Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

In the back row, Stephen Griffin held his face in his hands and stared at the woman playing the violin. He, too, had been taken from himself by the music; the music offered an invisible opening to another place, and through it, like a secret river, flowed the frustrations, sorrows, and ceaseless longings of everyone there. For each of them, it became the music of themselves.

By the time the Puccini was being played, Stephen found himself looking at no one but the slender figure of Gabriella Castoldi. Even when she was playing the quick fluttered notes of the Vivaldi allegro her expression remained one of frowning intensity. The bow flew back and forth across the strings like a sweet yet almost unendurable torture. Stephen looked at the woman whose name he did not yet know and his heart raced. The air in the room wavered with warmth. Men and women closed their eyes and, in the minor pause between notes, swallowed hard the emotions that rose within them.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

The last note was played and the music stopped. There was a pause, a long beat in which that Venice of the mind lingered in the hot humid room of the Old Ground Hotel. There was a held moment of nothing, of silence, as if no one who sat there wished to embark on the home journey, to emerge once more in the November rain. Nobody moved. (Later, Piero Motte would swear that when he looked down at them, every single man and woman had wet faces and suntans. He would tell his aged father in the pasticceria in Burano that in the old music they had revealed a new invention that night, a kind of heart travel, he would say, that took them all, tutti, to the place of Vivaldi — which is not Venice but Vivaldi himself. They did not applaud, he would tell his father. They could not.)

And how long passed before the first hands clapped could not be measured in time. It was a slow awakening, full of reluctance and dawning amazement, like sleepers rising from the most sensuous dream. Men raised their hands to clap and felt the dampness under their armpits and across the shirts on their backs. They stood and noticed they were in their stockings, and had slipped off their shoes earlier, in the mistaken certainty that they were sitting by the waterside. The women clapped their hands beneath their chins and felt their own air fanning them back from dizziness. Councillor O’Rourke, who had slipped out at the beginning of the concert to attend to mobile-phone calls, now stepped back in the door on the wave of applause. He smiled, raised his head to show his throat, and held up his hands to applaud so that Moira Fitzgibbon could see him clearly.

The possibility of an encore vanished in the wave of people spilling forward towards the small stage. Stephen did not move; he stood applauding and lost sight of the musicians as the crowd swelled about them. He angled his head to see the woman better, but she had stepped off the podium and was lost to him amidst the jostle of the Miltown Malbay people. His mouth was dry, his eyes burned. In his chest his lungs seemed to have collapsed. He could not breathe. He felt as if he had been struck in the throat. There was a moment when he thought he would fall down; then he looked up and blinked at the chandeliers and was able to move quickly from the room.

Once he made the doorway, he could move faster, and took the red carpeted stairs three at a time, hurrying down into the lobby like a man escaping a fire.

The cool dark dampness of the evening after rain was like a blanket thrown over him. Now he could breathe. He walked out of the grounds of the hotel and past the pulling-away cars and the dazzling lights of the homeward bound. But he did not want to go home, he wanted to walk, to keep moving until he could travel all the way back into the feeling of the concert. He walked around the shut shops of Ennis and heard the music of Venice in his mind. Stephen Griffin walked, mute, beneath the moonless sky. It was two o’clock in the morning and he was six miles out on the Inagh road. He had been walking for four hours and not once lost sight of the face of Gabriella Castoldi.

Stephen did not go home that night. He walked as far as his car and sat inside it, certain at first that the sensation he felt when he got in was that of sinking. Rain had softened the world; the scar where the car had ploughed into the ground was opened like wet lips. Stephen closed his eyes and expected slow decline into the sucking soft mouth of the bog. Soundlessly, the lemon car eased to the right; he felt the gradual collapse and tender sighing like fire sizzling into water. Then it stopped and the car sat there.

It was still sitting there at eight o’clock the following morning, when Patrick Mulvihill passed in his tractor, supposing it to be the abandoned remains of some young lad’s drunken evening, until he saw the figure of the teacher sitting behind the steering wheel.

It took Mulvihill six minutes to tow the car from the bog. It was Stephen’s second rescue.

“There is no such thing as stillness,” he said to Mulvihill, when the car had been pulled onto the road and the farmer had come back to unhitch the rope. He was a short man in a thick coat, his grey face was a balled newspaper. His facial expressions were so crumpled it was impossible to separate them more than: Wrinkled, or Very Wrinkled. He gave Stephen Very Wrinkled, and amidst the lost, closed-in folds of his red face his green eyes glinted.

“She’s all right,” he said, smacking the bonnet of the yellow car and ignoring the driver. “You took her too fast round that bend on the greasy road. Made terrible rain last night.”

“I’ve been sitting here all night wondering what to do,” Stephen said.

“The rain’s gone, but the road’s still greasy.”

“How do you know what to do? God, I don’t. I didn’t think that … I never expected. It’s not what you … well, maybe for some. But I’m not that kind of man. I just …”

“You don’t notice it in a tractor, with the heaviness.”

“I want to see her again,” Stephen said.

“But in a light car like that. She could slide right off easy enough.”

“I have to. I have to see her again.”

Mulvihill paused; he made crinkled lips and raised his face to where the light was breaking on the far side of Ennis.

“That’s exactly right,” he said, and reached down to untie the tow rope. “That’s exactly right,” he repeated, and then walked back to his tractor.

“Goodbye now,” Mulvihill said over his shoulder, climbing into the cab and throwing in the rope beside him, puttering off down the road towards the dawn, disproving once again his brother’s belief that he needed a hearing aid, proud of his conversational skills, and certain that the younger man had no idea he was deaf as a stone.

Stephen’s life had already begun to change. It was too soon yet for him to know outright, he was a cautious man and too long accustomed to his own unremarkable history to suppose his life could catch fire. He did not yet sense that the fluctuation in his heart rate, the fuzziness of his hearing, and the sweetness of tart apples were the early signs of love. He was disturbed, he was upset; he admitted that much, and knew too that it was because of the woman with the violin. But just as one day he had accepted that no sleep was deep enough or dream powerful enough to bridge him to the next world and meet the lost half of his family, so too Stephen Griffin had long accepted that he was to be alone. Imagining love is real makes life hard, and so he had instead moved it beyond the history of his future, leaving it rolled up and put away like a scroll of fairy tales in the farthest corner of his heart. Now, on the morning after the concert, it was not love he was thinking of. He was not thinking he had to see Gabriella Castoldi again so that she might see his face or speak to him, find an attraction in the timidity and melancholy of his character, that she might fall in love with him; it never entered his mind. Instead, he thought that the desire that was running along the arteries of his arms, that was tingling in his fingers and making them beat softly on the top of the steering wheel, was only the desire to hear her play the music again.