Serafim and Claire (7 page)

When he returned to Oporto, Serafim was astounded by the sudden change in Álvaro. He had transformed himself entirely: he was more confident, much louder, and he marched through the streets larger than life. For the first time in their kinship, Serafim felt lesser. Smoking cigarettes in cafés together, Álvaro's colours were as florid as a macaw's, while Serafim sat beside him in the mist, a drab sparrow, dull and tatty. When Álvaro leaned over the table to sermonize on the current political situation (a subject that always meandered back to the floundering republic), all Serafim could do was listen. He could offer nothing — he believed nothing. He wasn't a republican, or a monarchist, unionist, labour syndicalist; he was a photographer. What he felt, more than anything else, was quiet. Subtle as the sound of advancing film.

That was, until he met Inês Sá. Then everything changed for him as well. He crossed paths with her at the end of October that same year, and as the winter wore on he became even
less
interested in the world outside the tight walls of his own reality. At the same time, Álvaro was ploughing forth in the opposite direction. Then, in February 1926, Álvaro knocked on the door of Serafim's darkroom as if he were sounding the alarm of a fire, the heel of his hand causing the wood at the centre to cough and flex. Serafim was busy developing an image of Inês Sá that he'd taken four months earlier, and had been working on covetously almost every day since.

Serafim hadn't even shut the darkroom door behind him before Álvaro blurted out, “I'm leaving for Lisbon, or maybe somewhere else, tomorrow. Will you come?”

“What?”

“I was speaking with an anarchist today, whom I met in the capital last summer, and he assured me that everything's about to come undone. Big change is on the way, Serafim. The republic is crumbling and something is going to have to replace it when it falls. The libertarian syndicalists have the biggest following they've had since 1914. Don't you see? This is history in the making, right before our eyes. And it is history that has to be recorded. Can you imagine a photographer being given that charge? Can you? That's the offer on the table for me, Serafim, and I'm going to take it. So can you. We'll leave tomorrow, follow them wherever they go, every protest and rally. When they come into power, our photos will be remembered for all time. What do you think?”

Serafim shook his head. It was a notion impossible even to entertain. “Do you know that I was just invited to a dinner party at the Sá residence? I am afraid not. I'm not going anywhere. I'm . . . going to get married, Álvaro. I plan to take over my uncle's studio, live an easy, quiet life, here in Oporto. I am sorry.”

Álvaro walked to the centre of the studio and hesitated before speaking, as if trying to find the correct letter with which to begin his first word, mouthing soundless vowels until, with a loaded chuckle, he gave up and relaxed. Then he strode over to Serafim, grabbed his shoulders, and smiled wide. “I shall write you, dear friend.”

Serafim flinched at the intimacy, looking down at the leather of his shoes, “And I you. Of course.”

Álvaro, letting go, stamped audibly towards the door, turned, and gave the door frame a solid slap. “I wish you the best of luck, Serafim.” Then he gave a single, stout wave, “
Adeus
!” and disappeared.

Ville de Québec, le 12 février 1928

Salutations précieuse petite sœur,

I must be the first person in history to be elated about an appendix operation! I just received your letter (on which, I might add, the hospital forgot to write a return address, and anglicized my name, of all things) and am so glad to hear that this unforeseen procedure went well, and that you are now in good care, good spirits, and improving rapidly. As an aside, I wonder if it was your illness, just before your diagnosis, that I sensed in your previous letter.

At any rate, I thought to come and visit you. I telephoned the hospital, but they told me they couldn't find your name on the list, so I am assuming you have just been released, and are now, perhaps, staying with a friend who will, hopefully, look after you for a few days? I must admit that I do wish, at times, I had never moved from Montreal, and could be there for you now.

In the same breath, however, I certainly don't miss that city's exclusive form of philanthropy: Catholics strictly for Catholics, Protestant for Protestant, etc. Here, in such a small city, the corrupt factions have no choice but to work together, just to achieve any kind of effect at all. It's oddly refreshing.

In other news, Papa took a ship downriver this weekend, to lend Gilles a hand with our renovations. When I told him about your operation, he insisted on sending you a cheque, which I've enclosed, to tide you over, he said, until you are well enough to perform again. I do hope you take it, Claire.

Au plaisir de te lire bientôt,

Cécile

Claire continued her
mute-like e
xistence for two weeks, the sutures along her stomach beginning to itch and tingle. Soon it became possible for her to leave her bed, on brief sorties, padding to and from the nearest washroom. One day a nun she had never seen before came to her side wielding a pair of scissors and some tweezers. She lifted Claire's gown and methodically removed her stitches, smoothly drawing them out from her skin, one by one. That same day she was told, in reluctant, broken English, that she was now considered well enough to leave the hospital.

Claire gathered the few things she had, put on the dirty dress she'd worn to the doctor's office on the night of her operation, and signed her patient release form. She struggled with the spelling of the name O'Callaghan, two nuns standing close by, watching the end of her pen, the steadiness of her hand. Claire scribbled illegibly through the letters she wasn't sure of, and when she was finished, she looked up at the two nuns, who seemed to be waiting for her to say something. So, and mostly as a means of shunning their critical glares, she did.

She asked about the money that had been attached to her when she was found in the reception. She understood that there had been enough cash to pay for up to three weeks of care, which meant there should be almost a third of the money remaining. As she spoke in English, she was unbearably aware of her francophone accent, and the more she strained to conceal it, the more it spilled out, nakedly, into the open.

When she was finished, neither of the women moved. Finally, one of them said in a low, discreet tone, “
Mademoiselle O'Callaghan, tire pas sur la
ficelle
.” Do not push your luck, young lady. Then, reaching forward to gently remove the pen from Claire's fingers, the nuns bade her good day.

With that, Claire turned and lumbered away, only later realizing that her having apparently understood what the nun had said was, in a way, an admission of guilt, a loosely incriminating act of its own. But at the time it slipped her mind, and she simply ambled down the hall, through the front doors, and out into the blinding sunshine of the morning.

She squinted, a hand held out to shelter her eyes. Light splashed and sloshed through the snowy cityscape, bouncing from everything that could reflect it, pouring out of windows, piercing every mirror. There was a taxi close by, as if waiting there just for her, and with a hand on the black ragtop, she got into it with agonizing slowness, only to brace herself as the driver pulled away as if from a starting gate, painfully bouncing along the icy streets, sliding in and out of the deep ruts that the thin-spoked wheels carved into the packed snow.

When they pulled up to her apartment, Claire confessed that she didn't have a penny, and the driver, who still hadn't met her eyes, or even stolen a glance at her in the rear-view mirror, said that he would wait right there while she went inside to get the money. Claire had a few cents in her flat, in a chipped saucer on her dresser, so, clicking her tongue at the man, she said she'd be right back. It took her five long minutes to make the trip inside and back out again, leaning heavily on the staircase rails. The cabbie, still not looking at her, took a dime from Claire's palm, tossed a cigarette butt onto the snow at her feet, adjusted his hat, and sped away.

Inching her way back up to her apartment, Claire was thankful that the neighbours had shovelled the wooden planks of the stairs, even though they hadn't gotten around to salting the slick layer of ice that glazed them. Keeping tense for balance was painful. She stopped at her landing, where her mailbox was bulging with letters, sun-dyed paper fanning out from the lid, and laboured to pull the wad free without using her stomach muscles. Back inside, she was happy to discover that the air in her apartment had been kept more or less warm by the neighbour's wood stove below, dry heat slipping up through the loose-tooth gaps in the tongue-and-groove. She would only have to stoke a small fire, which worked out well, since she was running low on coal.

Claire slowly arranged a few things around her apartment, cleaning out the putrid remnants in the dried and crusted bedpan, digging out some fresh, though old and tatty, blankets (her nicest ones having been lost somewhere between her apartment and the hospital), and emptying out the few vegetables that had been in her icebox, which were now blue-furred and unrecognizable.

Easing onto the only chair she owned, she sorted through her mail, tossing the bills to one side and opening Cécile's letters before folding them back into their respective envelopes. As a welcome surprise, the most recent correspondence contained a cheque from her father, who was certainly making a sacrifice with the amount he'd enclosed, even if he'd been doubtful that she would cash it. For Claire, who was in desperate need of money, this was no time for pride or disdain. The sum would be enough to cover her rent and some basic groceries until she could get back to the club, work a few shifts, and start fending for herself again.

She wasted no time acting on the godsend, telephoning the general store at the corner of her block, where she often paid on credit, and asking for a few things to be delivered: milk, butter, jam, oranges, pears. All things she could eat (once she purchased some bread from the bread man the following day, anyway) without having to cook. Claire, for some reason, hated cooking, and had no idea how Cécile had grown to love it as much as she had. It was such a stereotypical homemaker thing to do. For Claire a baguette, some butter, and a dollop of honey gave just as much satisfaction as an elaborate meal.

A knock came at the door and Claire shuffled across the floor to answer it. The green-eyed, rosy-cheeked son of the grocer put the paper bag of merchandise on the floor beside him, dangerously close to some snow that had sloughed off his boots. He took out a pad of receipts and pointed out that Claire hadn't paid anything on her credit in weeks, and that his father insisted he return with some kind of payment or he would have to return with the groceries. At this point Claire could have explained herself, could have shown him the cheque and made him feel ashamed at the fact that she'd just returned from the hospital and was in no condition to fight through the city's snowdrifts to cash it. But none of that was necessary. Instead, she stepped close, held on to his arm, and blinked. She assured him that she would come in and straighten out her bill the following week. The roses of the boy's cheeks suddenly beaded with moisture from his hike, and he assented, and scurried back out the door, fumbling with the handle to close it. He waved a bashful smile through the window as he made his way around the bend in the staircase.

This was what she had hoped would happen with the cabbie as well. Men, thought Claire, gingerly lifting the bag of groceries, were somewhat sad creatures. They were pliable, predictable, and weak. Though, to be fair, most of the time she felt the same way about women.

Until her seventh year of schooling, Claire had been raised in entirely segregated conditions. From her education at a convent (from kindergarten to her sixth year) to dance classes to Sunday school, boys and girls were kept stringently cordoned off from each other. The one exception to this was in the streets, where francophone boys and girls swarmed the neighbourhoods together during the summer months, playing games with English names — branchy branch, run sheep run — or in winter, when they skated together near the local fire station, where the firemen hosed down a field to make a rink, or sledded together down the length of Hogan Street, the steep road lined with snowbanks and mittened children towing their toboggans back to the top to run down it again.

The girls at the École de Danse Lacasse-Morenoff talked giddily (stupidly, as far as Claire was concerned) about boys, with puppyish sniggers and cutesy affectations. Disappointed, Claire felt they were shamefully distracted from what they were all there to do, what they loved. Her classmates were losing their focus, too easily reshuffling their priorities, and it was maddening.

It was in grade seven, when she entered a school of twelve-to-sixteen-year-olds, that everything really changed. Claire was not prepared for how exasperating she would find the halls of a coed school that was pulsating with teenagers. It was as if, overnight, both the sexes had dramatically transformed, and the alterations were ludicrous. Girls whom she knew to be cruel and competitive and unforgiving were suddenly living out a kind of sham. They had instantly, and falsely, become frail and timid. What she found strangest of all was how they would out-and-out lie to make themselves appear stupid, even dull. The girls had become a pathetic charade. At the same time, they forgave the even more outlandish falsehoods being perpetrated by the boys, who were, in their own way, lying to make themselves appear fiercer, brutish, as if they cared forty times less than they actually did. It was baffling and, for Claire, a dismal turn of events.

After a year of Claire's friends (even Cécile) confessing, with an air of great secrecy, their consuming crushes and yearnings for these utterly feral creatures that were the opposite sex, Claire began to wonder if she was normal, if there wasn't something wrong with her. Even if she happened to doubt there was. If anything, the sensations her classmates were feeling — this irrational, fantasy-invading want — was something that she already understood better than most. Claire was well acquainted with infatuation; but more than that, she had come to know something beyond it, a kind of rare, sustaining, constantly maturing kinship. Only it was with dance, not boys. With dance she nurtured a relationship that was, even now, there for her, accepting her unconditionally in her daily moods, teaching her patiently about tenacity, resilience, art, subtlety, grace, beauty, and her body. Could a snivelling teenage boy really hope to compete with that?

Claire decided to ask her grandmother whether she would ever feel as strongly about boys as she did about dance. Afraid of giving herself away at the outset, she asked simply about love, in the most abstract sense of the word. It was a winter evening, and they were alone in the boudoir, listening to Vivaldi on the gramophone, and once the discussion began, her grandmother looked as though she'd just been asked to walk a thousand miles. She told Claire that a person only had enough room inside her body for love to occur — and she stopped to specify that she was talking here about the most real, rawest, most precarious kind of love — once in her lifetime. And if it happened at all, it almost always took place, she said, when a person was very young, at a stage when they were still foolhardy in their generosity, when they gave and gave away, unsustainably.

Claire, beaming with validation, hesitated for a moment at a discrepancy in her grandmother's statement. “But . . . I thought you moved to Montreal when you were twenty-one, from a small town up north, and
then
married Grandpapa, who died two years later.” Twenty-one didn't seem young to Claire.

And by the looks of it, that wasn't quite the age her grandmother had in mind either. The woman's expression seemed to wade back to the tiny village in northern Quebec where she'd grown up, returning to some hidden secret there, among the dark spruce trees or loon-haunted lakes. Her grandmother didn't answer. Instead, she kissed Claire on the forehead and said, “Why don't you show me that new dance you've been practising.”

As Claire danced, she thought of how lucky she was; how, as a fourteen-year-old, she had already come to understand, had already experienced, something that scores of married women didn't even know, and never would. What she felt for — and would give to — dance was obsessive. She already felt it eating up her world, taking on a life of its own. It seemed capable of consuming whatever she threw at it, and using it as fuel. Her desire to dance was ravenous, and it was growing stronger.