Silver Nitrate(14)

“She’s a tiny thing, Tristán.”

“Back then I was short, too. I didn’t stretch up until I was fifteen. When my family moved to Mexico City the kids around our building made fun of my accent. I was from up north, my accent was thick, and the neighborhood was full of bullies who’d beat me up for the fun of it. But Montserrat knocked them down with her cane.”

It was true about the accent. You couldn’t tell where Tristán had originated anymore, he’d smoothed all his edges, but once upon a time he’d had the thickest of accents. It had been the same story with Pedro Infante. They had dubbed him in his first film because his accent was too thick and producers doubted he’d make it big. He was raw. That’s what they had said about Infante in the beginning. Infante proved them wrong, though. And Tristán had possessed a similar rawness that he’d polished to a fine sheen.

“A cane?” Abel asked.

“I limped,” Montserrat said, cutting into the chicken breast on her plate and shrugging. “I had to have surgeries to fix my foot. The kids called me Frankenstein because of my scar. Or they’d call me Peg Leg. I’d swing my cane around and beat the little pricks. When they laughed at Tristán, I beat them, too.”

“And when you grew up you both went into the entertainment business. Did you attend university together?”

“God, no,” Tristán said. “I dropped out of high school to act.”

“What did your family say about that?”

“They had their reservations.”

That was such a euphemism that Montserrat couldn’t muffle a snort. Tristán’s father had wanted his youngest boy to become a lawyer or a dentist, and they’d had a legendary row when Tristán quit school. The only reason why his old man had relented was because Tristán brought in good money back then, and they could use his paycheck—Tristán’s dad was having a rough patch.

Montserrat’s mother had criticized Tristán’s decision loudly, too, warning that if her daughter ever dared to pull a stunt like that, she’d beat her bloody. Montserrat graduated from high school, studied accounting like her mom wanted—her sister was already working in that field, and her mother thought it was a sensible job for her younger daughter, too—and worked part-time at a business that rented audio equipment for musicians and for parties. She graduated with mediocre grades, spent most of her time trying to learn everything she could about audio, and quit her part-time job to get another part-time job at a post-production place with awful hours and awful pay.

Her mother still thought that was the worst decision of her entire life. Maybe the woman hadn’t been so wrong after all.

“Who do you work for, Montserrat?”

The last thing she wanted to discuss was her job. This was a sore subject with her mother, and she insulated her sister from her workplace issues, but the way Abel asked the question was with real interest, without any judgment. She found herself answering with a smile.

“Antares. I work on a bunch of projects. I did a bit of anime in the summer.”

“What is that?”

“Japanese cartoons. Tristán does voice work for a series from there. He plays Lancelot in Legend of the Round Table.”

Japanese was the hardest language to dub. English was also problematic. People used fewer words when speaking in English; the language was full of contractions. When you had to speak the same lines in Spanish, the dialogue could balloon. Tristán, however, dubbed Japanese cartoons with ease. It wasn’t so much that he synchronized his words to the lips of the characters, it was that he simply became the drawings on screen.

Lancelot, for example, was the most handsome and the bravest of the knights, and when Tristán spoke like Lancelot he sounded like an eager, twenty-something hero, brimming with bravado and courtly virtues. Other voice actors could master the art of the labial synch, but their performance felt wooden. Tristán seemed almost careless when he bumped into a studio, smiling, script in hand, but he was a pro nevertheless.

“Do you ever do any audio editing for films?”

“Yeah. Some post-production stuff, sometimes dubs for films they broadcast on TV, I’ve even done ‘foley art.’?”

“What is ‘foley art’?”

“Sound effects: chopping a head of lettuce to make it sound like a person is being decapitated,” she said, making a motion as if she were swinging an axe. “It varies.”

“God. It’s been so long since I worked, I probably wouldn’t be able to recognize an editing bay,” Abel said, shaking his head. “In the old days we didn’t call it that.”

“It was efectos de sala, yes. Or, to pull a ‘Gavira,’?” she said.

“Gavira! A genius, that one. Have you met him?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. Gonzalo Gavira had been a legendary Golden Age sound man. He’d worked for Bu?uel and invented the distinctive sound effects of The Exorcist. She doubted he’d worked with Abel, but the man might have a juicy tale about him after all. She suspected Abel Urueta had many juicy tales.

“A Gavira! You should have said that first,” Abel said. His tone was that of playful admonishment, like a grandfather teaching a child a lesson.

When had Urueta shot his last movie? 1966, perhaps? And afterward he mustn’t have had much contact with filmmakers. It was a little sad, when you thought about it, how a great director could be forgotten and detached from his previous world.