Serafim and Claire

by Mark Lavorato

  He had, of course, already sent her several gifts, flowers, chocolates, photos — including the one candid portraiture he’d been remunerated for, with a note on the back indicating such — but for this particular correspondence he chose to send only a brief note, four lines in his quavering penmanship, asking for her hand in marriage. He posted it immediately.

  He imagined he would receive a response the following day, Tuesday, or Wednesday at the latest, but when Thursday’s sun had also climbed and descended the walls, he reasoned that she must be taking a thoughtful, dispassionate approach to her reply. Serafim’s patience held its breath for days, then a week, then two, as he maniacally and repeatedly checked the mail. The one day that his aunt beat him to the postbox, she told him, as Serafim walked through the door, that there was a letter for him on the table, the address printed in an elegant hand. He rushed into the dining room, held the letter up to his nose, and opened it. It was not from the Sá residence, and his disappointment was so apparent that his aunt made a point never to take his post from the mailbox again. Small amendments provide immeasurable mercy. The letter on the table turned out to be from Mr. Araújo, who was asking to see some of the pictures that Serafim, his probationary and so-called “club photographer,” had taken.

  The darkroom work required to supply Mr. Araújo with the photographs gave Serafim some needed distraction. He devoted himself wholly to the task, arranging his photos in a stylish album with an attention to detail that he hoped would impress. The photographs, thought Serafim, also happened to be some of the strongest he’d ever shot.

  He met Mr. Araújo in the backroom at Café Majestic on a Sunday, after he’d received another, rather cryptic glance from Inês at church. Mr. Araújo shook his hand this time, then returned to the other side of his desk to sit down. “I’m interested to see these photos, Mr. Vieira. By all accounts no one recalls even seeing a photographer at the last few events, let alone posing for one.”

  “I prefer shots that are a little more natural, sir.” Serafim placed the album proudly on Mr. Araújo’s desk, who then tugged it towards himself and flipped through its pages with all the skepticism of someone reading over the fine print of a business contract.

  When Mr. Araújo finally spoke, Serafim’s back was turned, as he squinted at a map on the wall.

  “I . . . I don’t know what to say,” Mr. Araújo stuttered. Serafim beamed, rocked on his heels. “It is . . . It’s insolence. Impertinence.”

  “I’m sorry? Sir?”

  Mr. Araújo opened the album and spun it around for Serafim to see. “These two men — they hate each other. I know them both very well. And in this picture, you can see it. Clearly. Unmistakably. And that is what I’m saying: This isn’t a photograph. It’s a mockery.”

  Serafim dangled in the middle of the room from a thread of disbelief. “What . . . could it possibly be mocking if it accurately depicts what you yourself have said is the truth?”

  Mr. Araújo’s expression melted into one of scorn. “Mr. Vieira, you have wantonly wasted my time.” He closed the album and slid it back across his desk with revulsion. “You will not be given a single escudo from me. Now or ever. Take yourself and your photographs out of my office, and do not come back.”

  Serafim walked home with the album under his arm, feeling neither dejected nor miserable. Instead, he was busy mulling over the enigmatic glance that Inês had given him at church earlier that morning. That was all that mattered to him anymore. It was the only thing.

  Then, a week later, it hit him. He had come out of the studio and was waiting at a street corner to get to the other side, having to time his crossing with the horse carriages, ox carts, and trams, as well as the few automobiles that puttered and weaved through all of it, startling the animals, enraging the tram engineers. At his feet, the sun was slicking the tread-worn paving stones, and a motor car whisked by on top of them, swerving onto both sides of the road. Like the burst of air he felt as it passed, an idea suddenly planted itself firmly in his head. It wasn’t a belief or conviction as much as a pinprick knowledge, a kind of obscure though patent fact: Inês was going to accept his proposal. She was going to marry him. He was, suddenly, certain.

  This changed everything — the way he saw his day-to-day life, the way he thought of the future. He felt lighter, nimble, and began considering where they would live, what their lives would look like, even when and where they would have the wedding. He wasn’t embarrassed to say it, either, to his aunt, his uncle, even to people he spoke to throughout the day, clients at the studio, lottery vendors, his butcher, tailor. He would be the man to marry Inês Sá, and he knew it. He just, unerringly, knew it.

  Another two weeks passed. His aunt complained that he wasn’t eating enough, was looking gaunt and washed out. This was incongruous with the uncharacteristically hot mid-May weather, the sun having the same sharp feeling on the skin as it did in midsummer. People were already using umbrellas to shield themselves. It was a Wednesday, after the sesta, and Serafim was returning to the studio and had stopped to buy a newspaper.

  The man behind the newspaper stand looked self-satisfied for some reason, smugly adjusting the arm band on his shirt before digging for Serafim’s change. “I understand Inês Sá has finally accepted an offer of marriage,” he said.

  Serafim froze, grew colder in his stillness.

  “Gustavo Barbosa. Works in the stock market with her father. Fine-looking man. Thirty centavos your change. Next! What can I get for you, ma’am?”

  Serafim found himself walking aimlessly for some time, stopping at a corner to realize that his palm was still cupping thirty centavos. He turned his hand slowly around and dropped them on the ground. Above him, seagulls were agitating the rusty hinges of their calls. His feet turned and marched off in another direction, wandering rudderless through the streets of Oporto, wanting only numbness, an escape from the cold twisting at his centre, the sad fibre of his being wrung with a fist of disillusionment at one end and humiliation at the other. Finally, on a street he was convinced he’d never walked down in his life, he spotted an ill-kept and sun-faded sign over an entrance to a grimy commoners’ tavern. He ambled towards it, stepping listlessly from the glaring sun into the dark of the entranceway. Once his eyes had adjusted to the gloom and he was sure there was actually a barman on duty, he approached the man behind the zinc counter, who was running a grey rag over a milky tumbler.

  “I would” — Serafim cleared his throat — “like a glass of bagaço. Please.”

  Ville de Québec, le 26 juin 1920

  Chère et adorable sœur,

  It is so exciting to hear you are living from your love of dance, performing like some famous star of the moving pictures, out there on your own in the big city. My baby sister, how quickly you have grown up! I wish I could have experienced the same thing, if only for a few months, when I was your age. I am quite excited to hear of your adventures.

  For me, life in Quebec City is quiet and tame. We went to the St-Jean-Baptiste parade two days ago, and to be honest, it was so mild and conservative I could have screamed. It struck me for the first time — with everyone waving their Carillon-Sacré-Coeur flags, watching the floats go by in the same themes as last year, celebrating the arts of spinning and baking, the sanctity of Church and an unwaveringly traditional home — how great the barriers are that we will have to break down before any real progress can take place. I am beginning to think we see this devout sentimentalism of ours as a strength, not a weakness.

  On the other hand, walking around this city, I feel for the first time that I’m at home in the land of my own mother tongue, where everyday commerce and ad boards and tram stops, everything, is spoken and written in French. It is so reassuring somehow. As is the newspaper here, Le Soleil, which is quite progressive. The paper even had the mettle to criticize the Church’s constant electoral interference (and was shut down for it).

  I might
see you soon. I’m travelling to Montreal next month — for the risk.

  Mille baisers,

  Cécile

  11

  Plunged into an intensive showbiz immersion, Claire quickly learned the ropes, though she couldn’t have picked a more demanding, animated, and hectic scene to start off in. Vaudeville was made up of a dizzying ensemble of acts that had to be sequenced seamlessly then run through in rapid-fire succession. Mixed in with the always indispensable dancers were quirky musicians, minstrels, comedians, celebrity lectures, animals with zany tricks, magicians with much the same, two-man acrobatic routines, contortionists, strongmen, female and male impersonators, even small sets of actors staging pungent one-act plays. All of the performers had their own props and costumes and makeup, which was amassed and competing for space in the cramped warren of backrooms and passageways, pinched corridors, and dwarfed ceilings. Being a dancer without any props, Claire was usually jockeyed into one of the farthest corners with a few other dancers, who often had to sit on the three tiers of a toilet, one on the ground, one on the seat, and one on the tank, all of them bent over their hand mirrors applying their eyeliner, unperturbed as people passed the doorway in garish period costumes, thumping the door with their crinolines; or gingerly duckwalking by, trying to keep their monstrous headdresses from peeling off their scalps just before they stepped into the limelight. The stale smell of fabric saturated in sweat; spouts of perfume haze squeezed from vaporizers; mists of talcum powder swirling the cheap lights that filled the backstage area.

  Among these dancers, there was less of a feeling of sorority than Claire had always expected. It soon became clear that she wasn’t the only one with a dream of attaining sweeping adoration, success, and glory through dance. Though this really only served to reinforce her conviction that an unshakable fixation was the only method of attaining success. If she were to waver for just a moment in her drive and resolve, someone else, she thought, would simply slide into line ahead of her. In fact, she performed with women who would outwardly discourage her while at the same time (and in the sweetest voices) offering her all kinds of advice, on dance, show business, management, love, life. It soon became clear that their motivation for doing so was corrupt, that they saw her as just another rival, another obstacle that they now had to work around. What they really wished was for her to fail as quickly as possible, fall by the wayside, and forever be forgotten there, making their own path that much clearer.

  In this slough of underhanded niceties there were men as well, playing their part. Claire had quickly sussed out that the dance world was a very steep hill to climb, the top of which loomed with positions and venues that were highly respectable, legitimate, even prestigious, while the bottom, where gravity constantly tugged and drew, was a sinkhole of a much seedier nature. There were always offers of roles in seamy theatres that were much better paid, but which required performers to go on “dates” with patrons in private backrooms after the production was over. Other proposals of more profitable work, which ranged from dabbling on the fringes of the Red Light to delving right into its midst, were made almost nightly.

  On a more personal level, the same thing played itself out at the tables and taverns after every show. Hovering men, most with still-moist, tender white bands of skin on their ring fingers, supplied a deluge of drinks, presents, and promises whispered into young girls’ ears that sounded too good to be true. The number of dancers who fell for them was stunning to Claire, who, while never once believing a word these men said, would often indulge in an alluring tryst herself, accrue a week of gifts — flowers, jewellery, furs — as well as, potentially, a few evenings of adequate pleasure amidst a more than adequate standard of bedding. Surprisingly, from time to time a true story would circulate, of one of these elderly men actually following through with his pledges and assurances, and a run-of-the-mill affair would lead to a scandalous divorce and remarriage.

  It was in this way that Claire believed Cécile when she said that men and women were exactly, precisely, equal. They were equal in absurdity, contradiction, inadequacy. These characteristics manifested themselves in different areas, of course, but their sum totals came more or less to the same. As an example, Claire was convinced that, for every man who bent his integrity, continuously lying to have an affair with some young and impressionable girl, there was a woman out there who was doling out the same amount of deception, only lying to herself, bending her integrity, just for unlimited access to the wealth and power of some flabbily old and impressionable man.

  Perhaps the most surprising aspect of dancing professionally, Claire had to admit, was that there were actually times when it felt like just another job. There were days when she would dutifully perform her steps and routines, keep time to the music, and go through the motions without giving much of anything to her audience. On such days, she would count the money she’d made and reason that every penny was needed to just barely pay for her rent and food. Sometimes the need to eat meant simply punching a clock, even if, before, this was something she would have considered herself above.

  But at least, with dancing, there was always the potential for banality to be interrupted, unexpectedly, by the sublime. For Claire, there were still moments onstage that were nothing short of extraordinary, moments that could outshine even an eternity of ordinary ones; and it was amazing to think that almost no other career in the world could render or evoke them. These were the times when the musicians managed to play beyond themselves; and the audience, as if sensing something in the air, would let go in order to follow them, rise from their dreary inhibitions and egos, leave themselves behind, and watch as Claire lifted and soared on the updrafts of the ineffable, channelling their adoration and awe, dancing faultlessly, with a precision and grace akin to a swallow in flight. When she was finished and the audience could again catch its breath, she would watch them leap to their feet beyond the glare of the spotlight, a flower sometimes thrown into its white beam in a high, soft arc, landing on the stage without a sound, the applause deafening. She would bend low to pick it up and kiss it, then kiss her hand, flicking the moisture of her lips out at the adoring crowd, who clapped all the louder, shouting encore, encore, encore!

  It was enough to sustain her. She worked in the vaudeville scene, dancing, shifting from one venue to the next, ascending in slow, incremental steps up the ladder of the entertainment industry, for four years. It was then, gradually, that she began to feel she was missing something, that it was time to set her sights on something bigger, more advanced, grandiose. She began auditioning for things that were a little further away from her zone of expertise, asking a friend to coach her with her singing, though she had always known that, while she could hit almost any note nearly spot-on, her voice was neither particularly beautiful nor winningly unique. So the failure she met with in singing parts was no surprise. Her failure in auditions as an actress/dancer, however, came as a complete shock.

  Claire had always assumed that acting was the easiest (and involved the least talent) of all the arts. It was, after all, just people convincingly pretending to be something they were not; which, to some degree — in most situations, at least — every one of us did anyway. It was almost criminal that people were paid for it. Claire was told, however, repeatedly, discouragingly, that acting was certainly not her forte, and that she should leave behind any and all attempts at making it such.

  Dusting herself off from the criticism, she concluded that she would just have to find some kind of illustrious venue that featured dance alone, a Broadway show about the life of a dancer, for example. In search of such a prospect, she went to every performance (usually on the spare-no-expense arm of her most recent tryst) that featured dance alone. She saw an American musical called Aphrodite, which had intricate dance sequences created by the world-famous ballet choreographer Michel Fokine and a cast of three hundred. The poster for the show, which featured a testing-the-waters image of a loosely robed Greek goddess
, was pasted around Montreal, and overnight it caused such a controversy among the puritanical elite of the city that the theatre’s staff ended up rushing around the streets with glue and scraps of paper to censor the images. For Claire, the show was promising, but in the production itself she was disappointed to find that there was no single dancer who acted as the focal point, carrying the work in the way that she pictured herself doing someday. (The production also featured elaborate tableaux, which Claire found futile and irritating, dancers frozen in stop-motion poses, a kind of anti-dance, making up an image that was void of movement and life, that was as pointless and dead, thought Claire, as a photograph.)

  She began to wonder if her way out of the vaudeville scene might come in a less deliberate and calculated way, and arise as something more spontaneous and glamorous. Anything was possible in this business. It might simply be a matter of impressing the right person at the right time, dazzling someone in some high-up place, who would then back her, vouch for her, believe in her. Big breaks, after all, were not unheard of in Montreal.

  Claire had worked with her dance teacher’s son, Maurice Lacasse, the heir of the École de Danse Lacasse-Morenoff. She had landed several supporting roles from him, and had been called back on more than one occasion, dancing at a couple of private concerts in Westmount, a few gigs at the Palace Theatre, and a weekend at the Clarendon Hotel in Quebec City. In 1924, he told Claire about an audition for an eminent part in a Russian ballet, which was just then passing through Montreal and looking for a bit of local colour and flavour to add to their mix. The ballet was set to tour extensively throughout the Unites States. Claire trained and rehearsed for it relentlessly, and spent an entire evening willing herself to win the part. She showed up at the audition at the majestic Capitol Theatre an hour early, just to sit and focus all her thoughts and pining on the artistic director’s decision. Claire was rejected. But Maurice was not. And he and his wife, Carmen, were whisked away to a ballet school in Toronto, and within months, when the feature Russian couple of the company fell sick, they stepped up to replace them, and were instantly launched to stardom.