Silver Nitrate(27)
She thought about what Urueta had said, that Ewers believed magic could be performed using film stock, and for a second she believed he wasn’t so off the mark. Maybe certain people could cast spells with one look and a line of dialogue.
Tristán opened the tap, let the water flow, then closed it again and closed the refrigerator door, tearing away the wispy enchantment of light and shadow he’d conjured.
On the refrigerator he had a magnet with the number of a pizza parlor. “Now here’s a truly important question: triple cheese or quadruple cheese?”
She smiled and picked up the receiver. “Quadruple.”
FEATURE
FILM
6
Montserrat still missed the old Cineteca. She fondly recalled watching many films in the Salón Rojo before an inferno that raged for fourteen hours gutted it. They said the person responsible for that mess had been Durán Chávez, that he had fired the people who checked the air-conditioned vaults and made sure the temperatures did not rise above ten degrees Celsius. He’d been trying to save a few pesos, and instead the whole building exploded when the silver nitrate became unstable. But there were also tales of faulty wiring and even arson. There had been a fire at the UNAM Film Archive five years before the one at the Cineteca, and Manuel González Casanova, who designed the storage vaults there, had privately whispered that someone had stolen the reels inside and then torched the place to conceal the crime. If that was the case, perhaps the fire at the Cineteca was also deliberate.
Whatever the reason for the fire, the new facilities were soulless. The original Cineteca had been built atop two of the sound stages of Estudios Churubusco. One could say it had old films in its bone marrow.
The real problem with the new Cineteca was not aesthetic, but practical. Thousands of books, magazines, scripts, and films had been turned into ashes. Montserrat was looking at reduced holdings. Perhaps at some point there might have been more information, but now she was faced with the reality of finding only meager film stubs and capsules. The dregs of cinema, rather than the crown jewels.
In an attempt to be thorough, Montserrat combed through whatever material she could uncover on Urueta and Montero even if the pickings were slim: a few press clippings, publicity pictures of Montero from her heyday as a star, a filmography that didn’t even include all of Urueta’s flicks.
She found nothing about Ewers.
Beyond the Yellow Door. Urueta’s movie…She thought of film turning brittle, growing yellow with age, opaque, full of scratches and blemishes. But sometimes you could immerse film in hot water and restore it to its raw materials; recast it, bring it back to life. A coat of fresh emulsion…but the film Abel Urueta had shot was long gone. She wished she might have been able to see it. There was no trace of it. It had vanished. Just like Ewers, if he’d ever existed. Maybe Abel had told them a tall tale and there was no German occultist with a mysterious past. She’d never heard his name whispered by any of the film junkies she hung out with.
Tuesday, she dropped by Antares to collect a check and hopefully secure more work in the upcoming weeks, but Mario was still being evasive about future projects. At night she thought of the time a construction crew accidentally found more than a hundred nitrate negatives hidden under an ice rink in Dawson City. Strange discoveries happened at times, stories you wouldn’t believe if someone told them to you. Abel could be speaking the truth; Ewers might have been real. She kept going back and forth about him. Wednesday, she ventured to her sister’s place and they watched TV together. She hardly paid attention to the images on screen, thinking again of Beyond the Yellow Door. How much film had Abel shot before production shut down? What were the “half-stories” that happened on set that Abel had alluded to? All she’d ever heard was that Urueta had abandoned horror after Beyond the Yellow Door and picked other genres, something that was confirmed by his filmography. He hadn’t done too well and his career had quickly fizzled out.
Afterward, Montserrat went browsing around a shop that carried vintage magazines, looking at issues of Mexico Cinema and Cinelandia, with their yellowed pages and pictures of ancient actors. How things had changed since those golden years, not only at the box office, but also when it came to post-production. There was something kinesthetic about editing sound that would soon be lost as computers took hold of the business. Her thoughts whirled around negatives and lavender stock carefully wrapped in tissue paper, hand-winders, Moviolas, tables and joiners and cleaning machines. She’d met a negative cutter who told her you should never put nitrate in a tight container. It should have enough space to breathe. Breathe, like a fine wine! It had a special scent, too, once it had begun to deteriorate, but she couldn’t remember what it was.
She grabbed one of the magazines and went to the counter. Behind it sat an old woman who was doing a crossword. She smiled at Montserrat.
“Hey, Trini, you know every actor and director that set a toe in films in the fifties, don’t you? Ever heard of a guy called Wilhelm Ewers?” she asked, placing a copy of Cinelandia on the counter. Sonia Furió was on the cover and it had an interview with Urueta, from when he’d shot The Opal Heart in a Bottle. “He would have been a hanger-on in the late fifties, beginning of the sixties. Used to date Alma Montero and did a movie with Abel Urueta, but it never got released. Beyond the Yellow Door. I don’t know if he appeared in anything else, but I’m trying to find out.”