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

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