Silver Nitrate(23)
On Sunday, she met Urueta and Tristán at an agreed-upon intersection, and they walked to the market.
Montserrat didn’t haggle and she was afraid of pickpockets; therefore the market had little appeal for her. Tristán, on the other hand, seemed eager to explore the stalls. He was wearing his trademark sunglasses and a loose plaid jacket. He looked bohemian, which was fine. There were all kinds of people at the Lagunilla, from the homeless to a ritzier clientele hungrily searching for a bargain. Some of the goods sold were illegal, and when the police felt like it, they raided the place. But not that day.
The three of them looked at nineteenth-century chairs and plastic Barbie dolls with their hair in disarray. There was fayuca and genuine porcelain. Paintings of idealized adelitas sat next to posters of José José. Urueta was concentrating on watches. When he found an item that interested him, he took his glasses from his front shirt pocket and examined the item, then stuffed the glasses back in their place. He repeated this motion a half dozen times, sometimes nodding to himself and muttering under his breath.
“I sell them in the Zona Rosa,” he explained. “There’s always a clientele for watches, and I know a guy who is good at fixing them.”
They walked past a stall full of Nazi memorabilia. It had jackets emblazoned with red armbands and swastikas, Nazi war medals, old pistols, helmets, even flags and an Adolf Hitler doll. Montserrat stopped and stared at the display. She supposed it hadn’t been that hard for Hitler’s followers to make it to America, not with greedy people willing to harbor them. Some of those mass murderers must have been flush with Jewish loot, with the belongings of the poor Romani they tried to exterminate, and the coins stolen from the corpses of disabled people. And so they’d come to the Americas, to be greeted with open arms by Perón and others like him.
“You told us Ewers might have been a Nazi,” Montserrat said as Urueta stood next to her, a blue plastic market bag dangling from his wrist. He was carrying a couple of watches he’d bought in it. “Was he an agent in Mexico, like the actress you mentioned?”
“I still find it hard to believe there were actual Nazi spies in Mexico,” Tristán said, brushing a lock of hair away from his face. Montserrat saw Urueta and herself reflected in the dark lenses.
“They had their sympathizers. Ever heard of the Gold Shirts? They were around in the thirties, and even later. Rubén Moreno Padrés organized two anti-Semitic meetings right here in La Lagunilla back in 1940. They handed out a lot of leaflets that year, accusing the president of allowing Jewish immigrants into the country and leading it to its ruin. But I can tell you Ewers didn’t join flashy demonstrations of that sort, and he wasn’t with any particular group. It was more…well, it stretches farther back. Ewers was into runes and magic and film. All of it, combined.”
“Runes?”
They strolled next to a vendor displaying rugs and others selling heavy rotary telephones from the fifties.
“There were many magic systems in Europe in the early part of the century. Krumm-Heller, the physician I told you about before, he studied runes and also developed a therapeutic system based on scents.”
“A belief in nice-smelling candles sounds innocent enough to me,” Tristán said. He was taking off his glasses now, biting at their arm.
“Krumm-Heller also believed that certain races were inferior to others.”
“That is definitely not innocent,” Tristán added, shaking his head. He put the sunglasses on again. “Was every occultist a racist?”
“Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society, also talked about higher and inferior races and the evolution of humans. Guido von List conceived of a magical runic alphabet and thought humanity had entered a cycle of decadence and was firmly in favor of eugenics. Then we have J?rg Lanz von Liebenfels, who was also an occultist and believed the Aryan people were threatened by lower races.”
“But was he a Nazi, then?” Montserrat asked. “You haven’t answered that question.”
“Maybe he was a soldier,” Tristán ventured. “Wehrmacht.”
“No, he wasn’t a soldier. He was an occultist. But plenty of occultists had bizarre racial theories, and Ewers wasn’t above listening to what pro-Nazi groups had to say. He mentioned the Vril Society and the Germanenorden. He claimed he stole knowledge from them.” Urueta took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead with it. “He was opportunistic, would befriend anyone who might assist him. Let’s finish looking at this aisle and then we can head back to my apartment. I’ll tell you more there.”
They spent another half hour at La Lagunilla even though Urueta did not acquire anything else.
When they reached the apartment the old man offered to pour all of them a brandy, and they sat down in the living room.
Tristán relieved himself of his sunglasses and accepted a brandy. Urueta leaned back in his chair and removed his shoes with a groan, then he donned a pair of slippers. The plastic bag with the two watches had gone into one of the many drawers of a cabinet. On a coffee table Montserrat spied a thick stack of old issues of Cahiers du Cinema.
“The Lagunilla bleeds me dry. It takes a lot of energy to look at the merchandise and figure out what’s what.”
“You were speaking of Ewers,” Montserrat said, quickly, wishing to jump back on the subject.