As It Is in Heaven (5 page)

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.

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.