He threw back another shot and poured another, spilling some.
When an aged and sun-creased woman passed the doorway with three pigs on a hemp leash, he realized that this was one of the thoroughfares to the river, where people from the morning markets ferried themselves and their goods back to their homes in Gaia, on the other side. One of Serafim’s favourite photos ever taken in Oporto was on that river, the Douro. The shot, by an amateur photographer, had been well ahead of its time, and featured a line of women loading a merchant boat, balancing baskets on their heads. He had been down to the loading docks countless times since first seeing the print, trying to catch something like it; but he just didn’t have the luck of being in the right place at the right time. Though, he reasoned, luck was a strange thing. And maybe with the luck in his life turning sour in every way it possibly could today, the luck of a perfect exposure might just coast his way. Sure, he nodded to himself, that was as good an idea as any.
He emptied his glass one last time and stood up, feeling a wave of welcome nullity as the alcohol washed over him, pooling at his dizzy feet. Not wanting to speak to the barman, he tossed more escudos onto the table than the bottle of bagaço could possibly be worth, and watched as one slow coin rolled along the uneven surface as languid as an ox cart’s wheel then jingled onto the floor. He didn’t care. It would give the barman something more to talk about, add some flavour to the story, to the pathetic sight of him, Serafim Vieira, the laughingstock.
Out into the squinting light, he lumbered down the lane, which followed the lay of the land that drained every street in the city onto the banks of the Douro. He cupped his tiny camera, a Leica, against his chest; no model name or number, just solid German quality, which had been mailed to him directly from the factory a little under a year ago, only a few months after it was released onto the market. He’d been awaiting its invention for four long years. Finally, a sophisticated camera small enough that it wouldn’t be noticed by the people it captured, that could be taken straight into the heart of a dynamic street scene and remain overlooked by its subjects.
Now he could see the water, smell the soap from all the women doing their washing on the banks and in the tributaries. He stopped to take a wobbly picture of a boy climbing to the top of a hoist that angled up over the river. The boy’s friends, swimming below, cheered him on as he dove flaccidly into the brown water. Serafim took another shot of the group of them, bobbing around in the filthy river, their heads wading through orange peels and cigarette butts, skimming prisms of oil, the pale of their skinny legs disappearing into a sienna fog.
Serafim noticed that a ship was being loaded a little farther down the quay, and headed towards the commotion, thinking of its potential as a photograph. Longshoremen with square burlap sacks, swollen pillows stuffed to near bursting, were muscling into a tight queue and climbing onto the ship, while another gangplank of them, empty-handed and quick on their toes, filed out of the boat and towards the next parcels for loading.
From where he was standing, it would have been a poorly composed shot, but Serafim had lifted his camera anyway, when he heard his name being called out above the noise and bustle. He turned around to see an old acquaintance from grade school, who’d since taken over his father’s merchant business, casually leaning in a doorway with his legs crossed. His friend was standing with another man, who was holding a leather-bound notebook and presumably overseeing the order being loaded.
Serafim approached them, distantly aware that he was visibly drunk, his steps unbalanced against the uneven of the cobblestones. Abandon spilled from his swinging gestures. He was quite unsure what he would do next, feeling, for the first time in his quiet and reserved life, reckless. Just before he’d reached the doorway, the man with the ledger mumbled something into his acquaintance’s ear, who then nodded, smiling.
“Mr. Vieira. It’s been months, has it not? I trust that you’ve been well?”
Serafim stopped, and for some reason held his tongue like a barkeeper in a commoners’ tasco, casting a glance back at the ship being loaded. He swayed slightly, a thin tree in the breeze.
The man with the ledger, apparently discomfited by Serafim’s lack of response and drunkenness, excused himself and left to supervise the loading lines.
“Listen.” His friend uncrossed his legs. “Why don’t you come out of the sun. Step inside for a few minutes, have a drink. I’ve got a proposition for you.”
Serafim turned back, levelled his gaze, considering this, then stepped through the doorway.
Three shot glasses later, sitting on an even-legged steel chair, Serafim found himself laughing for the first time in what felt like weeks. Drinking aguardente, an incremental step up from his previous choice, Serafim and his friend butted out cigarette after cigarette, threads of smoke sculpting ever-changing horizons in the room. At first Serafim had scoffed at his acquaintance’s offer, but then a hazy conviction began to rise, swarming between the two men and their fervent conversation, plunging through its fateful undercurrents. And when his old friend stood and told him he had to tend to the ship, but suggested Serafim sleep off the drink on the sofa in the next room and think about it, Serafim went there immediately, curling onto the red cushions and unbuttoning his vest and jacket. He glided into an afternoon sleep, convinced that this chance meeting was no chance at all; that it was fortuitous, ordained. Just think of it! That a man of the sea — and a merchant, no less — might hold the solution to his, an artist’s, every problem. Serafim smiled to himself as he closed his eyes. Yes, luck was a strange thing.
Ville de Québec, le 2 février 1928
Ma très chère Claire,
I must confess how worried I am becoming. I have telephoned your apartment several times, pleading with the operator to let it ring just a little longer. Would you believe that I’ve been distraught enough to have even telephoned the only two hospitals I could imagine you in? Where are you, Claire?
The only thing stopping me from catching a train to Montreal is that you mentioned there were auditions coming up and you may’ve gone out of town. This, at least, is my hope; that you are safe and well, on a stage in another city, impressing some new agent, or maybe even trying for one of those Russian ballets that are passing through New York or Boston. And I hope this while fighting the idea that this letter is just another in a bundle crammed inside your mailbox, while you are somewhere else, in trouble.
Things here are frustrating as always. We’re preparing for the suffragist delegation coming to the city for the annual march on the Legislative Assembly. I wish you would come to it one of these years, Claire, join the struggle. Or even just visit.
Please, the moment you get this letter, please telephone me. I desperately need reassurance that you are well, and that I am worrying for no reason at all.
Je pense à toi,
Cécile
3
Claire’s memory worked like a radio station: memories that were pleasant and popular were repeated again and again. And with each reminiscence, Claire found that she could discover something new, some hidden timbre or cadence that she hadn’t quite appreciated before. And like a radio station, the selection of her memories changed with the times. A popular recollection one year might become forgotten or outmoded the next. Recently, it had been playing a countdown of her all-time favourite moments, the ones that had set her and her career on its bold trajectory.
One particular memory she’d been recalling was an underhanded threat she had been prepared to make to Dr. Bertrand. It was a threat she had rehearsed but couldn’t quite remember if she’d delivered. It was a sly implication of how she knew exactly what he’d done for her brother; and how he could go to prison for it. Other doctors certainly had, while Dr. Bertrand remained a free man, untarnished and unapologetic.
She could remember perfectly the feeling in the city that day. Music, the mayhem of mass celebration, the streets of Montreal ro
iling in dance, bells, singing, the clatter of pots and pans, horns, comet-like streamers tailing through the air above the streetcar wires and landing amid a brass-band frenzy.
For Claire, dancing with Dr. Bertrand the day of the false armistice was only the end of this memory song. The beginning, like most controversial things, featured her grandmother.
Claire’s paternal grandmother was an eccentric. She had been widowed early, and had raised Claire’s father by scraping by on what little money her husband had left behind. She read voraciously, blasphemed at will, and every year she lived she’d become less and less of a believer, first renouncing the sacraments. By the time she’d come to live with her son, his straitlaced wife, and their three children, Claire, Cécile, and Daniel, she had stopped going to church altogether.
Instead, on the Sabbath, with no one else home, she would shuffle over to the neighbours’ apartment — immigrants from France, and non-believers as well — where she would sip cognac on their terrace, discussing books, news, and politics. It was unheard of, scandalous even. But what tipped her scale into the realm of eccentricity was how unashamed she was. “Je m’en fous,” she would say, whenever Claire’s father or mother challenged her to consider what other people might say about the things she did or didn’t do. “If you do come across someone who has issue with me,” her grandmother would calmly say, “tell them that I am always right here. They are more than welcome to discuss their qualms, with me, to my face.” At which point she would retire to her boudoir, and close the door conclusively behind her.
Her grandmother’s boudoir was a tiny room filled with sofas, as well as a rocking chair and an anniversary clock that didn’t keep time so well. Several small paintings — rollingly idyllic Quebec landscapes — adorned the walls, interrupted by a window that looked out onto the dreary brick partition of the next apartment. It was a room designated for the women in the house to sit in quietly with their needlework, but it was really only used by Claire’s grandmother for reading, and for “poisoning her granddaughters,” as Claire’s mother liked to say, “with her audacious ideas.”
Claire and Cécile adored their grandmother. Once the door to the boudoir was closed, she was easily distracted from her reading and took a genuine interest in the girls and their fantastical whims and play worlds. She would gently clap and hum a tune and Claire would dance and spin on the rectangle of a second-hand rug in the centre of the room, which acted as a padded stage. She would endlessly reread the same fairy tales and stories to Cécile, who learned the words by heart and would mouth them as they were being read, her legs draped over her grandmother’s lap, enveloped by her large arms, as a wrinkled hand was lifted to lick a finger for turning the page.
When Claire’s grandmother first moved into their apartment, in 1910, Claire was seven, Cécile ten, and Daniel fourteen. That same year, a man named Henri Bourassa started up the newspaper Le Devoir, which had a liberal, anti-imperialist, intellectual tilt, and of which Claire’s grandmother became an instant disciple. Its daily reading was the only thing she did religiously. But the next two years saw her sight, already feeble, begin to fail, until it was so much work to squint and decipher — hunched-over, magnifying-glass cryptology — that she began asking Cécile to read certain passages aloud to her, to give her eyes some needed rest. She would insist, however, after Cécile had painstakingly sounded out each word individually, that the girl reread the words as a coherent sentence, and once she had, she would get her to repeat it — without its sounding so wooden this time, she would say factually, without malice. Then the entire paragraph again, only with inflection and confidence, like an adult. When she was finally satisfied, she would murmur, “Excellent, ma petite fille — impeccable. On continue,” and on it was to the next paragraph, the next page.
Soon enough, Cécile was charged with reading the entire journal, from cover to cover. As she got older, she was asked her opinion on what she was reading. Did she agree that the ruling class was grossly neglecting the rights of the working class? Did she agree that Canada’s responsibility began and ended with the defence of its own terrain, that it had no business sending troops to fight in British wars, as it had done in South Africa only a few years ago and seemed itching to do again? For her part, Cécile wasn’t exactly sure how one formed an opinion, though she became increasingly certain that an opinion was an important thing to have.
She hadn’t quite gotten around to choosing her position on Canada’s involvement in British wars before troops were being sent in throngs to fight in Europe. At the outbreak of the Great War, Daniel was eighteen, and by the time he was twenty, several of his friends had either signed up or quietly moved out of the city to relatives’ homes in the country, where the army officers who patrolled the cities could be more easily evaded. Officers stopped young men at will on the streets, and handed them papers with instructions to receive a physical and report for service immediately. One spring day, Daniel, who stayed in Montreal throughout the war, working as a shop assistant for a grocer — and who was devout in his boycott of beer as a patriotic gesture, saving on grain while withdrawing his support of the German-dominated brewery sector — was stopped by one such officer and handed his fateful papers. He brought them home shrugging, a sheeplike grin on his face, obedient and oblivious to the danger he faced.
He hadn’t taken his hat off at the door before his grandmother doggedly limped towards him, snatched him by the wrist, and dragged him back outside, down the steps, and up the street. They didn’t return to the apartment for hours, and when they did, it was with a note from Dr. Bertrand, with the somewhat shocking news that Daniel was suddenly found to have a rare, though minor, heart condition. Daniel moped around for weeks afterwards, sure he was going to be called a coward, insisting in a whisper that he’d even wanted to go and fight. Not die, of course, but fight. His mother, lowering her voice as well, would tell him, behind closed doors, that he could just tell the truth. “It was your grandmother’s doing. Her fault. Everyone knows what kind of woman she is, anyway. Now, stop fretting about it and set off for work. You’re needed here more than there . . .” Her words broke up as she smoothed the collar of her twenty-year-old son and pulled his jacket down straight.
In Claire’s family, each child was, in a way, a favourite. Daniel was clearly their mother’s, while Cécile always had her grandmother and Claire her father. During the five years of the Great War, when Montreal was the scene of national turmoil and heated polemics, of economic hardship and individual sacrifice, Claire’s father was eager to keep her unconcerned and sheltered from it all. Despite being a luxury that the family could ill afford, he somehow found a way to pay for her weekly dance classes at the École de Danse Lacasse-Morenoff, and attended every recital to clap as loudly as he could. He was also the only parent who would whistle, piercingly, with his thumb and forefinger in his mouth. Whenever talk in their house, especially with visitors from church, began to seethe about the gravest of issues — infant mortality among francophones reaching the highest in the Western world, the patent dismissal of their every concern by Ottawa, or the grisly scene of a horse-drawn trolley carting away corpses of those who had succumbed to the Spanish influenza, with one or two of the bodies still in their death throes — Claire’s father would pull her close to keep her from hearing any more, asking her about the dances she was rehearsing, or even taking her to another room, where he would wind up the gramophone and close the door behind him, leaving her to practise in peace.
Claire was fifteen years old and in her last year of school when, on a mild day in November, the news rippled through the city like a tsunami of cheers: the war was over. The school bells were suddenly ringing continuously, following the students out into the streets, where the chimes spread into the urban distance, infectiously, to church bells, firemen’s sirens, the klaxons of vehicles, descending all the way to the St. Lawrence and the harbour, where ship horns could be heard yawning and bellowing above the boom of c
annon fire. Claire, thinking of her father, headed to St. James Street, where he was a lowly record keeper for a small accounting firm. Along the way, the traffic at intersections was sometimes clogged and stagnant, people in the crossroads playing instruments, groups of singers and dancers flocking around them, and annoyed drivers leaving their vehicles only to join in the revelry a few minutes later, clapping their hands with their heads thrown back. The war was really over.
Claire bumped into her father as he was heading towards his favourite tavern. Upon seeing her, he picked her up, swung her in a circle, and kissed her cheeks ecstatically before leading her by the arm through the crowd that was amassing in ever-greater numbers. Inside the tavern, an accordion player stood on a table, his back to the wall to make room for a few more people to dance, while a fiddle player carefully stepped onto another tabletop to do the same. Two navy men, bristling with elation, swung each other by the arms in the centre of the room. The circle of people closest to them, mostly men in straw hats, clapped in unison, cigarettes clamped between their lips. Claire’s father ordered drinks, a whiskey for himself and a cocktail for her, and they had just clinked glasses and taken a sip when Claire’s father straightened up and exclaimed, “Why, Dr. Bertrand!” and hailed the man to come over.
Dr. Bertrand was a much-respected physician who, everyone knew, had gone to London and Paris just before war had broken out, where he had learned to perform surgical operations. His status in the francophone community was of the highest, and the Audettes were among the few lucky enough to be able to call him their family doctor. Claire’s father vigorously shook his hand, clasping the man’s shoulder as if to steady him, a dribble of whiskey spilling from the glass in the doctor’s left hand. He kissed Claire hello, and all three of them clanked glasses, drinking to the end of all wars.
Serafim and Claire Page 2