As It Is in Heaven by Niall Williams

each minute. (Kiaran Breen startled himself
     by standing up in the middle of the audience to look towards the window and see if it was not in fact morning and the sun
     was coming up.) In the middle of the third piece the audience started taking off their coats. Briefly they jostled in their
     seats and then lay the coats across their laps, so that from the front of the room their bright blouses and blue and white
     shirts looked like spring in Italy. The music transported them. Every man and woman was already in some Italy of the mind,
     and the storm of the November night blew outside with all the fruitlessness and ineffect of a government warning. When they
     had finished playing the Vivaldi, the people swept to their feet and let their coats fall to the floor. They applauded loudly
     and with such frantic joy that Piero Motte felt tears spring up in his eyes. With the applause ringing in the high chandeliers
     above them, the musicians looked at each other in bewilderment. The room was balmy with delight. And when the people sat again
     for the slow and romantic melancholy of the Puccini, they were pillowed on a deep and heartfelt gladness. Eamon Waters took
     the plump and warm fingers of his Eileen’s right hand and held them in his lap. Smelling the deepening scent of her perfume
     rising in the heat of the room, Jack Nolan at fifty-seven kissed Margaret Mungovan on the side of her neck and only barely
     kept himself from telling her he was ready to marry again. (It did not matter, for she knew it already, and when the music
     began once more, she allowed her head to lean against his shoulder and let him know in the silent language of perfume that
     she wanted his arms around her.)
    In the back row, Stephen Griffin held his face in his hands and stared at the woman playing the violin. He, too, had been
     taken from himself by the music; the music offered an invisible opening to another place, and through it, like a secret river,
     flowed the frustrations, sorrows, and ceaseless longings of everyone there. For each of them, it became the music of themselves.
    By the time the Puccini was being played, Stephen found himself looking at no one but the slender figure of Gabriella Castoldi.
     Even when she was playing the quick fluttered notes of the Vivaldi allegro her expression remained one of frowning intensity.
     The bow flew back and forth across the strings like a sweet yet almost unendurable torture. Stephen looked at the woman whose
     name he did not yet know and his heart raced. The air in the room wavered with warmth. Men and women closed their eyes and,
     in the minor pause between notes, swallowed hard the emotions that rose within them.
    Then, suddenly, it was over.
    The last note was played and the music stopped. There was a pause, a long beat in which that Venice of the mind lingered in
     the hot humid room of the Old Ground Hotel. There was a held moment of nothing, of silence, as if no one who sat there wished
     to embark on the home journey, to emerge once more in the November rain. Nobody moved. (Later, Piero Motte would swear that
     when he looked down at them, every single man and woman had wet faces and suntans. He would tell his aged father in the
pasticceria
in Burano that in the old music they had revealed a new invention that night, a kind of heart travel, he would say, that
     took them all,
tutti,
to the place of Vivaldi—which is not Venice but Vivaldi himself. They did not applaud, he would tell his father. They could
     not.)
    And how long passed before the first hands clapped could not be measured in time. It was a slow awakening, full of reluctance
     and dawning amazement, like sleepers rising from the most sensuous dream. Men raised their hands to clap and felt the dampness
     under their armpits and across the shirts on their backs. They stood and noticed they were in their stockings, and had slipped
     off their shoes earlier, in the mistaken certainty that they were sitting by the