As It Is in Heaven (29 page)
He walked down to the sea, because he felt she was nearer to him there. Though he faced west, he imagined her there before
him in the water. His shoes sunk in the soft sand. The white of the waves greyed and vanished in the darkness and made the
sea seem smaller than it was. Stephen felt a buoyant whiteness rise in his spirit, and remembered his father. He thought how
Philip Griffin thought he was still in Venice, thought that he was with Gabriella walking the Fondamenta delle Zattere allo
Spirito Santo and taking the air of the New Year like a blessing. He thought of it and thought his father's gift was not in
vain, for she was coming now.
Stephen opened his arms wide and held back his head. And he sat in the wet sand and looked out. “Thank you,” he said to his
father, who was just then passing him across the waves in a floating dream.
It was early the following morning when Stephen was awoken by the phone once again.
He walked into the hallway in the dismantled suit, and down the clearest line heard Hadja Bannerje tell him that his father
had died during the night.
Gabriella returned to Kenmare on Saint Brigid's Day at the beginning of February. She travelled by bus from Dublin in slow
stages, and arrived on the road through the mountains as the darkness fell over them. In the headlights the road gleamed and
vanished like an eel, the way ahead and the way behind only briefly present as the bus plunged on, its three passengers clutching
the waywardness of their unsteady bags as if they were straying children. When the bus arrived in Kenmare, the brakes hissed
and sighed and the driver, Mike Mahony, turned an uneven grin backward to the ones who had survived with him another day.
God was good, his face implied, and hadn't toppled us into death yet. With true but brief pride he watched the few souls get
off, as if he knew that he had delivered love back into the town.
If he had, it was well hidden. Gabriella was sick. The journey had been wrenching; the sorrow of leaving Maria Feri in the
apartment in Venice where the bird sang dementedly and had to be cloaked like a funeral all day and night had left Gabriella
filled with the emptiness of new loss. She travelled with the infinite introspection of uncertain lovers, and by the time
she had reached Dublin, the oily mixture of regret and hope had spread. Now nausea floated to her face like a sourness rising
off her soul. The hair at her forehead was dripping a cool trickle, and when she touched her cheek the flesh was damp and
unforgiving like the underside of a cold tart. A chill made puppet shudders of her shoulders, and as she stepped back into
the town where her new life was to begin, she almost fell over with the weight of expectation.
It was seven o'clock in the evening. Kenmare was stilled as a town in a bottle. Shops had shut, only the small supermarket
that was the glorified Honan's grocery threw light out the door onto the street. Gabriella stopped and leaned on a car and
breathed the mountain air. She breathed the sweet familiarity of that timeless scent that was the smell of the trees in the
darkness, the primal air tangled with the invisible presence of all the innumerable and nameless streams that ran forever
down those westerly mountains, the scent of water over rock and under trees that filled into the night town. She breathed
it and welcomed it like encouragement, then spewed her anxiety and the anxiety of the child within her out over the front
of Paudi O'Dwyer's car.
“Gabriella, is it you? Here, let me help you.”
A hand touched her shoulder and held it firmly. And when Gabriella Castoldi turned about on the street of Kenmare she saw
the face of Nelly Grant.
“I knew you would come back,” Nelly said. She was whispering to the air and had the glad expression of a reader who looks
up and smiles, having re-encountered a favourite character deep into the book. “Easy now, just lift your head a little and
breathe. That's it,” she said, “breathe.” She supported Gabriella's head until it faced the heavens, then announced: “It's
a baby. Of course. Nelly Grant, you old fool.” She shook the wild wool of her head at the plotting of the stars, then led
Gabriella across the street to her shop. “Everything will be all right now,” she said, in a tone which Gabriella could not
decide was either predicting the future or warning God.
The arrival could not have been better timed. For a week Nelly Grant had been studying the energy of the new year. Years earlier
she had chosen to live in Kenmare for the purity of its air and the translucent quality of the light through the passes of
the Kerry mountains, for the feeling of arrival she had felt the first moment she came down through Moll's Gap. But more than
this was the certainty of her belief that such places were the last sanctuaries of an ancient spirituality. She had read widely
books of Celtic folklore, studied the uses of all the indigenous plants, eaten wild haws and sipped sloe wine, learned to
read Old Irish texts, and recite prayers, enchantments, and spells that addressed the souls of woods trees and rivers, until
at last she had grown to believe that in the mountains and valleys of west Kerry there existed a kind of spirit world contemporaneous
with this one. It was beside us all the time. No corner of Kerry was without its ruined cottages, roofless stone places where
the dead had left their names, where O'Connell's Crossroads existed one hundred years after the last O'Connell died, and where
the presence of the vanished lingered like an after-scent in the great emptiness of the landscape. The spirits, Nelly knew,
were there all along. They had no inclination to leave and coexisted in the brambles and ditches, living through all seasons
without remorse or age but taking from winter and spring alike the same joy in the turning rhythms of the world, living as
it might have been intended without the regret of time passing. The spirits lived on like the mountains and the streams, and
by the time Nelly Grant had passed her fiftieth birthday, she had begun to feel in Kenmare the comfort of their acquaintance.
Saint Brigid's Day, she told Gabriella, when she had settled her in the humpy couch and knocked alive the low sods of turf
in the hearth of her house, was the beginning of springtime in the old Irish year. It was the feast day of the favoured saint
who was patroness of cattle and livestock, who had promised fine weather and the bounty of a good season. It was not her saintliness
that Nelly loved, she explained, but the real woman whose presence she felt beyond the veils of legend. That first Brigid,
who was a woman so in tune with female energy, she imagined, that the earth itself had responded to her and released the first
larks of early Irish spring in premature excitement. Brigid was a kind of pagan figure; she was in the moon's rhythm and felt
the ripeness of the soil underfoot for the fall of seeds. She was good tidings, and the fact that Gabriella had arrived on
her feast day was interpreted by the herbalist as an indication of the goodness ahead.
“It's a juncture, a doorway today. It means,” Nelly told Gabriella, “that we have come through the winter and now have a little
feast of thanks.”
In the low light of her cottage and the burning of scented candles Nelly cut into a thick cake made of carrots, seeds, and
raisins and served her visitor.
“There is this little prayer,” she said, “
Teighidh ar bhur nglunaibh, agus fosclaidh bhur sula agus leigidh Brid isteach.
Go on your knees, open your eyes, and let Brigid in.” She paused; her eyes glinted with the candles as if seeing visions
of the Holy Ghost. “I think it's lovely. Let Brigid in. What it can mean, do you know?”
“Yes,” Gabriella said weakly, and the Englishwoman and the Italian said together the fragment of ancient Irish. They ate the
cake and drank strong herbal tea. Nelly scattered pieces outside the front door for the passing spirits and the ones that
took the form of birds.
Gabriella slept that night in the house of Nelly Grant and in the brittle frosted starlight was revisited by dreams of the
dead. Her mother was pregnant as a moon. She lay on the bed with the blankets pulled down and the doctor listening to the
white orb of her belly for the secrets of the unborn's future. He was tapping on her skin with pink fingers whose fleshy tips
betrayed the richness of his asparagus risotto diet and made a softened, muffled popping with each tap. His stethoscope he
removed and clipped about his neck, raising his chin and then lowering it at the odd angle of a violinist, until his ear touched
the moon belly and he listened. He told
la senora Castoldi
to breathe deeply and then hold her air like some inflated cartoon, so that he could hear nothing but the secret life of
the child inside her. He tapped. He tapped quavers in quick time, he tapped in diminuendo, and then switched rhythms until
he was pulsing with his fingers the flurried notes of a new allegro.
“What are you playing at, Doctor?” la senora asked him.
“Vivaldi's ‘Summer,’” he said, and tapped on, his face against the creamy smell of her skin and his ear listening on the other
side of where Gabriella was hearing that first music and flicking about her tiny body in response.
“Play music in the room, you might save this one,” said the doctor when he stood up at last. “Her spirit dances.”
He walked out of the dream from where Gabriella saw him in the womb, and she thrashed in the blankets and hummed broken music,
until at last she stopped and heard it playing, and it was her father playing his fingers on her mother like a bow on strings,
making a music both harmonious and discordant in turns, a music that rose and filled Gabriella's sleeping until she dreamt
she could feel the child inside her dancing to it.
In the morning Gabriella awoke to the tender February light with a new feeling of calm. She had told Nelly the night before
that she felt she could never know the reality of true love or the certainty of goodness sometimes given to the sainted or
the insane. There was no answer to that, Nelly Grant had told her, but she herself had learned slowly, stubbornly, and with
the deepest resistance that at last we must trust the energy of things, to wait and feel the tug of the planet as it swings
round and carries us all relentlessly forward.