Niall Williams: As It Is in Heaven

When he found out, it snapped him like a Communion wafer. He met the anger of his sister’s eyes at the bedside of the corpse and knew at once there was a judgement upon him. He did not sleep for three nights; he lay in the bed like a ship moored in mid-sea and waited for the horizon of the dawn. He waited through three nights and then came downstairs in his mother’s house one morning to hear on the radio how the baker Pecce had killed his wife with a knife.

Since that night, Vittorio Mazza had lived sixteen years in the solitude of his guilt. He played music, but found little joy in it. At night he fell headlong into the same dream, over and over again. A grim place and a grey sky. Greyness everywhere. The feeling of wet concrete touching his face and the sense of his descending endlessly downward throughout the night, journeying down a slippery and rat-grey pathway where cold rain was falling.

It was, he knew, the condition of Purgatory that he carried around with him. It was the place his soul had fallen into, and much as he wished that sleep would one time bring him the warm and fabulous caress of Maria Pecce, in sixteen years he had not found it. He suffered the torments of his nights and woke exhausted into the light of the morning, like a swimmer surfacing from a great depth. The sunlight revived him, and he could move through the day briefly postponing his despair. But that morning, in Dublin, Vittorio Mazza awoke and looked out and felt the familiarity of misery smite him with the frightening awareness that the condition of his sin had deepened. This was worse than anything he had known previously. For the city, on that fourteenth consecutive rainy day in October, had taken on the air of a mortally ill patient, and under the persistence of the drizzling sky every man and woman seemed to Vittorio to wear the dulled expression of a longtime heartache. The grief of his own condition seemed to have leaked out into the city in the night, and made everyone and everything the cousins of affliction. Even the buses that shouldered with infinite slowness through the traffic past the hotel suggested the impossibility of hope and progress here, their engines thrumming a despondent music and the passengers, with their faces to the streaming windows, looking out on a journey that would last forever.

Vittorio lay back on his bed and pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes. He wanted to cry out, but rolled himself over until his face was pressed against the pillow. Why had he come here? He should have turned down the offer; how could he bear this desolate grey place? He raised his head and looked for the wine bottle he had bought the previous evening. He knew that it was empty, for he had emptied a bottle of wine every night before lying down for the last fifteen years, but he still searched the room for it, as if to confirm that it was morning and the umbrageous light was not the vivid dark of his dreams.

Vittorio Mazza lay on the bed in his Dublin hotel for an hour in an ooze of cold sweat. Then he rose and dressed himself quickly, his trembling fingers fumbling with the buttons of his white shirt. He did not trust himself to shave, for he was in too great a hurry. He had not unpacked and had only to put in his toiletries and draw on his thick black coat and silk scarf. Then he was ready. He wrote a short note to tell the others he had fled: “Sono tornato in Italia — lontano da questo Purgatorio,” and then slipped out the door with his violin case in his hand. If he hurried, he told himself, and shut his eyes in the taxi, he could be back in Venice by sunset.

It took two days before the consul from the embassy could discover for certain that Vittorio was gone. The first of the evening concerts had to be cancelled, and the ticket holders were turned away into the pouring night rain with the promise that the concert would be rearranged. They were not told that the lead violinist had fled their country in the appalling vision that it was the place of the damned. They took the news without protest, like a people used to disappointment, and walked off into the rainy darkness without umbrellas.

There was no funding for a replacement, and at a meeting in the gilt-mirrored room of senior consul Costanza, where the walls were painted in Naples yellow and the carpet was the blue of the Maytime Mediterranean, a decision on the fate of the ensemble had to be made. There was a file laid out on the polished mahogany table, containing within it the letter of Moira Fitzgibbon of Miltown Malbay. Then Isabella Curta, who was a junior secretary, told the consul that there was a violinist from Venice living in Kerry. Her name, she said, was Gabriella Castoldi.

Like Vittorio Mazza, Gabriella Castoldi had arrived in Ireland in the rain. It was the infamous hard rain that fell throughout the month of October three years earlier, when she had come on holiday in the small red Fiat of the poet Pollini. They had driven from Tuscany through the Brenner Pass and taken two weeks to cross France and arrive at last in the downpour of Rosslare harbour. They peered out at Ireland through the windscreen wipers and looked in wide amazement at the battered backs of warehouses and sheds. Pollini was twenty-eight and looked like a man who had fire for breakfast. His hair was blond, and the slow combustion of the poetry-making within him gave his face an expression of ferocity and desire. Only the backward motion of his head as he flicked his hair betrayed his arrogance, and as he steered the car slowly into the middle of Rosslare, he told Gabriella for the fourteenth time on their journey that he was not lost.

It was Pollini who had told her about Ireland. He had told her it was a wild and magical country, although he had never been there. He lay alongside her in the narrow bed in Eppi and, against the tacit waning of their passion, urged her to leave Italy and visit Ireland. He had discovered the richly fabled country through its poetry and read aloud in Italian the translated cadences of Yeats. He knew their loving needed rescuing and thought that they could move quicker than the failing of desire.

Gabriella was a teacher of the violin and five years older than the poet. She had two feckless brothers and no sisters. She had outlived both her parents, developing in the process of her days a severe measure of the world, against which everything fell short. She had an expectancy of grief and wore it in the soft pale circles beneath her eyes. No man had diminished that sorrowfulness in her thirty-three years, and it was not until she met Alessandro Pollini that she first imagined it might be possible to find someone who shared the innocence of her view that the world could be perfect. The poet loved her fiercely; she felt his glances were like silk scarves drawn slowly across her body, and it was not until six months into their relationship that she began to fear that it was her unhappiness that drew him. It was true, however. Pollini loved her for her vulnerability and had given himself to her in the vain belief that he could make her whole. He attended concerts she played in Venice and Verona, and sat mesmerized by the cold passion she brought to the music; she believed in rigour and rectitude, and while she bowed the notes of Vivaldi, her eyebrows met in a narrow frown of concentration that the poet loved. She played perfectly and yet, when the concerts were over, lacerated herself with the harshest of self-criticism, appalled at the slightest flaw and the injustice she had done the composer. Pollini was entranced by her. Or so he thought, not realizing that it was the intensity of his own reaction he loved, the quickened thrumming of his own heartbeat as he strode through the streets to the concerts. As a poet of twenty-five, he had been acclaimed widely for his first collection, Spontaneo. The praise had been so unexpected and so lavish that he had woken one morning believing he possessed a soul that was infinitely more sensitive and attuned to the sweetness of the world than anyone else’s. He got out of bed and carried his soul like a golden chalice. Then he met Gabriella Castoldi and was amazed at how moved he felt by the bruised and tender quality of her eyes, and offered her the chalice, thinking he would witness the miracle of her transformation under the power of such a love as his.