As It Is in Heaven by Niall Williams Read Free Book Online

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.