Free Serafim and Claire by Mark Lavorato Page B

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.

Medium: Gelatin silver print
    Description: Women strolling, Palácio de Cristal
    Location: Oporto, Portugal
    Date: 1925

    The sky is boiling. Billows of shaded cumulus flex in the backdrop like the close-up of a cauliflower in negative. Its bulbs of dark expanding, distending.
    The setting is a public place, on an apparently very public day. A dense crowd of people are passing through the frame, from left to right. Women in full dresses, men in full suits, tightly packed between the high stalks of trees and the low ruffles of bushes.
    The branches of one of the trees, silhouetted in the mid-ground against the sky, are almost bare. Three leaves dangle so loose and low that they seem to be reaching out to the garden floor, as if wanting to join the others of their kind there, let go, surrender to gravity’s tug at last.
    Two young women, dressed in white, are in the foreground, and of the multitude of dense figures in the picture, they are the only ones looking at the photographer. Though it is much more like peering, focusing deep into the lens as if trying to decipher something through it — the one who is slightly taller in particular, who seems fixed, almost cross. Much like the sky, her expression toes the line between anger and delight. Much like the sky, it appears, both light and lifting, but heavy with warning.

8
    Sunday was not a day of re st for Serafim. There was church to go to, and after the service (before the public at large retired to their social clubs and private dinners for the evening) most of the population would spend an hour or two promenading through the pruned grounds of the Palácio de Cristal, a florid garden situated at one of the highest points in the area, overlooking the city of Oporto and the banks of the Douro, where they parted from each other and folded out into the open sea. At times the massive and ornate gardens would be so crowded that people had to shuffle through with elbow room alone, brushing against women with their piquantly sweet perfumes and the contrast of their white dresses and black shawls, the fabric fluttering like doves taking flight at their feet as they walked, while above, a knot of swan necks seemed to emerge through the dark embroidery at their shoulders and peck at the height of their elaborate hats. Men stepped smoothly in their Sunday best, elegantly poised, bow-tied, and pulling the gold chains of their pocket watches just to make sure that, indeed, all the time in the world was still theirs. For a photographer, the opportunities were endless.
    One late October day, Serafim, attracted by the looming drapery of the clouds tethered above, paid a visit to the gardens. Some of the trees had already lost their leaves, which added an intriguing contrast as the crowds fluxed between them with all the pomp of spring flowers. He had found a bare branch and a position — near a wall fountain made up of a face with a wide-open mouth that was drooling a tongue of moss and algae — where he was low enough to frame the sky as a backdrop to the people walking by.
    Crouching there, he waited for everyone’s gaze to become accustomed to his peculiar