As It Is in Heaven (28 page)

“They have burned down La Fenice,” she said.

“
Santo cielo.
Oh, Gabriella, be calm. Calm yourself. Sit down.”

“No, I can't. I don't want to. I feel like …”

She thumped the back of the armchair hard. The acrid smell of destruction rose in the air, and the ashes spun from her head
in a pale beam of sunlight. She could not be still, and while her cousin leaned against the press that displayed the serene
blue glass of Murano, Gabriella kept moving back and forth across the light, twisting like a fish on a grim hook.

The disaster of the opera house spoke to her personally, like a moral fable; and it was less than an hour before she had discovered
the sharpness of its meaning inside her: we cannot remake the past nor build a new life on the ruins of the old.

It was so obvious, and painful. The city was spoiled for her now, and even though it was long before she heard the faintest
rumours that her brother Antonio had in some way been involved in the fire, that Giovanni had laughed in his cell so loudly
when he heard, that the jailors had gagged him, Gabriella knew that she would leave Venice for good. She couldn't fathom the
murky depth of that evil, to destroy the glittering place of music.

“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.

“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.