Serafim and Claire

by Mark Lavorato

  On a cold February morning, Serafim’s suspicions would become all but fact. He had spent the previous evening working in his private darkroom on the mysterious photo he’d taken during the Laurier Palace Theatre fire, until the light and chemicals had woven his concentration into a haze. He had a fitful sleep, twisting in his bed through fragmented dreams of Inês. When he woke the next morning, groggy, with a slight headache, pinching the gritty deposits from the corners of his eyes, he walked into the kitchen that he always kept fastidiously clear and clean, and froze in mid-stride. On the table in front of the chair where he always sat was a cup of tea, which had certainly not been there when he’d gone to bed. A teapot was soaking up the morning light beside it, as were a bowl of sugar and a carafe of cream from his icebox. The spoon used to stir the tea stained the saucer. The kettle was still on the range, though it was cold, so it must have boiled at some point in the middle of the night. The first thing Serafim touched was the match resting on the counter beside the stove, its tip a bulb of charcoal. Its tinder had burned along the shaft until, it seemed, some invisible pucker, breath of ice, had blown it out.

  Medium:Gelatin silver print

  Description:Aghast onlookers

  Location:St. Catherine Street, Montreal

  Date:January 1927

  A throng of people along a street are standing still, gaping in the direction of the camera. Though not into its lens; they are focused, intently, on something beyond it. Something that is palpably alarming, calamitous. Faces pale, brows creased.

  They look like people who’ve been interrupted while going about the daily motions of life, their Sunday errands on pause. Bags dangle from their hands, twined parcels wrapped in butcher’s paper cradled silently in their palms. The cane of an older gentleman has been lifted from the sidewalk and hangs forgotten, suspended somewhere out beside him, like the reality he has apparently just stepped out of.

  While they are standing shoulder to shoulder, they’re also harbouring their distance, not touching one another. Islands cordoned off in private despair; an archipelago of slender volcanoes, emitting shock and grief.

  They are dressed for the cold. A stonework building spans the background, snow gathered in muffled rows and arrangements on the horizontal ledges and mouldings. Spilling from a dark recess, a sinewy icicle stretches out for the ground, its translucence frail.

  In the centre of the photograph, between the tweed shoulders of two men in the mid-ground, a woman with bobbed though full-bodied hair is spinning to turn round, her curls unfocused, a mud-smoked smear. One can feel the urgency in her twist and step; her need to turn away — from whatever the scene is — and disappear.

  21

  Claire felt her charismatic momentum picking up, ploughing forward, and in many ways like it never had before. Toeing the line at the Kit-Kat Cabaret, she learned to keep her mouth shut and the jaws of her audience open, calls for encores to her acts becoming an almost nightly occurrence. She felt physically fitter than she had in years, working herself into a streaming sweat at every practice, pouring herself into new projects and choreography with an obsessive commitment reminiscent of her youth.

  What was driving her, however, had changed. Claire had always known that genius wasn’t born out of a gift or education or genetics. It was born, simply, out of love. When a person loved one thing and one thing only, they could give themselves to it, surrender themselves entirely, sacrifice blindly. Genius, as it turned out, wasn’t a cause but an effect. It was something that followed almost naturally in the wake of the truest kind of love. What had shifted in Claire wasn’t the intensity and conviction of that love, but what it was pinned to. For Claire it was no longer just about seamless movement, about physically channelling the music that was quivering in her bones; no longer, really, about great dance. It was about greatness itself. Claire was falling exclusively in love with the idea of success on a grand scale. And she was sure that genius would follow her there.

  It was around this time that Claire began frequenting the Terminal Club. It was no secret that the entertainment scene, even the film industry — with the new “talkies” synchronizing a track of sound and music with the moving pictures for the first time — was incorporating more and more black entertainers into its mix. It was the future, and everyone knew it. Black jazz was all the rage, Harlem dancers the ticket act for every venue, the “Black Bottom Stomp” taking over from the Charleston. Even the Kit-Kat hired black musicians and entertainers, though it continued to insist on a Caucasian-only audience (ads in the newspapers specifying that, while the artists in their acts and revues might be coloured, the club itself “welcomes white patrons only”).

  The Terminal, located right across from Windsor Station, was the heart of Montreal’s black community, where the bellhops, ushers, and porters of the city, who were almost exclusively black, gathered after their work shifts on the trains and at the downtown hotels at the end of the day. It was more of a joint than a club, with its minimum of trimmings, bare floors, pot-bellied stove, and lack of bathroom facilities. People had to head out into the alleyway during intermissions, where men stood in a line and urinated against brick walls, women in showy dresses and hats heading off in groups to squat behind refuse bins. Yet in spite of all this, it had become the after-hours locale, the place where talented musicians came to jam following their last act and the clientele could continue to party long after every uptown club had shut down for the night. It was a joint known for welcoming any colour that happened to love music, dance, and revelry.

  It was there that Claire almost always found someone to dance with who, if they didn’t end up teaching her a new step or two, could at least inspire with their impeccable rhythm and fluid feel for the new jazz, which was continuously replacing the old. Often they were women, Harlem dancers themselves, beautiful, flawless-figured performers in a rare moment offstage, though still showing scandalous amounts of their bodies — sandals, bare arms and legs, their skin covered at times, it seemed, by mere patches of sequins and tassels, blurs of blue, red, and silver that accentuated their swings, slides, shuffles, and sways. Claire danced in their midst, and a group of three or four of them would quickly become a spectacle, everyone stepping back from them to ogle and clap.

  While she was enjoying herself more than ever before, Claire’s circle of acquaintances, and even her flirtations and trysts, were far too low on the societal ladder to be influential connections, to be the decision-making people who guarded the cloudy heights of the industry. As winter turned into spring, and her twenty-sixth birthday (that grave milepost of defeat) crept ever closer along the blocks of her calendar, it occurred to her for the first time that, if she could just obtain a substantial sum of money, actually have a wad of cash in hand, she could simply bribe her way to those powerful people, strategically sliding bills into sleeves until she created her own break. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized that not only had this approach worked for her before, but it was the one thing that every powerful person she’d ever been around was sure to do on a daily, even hourly, basis. It was the way that other world worked. Money was the language they spoke.

  She had done all she could do in terms of practice, skill, and perseverance; she was as prepared as she ever would be. Claire felt more capricious, more daring, and bolder than ever before. She was also more than ready to do things others might consider ethically dubious in order to win over this necessary wad of bills, although she didn’t know what those things were, or even, for that matter, what they might look like. She hadn’t trained her eyes to see opportunities the way a swindler or racketeer might. It stood to reason that there were, very possibly, opportunities all around her. Her ticket to the top might already be within her grasp, lying somewhere in her everyday life, just waiting for her decisive action of plucking it out and running with it.

  It was an appealing thought, and one she was ruminating upon while walking to rehearsal
on an early Monday afternoon in May, a week before her wretched birthday. It was a sunny day and Claire was walking along St. Catherine Street, and had stopped to inspect a few hats in a window, squinting at the prices on the other side of the glass. The refraction from the window was glaring, and her reflection was almost as distracting as if she were standing in front of a mirror. She checked herself over, and as she did so, she noticed a man with a flat cap and a moustache standing a few paces behind her. He had something small and metal in his hand, and had stopped on the sidewalk for seemingly no other reason than to stare at her back in a kind of stunned disbelief. She turned to him, waiting for politesse and decorum to break the spell. He didn’t look away. Instead, he took on a demeanour of even greater shock. He appeared dazed and shaken. Odd bird, thought Claire, then turned and continued along the street.

  She looked back twice on her way to the Kit-Kat, and saw that he was following her, distantly, in a painfully unconvincing attempt to be furtive. When she glanced back, she caught him both times making adjustments to the tiny metal contraption he was carrying, just before he quickly held it up in front of his face for a brief instant. Claire reasoned that he must be taking photographs of her, a random woman walking down the sidewalk, which struck her as even more peculiar.

  She arrived at the club, checked over her shoulder to see if he was still there (he was), and stepped inside. She walked straight over to Callum the bartender, intending to alert him so he could keep an eye on the door in case the suspicious character came in. She would hate to look out from the stage during practice and see him there.

  But Callum was the first to speak. “Hey, doll, afraid your rehearsal’s been postponed a spell.”

  Claire slumped her shoulders. “Why?”

  Callum was slicing limes with a tiny knife on a thick wooden cutting board. “One of your fellow recitalists is presently indisposed, and will be for quite some time, I suspect. Her eminent furnisher’s dropped by again.”

  It was not always easy for Claire to understand what Callum was saying. English was one thing, but his was something else entirely. Claire was too proud to make him explain and headed towards the back to change, where, apparently, she would find out for herself what was going on.

  She heard the radio before anything else, a sleepy ballad by a big band. It was louder than it should have been, but as Claire got closer to the blaring doorway, blocked by a partitioned Chinese screen, she heard the illicit grunts and moans that the volume was intended to censor. She stopped in front of the doorway, unseen in the dark corridor, and stared in with a complete lack of discretion. It was the same Westmount councillor, atop the same dancer, the youngest and most attractive at the Kit-Kat. Again. In fact, this was the fourth time Claire had stood in that very same place, lingering for a moment in the murky hallway, peeking through the hinged slats of the screen with a feeling that was a mix of distaste, excitement, and contempt. Only on this day she experienced much, much more. She had an epiphany.

  Suddenly breathless, she could barely keep herself from sprinting as she hurried back down the hallway, past Callum at the bar, out the front doors, and into the bright afternoon. She stood on the sidewalk and pivoted round, surveying the streetscape, searching for the strange man with the camera. She soon caught sight of him across the lane, standing in front of a shop as if he was waiting there for her to come out again. He was facing the club, and as soon as he saw her, he began to snap pictures again, his lens pointed in her direction.

  Claire fixed herself in the centre of his viewfinder, along his line of sight, and stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, waiting for a horse-drawn cab to pass from the right and a motor car from the left. When she approached him, his camera was still in front of his face, obscuring it, while he repeatedly released the shutter, his blind fingers turning a dial to advance the film. She felt like a celebrity, her every motion hungrily captured by a camera.

  As she stopped in front of him, he snapped a final shot then hesitated, as if he was scared to lower the contraption from his eye. Finally he did, slowly, and offered her an unsure smile.

  Claire considered his moustache, the olive colour of his skin. “Do you speak French?” she asked in patois.

  He nodded, looked down at his camera as if in shame, and delicately adjusted one of its dials.

  Claire grinned, looked up and down the street. Then she leaned in close to him. “You and I, we need to talk.”

  [THREE]

  SERAFIM AND CLAIRE

  Paris, França; 22 de abril de 1928

  Adorado Serafim,

  I must confess my complete astonishment at the inquiry in your last letter, of Inês Barbosa and the state of her health. Serafim, you are the closest that I have to a brother in this world, so I am confident you will forgive me for suggesting that, after a full two years have passed since her marriage to Gustavo Barbosa, perhaps it is time to banish her from your thoughts and compulsions. I will of course not let you down, and have already sent the requested inquiries, and upon their reply will duly pass on news of her well-being. Though I worry of your overlooking opportunities in Montreal in favour of that which is categorically unattainable elsewhere.

  I have been desperately trying to break into the illustrated magazines that are commissioning candid photography, and have met with some, but mostly limited, success. It’s often said at the Café du Dôme that in photography right now it isn’t enough to be a genius, you also have to be Hungarian. And it’s true. All the names making headway in avant-garde photography are from Hungary: Stefan Lorant, László Moholy-Nagy, Kertész, Aigner, Brassaï. This doesn’t leave much room for the rest of us, having to fit ourselves into our chosen medium’s minuscule niche.

  This doesn’t mean I’m not content. I have more than enough work on my hands, and plenty of time for private pursuits as well. Perhaps it is worthwhile to remind oneself that, no matter how devoted one is, there are some obstacles that one will never be able to surmount.

  Os meus sinceros cumprimentos,

  Álvaro

  22

  As the winter tarried, Serafim became accustomed to waking in the morning to find a cold cup of tea on his table, waiting for him in front of his usual seat. It didn’t happen often (once every two months at most) and he was gradually becoming less alarmed by the phenomenon. He was no longer scared to be in the darkroom the following day, shivers climbing his back as he watched photographic paper in the pan of developer, portrait faces emerging like sceptres from a fog bank. He rounded the corner to his kitchen every morning, paused at the threshold, and sometimes even felt a pang of regret when he was greeted by an empty table. When he did see a cup of tea there, he would find himself carefully inspecting every artifact in the room with scientific scrutiny, as if looking for clues; though he didn’t want so much to solve the mystery as simply to verify that he already held the solution.

  He wanted to tell Antonino about the tea, but he was sure he wouldn’t believe him. Besides, Antonino had his own issues to deal with. The Italian community was so industriously dedicated to silencing his anti-fascist views that they’d managed to wheedle and pull their strings all the way to the Canadian immigration office, which had put Antonino under investigation for staying in the country on a student visa while having apparently ceased his studies altogether. At the same time, Antonino had just managed to convince an attractive young woman he’d known in his native Sicilian city to marry him and join him in the hinterlands. He had barely scraped together the funds for her steamship ticket (Serafim was proud to be able to reciprocate the favour and lend him some money to do so), and she would be setting sail in a few months. He’d lied through his teeth about the weather.

  Considering Antonino’s plight — as well as that of Álvaro, who, like Serafim, hadn’t exactly met with great success while following his passion — Serafim decided to ask Antonino’s opinion on what he thought God wanted from people. (This was his way of tou
ching on the topic of the ethereal, of the hereafter and providence.)

  As they were sitting on the stoop sipping beer, Serafim finished his glass and placed it gently on the concrete between them. “Antonino, I wonder what you think of God’s plans. When I hear of your visa story, of these powerful influences pitting themselves against you — and against anyone who marches out of line — at times it makes me wonder if God is taming us, if He would rather we be docile, like sheep. Maybe He flogs the ones who are more wild or inspired than the others, in the same way man does with a horse, who, after it’s broken, is left without a will, surrendering his resolve and spirit entirely to his master. Isn’t it possible that that is what God is trying to do with us, what He wants of us?”

  Antonino squinted. “For starters, I don’t believe in God. Instead, I think it is the complexity of the world, of man, that unthinkingly forces us, not in the direction of submission, but of modesty. All deities aside, the way people act on their own is more than enough to drive us towards humility. Couldn’t one also see these endless defeats from the opposite side, as events that actually serve us? What if chaos is constantly pushing us into corners that somehow result in our betterment, oblige us to demonstrate the stuff we are made of? However, if you really must think of it as God, then why not take comfort in the fact that the Messiah, the saints, martyrs, they were all, every one of them, eccentrics, fanatics, revolutionaries. All of them were, as you say, marching out of line. Yet they were all eventually rewarded for it.”