As It Is in Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mooney had awoken in his blindness, Moira Fitzgibbon had contacted
     the Italian embassy. She had heard of a touring Venetian ensemble sponsored by the embassy and phoned to ask them if they
     could play a concert in Miltown Malbay for the opera house fund. The woman from the embassy had never heard of Miltown Malbay,
     she sounded the name like Milano and told Moira to wait. When she came back on the line she said, Send a letter, we’ll see.
    At any moment the plot might have turned in another direction, the lines left to dangle, disconnected, and the meaning lost.
     But Moira Fitzgibbon wrote the letter, and when the Italians wrote back, saying that they would not come to Miltown Malbay
     but would donate one half of the takings from the planned concert in Ennis, there was a sense of rightness about it, like
     the smallest part of an elaborate puzzle, the sense of things fitting and bringing the unlikeliest of moments together.
    Two days later Stephen Griffin was asked in the staff room to buy a ticket.

7
      Vittorio Mazza did not want to play in Ennis. He did not want to play in Ireland at all. The day after he arrived in Dublin
     with the other members of the ensemble, he woke in his hotel and saw with alarm the peculiar greyness of the light. He imagined
     the cause was the net curtains and drew them aside, only to discover with grim astonishment that the grey was the colour of
     the sky. A steady October rain was falling, the Dublin traffic was blocked in apparent perpetuity, and the people who moved
     on the city path below wore the downcast and mottled expression of desolation. Vittorio gasped with the awfulness of it, blinked
     his eyes, and opened them only to understand that he had arrived in the haunting landscape of his worst dream and that Dublin
     seemed to be the place that for sixteen years he had been calling Purgatory.
    He lay on his bed and ordered room service. When it did not arrive, he was confirmed in his fears that the city was a kind
     of prison. The misery of the place was leaking in on him, the massiveness of the melancholia so potent that at first he thought
     he would not be able to stand, never mind play. He was the lead violin; he was Vittorio Mazza, he was fifty-eight years old
     and had been playing the violin for half a century. He had played in twenty-two cities in the world, and although he had never
     achieved any personal fame, he was known as a quality musician, and it was he who had been sought by the impresario Maltini
     when the Interpreti Veneziani was being founded.
    Now he lay on the bed in his white shirt and wept. The dream of Purgatory had first tormented his sleep sixteen years earlier.
     It was May, his mother was ill, and Vittorio Mazza was in love with Maria Pecce, the beautiful wife of the baker Angelo. Due
     to the obsessive jealousy of the baker, who imagined no woman as beautiful as Maria could be faithful to the likes of him,
     the meetings of Maria and Vittorio were arranged with great difficulty and at odd hours of the day and night. Maria was known
     to everyone because of her extraordinary good looks and raven-black hair and had to slip from the bakery in a variety of scarves
     and coats, even during the furnace heat of that Maytime. When she came to Vittorio, she was often naked beneath her coat,
     and as he pressed her to himself, the vapours of fresh dough entangled with the scent of the rose petals that she scattered
     on her innumerable baths. He could not believe that she loved him, but ignored as best he could the muted voice in the back
     of his brain that it was really the music that had brought her into his bed. She had heard him play Rossini in the Gala at
     Easter, and the moment had fired her with such reawakened passion for the rapturous and infinitely tender quality of life
     that she could barely sit out the concert and wait until the violinist was in her arms. The passion between them was instant,
     and remarkable, for they didn’t tire of each