As It Is in Heaven (6 page)

Gabriella was a teacher of the violin and five years older than the poet. She had two feckless brothers and no sisters. She
had outlived both her parents, developing in the process of her days a severe measure of the world, against which everything
fell short. She had an expectancy of grief and wore it in the soft pale circles beneath her eyes. No man had diminished that
sorrowfulness in her thirty-three years, and it was not until she met Alessandro Pollini that she first imagined it might
be possible to find someone who shared the innocence of her view that the world could be perfect. The poet loved her fiercely;
she felt his glances were like silk scarves drawn slowly across her body, and it was not until six months into their relationship
that she began to fear that it was her unhappiness that drew him. It was true, however. Pollini loved her for her vulnerability
and had given himself to her in the vain belief that he could make her whole. He attended concerts she played in Venice and
Verona, and sat mesmerized by the cold passion she brought to the music; she believed in rigour and rectitude, and while she
bowed the notes of Vivaldi, her eyebrows met in a narrow frown of concentration that the poet loved. She played perfectly
and yet, when the concerts were over, lacerated herself with the harshest of self-criticism, appalled at the slightest flaw
and the injustice she had done the composer. Pollini was entranced by her. Or so he thought, not realizing that it was the
intensity of his own reaction he loved, the quickened thrumming of his own heartbeat as he strode through the streets to the
concerts. As a poet of twenty-five, he had been acclaimed widely for his first collection,
Spontaneo.
The praise had been so unexpected and so lavish that he had woken one morning believing he possessed a soul that was infinitely
more sensitive and attuned to the sweetness of the world than anyone else’s. He got out of bed and carried his soul like a
golden chalice. Then he met Gabriella Castoldi and was amazed at how moved he felt by the bruised and tender quality of her
eyes, and offered her the chalice, thinking he would witness the miracle of her transformation under the power of such a love
as his.

But it had not happened. He had courted her with freesias and poetry, and watched himself languishing in the tossed sheets,
as if enacting a scene. When at last she had come to his bed, he had visions of roses bursting from the walls and wings growing
from the backs of men. He imagined the air itself would take on the perfume of permanent springtime, and he kissed her with
a passion that was beyond anything he had known. However, when, two weeks later, he watched her play one of the concerti of
Mozart in the Palazzo Musica in Venice, he was struck like a blow with the knowledge that he had not yet loved her into happiness.

Now they drove into Ireland. They drove west along the southern coast in the great disappointment of that outrageous rain.
(They did not know that the downpour was already on the point of ending, and that within four days the Gulf Stream would bring
a freakish Indian summer that would last into November and make children and old men feel the winter was already over.) It
was not only the grey skies that dismayed Pollini, for he had lived through grim Venetian winters; this was something more,
a desolate quality he sensed in the grim houses along the roadside, as if they huddled there in the misery of all weathers,
barely enduring. When he turned on the radio, he heard the news of a corrupted minister in Dublin, and that a woman had been
strangled to death on a farm in County Meath. He wanted an imagined loveliness, a rapture that would make vanish the failings
of their passion. He wanted fairyland, not this, and sped the car towards the coastline of Cork, taking the wrong way twice
and stopping at a butcher shop where a dog gnawed a bone to ask what the number of the road was. Nobody knew. They told him
it was the road to Mallow. He was flushed with embarrassment and sat back in the red car in a collapsed silence. His method
in the world was straightforward; you proceed straightforward, you go after what you want, and when you meet an obstacle you
ignore it, you go straight through it. Belief is everything. The world will surrender all its treasures if you bang down its
doors. So he had raced the car forward in the failing light of late October and carried Gabriella Castoldi in a gesture that
since time immemorial has been made against the waning of love: the flight to a new place. Pollini drove with impotent rage
and passed through many small towns and villages, not noticing that he was moving constantly inland and away from the extraordinary
beauty of the coastline, and only stopping again in the ten o’clock darkness when Gabriella suggested they should stay the
night where they were, in a damp guesthouse in Mallow.

The following morning Alessandro Pollini awoke with a head cold. The pressure within him had begun to leak outward, and although
the rain had already lifted and the day moved through a dozen different weathers, he knew that love was subsiding in his heart
and that he had not the strength to stop it. While he laid back his head and closed his eyes in the passenger seat, Gabriella
drove them towards Killarney and the mountains. He slept and woke all day, and by early evening, when they had arrived at
a place that overlooked the dazzling crystal of the lakes, he had not the strength to go out for a walk. He went to bed and
felt the love draining from him. He stayed in bed the following day, afraid to get up and speak to Gabriella, lest she notice
the alarming and unstoppable emptying of love from his eyes. For three days afterwards, Pollini urged it back; he announced
love to himself and flashed his looks at the mirror before going down to breakfast. But at last, on the bridge outside the
triangular town of Kenmare, the relationship ended. Gabriella told him to go home.

It was a moment that would haunt him for the rest of his life. When she had told him that he no longer loved her, he had denied
it. It was impossible to fall out of love like that; it was the place, it was the rain and the mountains, there was something
oppressive about the country, about being there on that wet island in the beginning of autumn. It was a place of death. Love
was doomed here. He did love her, more than anything. He took Gabriella’s hands in his and bent to kiss them, but she held
his face instead and turned it to her. She told him she loved him still, but that it was over, and at that moment he shook
uncontrollably and his tears flowed on the bridge beside her, knowing that it was true. Gabriella held him in her arms but
did not weep. Then she made the decision that was to change inexorably the rest of her life and make the memory of that moment
burn like a Roman candle in Alessandro Pollini’s mind fifteen years later, when he would return to Ireland to search for her
memory: she told him to go back to Italy and leave her there.

She had decided to stay in Ireland.

(It was cowardice, the poet admitted later, when he was in old age and had three times married women younger than himself. It was cowardice that had made him not try to convince Gabriella to come back with him. It was the fear of considering too closely that new discovery, the unbearable reality of the emptiness of his own heart. He would have had to travel back across France in the small car, sitting beside the beautiful woman, with the dead child of their loving propped between them. Worse, he would have known it was he who had killed it.)

Pollini left Ireland the next day to return to Italy, and Gabriella Castoldi remained in Kenmare. It was not something she had planned to do, and she did not for the moment have any idea what would come next in her life. She wrapped a long coat about her and went walking about the town. It was a quiet place in the autumn, with the mountains rising on three sides and the Kenmare River running swiftly towards the unseen Atlantic. Mists lingered in the mountaintops, and on a windless afternoon descended to the town, enveloping it as in a fairy tale. The day after the poet left, Gabriella walked around the triangle of the streets of the town. She looked in the windows and bought herself two apples in the small greengrocer’s near the bank. The shop belonged to Nelly Grant, a fresh-faced woman of sixty who looked like forty, wore green fingerless gloves, and believed in the healing powers of fruit. She herself had come to Kenmare from England twenty years earlier, and viewed lone visitors in the autumn with a knowing look, understanding in an instant how easily the mountains and the mist seduced them into never leaving. Nelly Grant knew when she saw Gabriella that the town was enticing her. She had seen the man leaving in the red Fiat and imagined she could detect in Gabriella the ashen look of the end of an affair.

“These please.”

“Two apples? Anything else, dear?” Nelly paused, she let her eyes look over to the far stall, where she had a basket of ruby grapefruit, whose bitterness she knew was the perfect antidote to heartache.

Gabriella did not get the message, and the shopkeeper did not press it. For although she had come to believe completely in the restorative powers of the proper fruits and nuts, and had even converted a great number of the local population to the sweet figs of Portugal and the bottled olives of Morocco, she sensed that Gabriella was not yet ready for the suggestion, and simply slipped a free clementine into the paper bag with the apples.

It was mid-afternoon when Gabriella left the shop and walked out of the town. She already knew the roads and took the rising curve in the direction of Killarney, walking to meet the descending mist and the mesmerized mute faces of the sheep, grazing the grass edges for eternity. Cars slowly passed her. The light was thin and pale, there was a washed translucence in the air, and the feeling of it touching her face was like the tears of someone else. The views into the valley as the road rose were colour-washed with fallen cloud. There was a hush like a blanket, and Gabriella imagined she was walking in the secret landscape of dreams. It was a timeless place. There were no houses, no sounds but the running of small streams, streaking the rock and grass of the mountainsides and gleaming like elvers. Water crossed the road and fell over the edge down into new streams that arrived at last in the lakes below. She walked on. She walked as if the walking itself carried her nowhere and the action of her footsteps was merely a gesture, like treading water, to keep herself alive.

The afternoon in autumn so quickly married the evening that the light that lingered one moment was curtained with darkness the next, and before Gabriella at last stopped on the road from Kenmare, she was moving in a damp, impenetrable blue, with only the scattered lights in the valley below visible. She stopped and stood, eight miles from Kenmare, in the October darkness. She had eaten the apples, and her hand in her right pocket held the clementine. Her hair and face were wet, her heart ached for the lost loving of the poet, and she imagined him in a narrow berth belowdecks on the ferry crossing the English Channel and vanishing from her life. She wanted to cry out and fall down, but instantly attacked herself for being so weak, and instead ate the clementine and walked back towards the town.

The following morning she walked even farther out of Kenmare. She took two apples and two clementines, and when she was twelve miles from the town she strode off the curving roadway and made her way upwards through the old trees and the dying rhododendron until the mud had painted the bottom of her dress and her hair was flecked with pieces of fallen leaf. When she was exhausted, she stopped and sat upon the trunk of a fallen ash tree, looking about her in the cool shade of the slanting mountain trees, dizzy with the sense of the world below her. She sucked on the green air, and sat in the undergrowth of the Kerry mountains. She did not move in that motionless place and imagined how long she could remain like that, and how long it would be before the birds might forget she was living and land on her limbs like a tree. She held her breath and put her hands outward, as if expecting gifts. She held them outward so long her fingertips ached, and then her wrists weakened as though they were incapable of holding up any longer the burden of living.

Then she turned and saw a deer six feet away from her.

She did not move, and the deer didn’t either. His head was at an angle and his nose lifted into the new and strange sweetness
of the air. He had found her scent a mile away across the mountain and tracked it to here, and now did not know what to do.
Gabriella allowed herself to do nothing but smile. Briefly there was no sound, then the stillness of their being there was
filled with the thousand minute noises of the turning world, the haw of the deer’s breathing, the ephemeral vapour of its
presence on the mountainside uncertain as a vision, and the sound of its flanks heaving. The deer moved its right foreleg
and the ground crackled tinnily with the stuff of ancient twigs and pine needles beneath the deep mulch of a hundred years.
The deer lowered its neck and nosed the ground where Gabriella had walked. She saw its great muscle flex beneath the brown
hide and knew the strength of the animal. She imagined the animal’s massive turn and bound and flight away through the mountain
forest, the crash of alarm its charge would signal as it climbed farther and farther from the green stillness of that moment
that was like a deer’s dream of paradise. If she moved, it would take flight and run until it arrived at last high in the
mountain to drink the clear running water of safety.

But Gabriella did not move. She was enchanted. She closed her eyes a moment and felt the coolness of her eyelids and saw the
green shadows dancing beneath them. She pursed her lips to taste the moisture of the mountain forest and knew for sure that
she was not dreaming. When she opened her eyes, she saw the deer eating the coiled peel of the clementine. It was a moment
which she would long remember. She would remember it as the mysterious beginning of healing, the untranslatable language of
God speaking in nature and stopping the world in a green moment.

The deer lifted its head and looked at her. Somewhere a bird flew and the last leaves of a high tree quivered with its presence.
The mist drifted like a veil across the little opening where Gabrielle was sitting. The deer looked away, and then back again,
as if deciding that the strange figure of the woman might be companionable, and doubting for the briefest instant its own
instinct of fear. Then, slowly, moving on the point of haste but not in haste, tempting the vision to transform and frighten
it, but knowing that it would not, the deer walked away. It was three minutes before it vanished and Gabriella stood up.