Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

“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.

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.

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.