Serafim and Claire Read Online Free PDF Page B

winter stew with a piece of bread, spoon in one hand, crust in the other. She’d slapped the top of his head and pried the bread from his fingers, disgustedly throwing the soggy dough into a slop bucket.
    â€œ Virgem Maria , child, you’re not a barbarian. No reason to eat like one.”
    â€œOh,” Serafim said, flattening his bread hand onto the table. “What is a barbarian?”
    â€œThe sort of person who soaks up their food with bread.” Then, as an afterthought, “Besides Italians.”
    â€œOh.”
    Serafim’s father’s room was a place with even more mystery. Sometimes, at night, he would steal through the halls and stand outside the door, listening to the strange struggling sounds that the voices of his father and the current maid were making on the other side. But what really drew him to his father’s room was the photo on his escritoire.
    Serafim couldn’t remember when he first sat on the edge of his father’s bed and studied it, he only knew that at some point it had become a fixation. What he did remember was the day one of the maids told him it was his mother. Tidying his hair, she said, “She died two years after this picture was taken, in 1905. And do you know the very last thing she did?” A soft arm wrapped around Serafim’s shoulders, her lips speaking half pressed against his head. “She delivered you, Serafim, into this world. She was very brave. She was fifteen.”
    The photo held her stories in the worst way it could — by hiding them. Serafim had never seen women — in the streets, sitting at café tables with their tall and elaborate hats, washing clothes in the river, filling wooden buckets from the city’s fountains, removing steaming pots from a range — staring fixedly forward in such a way. The only life that could be derived from the photo was in the painful restraint of her smile, and the faint sepia blush of her cheeks. And what could that possibly tell Serafim? He was at a loss. Hungry for intimacy, for familiarity, and the still, brown-scale portrait offered nothing in the way of sustenance.
    When his father would catch him sitting in his room with the picture, he would instantly seem tired, sure that Serafim had yet another question for him. Did she like oranges? Could she sing? Was she afraid of heights? What was her favourite bird? And when she wasn’t paying attention to what her hands were doing, would she sometimes crumple her hat like a peasant? But even more disappointing for Serafim was the fact that, most of the time, his father didn’t know the answers. He’d proposed by letter, spent six months getting acquainted with her in public places and in the company of a chaperone, and was only married to her for eleven months before she passed away.
    Well, did he have any other photos of her, Serafim wanted to know, pictures where, maybe, she was doing something? No. None. Serafim’s uncle, a not exactly successful photographer in Oporto, took a picture of the couple on their wedding day, but, in some kind of bungling chemical mistake in the darkroom, he’d ruined it. “Soon after that,” his father said, “she was with child, which is rather unsightly, to say the least. So, no. Only one photo of her was ever taken. Which is why we should put it back on the escritoire where it belongs.”
    One of the other things Serafim remembered well was how he met his friend Álvaro. It was during their lunch break at school, in the playground. Children were running maniacally in circles, hollering and bellowing, their golden minutes of unrestrained conduct, raising dust from the sandy ground, lines of boys chasing each other, girls skipping rope in song. Serafim, too subdued to run amok with the screaming droves, came across Álvaro crouched near one of the few bushes in the schoolyard. His hat was off and he was reaching as far as he could into the shrub, burying his