Niall Williams: As It Is in Heaven

When he awoke he was like a new man, and had the flushed rapture of those who know they are about to see their dreams realized. He imagined the money adding up, he totted the imaginary figures and was able to elaborate the plans for the opera house, extending the balcony and adding a small restaurant, where chamber music could be played in the summertime. He laughed at the miracle of it all, the simplicity of how things happen in the world, of how his seagoing days and nights, the endless blue journey towards the limit of all horizons, had arrived at this, the meaning of his life. He did not go out that day. Nor the next. He let the dreams bank up like snow. It was three days later when he at last allowed himself to go out, to walk down to the town and find out what had happened. He arrived at the bank just before closing and asked to check the balance in the account.

It was exactly the same amount he had started with.

He had to lean on the counter to keep from falling. The teller did not look at him, but kept her eyes fixed on the blue light of the terminal screen. Moses heard the water gurgling in his ears like laughter and kept staring at the figures on the docket until he could no longer hear or see anything. The vanity of hope and the mockery of all enterprise flooded through the sluice gates of his brain, bringing with them the hopeless realization that he was utterly alone and carrying away in a single instant any possibility of help. He gripped the counter he could no longer see, he felt his throat tighten and gag him, and then he fell to the floor with a soft thump.

It was seven days and fourteen tests later before Dr. Maguane could confirm for certain that Moses Mooney was blind. The procedures had been complicated by the patient’s inability to tell whether he could see or not; he sat before charts without a word and kept his blue eyes fixed so perfectly on the letters that at first the doctor was certain he could see them. He sometimes called out the letters with such accuracy that Maguane himself had to walk up next to the board and peer at the smallest of them to be sure that Moses was right. The whole business was complicated even further by the blind man’s declaration that he could see them perfectly clearly in his mind. The examinations of his eyes were not conclusive either, and it was only when Dr. Maguane saw the patient reaching for his fallen stick that he agreed to give the diagnosis and shatter the town with splinters of shared guilt.

When Moses Mooney was brought home to the cats on the first afternoon of his declared blindness, the balance in the opera house account rose by £600. The following week there were £400 more, and although it was still far short of the impossible goal, it was enough to send Moira Fitzgibbon of the Community Development Association to visit Moses Mooney by the fireside in his house and tell him the good news of how the people were responding.

What nobody knew was that although Moses Mooney had lost his sight, he had gained omniscience and knew already. On the vast seas of his blindness he sailed now, guided by no stars and not daring to dream. He sat in his house, with few visitors, and retreated to the warm exotic landscapes of his imagination. The world had no place for vision, he told God.

And yet something had lingered on. For, one year after Moses Mooney had awoken in his blindness, Moira Fitzgibbon had contacted the Italian embassy. She had heard of a touring Venetian ensemble sponsored by the embassy and phoned to ask them if they could play a concert in Miltown Malbay for the opera house fund. The woman from the embassy had never heard of Miltown Malbay, she sounded the name like Milano and told Moira to wait. When she came back on the line she said, Send a letter, we’ll see.

At any moment the plot might have turned in another direction, the lines left to dangle, disconnected, and the meaning lost. But Moira Fitzgibbon wrote the letter, and when the Italians wrote back, saying that they would not come to Miltown Malbay but would donate one half of the takings from the planned concert in Ennis, there was a sense of rightness about it, like the smallest part of an elaborate puzzle, the sense of things fitting and bringing the unlikeliest of moments together.

Two days later Stephen Griffin was asked in the staff room to buy a ticket.

Vittorio Mazza did not want to play in Ennis. He did not want to play in Ireland at all. The day after he arrived in Dublin with the other members of the ensemble, he woke in his hotel and saw with alarm the peculiar greyness of the light. He imagined the cause was the net curtains and drew them aside, only to discover with grim astonishment that the grey was the colour of the sky. A steady October rain was falling, the Dublin traffic was blocked in apparent perpetuity, and the people who moved on the city path below wore the downcast and mottled expression of desolation. Vittorio gasped with the awfulness of it, blinked his eyes, and opened them only to understand that he had arrived in the haunting landscape of his worst dream and that Dublin seemed to be the place that for sixteen years he had been calling Purgatory.

He lay on his bed and ordered room service. When it did not arrive, he was confirmed in his fears that the city was a kind of prison. The misery of the place was leaking in on him, the massiveness of the melancholia so potent that at first he thought he would not be able to stand, never mind play. He was the lead violin; he was Vittorio Mazza, he was fifty-eight years old and had been playing the violin for half a century. He had played in twenty-two cities in the world, and although he had never achieved any personal fame, he was known as a quality musician, and it was he who had been sought by the impresario Maltini when the Interpreti Veneziani was being founded.

Now he lay on the bed in his white shirt and wept. The dream of Purgatory had first tormented his sleep sixteen years earlier. It was May, his mother was ill, and Vittorio Mazza was in love with Maria Pecce, the beautiful wife of the baker Angelo. Due to the obsessive jealousy of the baker, who imagined no woman as beautiful as Maria could be faithful to the likes of him, the meetings of Maria and Vittorio were arranged with great difficulty and at odd hours of the day and night. Maria was known to everyone because of her extraordinary good looks and raven-black hair and had to slip from the bakery in a variety of scarves and coats, even during the furnace heat of that Maytime. When she came to Vittorio, she was often naked beneath her coat, and as he pressed her to himself, the vapours of fresh dough entangled with the scent of the rose petals that she scattered on her innumerable baths. He could not believe that she loved him, but ignored as best he could the muted voice in the back of his brain that it was really the music that had brought her into his bed. She had heard him play Rossini in the Gala at Easter, and the moment had fired her with such reawakened passion for the rapturous and infinitely tender quality of life that she could barely sit out the concert and wait until the violinist was in her arms. The passion between them was instant, and remarkable, for they didn’t tire of each other’s body but made a kind of hungry loving, as if trying to devour one another’s limbs and mouth and arrive at the essential stuff of the soul.

Vittorio knew the affair was doomed, but was helpless to escape. He knew he should tell Maria that he could not meet with her on the morning after his mother had taken another turn in her illness. He should have left Venice and driven to Verona. But when Maria came to his door, the look in her eyes erased his words, and his gratitude for the comfort of her breasts washed over everything else. Later, she lay like a dark cat on the pulled-back sheets of his bed and he played Schubert on the violin over her, not yet knowing that his mother had died.