Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

“I can't believe it,” she said, and struck at the wing of the chair.

Maria felt the glasses tremble in the press behind her and saw anew how one grief impacts on another. She raised the sharp angle of her nose as a precaution against tears and held on to the press with pale, hidden hands. The bird watched her and did not sing.

“It is barbarous. It is, you know. It is …”

“It is very sad,” said Maria from the shadowed side of the room, her voice low as a sigh in an ancient chair as her spirit subsided into it.

“It was like a jewel, La Fenice.”

“Yes.”

Gabriella lost her words. She leaned on the window, and at once the full force of man's stupidity, meanness, and malevolence caught up with her and crushed the energy of her rage. She could say nothing. The two women stood in the room silently apart and the light diminished. They could not speak. It was as if the room were flooded to the very rims of their lips with the despair of mankind and to utter another sound could only drown them. Maria Feri felt her own frailty and the great sudden pressure of the world. She told herself to concentrate. She made a mental ladder of prayers and thought of her favourite story of Venice, of how once, when the city had a plague, the population had prayed so fervently that their prayers became a wind that reached Mary in heaven, and how when the plague had passed, they had built her an impossible church on water. It was her favourite story, for Maria knew intimately the quality of that beseeching and could easily imagine the force of yearning transformed into something elemental. While Gabriella looked out on the smudge of man on the Venetian sky, Maria Feri held herself stiffly against the press and longed for what she already knew was impossible.

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.

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.