Island of Lightning by Robert Minhinnick Page A

that roam this city at dawn and dusk and every sanctified hour between, and my bed hard as a shelf, this bed drenched in dreams and the light upon me a crust of pearls.
    Yes, I say. Praise the bells. They have freed me from the madnesses of sleep. So perhaps I should walk out now and join the devout and the poor and pray for my own soul. I should stand where the bells bellow, stand in the nave of the thunderstorm and let the priests prosecute this intruder. But I tell you straight. I will never confess. Never. I’ve done what I’ve done and I’ll pay what I have to pay but I will not do God’s dirty work.
    3. Paradiso
    I have seen her sometimes on the stair or at the Stage Door and we have exchanged greetings. Today in Leone’s, there she is, a cup before her like a white bell. Her treat to herself, she says. Coffee with cardamom.
    As we have the theatre in common it is easy to talk. It seems she has been a cleaner there for thirty years, starting at fifteen, like her mother before her, her mother with whom she lives in an alley under the eastern bastion.
    Not much money, she smiles. But a steady job.
    What’s been your favourite concert? I ask.
    But Manuela has never attended a concert in the theatre. Nor a play, nor any paying performance. Rehearsals? Now that’s a different matter.
    By the evening, I’m tired out, she says. So much dust. So many people and so much dust. There’s dust in the costumes and a dune of dust in the orchestra pit. It comes from the fresco.
    The painting in the cupola?
    The fresco. In the paradiso, she says.
    I have heard about the painting, I say.
    Yes. High up amongst the blue and gold. Three hundred years old. Caravaggio, they say.
    Surely not?
    El Greco, then.
    Never.
    Oh maybe, she says. Maybe. He is looking at it now.
    Who?
    The Superintendent. But he’s been called away.
    Show me, I say.
    Now?
    Yes.
    The theatre is always being restored. Its limestone flakes away in a tawny scurf. Its lead leaks, its boards rot. Out in the street, Manuela takes an iron key from her bag and opens the artists’ entrance. We step in darkness down a corridor and up a flight of steps. Suddenly, we are on stage.
    Was there a concert last night? I ask.
    Nothing.
    Are you sure? I thought I heard voices. And singing.
    No, nothing.
    And strange music.
    Manuela laughs. Manuela in her pinafore, Manuela in her slippers because her bunions hurt today. All her life Manuela’s feet have suffered the island’s broken steps.
    The light is rosy here. The boxes above stage and along the walls are quilted in a red plush. And there is gilt everywhere, a circuitry of gold luxuriant as honeysuckle. A ladder stands in the auditorium and reaches a hundred feet into the paradiso, and yes, I am climbing, climbing a sketchy ladder towards God, out of the darkness and into the gilded light that filters in through windows like arrow slits, climbing further and Manuela laughing, Manuela whom I thought would protest, but who is laughing at me as if I was performing here for her, Manuela who has never seen a pantomime nor an oratorio, but who watches me now, Manuela who is already so far below in the black ranks of seats and I peer into the Superintendent of Singing’s box and then into the Presidente’s balcony and the light falls over me, a light that might devour me and no there’s no going back even as I feel the ladder shudder and bend, the ladder that is really three, four, five ladders held together in aluminium brackets, a ladder that bows like bamboo, some rungs wooden and some wire and once a rung missing but I am beyond that chasm now and the dust is falling, yes, the paradiso dust that has settled upon me every time I have entered here, the dust I noted in Manuela’s hair as she raised the coffee to her lips, I am ordained in that dust, as were the sopranos and the comedians, the cellists with their knees flung wide as if to receive the dust, that dust is falling