As It Is in Heaven (26 page)

“No, please.”

“Yes.” She touched a fallen ash-grey hair back from her eye and had the brief dizzy sensation of feeling pregnant herself.
“
Mia cara cugina.
Gabriella. You are my guest here. Please let me make you welcome. It is my happiness.”

She left the room and went to the kitchen, from where she could still hear the bird singing. Then she cooked the first of
several meals that were her prescription to enrich the iron in her cousin's blood. The scent of liver with onions and polenta
travelled the house like an upbraiding nanny.

Gabriella had told Maria only when the weight of her uncertainty threatened a kind of madness. She had told her she was pregnant
to explain the discourtesy of not wanting to go out to hear concerts or visit relations. She had told her in desperation,
not with shame or upset, but with the calm resignation of those who have no idea what is supposed to happen next. While the
pots were clattering and the onions sizzling in oil, Gabriella lay back in the armchair and drifted in a half-dream of Kenmare.
How unreal it seemed now. The days and nights of loving blended in a blue memory. What had happened? She turned to the long,
narrow window that looked across the street at the ochre wall of the Passinettis' and tried to see there the face of Stephen.
Then she shut her eyes and held her lips tight together, as if one kissed the other.

And there he was. He was that long white figure standing by her bedside. He was the man she had reached out to in the morning
and who had come onto the bed and been careful to keep his shoes sticking out in the air not soiling the covers. He was the
man who shook like tin foil when she touched him. Gabriella's heart opened with memories of him: how he looked at her with
disbelief, how he reached across the space between them each time, as if the journey of his fingers towards her skin were
the sailing of some intrepid armada voyaging towards a dream continent. She lay back in soft memories all afternoon, until
darkness fell, and then, for no reason other than that it was the learned habit of years, her mind sliced into them like a
knife: she diced them into nothings. Love wears off like cheap perfume, she heard her father say. A child, marriage, a life
together, these were different things from a passion in the Irish mountains. Gabriella heard her father, she heard the harshness
of his voice and saw the vanquished look of his eyes, and then with a sudden chill understood that his voice was her own.
It was she who was unable to believe in love. She had been able to sustain no relationship in her life thus far; there was
some flaw in her, she believed, some fracture that ran deep below the surface of her soul and made the reality of loving seem
a fairy tale. Stephen loved her, she knew that, and knew, too, that she had loved him in Kenmare. But in the dull melancholic
weathers of Venice, trapped in the dry rooms of the apartment of Maria Feri, Gabriella lost belief in the future.

A return to Ireland seemed suddenly impossible. She could not imagine herself a mother, and fell into naps feverish with nightmares
of miscarriage and blood. Her hair matted and her eyes burning, she woke in the dawn with pressure on her soul and banged
on the birdcage to get Goldoni to stop singing.

  When Stephen arrived off the airport bus in the Piazzale Roma, he had no idea where to go. The afternoon was chill and grey
and empty. He had less than fifteen phrases in Italian and had never been out of Ireland before, and yet with the blind innocence
of lovers, imagined he would find his way to Gabriella. He did not have an address for her or the slightest clue other than
the name of her old music teacher, Scaramuzza, who he knew might be dead. He stood in the
piazzale
with his bag and waited until he could sense the unseen canal to his left, and then he crossed to the floating platform to
await the
vaporetto.

Venice on that January afternoon was unlike the pictures of itself. When the
vaporetto
came and took him in a steady tugging round the bends of the Canal Grande, Stephen saw the palazzi grimly shuttered against
the winter and had a sense of the city turning its back on the progress of time. Greenly brown watermarks lined the lower
walls of the buildings; the colour of everything was faded, there was a worn air of enormous fatigue in that winter afternoon,
as if some long and brutal enemy had been exhaustively endured and barely defeated, leaving the stonework of the city itself
cracked and dismayed in a way that to the summer tourists would seem antique and elegant with grandeur. Still, it was Venice.
It was like nowhere else, and as the
vaporetto
moved down the green waters of the canal, the very frailty of the city, its watery divisions and myriad narrowly bridged
islands, struck Stephen as being clearly the city of Gabriella. He could imagine her there. He could imagine the childhood
she had described to him in those narrow ochre buildings that rose from the waters. He could see her as a girl and felt in
the foolish hopeful way of the romantic that in some way he could heal her past by coming. He leaned on the side rail of the
boat and watched the slender street-ways they passed as if he would suddenly see her.

He got off at the Ponte Accademia and found his way with the small tourist map in his guidebook to the Hotel San Stefano.
His father had chosen it with the same purpose he had chosen Stephens Green: to remind God to keep an eye on his son.

After Stephen had settled in his narrow room and opened the shutters that looked out on the Campo San Stefano, he got a phonebook
and checked the listings under Castoldi. He knew that Gabriella's parents were dead, but imagined that he might find one of
her brothers or relations and learn where she was. On a small piece of paper he had written down the phrases he needed.

“Mi scusi, sto cercando Gabriella Castoldi.”

He rang seven different numbers and grew familiar with the exasperated tones of Venetian voices telling him he was calling
a wrong number.

“Ha spagliato numero.”

“Gabriella Castoldi.”

“Chi e? Non I'ho mai sentita.”

By the following midday he had called them all.

There was no violin teacher Scaramuzza either.

It rained coldly. He had come ill prepared for the weather and wore a sweater beneath the blue suit his father had made for
him while he walked through the chill city looking for her. He began after breakfast. He crossed the empty square of San Stefano,
where no pigeons flew, and took different
sestieri
each time, walking through the labyrinthine alleyways, stopping to read carefully the posters of concert performances, and
then pacing on while his symptoms of flu worsened. His nose streamed. The cold made his ears burn and his eyes water. Within
five days of pursuit through the puzzle of the city, he was a shattered, wild-looking shell of himself. He imagined the awfulness
of chance lurked everywhere, that he might miss the opportunity of meeting her if he stopped somewhere for lunch, that if
he rested for the afternoon she might be that very day passing by the hotel. It was the madness of the unrequited, and in
the city of Venice for ten days that January Stephen Griffin succumbed to it, walking from morning until night the twisted
street system, where the sudden turns and blind alleys might have been invented for avoidance and secrecy.

For ten days Stephen searched for Gabriella. He asked for her and said her name at shops and fish stalls, and then, in desperation,
visited damp candlelit churches, where he prayed that he might find her, until at last, his coughs choking in his chest and
his body releasing a kind of rheumy film of sweat and anguish, he surrendered, took the
vaporetto
back up the canal, and returned to Ireland.

  On the twenty-third of January Philip Griffin awoke with no pain. The morning was brilliantly lit. It was as if spring was
being previewed, and so when he got out of bed he chose the light fabric of his green trousers with the blue blazer that he
had worn in the summertime. He breakfasted with Puccini. He played the music so loud that down the little street Mrs. Flynn
and Mrs. Hehir listened while they cleaned their windows and hummed the airs without knowing them. (The music slipped inside
their minds like birds in trees, and within two days both of them had bought discs of
Turandot.
) Philip left the music player on Repeat and polished his shoes to the infinite sweetness of
“In questa reggia.”
When he had finished, he looked at himself in the mirror and was suddenly himself forty years younger, looking at the fresh
face of his youth before going to meet Anne for the first time.

The music soared through the rooms. He almost wept with happiness. His pain had died away. At last, he thought. At last. Stephen
was in Venice. And Philip had given him the ticket, had urged him to go. If it wasn't for me he mightn't have gone. But now
he will be all right. He will be there and have met her, and she must love him, after all. He shook his head with the surge
of gratitude he felt, that his son's life would turn out well in the end, that Stephen would not be left abandoned again,
and that God had been listening, after all. Suddenly the logical formula of his life was made clear: while love progressed
in Venice, the cancer grew in Dublin. The fact that that morning he felt no pain meant that there was nowhere else for the
cancer to go, his healthy tissue had been eaten up. This he took to be a good sign. Now is the time, I must be ready to meet
her now.

He walked out the door, leaving Puccini playing as the best defense against the daylight thieves that robbed the houses on
the street in numerical sequence. He took his car and drove to the bank with the excitement of a youth on his first date.
He called for the manager and withdrew everything he had left in his account, taking the cash and putting it in a plastic
shopping bag before heading for Stephen's Green.

The morning had a soft quality that Philip Griffin imagined had been prepared for him like a bed. Sunlight danced across the
windows of buses. The perfumes of spring were awakened and mingled beneath the leafless trees of Stephen's Green, catching
the moving crowds and teasing them with a sense of rebirth. At the first railings he came to, Philip stopped and reached in
the bag. He let his fingers clutch the money blindly and looked up at the blue sky, as if he could see there the face of lost
love. The brim of his hat dribbled a small sweat. With only a half glance about him, he took a fistful of twenty-pound notes
and stuffed them quickly into the bushes at the muddy bottom of the railing. Then he walked on. He didn't hurry. He had a
lot to get rid of, and knew that when the last of his lifetime's savings had been given away, he would have exhausted his
source of good acts and at last death would arrive. He would fall down in the street, and his wife would be there.

He had no pain. The sun pressed its palms on the back of his blazer. He smiled, thinking of Stephen in Venice, and wondered
if that was where the weather had come from. He stopped and leaned against the railings, letting the city pass him for a few
moments. Then he reached into the shopping bag and drew out another thousand pounds. He was about to make the second down
payment and had turned to put the money through the railings when a blow struck his head.

His hat fell forward onto his face. A man wrenched his arm backward. He cried out, but his cry was short and went downward
instead of up, so that the sound was lost. There were two men. They were not men, they were youths, he thought. He was expecting
angels. A woman walking past was looking at them. “Hey,” she said. And the second blow landed in Philip's stomach, and his
head fell down and he vomited on himself. For an instant he clung backhandedly to the railing behind him as he was swaying
over, holding an instant as if there was still some chance the world was reparable and he could catch the ship of death.

“Hey, stop that!” the woman called from another world. This brought another blow, hasty, more urgent. Any moment there might
be rescue, he thought. Help me, please. Still, Philip did not let go of the bag. Not until he felt teeth biting into his hand.
They grated on his bone and a searing pain ran through him, so he screamed and let go. Then the men were running away, and
the money was gone.