Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

The afternoon in autumn so quickly married the evening that the light that lingered one moment was curtained with darkness the next, and before Gabriella at last stopped on the road from Kenmare, she was moving in a damp, impenetrable blue, with only the scattered lights in the valley below visible. She stopped and stood, eight miles from Kenmare, in the October darkness. She had eaten the apples, and her hand in her right pocket held the clementine. Her hair and face were wet, her heart ached for the lost loving of the poet, and she imagined him in a narrow berth belowdecks on the ferry crossing the English Channel and vanishing from her life. She wanted to cry out and fall down, but instantly attacked herself for being so weak, and instead ate the clementine and walked back towards the town.

The following morning she walked even farther out of Kenmare. She took two apples and two clementines, and when she was twelve miles from the town she strode off the curving roadway and made her way upwards through the old trees and the dying rhododendron until the mud had painted the bottom of her dress and her hair was flecked with pieces of fallen leaf. When she was exhausted, she stopped and sat upon the trunk of a fallen ash tree, looking about her in the cool shade of the slanting mountain trees, dizzy with the sense of the world below her. She sucked on the green air, and sat in the undergrowth of the Kerry mountains. She did not move in that motionless place and imagined how long she could remain like that, and how long it would be before the birds might forget she was living and land on her limbs like a tree. She held her breath and put her hands outward, as if expecting gifts. She held them outward so long her fingertips ached, and then her wrists weakened as though they were incapable of holding up any longer the burden of living.

Then she turned and saw a deer six feet away from her.

She did not move, and the deer didn’t either. His head was at an angle and his nose lifted into the new and strange sweetness of the air. He had found her scent a mile away across the mountain and tracked it to here, and now did not know what to do. Gabriella allowed herself to do nothing but smile. Briefly there was no sound, then the stillness of their being there was filled with the thousand minute noises of the turning world, the haw of the deer’s breathing, the ephemeral vapour of its presence on the mountainside uncertain as a vision, and the sound of its flanks heaving. The deer moved its right foreleg and the ground crackled tinnily with the stuff of ancient twigs and pine needles beneath the deep mulch of a hundred years. The deer lowered its neck and nosed the ground where Gabriella had walked. She saw its great muscle flex beneath the brown hide and knew the strength of the animal. She imagined the animal’s massive turn and bound and flight away through the mountain forest, the crash of alarm its charge would signal as it climbed farther and farther from the green stillness of that moment that was like a deer’s dream of paradise. If she moved, it would take flight and run until it arrived at last high in the mountain to drink the clear running water of safety.

But Gabriella did not move. She was enchanted. She closed her eyes a moment and felt the coolness of her eyelids and saw the green shadows dancing beneath them. She pursed her lips to taste the moisture of the mountain forest and knew for sure that she was not dreaming. When she opened her eyes, she saw the deer eating the coiled peel of the clementine. It was a moment which she would long remember. She would remember it as the mysterious beginning of healing, the untranslatable language of God speaking in nature and stopping the world in a green moment.

The deer lifted its head and looked at her. Somewhere a bird flew and the last leaves of a high tree quivered with its presence. The mist drifted like a veil across the little opening where Gabrielle was sitting. The deer looked away, and then back again, as if deciding that the strange figure of the woman might be companionable, and doubting for the briefest instant its own instinct of fear. Then, slowly, moving on the point of haste but not in haste, tempting the vision to transform and frighten it, but knowing that it would not, the deer walked away. It was three minutes before it vanished and Gabriella stood up.

“ Grazie, ” she said, and began the slow wet journey back down the mountain.

The following day Nelly Grant knew that Gabriella did not need the ruby grapefruit and offered her instead the fortification of bananas. Bananas ensure us against the suddenness of violent emotions, she told the Italian woman, and put two in her bag with a conspiratorial smile. Gabriella was carrying her violin case, and when Nelly asked her was she going to play, Gabriella said, “I need a lot of practising.”

That afternoon she played Vivaldi in the small clearing among the trees where she had met the deer. She did not expect him to return, and he did not — at least not so that she could see him — but she played nonetheless, making the notes move through the changeless frozen time of that beautiful place where only the air and the trees listened. It soothed Gabriella to play. She played for an hour; she played with a flowing motion in her bow and heard the music reach a point so near to perfection that even she could not find the smallest flaw. Above the treetops the broken pieces of the pale sky glistened like glass. No clouds were moving. The air was scented with pine, and the stillness of that secret place shimmered with the music.

When Gabriella had stopped playing and returned down the mountainside, she had decided she was going to stay and live in Kenmare. She did not yet know how or for how long, but as she walked along the black road back to the town and felt the rain coming in her face, she knew the decision was irreversible.

It was three days before she got a job in the vegetable shop of Nelly Grant. By the time the summer arrived and her skill on the violin had been discovered, she was invited to play three evenings a week before the great fireplace in the mustard-coloured lounge of The Falls Hotel. It was there that Isabella Curta, junior secretary of the Italian embassy, had discovered her, and been so moved by her playing that she had written down the name Gabriella Castoldi, and was able to recall it two years later when Vittorio Mazza fled back to Italy.

On the first Friday of November, Stephen Griffin did not know that his life was about to change. He had long given up the vanity of supposing that life was something you could plan, or that wishes and desires could be achieved. For years he had lived in a kind of ghostly nowhere, a place of continuing days and nights whose only feature was its own unremarkableness. He expected nothing, and opened his eyes each morning in the back bedroom of the small house by the sea, uncertain as to whether he was among the living or the dead.

This was nothing new. He had a facility for living with ghosts. As he grew up in the house of his father, he had grown used to encountering his mother and his sister in the shadowy corners of the past. It did not frighten him, and he soon understood that the treasured moments of his family’s loving remained undiminished and unvanquished despite the passing of time. Indeed, it was the sweetest of sorrows, and when he was alone in the house as a young man and startled himself with the sudden vividness of a certain moment — his sister, Mary, coming down the stairs with the doll Philomena — he discovered that the grief was assuaged by the understanding that for some things time does not pass, it recycles.

Life in that house in Dublin had taught him to cherish the company of the invisible. When he went to university and began to study history, it was the now familiar presence of the disappeared that attracted him. He sat in the glass-fronted room of the library and lost himself with the ghosts of the previous three hundred years. He kept his head down and his eyes moving on the pages, but his mind took flight, and soon even his body was elsewhere, a fact noticed only by old Murtagh, the ancient librarian assistant, who himself had long ago vanished into the books of Thomas Hardy. The power of language was a conjuring magic, it magicked doors in castles and courtyards, and through them Stephen entered. He was the student humped over in the library, reading the books until the night porter came round clearing the tables and sending him home. When he rose and walked out into the glitter frost and million stars of the Dublin night, he was walking with others in a different place. He had abstracted himself from the world so thoroughly that by the age of twenty-one, when he was in his final year, he hardly needed the book to be open for him to slip into the past.