Serafim and Claire

by Mark Lavorato

  Now, five years later, Claire held the photo with her and Corrine in it, standing in a chorus line on a vaudeville stage. Claire found herself wondering where she was, if she was safe, well; though she happened to doubt very much that she was. Isn’t it strange, she thought, how she hadn’t recalled this incident for ages, and how it could rise up out of nowhere and leave her with a more cumbersome feeling than before? She’d already felt hampered of late, as if she needed to slow down, stop, rest, and take stock. And she saw this recollection as yet another reason to fear what would happen when she finally did.

  Paris, França; 25 de agosto de 1927

  Estimado Serafim,

  How fascinating to think that we were, almost certainly, both taking photos in the streets yesterday, capturing the riots in our respective cities, sparked by the same event. The wrongful execution of Sacco and Vanzetti has, or so I’ve read, incited protests the world over. Our planet, as the artists of Montparnasse are wont to say, is more interwoven than ever before. The riots here besieged the American embassy, and did appreciable damage to the Moulin Rouge. I’ve enclosed a contact sheet from one of the films I shot throughout. I would love to know what took place in Montreal — protests, unrest, arson? What of the anarchists there?

  I have also included more pages of the illustrated magazine every photographer is striving to work for, which features, almost exclusively, candid photography. I know of several people who believe this to be our medium’s future; though the camera of choice here seems mostly to be (unlike yours and mine) the Ermanox, for its high-resolution optics and ease of concealment. However, before you begin saving for a new model, you should also know that these are the same individuals who champion the photomontage, which I vigorously dislike.

  Apart from photography, the design in Europe at the moment is all refreshingly modern. Art deco delineates every interior with geometric motifs and bold colours, while the surrealists are proclaiming this as their very own époque des sommeils.

  What news of your fascists? Are all the Italian immigrants you told me of still standing so united?

  Espero ansiosamente a tua resposta,

  Álvaro

  20

  By the following summer, Serafim felt he was making a steady-enough income to venture on from his life as a boarder in a congested Italian household, with its seasonal flux of migrant workers coughing and snoring — railwaymen, construction workers, miners — as well as the apartment’s persistent smell of horse manure and hay that wafted in from the stable located in a nook behind the building. But since almost all the connections and acquaintances he’d made were Italian, he found a place in another, though older, Italian neighbourhood, at St. Timothée and St. Agathe, only a few blocks east of the Red Light. It was tight, as far as apartments went, and there was little movement of fresh air in the summer months, but (the real reason he’d taken it) there was an uncommonly large closet at its centre, which Serafim could convert into a makeshift darkroom to develop his personal photos. He also found a hidden storage space that was cool and dry, where he constructed a kind of drawer to store both his developed film and the large spools of unexposed thirty-five-millimetre motion-picture stock that he bought and cut into smaller sections for use in his Leica.

  Serafim then purchased a second-hand set of dishes, as well as a few pots and pans, and tried his hand at cooking for the first time in his life. He failed miserably, convinced that he was missing out on those critical secrets which every recipe apparently hid, secrets that only the likes of Inês Sá discovered and hoarded. Though with scarcely enough money for food, he had little choice but to eat his culinary disasters, soaking up the blackened remains from his plate with a crust of bread.

  Meanwhile, Antonino was increasingly becoming less a student and more a journalist. Il Risveglio Italiano had quickly gained a reputation as a voice of controversy and agitation, and with the few new friends this won him (friends with deeper pockets than Antonino enjoyed), the newspaper was able to expand to a print run of several thousand copies a week. At the same time, aside from his journalistic duties, Antonino was helping to organize three food co-operatives in the city, the most dynamic of which was in Ville Émard, where a hall, the Sala Mazzini, soon became the headquarters of the local anti-fascist movement.

  While the anti-fascist group remained intensely unpopular, and continued to incite aggressive and even violent opposition, it did manage to win over several labour unions in its appeal. The swelling of its threadbare ranks, however, did not go unnoticed. Antonino not only received threats, but he began to have problems when dealing with any red tape that was even distantly connected to prominent members of the Italian community, inconveniences about which, he endlessly exclaimed, he “couldn’t give a cabbage.”

  He sometimes invited Serafim along to take photos during planned altercations. A cluster of anti-fascists waving socialist red flags would descend upon a proud march celebrating Giovanni Caboto or Guglielmo Marconi, ranks of unyielding men in black shirts and women in charcoal skirts and white blouses parading along Sherbrooke Street with great fanfare, everyone bearing the fascist insignia. Serafim was astounded that people weren’t actually killed. Ironically, the most violent confrontations erupted after Sunday Mass, when Antonino and his tiny clan would gather outside the Madonna della Difesa Parish. The curate there was the single most influential proponent of Mussolini in the city — the church a stronghold of fascist propaganda, and the chief co-ordinator of blackshirt parades — and the man would all but sic his churchgoers on them, a furious mob forming around Antonino’s provocateurs, shoving, punching, kicking. Afterwards, the tattered group would walk away, limping and bruised, swabbing drops of blood from their nostrils, Antonino striding beside them with an air of accomplishment.

  Lionel Groulx, an activist, Catholic priest, and historian, was immensely popular with French Canadians at the time, and was also a firm proponent of corporatism, which he believed would one day replace class struggle with class co-operation, an idea shared with Mussolini. Fascists, and indeed the majority of Montrealers, were not exactly great sympathizers of leftist causes or ideologies like anarchism, so the turnout of protesters to rally against the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti was a rather meagre one. It was so unimpressive, in fact, that Serafim had only snapped a few exposures throughout, and when he developed them, he couldn’t find a single frame worth sending to Álvaro, who was used to seeing things of a much more dramatic and glamorous nature.

  In the autumn, Antonino also moved, though only a few blocks away from the original boarding house where they’d roomed together for their first year. He had found two other aspiring journalists as flatmates, which meant the apartment was steeped in discussion. The three of them had taken to sitting on the stoop of their building in the Indian-summer heat, chatting, smoking the slow of the evenings away like a wick. All of them bought cigars from the Italian company Capuano & Pasquale, who divvied them out for a penny each. Serafim often joined the group, sitting on their periphery, watching them as they spoke while petting the neighbourhood dog that would inevitably drop by, a mongrel panting onto the men’s leather shoes, the dog’s shadow waiting beside Serafim, eager to amble away and seek out the children playing in the streets before they were called indoors for the night. Radio orchestras crooned through windows as they talked.

  Whenever they were left alone, Antonino would encourage Serafim to analyze or intellectualize his photography, asking him unwieldy questions and patiently waiting until he answered. Serafim thought it a good exercise, sure that Álvaro was doing the same thing in Parisian cafés every day.

  “But why is it the setting of the street that draws you so?” asked Antonino, bracing for the long pause he knew would follow.

  It stretched out longer than both of them expected. “I think . . . that art’s function is to depict life, the human experience. And life, real life, manifests itself in its most naked form on the street.” />
  “You don’t think that’s done behind closed doors?”

  “No. Well, yes. But what I mean is . . . the street is the place, for example, where our greatest victories are celebrated, our traditions, and sudden or dire circumstances like protests and riots and warfare and revolts. But . . . but that nakedness extends to peacetime as well, to people going about their daily errands, buying bread at the bakery, carrots at the grocer and such. We are never more genuine than we are in public life.”

  “Is that the right word, ‘genuine’?”

  “Yes. I mean the way we keep ourselves on guard, how we restrain and contain ourselves — that is what reveals us. I mean the cadence of our pace, or our fashion sense, posture, disposition, our confidence, how we react when we are bumped into, how we cope with everyday annoyances. That is who we really are: the person we are on the streets.”

  “But don’t those things happen in private as well? At a private party, for instance.”

  “No, because a private party isn’t changing constantly, the way the streets do. The streets are the most dynamic place we encounter. We must be in the mindset of a traveller there, moving through an exotic land, a land that changes anew, every day, every minute. The happenings on a street are jerky, with distinct occurrences right beside each other, with no connection, and no transition. Endless, random juxtapositions, a constant stream of unexpectedness. The street is graceless, like us. Which is precisely its grace, why it must be captured and depicted. Why photographs taken of it are art.”

  “Serafim,” said Antonino, stretching out a hand to tap him gently on the back, “I think you should learn to organize your thoughts more coherently. But I think this is a good start.”

  The two of them continued to smoke, moving to easier subjects, until the neighbourhood was completely dark, moths drunkenly orbiting the few lampposts, the drone of masculine voices muttering in the shadows, pointing themselves out with the red tips of their cigars as they inhaled.

  It was the same autumn that Serafim’s unspoken suspicion about Inês and what had since happened to her began to take root. He soon lost patience developing the elusive exposure that he’d captured the day of the Laurier Palace Theatre fire, the day he saw that ghostly flicker of Inês’s face in the street; which, in the darkroom, only yielded a blur of bobbed hair. So instead he reverted to developing the shot he’d taken of Inês at the Palácio de Cristal, a shot that was infinitely more gratifying to reproduce; so much so that he spent the majority of his free time over the next few months in his converted closet working on it. He’d long ago perfected the exposure’s development, but now he knew how to refine it to an even greater degree, drawing out the features of her face, intensifying her expression, while burning-in the livid clouds that loomed in the background over her shoulders. The more satisfied Serafim was with these results, the more dissatisfied he became with his inadequate sexual life, which was still pathetically confined to furious bouts of auto-stimulation.

  As the winter approached, Serafim — for photographic purposes only, to be sure — began venturing into the Red Light district, located only a few luring blocks away. There he would snap pictures of the various harlots, madams, pimps, and procurers as they solicited men who were passing by, stopping many of them to make what seemed to be secretive negotiations. He would wander down Gauchetière Street, where it was common to see young women buying cocaine and sniffing it out of tiny spoons in plain view, standing in a circle as if they were smoking casual cigarettes. They would often call him over, giggling, intimating for him to join in, or gesture to a nearby window where another mistress would be leaning out over the sill, waiting to render her services. His photos were poorly composed, often unfocused. Which in turn had him venturing back — in the interest, to be sure, of attaining better results.

  Then, one December evening when it was too dark to take photos, he decided to take a stroll for some fresh air. He left his apartment without his Leica but with much more cash in his wallet than it was his custom to carry. He was soon moseying down a small and discreet avenue in the Red Light district, and when he was approached (as he had been countless times before) he did not, in keeping with his well-established habit, hold up a hand and shake his head, lower his gaze, and scuttle off in the direction he’d been heading. Instead, he listened to what a slick-haired man had to say. The man smelled of pungent cologne and shaving cream, and asked Serafim point-blank what kind of woman visited him in his dreams. Serafim hesitated at first, but then eagerly described her, and in likely more detail than the procurer had ever heard before. Amused, he led Serafim two blocks farther along, asked for five dollars, and handed him over to a madam standing at the entrance to a nondescript apartment, from which Serafim could hear a piano playing ragtime somewhere nearby.

  Respectfully taking off his hat, he was led up a narrow staircase, having to step around an accordion player who was swaying to his own music and who gave Serafim a cordial nod in passing. At the top of the stairs the madam ushered him into a small bedroom and sealed him inside, alone with a not-unattractive brunette. Upon his entering, she had stood from the bed, placed the emery board she’d been so busily filing her nails with onto a bedside table, and pulled her dress over her head.

  Serafim averted his eyes from her nudity. She laughed, settled herself in the centre of the mattress, and waved him over. Serafim scrunched his hat in his hands and made his sheepish way to the foot of the bed, blushing, unsure what to do. He undressed, folded his clothes, piled them on a chair, and stood there in front of her, covering his erection, awkward and gawky. The mistress had to physically reach forward and pull him onto her and guide him inside. Intensely excited, he didn’t last long, and they were soon sharing a cigarette, lying side by side, Serafim desperately trying to think of things to say. He felt somehow unsatisfied; but also purged, released from a kind of nameless discredit. The act had been messier than he’d imagined, his stomach sweaty and both their fluids matting his pubic hair. In his drained calm he wondered if he should ask her what her name was, or where she grew up.

  But before he could, there was commotion outside, the sounds of panicked movement throughout the building, a quick double knock at the door, the accordion player stopping abruptly and hustling away, the last wheezes of his instrument trailing behind him. The girl pounded a fist against the mattress, cursed, and rolled off the bed, throwing her dress on and stalling in front of the mirror to apply some quick makeup. Serafim looked at the door and heard the sound of bodies rushing and stomping on the other side of it. Then he looked over at the woman and waited for her to say something, to explain what was going on.

  Unflustered, having clearly done this several times before, she muttered (her mouth stretched wide, applying mascara), “Police raid.”

  “Excuse me? Police?”

  The door burst in. Serafim fumbled to cover himself, falling onto the floor, scrambling towards his clothes. The mistress put her mascara down and picked up her purse.

  They were not handcuffed but brusquely guided down the stairs and out, single file, into the cool night air. Several paddy wagons — named for their customary function of loading up groups of revelling and combative Irish — were waiting for them in the street, men and women alike cramming into their boxes, mumbling lighthearted jokes. Girls were pinched, and frivolously slapped the men’s shoulders in retaliation, fixed their hair and hats, and passed lipstick and compact mirrors to one another. Men tucked their shirts in, straightened their ties, and adjusted their cuffs and collars.

  Serafim, beneath the clenching terror in his chest, felt his throat begin to swell and smart. He wanted to weep. Was there any harder luck in this world than to be sent to jail for losing one’s virginity? Could there be a more lopsided justice than having his only time in a brothel be the one that sent him to prison?

  The mistress that Serafim had been with noticed his expression and, sensing he was struggling with an unnecessary w
eight on his shoulders, shuffled closer. “Don’t worry. Happens all the time.” Her French was extremely colloquial, her accent garbled and nasal. “It’s just for the piastres, the cash, sweetie. Tomorrow they’ll write it all up in the papers, the pretty sum this raid won for the city’s coffers, and that’s it. Politics. Nothing more. Just don’t go giving your real name or address. Make something up, pay your bail as soon as we get there, and disappear. They only want your five dollars. Whereas I’ll likely have to give a little more.” She winked, and stepped into the back of one of the paddy wagons.

  Serafim, relieved, paused on the road behind the vehicle and, as if to follow the sudden sense of floating release he felt, found himself looking up into the grid of wires that draped across the side street, netting in the night sky and its plankton swirl of stars. It was then, as he was looking up, that it happened, again. A woman with a remarkable likeness to Inês Sá stepped into the frame of a lit window and looked down at him for a moment, with something like recognition. Unlike Inês, the woman appeared tired, worn, perhaps even in pain. Just then a policeman nudged Serafim towards the rear door of the nearest paddy wagon, and Serafim stepped inside, excusing himself for the crowding. The door slammed shut, and the paddy wagon was soon jostling down the avenue on its way to the police station, while Serafim’s thoughts swam away in quite another direction.

  Over the next two months, his initial suspicions matured, became more refined and intricate as they moved towards a kind of irrefutability. In Serafim’s mind, the only way to approach these otherworldly phenomena was to use otherworldly logic. Inês Sá, it seemed clearer and clearer to him, was dead — an accident, sudden sickness, in childbirth, or a suicide. Anything was possible. And it would appear that the regret she’d been wrestling with, at not accepting Serafim’s hand in marriage, had haunted her throughout her final days, and so her ghost was now haunting him in an attempt to make amends, to redeem herself, and stay true to the secret affections she’d so convincingly concealed.