Changing Heaven (28 page)

He is surprised by a mild breeze creeping through a crack under his window while he is gazing into the soft face of the devil-angel in the
Temptation of Christ in the Desert
. There is this fragile moving air, and then the delicate pink that clothes the creature’s wings. Almost absently, Arthur reaches for the airmail stationery that has been pushed by angels to the farthest corner of the desk.

On one thin sheet of onionskin he writes:

“I am going to Venice for one week … alone.” He folds it, unsigned, into the miraculously addressed envelope.

He is certain, as he walks towards the corner, that he will never post the letter.

T
HE MORNING
cat has caught a bird – an English robin deafened by wind and busy with worms in the little rocky garden.

The feline has begun the day early; leaving the stone barn that is his home and meandering slowly through the village, investigating garbage, sitting for a while, placidly in the low sun, sheltered by a drystone wall. He steps carefully around the edge of roadside puddles and walks fastidiously away from the ever-present animal excrement on the streets. He is aware of sleep breaking open to wakefulness in any number of the cottages whose foundations he skirts; still he struts Slowly by, uninterested. He freezes once and stares down one of his brothers who is working the opposite side of the street. Both animals bristle briefly, hold the pose and, then, as if by mutual agreement, turn and walk arrogantly away; a contest of power that each of them believes he has won.

When he reaches Ann’s cottage he is mildly annoyed to discover no one stirring, the soft cloud of deep morning dreams drifting as surely as an aroma through the outside walls. He leaps up to the ledge of the kitchen window, brushing his fur against the cool glass, looking into the dim, unlit interior. His tail flicks back and forth through an assault of wind. He turns and sees the two bottles of milk on the stoop, left by an even earlier creature: the milkman. The cat’s breakfast is being kept from him by glass – glass and sleep.

Hearing self-confident, directed footsteps on the walk, the cat takes no time to look but jumps silently from the sill and hides behind the garbage pail that he knows, from
previous morning excursions, to be tightly sealed. As the crunch of gravel grows quiet and quieter and finally fades, the cat walks coolly across the path where he watches with restrained curiosity as the wind picks up a blue envelope that has been left on the stoop and sends it flying towards the little garden where its journey is halted by the bare thin arms of a rose bush. It twitches there like something alive, something the cat might like to play with. His attention is divided, however, for at this exact moment he becomes aware of indoor activity, the creak of casual steps on stairs, and clamorous goings-on in the coal cellar. There will, he knows, be a saucer for him soon, but this struggle of wind, branch, and paper interests him. He begins to amble towards it; the centre part of his body sways slightly. It is then that he spots the preoccupied bird.

What comes bearing down on him after several splendid moments of utter engagement in the pastime of distributing equal doses of fear, hope, and pain to the bird, is a furious woman who is intent on giving him a broom for breakfast. He bounds over the garden wall and runs off onto the moor, domain of field mice. Ann stands, breathing deeply, looking stupidly at the spot on the top of the wall from which the cat has disappeared; the bristles on the bottom of her broom soaking moisture from garden earth, the bird turning heavily at her feet.

She brushes the hair from her eyes and looks down. John calls from the doorway. “Leave it,” he says, “it’s probably just stunned. It will fly away in a few moments.”

She is not so sure of this, but pivots, nevertheless, in soft earth away from the tragedy, the sleeve of her sweater catching on a thorn in the rose bush as she starts to move away. As she unhooks the wool, the letter sails on the wind and is stopped a second time by the dark stone wall. Instantly, she knows what it is and by whose hand it was written. As she returns to the house she hides the envelope in her snagged sleeve.

The next morning the cat will return, as though no acts of violence have been committed, as though nothing whatsoever has changed.

The bird dies a slow and painful death.

“H
E WAS YOUR
shadow self. He was ‘the former of your shadow self.’ Part of you was drained by him, practically annihilated, and another part sprang into being, energized and whole. It’s as though he gave you order and its chaotic opposite all at the same time. All of this he gave to you. But he needed something white and empty for himself. Do you understand?”

“No, Emily, I wanted pleasure and warmth from him. Surely, eventually, he wanted that too … he understood that, I think, when he began to love me again.”

“Oh, Arianna, oh, Polly, don’t you see? He had only discovered a new approach to whiteness and emptiness.”

“But we don’t know that, because I died before his new love for me could express itself over time. Such is the irony.”

“Such is the actuality … the inevitability.”

“I shouldn’t have died.”

“It was, for what you wanted … his love … inevitable.” Emily looked around, all over the soft white moor. “This is storm’s aftermath,” she said, “storm’s legacy. How smooth, eventless, comforting. Sometimes it’s enough just to know this quietness, if it’s a quietness born of tempest. Then it is like evidence; a letter full of small, unexaggerated words describing a disaster in the passive voice. A letter like a sigh, filled with resignation and reconciliation.”

“Every jagged edge is gone,” said Arianna. “I can see nothing of the rocks, or stiles, or even blades of grass. And there are no paths at all. Travellers would be lost in this.”

“Travellers, yes. But not ghosts. Ghosts always know exactly where they are.”

S
HE COMES TO
Venice unencumbered by the details of her journey there, by the interiors of trains and ferries, the expressions of ticket agents, the shaved necks of cab drivers in major cities, the changing railway stations. Unencumbered by the landscapes that stream past windows, the border police stamping her dark Canadian passport. All this she sloughs off as her mind returns like a trained bird to the idea of Arthur, his residence in a city where she knows, at last, she can find him. She is bringing light with her, and air. She is bringing clarity. She will remove the fear from him, remove the dark, heal him as she has been healed. And then he will place his inner self in her uncomplicated hands. She is lit from within by this concept. It is the electricity operating the trains that carry her there. It is the energy.

John, sensing the energy, the unstoppable forward momentum, silently packed a bag for her, and drove her to the station in his old grey van. On the platform he looked hard, for a moment, into her face, and seeing the idea glowing there, he said quietly, sadly, “It suits tha’, this gypsying about.” Her suitcase hung heavy, like a growth that had suddenly sprouted on the end of his left arm. And for just a moment as he stood before her, Ann saw his suffering. “I will come back … I’ll be back,” she said, not knowing whether or not she spoke the truth, pausing for several seconds in the midst of obsession to place her face against his.

Now, as she enters Venice on the Grand Canal vaporetto, she can barely hear the roar of the churning engines, barely see the night-lit water. The famous architecture parts like an inconsequential curtain, allows her to pass through, to
get to Arthur. She remembers a ground-floor room on a highway, herself entering by a sliding glass door, fumbling with the heavy motel curtains in a panic to get to the other side. Here, palaces touch the top of her head, slide past her shoulders while she stands straight, ignoring them. She is propelling herself through the exotic night towards Arthur, while everything around her repeats itself in swaying inky water; this inappropriate distracting outer life, these buildings with other histories, people with other appointments to keep. She is not on a boat, she
is
a boat-clear sailing, number four on the wind scale, the admiral relaxed on deck enjoying the breeze, land sighted just minutes ago through his telescope.

In the small hotel room Ann does not sleep, still feels herself moving towards Arthur, the wind pushing her across a liquid surface. She
must not
rest, even after she finds him, must gather him up in the arms of this breeze and take him with her into clarity, into a new morning as spiritually nourishing as white bread and communion wine. One sweeping, graceful gesture will lift him up with her into this clear river of air.

She sails through the dark hours, past the unvisited islands of the rest of her life. She is breathing the air that fills her lungs and stretches her sails. She begins to construct the beautifully simple life she will give him, the order of appropriately filled daylight hours and nights rich with rest. She hears their two sleeping hearts drum uncomplicated messages into the air of some future room.

Outside the hotel, the city reeks with assignations. Plans are being made or carried out, strangers occupy café tables, dogs lick spilt ice cream in the corners of campos and the seams of calles, waiters bend and scurry. She knows none of this and cares even less, is conscious only of her voyage to Arthur and the form it is taking, this easy, joyful drift. She considers, as her eyes stare wide and dry into the dark, Emily Brontë’s sleepless nights, her poems concerning “the visitant of air,” “the wanderer.” Who was he? Who was
he? Who held the nineteenth-century, housebound girl transfixed, entranced? Who created the ghost, the weather in her?

The weather in Ann is calm all night long: untroubled, unchanging. The ship she has become is like a vast open sky sailing across the night looking for the perfect spot over which to settle, the perfect man. She can barely remember what Arthur looks like, how his face changed during the act of love, but can recall his hesitant hands, how rarely he used them. And his beautiful mouth, speaking.

When she walks out into the first light of dawn she is startled in the midst of her own transparency to find fog, and everything she disregarded the previous evening veiled, secretive. Across the Grand Canal one decaying palace is displaying all its chandeliers; boasting of an all-night dinner party. She is transformed by purpose. Turning a map in her hands she follows the maze of canals and calles that leads to the Scuola San Rocco, passing cats absorbed by garbage and the odd dog-walking dawn person. Occasionally, her own fixed concentration is interrupted by the staccato sound of early merchants flinging up the metal curtains that protect their shops.

It is a long way from the hotel to the Scuola San Rocco and there is much of which Ann is not aware as she walks. She is unaware that she has caught the attention of an elderly lady who watches her pass from an upper-storey window; that as she steps over a bridge a soccer ball lost elsewhere in the city floats beneath her, heading east, its destination the Adriatic; that in one dim, watery garage three empty, floating hearses nudge and scrape each other. She is unaware that the morning mist has invaded her hair, is causing it to curl in peculiar directions; that from the back of a dimly lit, as yet unopened café, a
mopping padrone
has eyed her lustfully and has whispered the word
“Americana”
under his breath. She is unaware that certain individuals
who visit Venice often are pushing open hotel-room shutters and saying to themselves, “Ah, … a misty day … this is when it is best. …”