As It Is in Heaven (22 page)

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“That you are beautiful.”

She turned away from him.

“There is a walk down here,” she said, and stepped ahead.

She was still not sure why she had come, why she had invited him, or where one moment would lead the next. Gabriella Castoldi
had abandoned the fantasy of true love; the rigour and perfectionism of her character, which had been gifted her by her father
(a man whose ceaseless but muted anger at the world had found expression only in the three warts that ran in a line on the
left side of his forehead), meant that she could not envision happiness for herself longer than an instant. So, as she stood
by the river's edge in the late evening, where the falling fog smelled of the mountains, she did not think of love; she did
not imagine that the awkward man with the long arms and bare head could have a long and lasting role in her life. She considered
none of this. She was there with him simply because of the way he was, because of how he had listened to the music, because
of that quality of intensity and seriousness in the white puzzle of his face that suggested a dumbfounded amazement and wonder
at the same time as the long-suffering knowledge of woe.

Gabriella walked ahead of him down the gravelled path by the river. She heard his footsteps crunching unevenly behind her.
It was dark and drizzling. They had moved beyond the reflected light of the floodlit waterfall into a place where the pine
trees grew thickly and the scent of the night air was held low upon them by the overhanging branches. Gabriella stopped and
Stephen came close to her.

“Shush. Listen,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

Nothing. Stillness. Their breaths slowed until the entangled sounds of the woods and the water rose like raised volume, those
soft crashings and whisperings that were the life of the night, revealed and shared like a secret.

“I love this,” she said. “This is why I like to stay here, in Kenmare. In the mountains.”

They stood a time with nothing to say.

“The world is simple here, isn't it?” Gabriella said at last. She looked into the darkness of the river flowing past the trees.
She looked at the outpouring and onrushing river that was the river of her own life and felt its sadness teem; here was her
childhood in Venice, firstborn of the policeman Giovanni and Christa Castoldi, the child of their earliest loving, upon whom
fell the unsaid yet subtly broadcast disappointment that she was not a son, and whom her father, Giovanni, could not hold
for more than five minutes without passing her back like a strange fish netted in the murk of the lagoon; her mother, who
was always pregnant and miscarrying, who passed to Gabriella the understanding that girls clean and cook, and who made her
from age six the second in command of the narrow brown rooms of the house in the Calle Visciga, where already her two brothers
were lords; how her duties mounted, and how frequently she stayed in the kitchen with the caged bird that did not sing to
prepare the meals which might garner love in her returning father's quick praise as he gorged himself closer to death; how
she had heard the violin teacher Scaramuzza when he moved into the apartment below them and managed to persuade her mother
to let her take lessons; how there, too, was reinforced the already solidifying belief that nothing she could do would ever
be good enough, and that the brutal music she made was a sorry and discordant insult to its composers; and yet how she had
continued, playing only when her parents were out of the house, and then, when her mother, after six miscarriages, was taken
to bed with the early stages of liver failure, gradually daring to bow the notes in diminuendo in the farthest room; how she
had become the mother then, years before she had been a lover or known anything but the dreamt caresses that visited her sleep
like the princes of fairy tales; the years of her father's pent-up and brooded-upon horror as his sons became vivid and frightful
mockeries of his once most cherished machismo fantasy of the Castoldi boys, who were to be policemen like their father, cleansing
the plaguey corruption that soured the air of Venice like grey spores, but who became instead the very same small villains
with open shirts and silver chains whom he spent his life jailing; how Giovanni Castoldi did not get to retire, but whose
spleen had ruptured and exploded inside him with hot rage in the police motor launch on the Canal Grande when he found himself
chasing the slippery and evil shadow of himself that was Antonio Castoldi, who had fired three shots at the man he did not
know was his father before crashing at full speed into the
vaporetto
station at the Ponte Accademia; how the music had taken over then for Gabriella; how the violin had become her father and
her mother and her family; and how even Scaramuzza had admitted her progress, scratching the dryness of his right ear and
clearing the wet cloud of his chest phlegm to acknowledge her with the single word
bene;
the years of her university then and the approach of those not yet men who saw in the cool remoteness of her playing something
to be conquered, a woman too much in her own kingdom who they imagined needed bringing into the tight prisons of their smaller
passions, and whose fumbling and filmy-sweated version of love left Gabriella Castoldi feeling there were no emotions as pure
as those she played in the music; and then the poet Pollini, who arrived in her life with the surprising abruptness of grace,
when beneath her eyes was already the colour of pale plums; the season of that happiness that then like everything else fell
down and withered. And left her there in Kenmare.

She saw it in the night river. She saw it and felt the grief and loneliness of her world grow immense and cold inside her.
She stood motionless, and Stephen stood behind her. There were no stars. The mountain fog lay on the treetops. Thin veils
descended wetting their hair. Gabriella turned around.

“I don't know your name,” she said.

When he told her, she nodded, as if the sounds of it revealed something that she had already known.

“Stefano,” she said. “Hold me.”

  Early the following morning Gabriella lay on the bed with the covers half across her and her feet hanging over in the cool
air. She was midway between waking and sleep, and lingered in that warm place where time slows and holds still the not quite
vanished dreamlike quality of the night. She was lying on her back and her hair fell to the right across the pillow. She kept
her eyes closed and held behind them the astonished and rapturous kisses of the night, the white tremoring of Stephens body
when he was undressed, and his loving that was first infinitely hesitant and slow, each touch like a terrifying adventure—this
place on her bow arm, this firmness in her neck where her violin fit and where his mouth tasted her—until, in the clockless
time of two bodies learning each other like a language, he had loved her more wildly, and they had rolled back and across
the bedclothes in each other's held embrace, in a way that had sometimes seemed as if from the unseen and enormous tide of
loss, grief, and despair, each was rescuing the other.

Gabriella was not in love. She was not ill or delirious for his presence, she did not feel she needed him to be able to get
out of the bed and imagined she could live through the day without seeing him and have no balloon of longing inflate in her
chest. She had nothing of the schoolgirl's flushed excitement and ran no fever. But the emotion she felt for Stephen Griffin
was the baffled and uncertain beginnings of love nonetheless.

She lay in the bed and listened to the sounds of morning. Stephen had gone to the shops for milk for her coffee. When he returned
with the milk and two punnets of strawberries, he entered her cottage with the deep hesitation of a man unsure if this was
the place where he had left a dream. She stirred in the bedclothes, and he went to her kitchen, opening her presses like privacies
and finding that she drank no tea, only coffee from grounds. He looked at the cups she had, at her sugar bowl and milk jug.
He ran his hands on the countertop, as if fingering a hidden keyboard where there played the music of all her time there in
Kenmare. He looked at everything that was hers, and then made a muddy coffee without a paper filter, carrying it in to her
bedside and then sitting down in the chair beside the window like a visiting uncle, with his hands on his knees.

Gabriella sat up, and the bedclothes fell down. She looked at him and laughed.

“You are so sweet,” she said, smiling at his attendant heart sitting beside her and passing through another wave of her own
disbelief that such a man existed. She held out her arms to him, and in his jacket, shirt, and trousers he stretched himself
across; he did not reach for her with his hands, but closed his eyes as he craned forward like a finishing sprinter and was
an instant there in that invisible place of long-imagined arrival, until her fingers touched his face and drew him toppling
onto the bed. She was laughing. She drew him against her breasts and rose her body against him, caressing him with the fullness
of her so his face travelled the length of her skin and tasted the perfume that was herself and did not come in bottles. He
shook again in spasms. He clung to her as she moved now beneath now above him, now turning him over like a shipwreck in the
churned-up waters of a passion that she could not fathom. She undressed him with a quick and flashing urgency, not thinking
that her actions were like those of a saviour or that the dampness of her mouth finding his was the ageless, time-honoured
way in which the world was resuscitated and gasped anew the miracle air. She thought nothing. She kissed the white and shaking
wreckage of his body and swallowed his tears that spouted and rolled; he wept and tried to cling to her, embracing in this
woman for the first time in his adult life the possibility of happiness and feeling at the same moment that the wave might
crash, drowning him in that strange foreknowledge and expectancy of suffering which every day had taught him. He held her
so tightly she arched and cried out, the breath squeezed from her in a thin red-and-yellow ribbon, and she was pressed onto
him like a transparency. Their loving was thrown about; it rose up and fell down, it tumbled off the bed and arrived on the
carpet among Gabriella's shoes. It squirmed and burned. She took handfuls of his skin and closed them tightly within her fingers,
letting go and taking another even as he held hers. He hooped her, she enwrapped him. She rolled him over and shook him. She
pressed his face hard to her breasts, she pulled his shoulders against her, as if the wholeness of himself might enter there;
as if each of them had somehow forgotten their sex organs or forgone them as some hopelessly inadequate apparati of conjoinment,
as if they wished not to be joined at all but to be one another, to blend. They wrestled and tumbled within each other in
a way that sought transcendence and to make their bodies one as air or spirit.

“I love you,” Stephen said.

Gabriella touched the smooth moon of his bare head where he lay across her. But she did not say she loved him.

  And so there was then a brief season before Christmas, a time which glimmered with the quality of fables and made for Stephen
Griffin and Gabriella Castoldi the single most enduring memory of what happiness could be like on earth. The sun stayed between
the mountains. When Gabriella told Stephen that the cold dampness of the weather in winter depressed her, he made the characteristically
rash promise of the first-time lover that he would not let it rain on her. Within a few days, when the pine needles of the
town's Christmas trees were drying and falling and the sun still warmed Kerry like Maytime, he began to believe, like a child,
that love had more powers than he supposed and that the force of wishes sometimes made things true. His gift was one of pure
sentimentality and he wanted so deeply for everything to turn out right that, in that brief season of sunlight, he imagined
it would. He lived at Mary White's and visited Nelly Grant and carried to Gabriella's cottage the bags of fruit, honeys, and
jams that fed pleasure and rapture. Sometimes she played for him. She stood beside the bed, and having bargained that he lie
long and naked while he listen, she bowed a light quick music whose notes came like birds and sang through the cottage air.
She played more easily than she had ever done, not yet knowing that the quality she had discovered was forgiveness and that
in the secrecy of her spirit a healing had begun.