Silver Nitrate(34)

“I’m not sure Abel will let me get him on camera and talk about the movie, even if we dub the film. And I’m even less sure that Enigma will want a story out of this,” Montserrat said, slowly scratching a peanut with her nail. “What if we’re taking advantage of a delusional old man? Maybe he needs, I don’t know, a therapist instead of us hanging around him.”

“He doesn’t want a therapist, he wants to relive his glory days for a few minutes.”

“We shouldn’t be doing this on a weekend,” she said, of all things, and he knew she was out of excuses.

Tristán exhaled. The smoke rose from his lips with an elegant, practiced abandon. “Do you have anything more exciting planned?” he asked. “Cutting your toenails, maybe? Adopting a stray cat?”

Montserrat was looking at him, her fingers drumming against the glass of soda. “Fuck you,” she said, but the words had no barbs. She was agreeing with him. Like when they sneaked behind the rickety fence, into the storage facilities, and walked along the long wooden beam before plummeting into the grain. I dare you, she said and he repeated it, he said it back, and then they jumped together.



* * *



—

Montserrat opened the door of the studio to Abel and Tristán at exactly midnight. They couldn’t do the work in the daytime because her boss would have thrown a fit, but at night the employees sometimes sneaked their personal projects into the editing bays. It was fine as long as no one was charging anyone outside the studio for their time, and even though Montserrat’s shifts that November were rather limited, her seniority at Antares still provided her with a certain freedom of mobility. In other words, they could work on the dubbing when the others had left the facility. If need be, Montserrat might work into the morning. The early hours were slow. Or she’d fit it in during her supposed lunch time. For now, the important part was to record their voices.

Tristán and Abel followed Montserrat down the long hallway with mirrors. Her t-shirt that day had The Hunger written on it and her hair was tied up in a messy bun. She looked as plain as usual, but it was a plainness Tristán liked, even if he teased her about it. He wouldn’t have known what to do if Montserrat had suddenly decided to color her hair or slip into tight dresses. Part of their unspoken agreement, he thought, was that Montserrat must always remain the same. She must be a constant in his life, his true north.

There was a monstrous selfishness to this attitude. He understood this the same way he realized he was sometimes annoyingly childish in his demands and affection. But it was the only way he truly knew how to love someone.

“I made a duplicate of the film so we could work with that to produce a final mix, but I wanted you to at least see the original nitrate print one time,” Montserrat said, as they approached a door. “I was afraid the film might have shrunk, or that I wouldn’t have the right projector and equipment to work with it, but I can play this film fine. I’m not sure I’d want to be projecting an entire film with no assistant—you want two people switching reels and you want to be in a safety booth—but it’s a few minutes of film.”

“Then the film is in good shape,” Abel said nervously.

“You’ll see,” she said, holding a door open for them.

Tristán and Abel entered a small screening room with only three rows of seats. Tristán had been there on previous occasions. Antares had been top of the line, once. A 35-millimeter projection room, an editing room with a sturdy Moviola, a KEM and two computers that could run Avid, multiple editing bays with MIDI synchronizers: it was nothing to sniff at. But from what Tristán had heard, courtesy of Montserrat, Antares wasn’t doing so hot anymore. The equipment was aging, and there were new players in the market. Audiomaster 3000, which had already swallowed several other companies, dominated the dubbing market in no small part because of their ties to Televisa. Things were getting worse now that Audiomaster was the only dubbing studio capable of recording in stereo rather than the monoaural system once prevalent in Mexico.

Magic, if it does exist, would sure be helpful right about now, Tristán thought. Antares could use it, and so could Montserrat with the way her career was going. Then again, so could he.

Tristán and Abel picked their seats while Montserrat fiddled with the projector. Abel clutched the typewritten pages of the old movie script he had kept. He coughed and muttered to himself. Tristán, on the other hand, tossed a mint into his mouth. Montserrat had warned him there would be absolutely no smoking inside the studio, and he had to have a palliative.

The reel began with no fanfare, interrupting the darkness of the room, and he gazed at the screen.

Tristán had seen many films and never paid much attention to the stock they were shot on. That kind of trivia was best left for people like Montserrat or Abel to discuss. To him, it didn’t matter, and it must not have mattered to many others because Montserrat had mentioned that the majority of silver nitrate films had been recycled to extract the silver and celluloid.

But as he looked at the screen, he finally understood what those granules of silver could do for a film in the hands of a skilled director. There was a clarity to the images that belied their age, a depth to the shadows that made them almost touchable, and a luminosity that entranced the eye.

The first shot was of an empty altar with black draperies. Then two people walked into the frame, dressed in dark clothes. On the left was a beautiful woman, her hair pulled back with a ribbon across her forehead. Her hairstyle made her look like a Greek priestess, but her eyes were vacant or glancing in the wrong direction, away from her co-star, as though she were searching for a cue card. Clarimonde Bauer might have been a wannabe starlet, but she did not know what to do in front of the camera.