Silver Nitrate(15)
“Sorry, we use a lot more Americanisms now,” she said. “When they shot Tarzan in Mexico they didn’t shoot it with sound, and they had to send it to Los Angeles for all the sound effects. But we do that now.”
“They shot that at Estudios Churubusco back when…oh, it would have been ’69?” Abel said, rubbing his chin.
“From ’66 until ’68,” she said breezily. Montserrat had a good memory. You needed it with editing. “It wasn’t the first Tarzan production in Mexico: Weissmuller shot The Mermaids in Acapulco in ’48.”
“Weissmuller used to like eating at this little place near Caleta back then. Such a long time ago! I would have been twenty years old when RKO was rolling their cameras in Acapulco.” Abel smiled wistfully and refilled her wineglass. “John Wayne owned the Hotel Flamingo in Caleta, did you know that?”
“And Errol Flynn anchored nearby and lounged around the Sirocco. But I can’t remember if that was before or after his trial for statutory rape. A big creep, that one.”
“Hardly the worst or most interesting of the lot,” Abel said. “I’ll tell you a fun story after dinner, since you like old movies and their stars.”
The evening was flowing better than she’d expected. She thought she’d either clam up or talk too much, but Abel was a pleasant host; he knew what questions to ask and listened to the answers with real interest.
After the plates were cleared, they moved into the living room. This, like the dining room, was crammed with objects and furniture from previous eras, with shelves extending as high as they could, overflowing with dusty treasures. Two overstuffed velour couches were set in the middle of the living room, and that is where they sat. Tristán quickly took out a cigarette, and Abel handed him an amber-colored ashtray.
“Would you care for a brandy?” Abel asked, as he stood next to a bar cart and began filling a glass.
“I’ll have one,” Tristán said.
“I’m fine,” Montserrat said.
“Nothing better than a brandy and a cigarette in the evening. It helps with the digestion,” Abel said, filling a second glass for Tristán. The old man then sat on the couch in front of them.
With his handkerchief around his neck and his horn-rimmed glasses you could discern what Abel Urueta must have been like in his youth. A cool, snappy dresser. A rich boy. He spoke with a luxurious voice that plainly telegraphed the distance between their upbringings. Montserrat had grown up in a tough neighborhood and weathered a rough childhood. Urueta had not. And his history was imprinted in his voice. It was very difficult to erase such things. They lingered, like the scent of faded flowers. Of course, there were certain people who were able to shed their old skins and their primordial speech patterns. Tristán, for example, had the gift of mimicry. But these were rare creatures, and Tristán had never wanted to be himself in all the time since she’d first met him. When they watched horror movies, it was the sight of the monster, the Other, that terrified Tristán and the idea of becoming the hero that seduced him. Montserrat saw herself in the faces of monsters and did not wince.
“Tristán said you’ve been looking for a poster of Beyond the Yellow Door. That was a very curious movie and the last of the horror films I ever shot. Now, let me ask you something: what would you say is the most infamous horror film ever shot?”
“Infamous how? Freaks caused a scandal,” Montserrat said, thinking back to Browning’s pre-Code masterpiece. It was an oddly affectionate horror film, and in her mind far superior to Dracula. “And a few years ago Carlos Enrique Taboada was editing Jirón de Niebla when Salinas confiscated the film. I heard it from a trusty source.”
That was a bit of a half-truth; she’d heard it from Paco Orol, and he wasn’t a good source at all. Montserrat wasn’t sure that something else hadn’t happened to halt the editing of Taboada’s fifth horror flick. The story went that one of the producers of the movie had been backing Salinas’s political rival. When Salinas seized the presidency, he retaliated by either sending soldiers to steal the reels or accused the man of piracy and then had the reels seized. Of course, people also said that Salinas had murdered a maid when he’d been playing cowboys and Indians as a child and it had been covered up. All sorts of stories swirled around at parties, and when you were drunk the stories tended to become bloated. Nevertheless, as long as they were talking infamous films, surely Jirón de Niebla had to count.
“Those are good examples. What about cursed films?”
“Wasn’t The Exorcist supposed to be cursed?” she ventured. “The set burned down. They hired a priest to perform a blessing.”
“Mmm,” Tristán said, taking a quick sip of his brandy. He turned to her. “We rented Three Men and a Baby to see if a ghost had been caught on film. Remember that?”
She did. They had frozen the frame and moved close to the TV set, but all Montserrat could distinguish was a shadow. It was something silly to do on a Friday night when the pizza from Benedetti’s was running late.
“A ghost is a ghost. But a curse is entirely different.”
“Is Beyond the Yellow Door cursed or infamous?” she asked.
It was neither, as far as she knew, but it was clear he wanted this question asked. She’d heard stories about the movie through the years; there had even been that guy who swore he’d seen a poster for it. But nothing ever materialized. It was too small a film and Abel Urueta was too obscure a director for it to garner more than a sentence in publications about Mexican cinema, if that. From what she understood it would have been another horror film, slightly different from Urueta’s previous historical entries because this one would have been a contemporary story. No-name actors in the cast, or marginal ones, which was par for the course. The plot? A cult, evil shenanigans. One theory was that Urueta never meant to release the flick, that it was commissioned by a consortium of Americans laundering money and the negatives destroyed. A second rumor was of embezzlement by one of the investors, who fled with much of the film’s budget to Brazil, as the reason for its implosion. Another one was that it didn’t get beyond the pre-production stage, and if it did Urueta only shot a third of it. But it wasn’t Jodorowsky’s Dune, or Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind. People were not muttering excitedly about it and hoping for a belated release. The only reason Montserrat had ever heard about the flick was because she had a soft spot for Abel Urueta, which in itself was a rare endeavor.