Serafim and Claire (6 page)

Later that afternoon, one of the nuns walked past Claire with a pitcher of water. Striding briskly, she pointed at the carafe and offered to top up Claire's glass. “
Plus d'eau
?” she asked, hesitating at the foot of the bed.

“
Non, merci, j'ai
—” Claire cut herself off, shook her head. “No,” she repeated, still frozen. The nun continued through the ward as if nothing out of place had happened.

Medium:
Wet plate; albumen silver print

Description:
Álvaro de Sousa, age thirteen

Location:
Oporto, Portugal

Date:
1918

A boy stands on a doorstep. There is an empty pot on the ground beside him, where a flower might have grown at some point but has since withered into a dry curl, a woody, arthritic finger pointing back on itself.

His skin has seen a great deal of sun, looks coarser than it should for his age, wind-dry, dust-furrowed. Eyes pearls inlaid on bronze. A wisp of hair has fallen limply onto the mud beach of his forehead and hangs there forgotten, marooned.

He is wearing pants that might be brown, and a darker vest, presumably black, that contrasts with his off-white shirt. The shirt has distinctive rounded collars, which appear refined. And while his lips are pressed together into a line that should further support this notion of gentility, his expression is one of wild, disquieting focus, his concentration bent entirely on the obscurity of the lens.

His arms dangle at his sides, while the fingers of his right hand are spread open and seem tense with the want of something, as if unconsciously reaching out for it.

One is given the distinct impression that, whatever the object of this unnameable want, this boy will find a way to get it.

Serafim and Álvaro
first lived at opposite ends of the same neighbourhood, but when Serafim moved to his uncle's house, they found themselves sleeping under roofs that sloped to the south on the very same block. They spent every waking hour they could together, their fixations transforming into what would later be seen as a kind of logical progression, though at the time (at least to the adults in their lives) they appeared as abnormal preoccupations that had no relation to each other whatsoever. They never played with any kind of ball or sought out other boyhood competition; instead, they focused all their energy on catching things. What began with exotic and colourful insects moved to the most venomous — spiders, wasps, centipedes, scorpions — and eventually to birds. They killed none of them.

Hours were spent in Álvaro's tiny treed courtyard, coaxing passerines from the branches onto the ground, a trail of seeds leading them with inching hops towards a down-turned basket propped up with a stick on a string. What adults found unsettling about this was the way two young boys could demonstrate such resolute patience, both of them crouching against a wall, still, silent, waiting, a sundial slat of daylight scanning their faces, making them appear like a pair of pink-marble statues perched on the edge of some plaza fountain, holding a yarn of stone.

What was even more peculiar was what they would do with a bird when they actually caught one. Exploding in gesticulations of success, jumping around in circles, they would descend to lean on the wicker of the basket and peer through the slats of its bottom, taking in every detail of the terrified creature, excitedly pointing out its colours, the tiny talons of its four toes, the kink of its neck that cocked as if the bird were listening to its commentators above. Then, resting their heads on the ground to peer underneath, they would slowly lift the basket, until the bird could finally duck out of the gap. Then they would roll onto their backs to watch it fly straight up, out of the atrium, with a flash and flutter against the blue sky, before disappearing over the red-tiled roof. Álvaro's father would sometimes come out and offer to find them a cage, but they always declined with a kind of condescension, as if the poor man just wasn't quite of the age to get it, and maybe, just maybe, never would be.

Their next preoccupation was flying machines. They'd both been too young to appreciate the significance when the first plane had flown over their heads — a crowd of men with their oiled moustaches curled up at the ends passing around cut-out rectangular shapes to shield their eyes from the glare of the sun, their brass monoculars extended, followed by guffaws of amazement as the skeletal contrivance trailed its buzz out over the wobbly horizon. The Great War brought military aircraft into the skies above Oporto in significant numbers, and Álvaro and Serafim were fascinated by them. They made wooden models out of the thin pine of fig crates, and ran up to the railway tracks where they could fly them at the ends of their outstretched arms, alongside the real ones floating in the sky. When the flying machines had disappeared, they would slow to a huffing stop and hold their models tall in the air, freezing them at the most dramatic angle, then they compared each other's display and pose, each walking thoughtfully around the other's pinched fingers, squinting, inspecting.

On the way home one day, Álvaro suggested they fly their planes back on different routes, meeting up like a military rendezvous. The railway tracks splayed out in two directions, one they knew and one they didn't. They flipped a centavo, Serafim calling it in the air, and soon he was sprinting off into unfamiliar territory, where he would eventually get lost, pacing up and down a net of tight streets and walkways, looking everywhere for the river he knew so well. It grew dark, and Serafim grew hungry. Not knowing what else to do, he finally found a policeman walking his beat, eyeing everyone who passed, not, it seemed, with suspicion, but to inspire subordination. Serafim stood small beside the man and explained his plight. The policeman laughed with a hoarse voice, then coughed. “Lost over the flip of a coin! Not a lucky toss, was it, boy?” The officer escorted him to a tram station and informed the driver that this young man would be riding to the end of the line today, without a ticket. Luck, Serafim was beginning to learn, was a strange thing.

When his father died in the war, Serafim lost interest in playing for a long while. He withdrew from Álvaro's company, and became despondent and reclusive. They might even have drifted apart had Serafim not shown up on his doorstep one Saturday morning, lugging an old, outmoded view camera that belonged to his uncle. He extended the wooden tripod in front of the door, buried himself under the dark cloth that draped over his back like a cape, and looked at the piece of glass, focusing the upside-down and backwards image of his best friend, waiting for the right moment to take a shot. After he'd secured the large-format exposure the way his uncle had shown him, Álvaro was free to give the camera a thorough inspection, both of them trying every dial and adjustment — tilts, shifts, swings, and shutter release — watching what each one did inside the camera whenever possible. When Serafim returned the following day with the print and the news that his uncle would allow them to take up to four such exposures a week, they swapped a look and a smile, understanding how this fixation might take up a lifetime.

Serafim's uncle was used to the boys being inseparable, so it was natural enough to have both of them crammed into the darkroom with him in the evenings and on weekends. They watched everything he did, sometimes asking questions, but mostly they just sat behind him on tall stools, craning around his body to observe his hands with the disconcerting patience and silence that was their custom. At fourteen, Serafim could proudly call himself a darkroom apprentice, with paid work that he received from his uncle. Álvaro, refusing to be outdone, and realizing the potential in the knowledge he'd already picked up, began volunteering his time and services with another photographer in Oporto, and by the time he was sixteen he too was getting a small stipend as a darkroom apprentice.

Finally, one could just about refer to both of them as young men, their voices rupturing low, new-found hair under their arms and in their nether regions; and already between them they had an arsenal of camera types at their disposal, from which they developed know-how in a variety of formats and processes, as well as enough photographic paper, developer, and fixer to explore any avenue of photography they desired.

This exploration began in whatever photographic journals, periodicals, and enthusiast magazines they could lay their hands on, including the
Encyclopedia Photographica
, published in Lisbon in 1906, which had selections and adaptations from foreign manuals, the avant-garde world (or so it always seemed) that existed on the other side of Portugal's borders. It was true that all the abstract discussions and debates on the various isms proved difficult for them to grasp — Naturalism, Symbolism, Pictorialism, Modernism — so instead they focused on the technical details, as well as the sense of aesthetic that was gradually developing between them, fostered by their tactful two-way critiques and solid friendship.

They found themselves drawn away from the studio and out into the streets, but were met there by a public that reacted to them, quite understandably, the way the previous several decades had taught them to. Every photographer before these two eager young men had obstinately required one thing from his subjects: for them to pose deliberately, everyone's face to the camera, standing still for what felt like minutes, staring into some cumbersome device with all the docile sincerity of a herd of cattle. Not surprisingly, their initial photos looked much like those taken in a controlled setting, only with streetscapes giving them an outdoor (and for some reason often outlandish) context. Their technical skills at both taking and developing their exposures were good and getting better, but they found the pictures themselves, at best, uninspiring.

It was Álvaro who hit upon a solution, after seeing an amateur photographer in the street one day with a hand-held box camera, a Kodak Brownie, taking a picture of a birthday celebration as it trickled out into the street, people milling around a doorway, drinks in their hands, backs to the photographer, completely unaware. The following weekend Álvaro borrowed a Vest Pocket Kodak and sat for hours in cafés trying it out, having already set the distance, speed, and aperture, and only slipping it from his jacket when something interesting transpired at the tables nearby. No one caught on. Álvaro and Serafim developed the film together — a massive format, no enlarging necessary — and hung the images up to dry on the loop of string they usually used. Only on this particular day something seemed very different in the deep-sea-green murk of the darkroom. The boys were speechless with excitement, with having stumbled upon a discovery: while a traditional, straight-faced portrait tended to take the personality away from subjects, plucking out whatever vivacity they held and systematically killing it, a picture of people taken when they were unaware somehow managed to retain their animation, their humanness. Caught it, alive.

Both of them painstakingly saved up for, then bought, increasingly smaller cameras and took candid pictures in whatever free time they had. They also came to terms with the fact that no one, not a single person, organization, or institute, would ever pay them to do so. In Portugal, there were only a tiny handful of photographers who had ever managed to sell a candid shot, one of them being Joshua Benoliel, a man whose work they followed with great admiration. He was a “photographer-reporter” who took occasional pictures for one of the country's leading newspapers,
O Século
, a journal that would print one candid shot, perhaps, every two or three months, as if by accident. Serafim and Álvaro had to face the fact that if they wanted to make a living in photography, it would have to be done in a studio, with portrait work. This would have to be the staple, cash crop, the means to their end.

When Serafim had finished school, his uncle requested that he make a more meaningful contribution to the studio — in which he was sure to become a partner one day — instead of just putting in the minimum amount of work required to pay for his own photography projects. Serafim dutifully acquiesced, and enrolled in English courses during the week, as his uncle aspired to break into the market of the British gentry and expats who lived in and around Oporto. Serafim had always had a knack for languages. He had done well in his French studies in grade school and could get the gist when reading Italian and Spanish without too much difficulty.

Serafim wasn't sure what he thought of the English themselves. Besides the fact that his father had died for them — just another piece of fodder for the Crown — in Oporto itself the English were known for being extremely insular, refusing to budge from their deeply set colonialist mentality. The English expats, their pale cheeks rouged with pompous pride, appeared to have set up, in their infamous way, a self-replicating monopoly within the city, tapping into the riches of Portugal only to pipe the money back to their rain-dreary isle. Nevertheless, judge them as he might, they were the ones with all the money; and in that respect Serafim's English lessons paid off. His uncle was soon the only Oporto photographer to get any business from the English. Serafim's lessons also led him and Álvaro to their first, and only, commission for a candid shot they would create together.

It was spring, and both of them were nineteen and proudly sporting downy moustaches. Serafim's uncle was laid up with the flu, and had asked him to take over the studio and deal with the clientele for the week. An Englishman, for whose family Serafim had done a first-rate portrait, came in with a friend from London who had holdings in Oporto and a holiday home in the nearby picturesque village of Lamego. The man from London would only be in Portugal for a month, during which time his daughter would be turning four. She was a very, very special child, he said, and he wanted a very special picture of her on her birthday, one that would do justice to her remarkable character. Serafim asked him what he had in mind. The man shrugged and said he simply wanted a photograph that was unique. He slapped a date and address on the studio's counter, bade Serafim good day, and the two men walked out. Serafim watched the door close behind them, his face sinking into a devilish grin.

He and Álvaro went by train to the village for the birthday party, made giddy by the fact that they had left behind all their cumbersome tripods and view cameras — the kind exclusively used for portraits. They brought with them only two hand-helds each, a modus operandi that was nothing short of daring. They arrived at the house and, after recovering from the sight of the massive English-preened gardens, explained that they had no equipment to set up, that they needed only to spend time near the girl while she was merrymaking. The gentleman certainly thought the approach unconventional, but he took it to be the way things were done in Portugal. Serafim and Álvaro shot a myriad of exposures, but agreed that the best shot was taken when the girl was participating in a scavenger hunt. The two young men were crouched down next to her as she searched a massive planter. Tiptoeing up and reaching inside, the young girl patted around in the underbrush, and just as she found something, she turned her head in excitement. Serafim and Álvaro captured the moment perfectly. The man was so pleased with the final photograph that he made a great scene of giving Serafim and Álvaro a meagre bonus. For Serafim, that small amount was what tipped the scale in the savings for his Leica, which he could now send away for.

A few months later, Álvaro received an offer to fill in as a darkroom apprentice for one of the more prestigious photography studios in Lisbon. For his career, it was great news, though it meant a long and lonely season in Oporto for Serafim. They wrote each other weekly letters, sent contact prints of the films they were developing, independent of each other's influence for the first time. While their photos remained similar, by the end of August the tone in Álvaro's writing had become markedly more political, filled with topics neither of them had ever discussed before.