Read As It Is in Heaven for Free Online

other’s body but made a kind of hungry loving, as if trying to devour one another’s
     limbs and mouth and arrive at the essential stuff of the soul.
    Vittorio knew the affair was doomed, but was helpless to escape. He knew he should tell Maria that he could not meet with
     her on the morning after his mother had taken another turn in her illness. He should have left Venice and driven to Verona.
     But when Maria came to his door, the look in her eyes erased his words, and his gratitude for the comfort of her breasts washed
     over everything else. Later, she lay like a dark cat on the pulled-back sheets of his bed and he played Schubert on the violin
     over her, not yet knowing that his mother had died.
    When he found out, it snapped him like a Communion wafer. He met the anger of his sister’s eyes at the bedside of the corpse
     and knew at once there was a judgement upon him. He did not sleep for three nights; he lay in the bed like a ship moored in
     mid-sea and waited for the horizon of the dawn. He waited through three nights and then came downstairs in his mother’s house
     one morning to hear on the radio how the baker Pecce had killed his wife with a knife.
    Since that night, Vittorio Mazza had lived sixteen years in the solitude of his guilt. He played music, but found little joy
     in it. At night he fell headlong into the same dream, over and over again. A grim place and a grey sky. Greyness everywhere.
     The feeling of wet concrete touching his face and the sense of his descending endlessly downward throughout the night, journeying
     down a slippery and rat-grey pathway where cold rain was falling.
    It was, he knew, the condition of Purgatory that he carried around with him. It was the place his soul had fallen into, and
     much as he wished that sleep would one time bring him the warm and fabulous caress of Maria Pecce, in sixteen years he had
     not found it. He suffered the torments of his nights and woke exhausted into the light of the morning, like a swimmer surfacing
     from a great depth. The sunlight revived him, and he could move through the day briefly postponing his despair. But that morning,
     in Dublin, Vittorio Mazza awoke and looked out and felt the familiarity of misery smite him with the frightening awareness
     that the condition of his sin had deepened. This was worse than anything he had known previously. For the city, on that fourteenth
     consecutive rainy day in October, had taken on the air of a mortally ill patient, and under the persistence of the drizzling
     sky every man and woman seemed to Vittorio to wear the dulled expression of a longtime heartache. The grief of his own condition
     seemed to have leaked out into the city in the night, and made everyone and everything the cousins of affliction. Even the
     buses that shouldered with infinite slowness through the traffic past the hotel suggested the impossibility of hope and progress
     here, their engines thrumming a despondent music and the passengers, with their faces to the streaming windows, looking out
     on a journey that would last forever.
    Vittorio lay back on his bed and pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes. He wanted to cry out, but rolled himself
     over until his face was pressed against the pillow. Why had he come here? He should have turned down the offer; how could
     he bear this desolate grey place? He raised his head and looked for the wine bottle he had bought the previous evening. He
     knew that it was empty, for he had emptied a bottle of wine every night before lying down for the last fifteen years, but
     he still searched the room for it, as if to confirm that it was morning and the umbrageous light was not the vivid dark of
     his dreams.
    Vittorio Mazza lay on the bed in his Dublin hotel for an hour in an ooze of cold sweat. Then he rose and dressed himself quickly,
     his trembling fingers fumbling with the buttons of his white shirt. He did not trust himself to shave, for he was in too great
     a hurry. He