice.
“Stefano?”
The sound came from so far away it might have been the next world. He could not believe it was his name in her mouth. He opened his lips to it in the darkness. The wind that came beneath the front door chilled his ankles. He held the receiver with two hands and listened deeply to the sound that was the sound of underneath the sea.
“Stefano, hello?”
His lips moved soundlessly and his eyebrows lowered as if he was concentrating on the most difficult puzzle in the world.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Yes. Gabriella.”
He could say nothing else. The tenderness of her voice moved him. He felt he would fall down, and with the loose-sleeved arm, he reached to touch the wall.
“I had to talk to you. I have something to tell you,” said Gabriella.
She waited. The deep ocean of the darkness between them crackled down the telephone line. Stephen said nothing. He listened to her breath as if it were language.
“I am carrying your child,” she said, “and …”
And his breath went, as if someone else needed it and took it. He put his forehead against the wall to balance himself; life came pulsing through the darkness and lit him like a charge. He was exhilarated yet extinguishable. Gabriella was talking, but his ears were humming. He pressed his head against the wall.
“I love you,” he said.
“Stephen.”
“I love you.”
“I know. I know you do. But … Well, I mean this is different. It's a child, it's … I don't know what I feel. I don't know what I will feel tomorrow, the next day, the day after …”
“Please, Gabriella.” He said it like a demand. “I want you. I want to see you. I want to be with you. Oh God, Gabriella, I can't …” He stopped and thumped his forehead on the wall. His face was wet. “I love you.” He had nothing else to say and imagined for a moment if he repeated ceaselessly the three immemorial words, then the enchantment of language would bring her to him.
“You are kind and good. You are too good for me,” she said. “You love me even if …” She paused, as if a wave were rising, then said, “I don't know if I love you, Stephen.”
The one who had taken his breath now took his voice. The truth was like ice on him. Then Gabriella said, “I mean I do. I did. It's just me. I am so wretched. I … I don't know. Can I love anyone for my whole life? I don't know.”
And Stephen's voice returned: “I was in Venice.”
“What?”
“I came to find you. I …”
“Oh God, Stephen … Where did you, when did …?” And the questions fell away into nothingness, and the air hummed down the line between them.
Please, Stephen thought, please, God. And he closed his eyes tightly on that deeper darkness that was the darkness of all the disappointed days of his life, the darkness of that all but defeated spirit that skirted the shadowy edge of dreams with the expectation only of their failure. Then he heard her say:
“I will come back to Kerry.”
He wasn't sure he had heard her.
“I will come next week to Kenmare,” she said, as if she were telling herself to see how it sounded.
There was silence. Their lives hung in the baffled air; then Stephen said, “Play something.”
“What?”
“Play something, please.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn't. I haven't played since �
�”
“Gabriella.”
The sea rushed into the phone.
“Wait,” she said.
And while Stephen held the phone in the darkness, he imagined her crossing a living room in a building just across the Campo San Stefano from where he had looked out on Venice, and he joined her there in imagination as she found the case and opened it and rosined the bow and walked back across the hardwood floor, making the footsteps that he could hear approaching (as Maria Feri heard them, too, behind the shelter of her slightly ajar bedroom door). Then Gabriella was playing the violin beside the telephone, a passage from the A Minor Concerto of Antonio Vivaldi.
The music travelled, invisible as love, into the house by the sea. It returned, and was like some simple and ancient language between them, the one playing, the other listening. The quick notes in the upper octaves were the music of human ache and flurried down the phone the unsayable, timeless message of all our yearning, the never-ending, indefatigable, and desperate need to believe love like God's exists on earth. It was a message beyond telling. Yet it travelled the three hundred years from the Ospedale della Pietà, where Vivaldi had scored the music in black ink by waxen candlelight, all the way to that moonless night when Gabriella Castoldi played it to the shores of the Atlantic. It played and pierced Stephen Griffin like an arrow.
Then it stopped, and as if the natural closure of that playing was a coda of silence, the phone line hummed between them for a time. They said nothing, and then replaced the receivers.
As if he had just returned to the world, Stephen opened the front door. The loose sleeve of his jacket fell off and he caught it and put it on, patting it back in place like a plasticine limb and going along the gravelled pathway into the big blowing of the night wind.
“Gabriella,” he said softly, letting the gusts take her name like a bird and blow it down the road. Gabriella. Clouds blacked the stars. The sea was in the air and spat saltily at the back of the house, but Stephen did not care and walked down to where the land fell away to the rocks and the waves. His heart was racing. He felt as if, out of the infinite vastness of the unknown, a hand had reached for him, and he had been given new grace.
He walked down to the sea, because he felt she was nearer to him there. Though he faced west, he imagined her there before him in the water. His shoes sunk in the soft sand. The white of the waves greyed and vanished in the darkness and made the sea seem smaller than it was. Stephen felt a buoyant whiteness rise in his spirit, and remembered his father. He thought how Philip Griffin thought he was still in Venice, thought that he was with Gabriella walking the Fondamenta delle Zattere allo Spirito Santo and taking the air of the New Year like a blessing. He thought of it and thought his father's gift was not in vain, for she was coming now.
Stephen opened his arms wide and held back his head. And he sat in the wet sand and looked out. “Thank you,” he said to his father, who was just then passing him across the waves in a floating dream.
13
It was early the following morning when Stephen was awoken by the phone once again.
He walked into the hallway in the dismantled suit, and down the clearest line heard Hadja Bannerje tell him that his father had died during the night.
IV
1
Gabriella returned to Kenmare on Saint Brigid's Day at the beginning of February. She travelled by bus from Dublin in slow stages, and arrived on the road through the mountains as the darkness fell over them. In the headlights the road gleamed and vanished like an eel, the way ahead and the way behind only briefly present as the bus plunged on, its three passengers clutching the waywardness of their unsteady bags as if they were straying children. When the bus arrived in Kenmare, the brakes hissed and sighed and the driver, Mike Mahony, turned an uneven grin backward to the ones who had survived with him another day. God was good, his face implied, and hadn't toppled us into death yet. With true but brief pride he watched the few souls get off, as if he knew that he had delivered love back into the town.
If he had, it was well hidden. Gabriella was sick. The journey had been wrenching; the sorrow of leaving Maria Feri in the apartment in Venice where the bird sang dementedly and had to be cloaked like a funeral all day and night had left Gabriella filled with the emptiness of new loss. She travelled with the infinite introspection of uncertain lovers, and by the time she had reached Dublin, the oily mixture of regret and hope had spread. Now nausea floated to her face like a sourness rising off her soul. The hair at her forehead was dripping a cool trickle, and when she touched her cheek the flesh was damp and unforgiving like the underside of a cold tart. A chill made puppet shudders of her shoulders, and as she stepped back into the town where her new life was to begin, she almost fell over with the weight of expectation.
It was seven o'clock in the evening. Kenmare was stilled as a town in a bottle. Shops had shut, only the small supermarket that was the glorified Honan's grocery threw light out the door onto the street. Gabriella stopped and leaned on a car and breathed the mountain air. She breathed the sweet familiarity of that timeless scent that was the smell of the trees in the darkness, the primal air tangled with the invisible presence of all the innumerable and nameless streams that ran forever down those westerly mountains, the scent of water over rock and under trees that filled into the night town. She breathed it and welcomed it like encouragement, then spewed her anxiety and the anxiety of the child within her out over the front of Paudi O'Dwyer's car.
“Gabriella, is it you? Here, let me help you.”
A hand touched her shoulder and held it firmly. And when Gabriella Castoldi turned about on the street of Kenmare she saw the face of Nelly Grant.
“I knew you would come back,” Nelly said. She was whispering to the air and had the glad expression of a reader who looks up and smiles, having re-encountered a favourite character deep into the book. “Easy now, just lift your head a little and breathe. That's it,” she said, “breathe.” She supported Gabriella's head until it faced the heavens, then announced: “It's a baby. Of course. Nelly Grant, you old fool.” She shook the wild wool of her head at the plotting of the stars, then led Gabriella across the street to her shop. “Everything will be all right now,” she said, in a tone which Gabriella could not decide was either predicting the future or warning God.
The arrival could not have been better timed. For a week Nelly Grant had been studying the energy of the new year. Years earlier she had chosen to live in Kenmare for the purity of its air and the translucent quality of the light through the passes of the Kerry mountains, for the feeling of arrival she had felt the first moment she came down through Moll's Gap. But more than this was the certainty of her belief that such places were the last sanctuaries of an ancient spirituality. She had read widely books of Celtic folklore, studied the uses of all the indigenous plants, eaten wild haws and sipped sloe wine, learned to read Old Irish texts, and recite prayers, enchantments, and spells that addressed the souls of woods trees and rivers, until at last she had grown to believe that in the mountains and valleys of west Kerry there existed a kind of spirit world contemporaneous with this one. It was beside us all the time. No corner of Kerry was without its ruined cottages, roofless stone places where the dead had left their names, where O'Connell's Crossroads existed one hundred years after the last O'Connell died, and where the presence of the vanished lingered like an after-scent in the great emptiness of the landscape. The spirits, Nelly knew, were there all along. They had no inclination to leave and coexisted in the brambles and ditches, living through all seasons without remorse or age but taking from winter and spring alike the same joy in the turning rhythms of the world, living as it might have been intended without the regret of time passing. The spirits lived on like the mountains and the streams, and by the time Nelly Grant had passed her fiftieth birthday, she had begun to feel in Kenmare the comfort of their acquaintance.
Saint Brigid's Day, she told Gabriella, when she had settled her in the humpy couch and knocked alive the lo
w sods of turf in the hearth of her house, was the beginning of springtime in the old Irish year. It was the feast day of the favoured saint who was patroness of cattle and livestock, who had promised fine weather and the bounty of a good season. It was not her saintliness that Nelly loved, she explained, but the real woman whose presence she felt beyond the veils of legend. That first Brigid, who was a woman so in tune with female energy, she imagined, that the earth itself had responded to her and released the first larks of early Irish spring in premature excitement. Brigid was a kind of pagan figure; she was in the moon's rhythm and felt the ripeness of the soil underfoot for the fall of seeds. She was good tidings, and the fact that Gabriella had arrived on her feast day was interpreted by the herbalist as an indication of the goodness ahead.
“It's a juncture, a doorway today. It means,” Nelly told Gabriella, “that we have come through the winter and now have a little feast of thanks.”
In the low light of her cottage and the burning of scented candles Nelly cut into a thick cake made of carrots, seeds, and raisins and served her visitor.
“There is this little prayer,” she said, “Teighidh ar bhur nglunaibh, agus fosclaidh bhur sula agus leigidh Brid isteach. Go on your knees, open your eyes, and let Brigid in.” She paused; her eyes glinted with the candles as if seeing visions of the Holy Ghost. “I think it's lovely. Let Brigid in. What it can mean, do you know?”
“Yes,” Gabriella said weakly, and the Englishwoman and the Italian said together the fragment of ancient Irish. They ate the cake and drank strong herbal tea. Nelly scattered pieces outside the front door for the passing spirits and the ones that took the form of birds.
Gabriella slept that night in the house of Nelly Grant and in the brittle frosted starlight was revisited by dreams of the dead. Her mother was pregnant as a moon. She lay on the bed with the blankets pulled down and the doctor listening to the white orb of her belly for the secrets of the unborn's future. He was tapping on her skin with pink fingers whose fleshy tips betrayed the richness of his asparagus risotto diet and made a softened, muffled popping with each tap. His stethoscope he removed and clipped about his neck, raising his chin and then lowering it at the odd angle of a violinist, until his ear touched the moon belly and he listened. He told la senora Castoldi to breathe deeply and then hold her air like some inflated cartoon, so that he could hear nothing but the secret life of the child inside her. He tapped. He tapped quavers in quick time, he tapped in diminuendo, and then switched rhythms until he was pulsing with his fingers the flurried notes of a new allegro.
As It Is in Heaven Page 19