Serafim and Claire

by Mark Lavorato

  Serafim crossed his arms, stood firm. “And you would be exactly right in that, sir.”

  The gentleman looked up, flabbergasted, searching for words. Not finding them, he hurriedly gathered the three sheets from his ledger and handed them back to Serafim. “We will purchase none of these. Good day to you, sir.”

  Serafim, indignant, looked at the contact sheets. “Then I have no use for those, and will leave you to dispose of them yourself. Good day to you, sir.” And he turned, left the room, and made his way to his cabin in the third-class section of the ship to get his things.

  The ship was empty, and the rooms were stripped of their sheets and blankets. Serafim was glad to see that his trunk was in the centre of the room he’d stayed in, so he could tell it apart from the others. He sat heavily on one of the berths, feeling annoyed and doubtful.

  Staring forward, he became aware of two things almost simultaneously: one, that his trunk had been moved from where he’d secured it; and two, that the lock had been jimmied open and was now warped and damaged.

  “Virgem Maria!” he hissed, clumping onto his knees on the floor and wrenching the trunk open, his hand diving to the place where he’d left his every escudo in a bulging envelope, safe and sound. It was gone. So he emptied the trunk onto the floor to search more thoroughly, scattering his clothes on the ground, shaking them out, hoping for the envelope, plump and full (like a paper grub that might have wormed its way deeper into his wardrobe), to drop from one of his garments. It did not.

  A man’s voice hollered down a nearby gangway, calling out that no passengers should now be on board. Doors were being closed, rooms checked. So Serafim, arms moving limp and feeble, piled his clothes back into his trunk without folding them, closed the lid, latched it shut, took the key from his pocket, and tossed it, useless now, onto one of the berths. Then he left the ship.

  He carried his trunk through the chaotic port, lumbering awkwardly, not knowing where he was going or why. He heard a group of Italians calling out at each other, angry shouts escalating, becoming incensed. Montrealers stopped, agape, waiting to see what would come of it, whether or not someone would be killed, but Serafim was already used to the Italians’ dramatic antics, and knew that whatever it was, they would work it out before it ever came to blows. Nearby, he found a section of a jetty that was planked with wood, and which moored some of the smaller vessels in the port. He placed his trunk onto the boards there and sat on its lid, hunched over, watching the smaller boats oscillate and sway in the water around him, rocking themselves to sleep.

  Oddly enough, he wasn’t panicked. He was more numb than anything else. He thought how strange it was that, at the moments in our lives when we should be feeling the most, we almost always feel the least. He was in a dismal mess, with no money whatsoever, destitute in a foreign land, with no real plan of action coming to mind but to sit and watch a bevy of small boats list and bob in the water in front of him. Behind him, the Italians were winding down from their argument. Above him, a seagull floated by. Around him, gradually, the thought and image of Inês Sá began to coalesce from the water and its dizzy refractions, swirling into a daydream that was warm and inviting.

  The daydream was a photograph in the flesh, a tableau of two actors, motionless: Inês lying in the sun, naked and shameless, her hair untied and cascading over her shoulders, her arms loosely cradling Serafim, who lay coiled on top of her, weak and tired, his hands confining her breasts like scallop shells cupping a mermaid. On the ground beside them was a cup of tea, a bucolic witness. Both within the daydream and without, Serafim grinned.

  “Serafimeh? Tutto bene?” Antonino Spada tapped Serafim’s trunk with his foot. “Eh!”

  Serafim, startled, grabbed hold of the trunk’s lid. “Antonino.”

  “Yes, ridiculous, but I am still here,” Antonino said, looking back at the same group of men who had been in disagreement earlier. “These odious banchieri, the employment agents I told you of — and others — here to exploit their own ignorant countrymen, right off the boat, get their meathooks in early. But I tell you, just a few pointed questions, you can divide the con men from the genuine, send the former limping back to their brothels. And you, Serafimeh? What are you still doing here?”

  “I was robbed” — Serafim bent round to finger the jimmied lock of his trunk — “of every escudo I had. I’ve not a centavo to my name now.”

  Antonino took his hat off, stamped the boards at his feet. “Merda.” He slapped the side of his leg with his hat. “Cazzo!” he belted out, conclusively. Then, with a long sigh, he put his hat back on. “And your camera, what you need to ply your trade, did they take this as well?”

  “No, no, I still have my camera.”

  “A stroke of luck, then.” Antonino craned his neck to size up a row of taxis waiting in a long black, vinyl-roofed queue on the other side of a railway track. “Why don’t you come with me. Help me with your trunk. Come on, grab hold, I’m not going to carry it alone.”

  Serafim, with dull automation, did as he was told, and was carted from the port and into an Italian neighbourhood, then into a long and thin apartment that had twenty-two other people living inside it, bordanti, boarders who paid an Italian family three dollars a week for cooking, cleaning, laundry, and lodging. Antonino handed over his own money for both of them, reassuring Serafim that he would find a job soon enough and could pay him back then. Serafim thanked him quietly, and set his trunk in a corner of the apartment, where he was given a thin, straw-stuffed mattress on the floor and a blanket that smelled of horses.

  That night, he and Antonino ate their meal, a plate of pasta, on their laps, out on the apartment’s balcony, overlooking an impossibly long street that was lined and trembling with young trees. Serafim wasn’t in the mood to speak, and spent his time listening to Antonino rant and bluster. Between each of his diatribes, Antonino would offer a few encouraging words, asserting that things were sure to go more Serafim’s way in the coming weeks.

  When they had finished their meal, Antonino lifted a small basket of bread from between their feet and broke a piece off to clean his plate, wiping it to a porcelain shine. He offered some to Serafim, who shook his head. But Antonino insisted, ripping off a long chunk and tossing it onto his plate. Serafim looked down at it for a moment, then out at the street, up at the grey sky, and back down to his lap. Then he took the piece of crust and began wiping up the remnants of the sauce, daintily at first but with growing gusto, sponging every blot of tomato sauce that stretched with the sheen of olive oil, soaking it from the plate and into the dough, which then slipped from his fingers and melted in his mouth.

  Serafim closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and rested on the red brick of the building, sated with a satisfaction that seemed to glide out from the terrace and over the trees. He wondered if every blessing was like this; like the weight of a songbird that had been trapped, fettered, and at last let go.

  Ville de Québec, le 25 avril 1928

  Ma chère Claire,

  Having just gotten off the telephone with you, I will admit that I feel no small degree of frustration with our conversation; or, rather, your seemingly apathetic response to the horrible news, of which I am still shocked you heard for the first time from my lips, and not elsewhere. The fact that the Supreme Court has decided that the constitution does not recognize women as “qualified persons,” and hence cannot be orchestrators in our own fate and station in this country, didn’t appear, if I may say so, to affect you in the slightest. Claire, sometimes I could shake you!

  This frustration got me thinking about our conversations of late, our letters, which reminded me of something. Claire, you know very well that I have never considered it my place to be critical of you or your choices, but to be perfectly forthcoming, I’m not sure that you are even aware of this: Do you know that I never hear you speak or express any degree of curiosity about anything outside your own epic journey to
wards becoming a famous dancer? Not so much as a whisper that alludes to even the existence of the plight or quandary of anyone outside your own being.

  I promise this will not descend into a lecture. I guess it is more a question than anything else. Am I not right? And if I am, Claire, I cannot help but wonder, my dearest little sister: Does it not get lonely in that head of yours? Do you not miss, even once in a while, the reassuring company of other people’s stories?

  Avec toute mon affection,

  Cécile

  17

  Claire was sitting on the only chair in her apartment, staring forward at nothing, the cracked and glued-together bowl on the table in front of her cupping three apples with fragile care; a still life of bread crumbs and blighted fruit, faithless offering to the light that filtered through her window from the streetscape outside.

  For days now, in a murky and faraway consciousness, Claire had been busy dismissing her sister’s insinuation that she had gradually become, for all intents and purposes, a narcissist. What her sister did not know was that, over the winter, Claire had accrued what felt like enough worries and concerns to fill more than a few lives. She was still working at the same scruffy cabaret in the east end, still failing to pay off her debt to the waitress who’d lent her the money for her “salvation,” still hadn’t succeeded in finding a job at any of the reputable establishments in the city, while in two days she would be turning twenty-five. But there was more. Since Claire had come home from the hospital, she had been waiting for her body to return to normal, to find its balance again. She religiously took a teaspoon of cognac with a bit of milk at eleven each morning to build up her strength, while waiting for her menses to fall back in line with the new moon, like the clockwork it had been running on since she was thirteen. Yet three full months after her operation, there was still not a hint of this happening.

  Claire didn’t particularly want to see Dr. Bertrand to ask him about such matters, but she knew he was the one person who was already acquainted with the necessary details and could be trusted. Not turning Claire in to the authorities the very moment he’d learned she’d had an abortion made him just as much a criminal as she was. So she decided she would take a walk near his practice, saunter past his front doors, where, provided there were no other patients waiting to be seen, she would step inside and get his opinion.

  It was the very beginning of May, when the arms of the trees were still grey, though the tips of their fingers were just starting to turn rubbery and brown with buds. It was the time when gangs of pick-and-shovel men, municipal workers, went out into the streets to chip and chisel ditches alongside the sidewalks, allowing for the accumulation of melting ice and snow to run off into the sewers. Claire listened to the music of the streets as she walked, the rhythmic swinging of the men’s tools making hollow thunks in the ice that were followed by tinkling echoes. The returning crows watched from bare branches, offering a ragged chorus of caws and chortles, while the murmur of meltwater at her feet burbled through the ditches in rushing streams, disappearing into the cool black mouths of storm drains, which hummed as deep as gargling throats.

  Claire happened to pass Dr. Bertrand’s practice at a fortuitous moment. Not only were there no patients waiting, the doctor himself was standing in the entranceway, his winter-pale face soaking up the first of the year’s sun, eyes closed.

  Claire hesitated on the sidewalk, waiting for him to see her. “Dr. Bertrand?”

  He opened his eyes. “Claire,” he said, as if he’d been wishing for her to appear in front of him, as if he’d conjured her himself. “Follow me.”

  He led her into a room and closed the door behind them, gesturing for her to sit on a wooden examination table. He stood opposite her, arms across his chest, bushy eyebrows furrowed. He looked angry.

  Claire smoothed her dress down, waiting for him to say something, and realized for the first time that he might actually expect her to pay him — for his services, as well as that of the hospital, which, after all, he’d footed the bill for. Aghast that she hadn’t thought of this before, she tried hard to smile. “And how is Mrs. Bertrand these days? Keeping well?”

  Dr. Bertrand stared her down for a few weighted seconds more before speaking. “Why did you not come to me, child? I would have done it. I would have done it for you myself, I swear. And in doing so, I would have put myself at considerably less risk than the position you forced me into, that of having to both remedy and cover up for some exploitative underworld butcher. Having seen his work first-hand, I happen to doubt the man was even a veterinarian.”

  Claire looked into her lap, at her hands gathered there, her voice retreating into a whisper. “I don’t know, sir.”

  Dr. Bertrand emitted a long breath. “Well, let us have a look at how the sutures have healed over.”

  Claire lay back on the clothed-over table and lifted her dress. His warm hands pushed and manipulated her skin. “It is less pretty than I had hoped for, I must confess. But, all things considered . . .” He pulled her dress back down over her stomach, gestured that she could sit up again.

  “The reason I came, doctor, is that, well, my cycles haven’t yet returned to normal, and I should have thought that, by now . . .”

  Dr. Bertrand shook his head. “No, Claire, I’m afraid you don’t quite understand what has happened here. The intense scraping in your uterus left enough tissue damage to give way to an acute infection. The only way to keep you alive, to keep that infection from spreading into the rest of your system, was to remove, entirely, the contaminated organ. Meaning I have taken out your uterus. Your ovaries are still in place, so you will not know the symptoms of menopause until you’re much older, but in terms of your cycles, and with that the possibility of children, you will never, can never, have that again. I am sorry. But again, given the circumstances, it was the only solution.”

  Claire looked around the room, her eyes eventually settling into one of its blank corners. She blinked. “I . . . Thank you, Dr. Bertrand. Now, I really must be going.” Claire pushed off the examination table and rushed from the room, out into the springtime street, where she wandered the wet sidewalks of Montreal for hours, past gangs of men swinging their picks and adzes, workers chinking away troughs of slush and sluice. Icy water sloughing away in every direction around her.

  Hiking along, she was filled with the sudden urge to be occupied, busy, tirelessly busy, and so she trudged the streets until it was time for her shift at the cabaret, where she then worked all night long, even going into the back and scrubbing dishes once the manager wanted to send her home. For the next two days she managed to keep herself almost completely active, frantic with tasks that were growing in both quantity and complexity. She worked until her eyelids were leaden with sleep.

  However, during those two days, and even at her busiest moments, there were thoughts that managed to enter her mind for a few troubling seconds. Claire felt that she had become less free, confined to a future to which she hadn’t given much consideration before. In fact, she had never once gotten around to picturing what her life might look like after twenty-five, hadn’t imagined her existence beyond the stardom she was so sure she was going to attain. The threatening vertigo that she felt during these moments made her push the thoughts away and she would quickly find something else to do, something difficult, something in need of her undivided concentration.

  On the night of her twenty-fifth birthday, she went out dancing, alone, and had all the men buy her drinks until her speech was slurred and almost every other reveller had gone home for the night. A single musician was at the piano, playing for Claire alone, a tune that was slow and sad. The pianist eyed her as she swayed her hips from side to side, her hands wrapped around her own torso as if they were the arms of a smitten lover.

  As she danced alone on the hardwood floor, she heard her own voice in her head, speaking to her. Both detached and warmly reassuring, the voice told her: You ha
ve only ever done one thing. You only know how to do one thing. Without it, you are nothing. You must understand that you have not failed in your pursuit. Instead, will has failed you. You can continue, but you must do so on your own, compensating for the things that the force of will once provided you with. In order to rise above your station in life and the situation you have made for yourself, you’ll need to be bolder than ever before, more daring and audacious. Time is not on your side. If you are going to make a move, you must do so now. Now.

  Claire straightened and woozily turned round to take in the room. Besides the pianist and the bartender, there was only one man in the club, a grey-haired gentleman, watching her with bleary eyes and nursing what was likely his fourteenth tumbler of Scotch. She walked straight towards him, leaned on the bar. “It is my birthday. You should buy me a drink.”

  The man smiled the smile of a drunk. His suit was trendy, expensive, his shoes freshly shined. “Yeah? And how old are you, sweetie?”

  “Twenty-four. I’ll have what you’re having.”

  The man snickered and gestured for the bartender to comply. Then he stood up. “Hafta visit the gents’, doll, but’ll be right back.”

  “I can’t wait,” said Claire, putting an arm around his waist, her hand slipping down to his buttock. She kissed him, slowly, then leaned away, letting him pass by her on his way to the urinals. Before disappearing through the doors at the back, he exchanged another lusty look with her, then stumbled inside.

  Picking up her coat from a seat, Claire shoved the wallet she’d just stolen from the back of his trousers into one of her coat pockets and hurried outside, where she waved down a cab and headed home.

  The next day, she went to one of the biggest cabarets in town, the Kit-Kat, on Stanley, and asked to speak to the manager. Unfortunately, he recognized her. “Wha’d’you want here?”

  “A job. I can waitress, and dance. Both better than most.”