Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

He went home in the last light of the afternoon and was lying on his bed fifteen minutes after finishing work. He lay in the suit that was coming apart a little more every day. He did not know yet that his father had been robbed of his life-time's savings or that he had told the doctors his son was unreachable in Venice and was spending days in hospital while Puccini played on in the empty house without him.

Stephen did not know the half of it; he did not know that Gabriella Castoldi lay like him on a bed of diminished hope, that she waited for a sign that did not come, and balanced on the edge of new life unable to move. For the plots of love and death had stopped altogether. It was a time when nothing happened. A cold, strange, wind-and-rain-beaten season of its own. It arrived in off the Atlantic and smashed on the rocks with destructive gladness. Hail fell out of the night skies into the churned-up waves. People hurried from their houses to their cars; they held their complaints closed on their chests and then gasped with released curses and coughs when they stepped inside shelter. A brutal weather held the towns of the west captive, and in it nothing grew. Gorse and white-thorn bushes slanted eastward and the cattle huddled beneath them. Caps blew off. Puddle-mirrors loomed in the yellowing grass, and everything waited.

When Gabriella Castoldi awoke in the dawn light on the morning of the last day of January, she smelled smoke. She rose from her bed and opened the window to be sure it was not a fire in her dreams. It was not. The sky above the red rooftops wore a grey smudge and the air of Venice smelled bitter with grief.

It was half an hour before she discovered what had happened. She dressed quickly, prompted by a sudden sense of urgency. When she stepped into the street, the disappointed light of the January morning met her like a returned memory from childhood. She drew her green coat across her chest and walked toward the smoke. When she was crossing the Campo Manin, she already feared what had happened. Others were walking talking in the same direction, hurrying along like blood to a bruise.

They crossed the Campo San Angelo and were stopped by polizia.

They stood, the gathering excited crowd, and heard the truth of their fears confirmed. The Teatro la Fenice, one of the most spectacular opera houses in the world — the building, it was said, was like being inside a diamond — had been burned to the ground again.

Gabriella heard it in disbelief. “Non si credo.” She gasped a shallow breath and felt the blood rush to her face. “O mio Dio.” She looked away and back again at the billowing smoke and thought she would fall down. The vision struck her forcibly like the phantasms of nightmare, and her heart raced with the distress of it. She wanted to cry out and run away, but stood with the others staring at the dark swirls rising and smudging the sky. She watched, and though she could not see the teatro itself, she felt the loveliness burn, she felt the stage she had stood on crackle with the licking flames and herself falling through it, downward into the darkness. And in that moment of freefall, even while she was standing there in the bitter fume-soured air of the Calle Caotorta and seeing burn so much more than the teatro, seeing the burning of all her yesterdays in that city, Gabriella thought suddenly of Stephen and knew that to go forward she had to go back to Kerry, and that the puzzle of love was that the pieces did not seem to fit but lay in the palm of your hand like some insoluble cipher, until at last you let them go and saw them fall, gradually, into place.

When Philip Griffin opened his eyes he did not see the face of God.

He saw the round, mobile face of Michael Farrell like a placid moon hovering beside his hospital bed.

There was more of Michael Farrell than God intended. He sat beside the bed in a chair that did not fit him. He wore an expanse of grey cloth with a white shirt and a yellow tie. He was immaculately groomed and kept his hands on the great globes of his knees. The absurd smallness of his shoes squeaked on the polished floor like minor jokes.

“Well,” he said.

“Well well well,” he said. “There you are now.” He leaned forward, the chair drew breath. “You don't know me, of course.” He blinked his eyes together. “I work for Fitzgerald & Carey. The solicitors,” he added, struck as he always was that the name brought no recognition and that as a large man his junior capacity diminished him. He brought the very tip of his tongue peeping out between his lips and kept it pressed briefly, stoppering further announcement.

He looked down at the small broken figure of the tailor in the bed and thought that the lack of reaction was perhaps nothing but fear. So, withdrawing his tongue, he threw up the eyebrows to say, “No no, there's no trouble. Nothing wrong. We sent you a couple of letters, Mr. Griffin. They're at your house waiting. In any case, we learned about your misfortune, and well, I live across from the hospital here and I thought I'd check up on you myself …”

He waited a moment to see if any light dawned on Philip Griffin's face. But it did not. The old man just watched him with a kind of frozen bewilderment.

“Yes indeed,” he said. “Well, you know the late Dr. Tim Magrath?”

Philip Griffin made no gesture or expression. He lay motionless in the deep confusion and abandonment of those who feel God has not heard their calling.

Michael Farrell paused a final time, took a white handkerchief from inside his jacket, and dabbed at the damp leakage all over his face. “Well,” he said, “it's Mr. Considine who will tell you, but Dr. Magrath had no family as such, and well, you've been named prominently in his will.” He paused. “Very prominently,” he added, and then leaned forward to pat a huge hand on the tailor's shoulder, saying, “Now, isn't that good news?”

From the moment Gabriella returned to the apartment, Maria Feri knew that her dream of being the twin mother of the child had burst. Gabriella would not stay in Venice. When she walked in the door there were ashes in her hair, her eyes burned with a kind of wild indignation as she paced in the living room and would not sit down. The bird flew about in his cage.

“They have burned down La Fenice,” she said.

“ Santo cielo. Oh, Gabriella, be calm. Calm yourself. Sit down.”

“No, I can't. I don't want to. I feel like …”

She thumped the back of the armchair hard. The acrid smell of destruction rose in the air, and the ashes spun from her head in a pale beam of sunlight. She could not be still, and while her cousin leaned against the press that displayed the serene blue glass of Murano, Gabriella kept moving back and forth across the light, twisting like a fish on a grim hook.

The disaster of the opera house spoke to her personally, like a moral fable; and it was less than an hour before she had discovered the sharpness of its meaning inside her: we cannot remake the past nor build a new life on the ruins of the old.

It was so obvious, and painful. The city was spoiled for her now, and even though it was long before she heard the faintest rumours that her brother Antonio had in some way been involved in the fire, that Giovanni had laughed in his cell so loudly when he heard, that the jailors had gagged him, Gabriella knew that she would leave Venice for good. She couldn't fathom the murky depth of that evil, to destroy the glittering place of music.