Silver Nitrate(35)
The man on the right was Abel Urueta, as young as they’d seen him in the album, a pale scarf tied around his neck. Clean-shaven, with the light hitting his face, he looked younger still. His mouth, twisted into a boyish smirk, added to that sense of greenness. Abel had wished his smirk to appear knowing, but instead it made him look panicked. He had been made to stand behind a camera, not in front of it.
Tristán had memorized the lines they would speak into the microphones that night. Even though Abel clutched the pages, and even though it was too dark to peek at them right that instant, he knew the words that were being mutely spoken on screen, and his lips traced each syllable.
“I greet you upon this most sacred of hours,” Abel was saying.
“I greet you as the moon bares her face to the sky,” the woman replied.
Two more lines, spoken in the silence of the projection room, and then a curtain was lifted in the background, and a hooded figure stepped forward. He walked without haste, his face shielded from the camera. Although Tristán could not be sure, this being black-and-white, he had a feeling the cape he wore would have been yellow, same as the gloves that encased his hands. It was a hunch.
The figure stopped suddenly and removed his cape, letting it fall upon the ground and finally showing his face. Although Tristán had not understood Ewers’s magnetism from gazing at a still photograph, he was now able to appreciate the man’s talent for showmanship.
Ewers had a fluidity that was ripe for the camera. Fittingly, he reminded Tristán of silent film actors, and he wondered if Alma Montero had tutored her lover in the art of theatrical gestures and movements, showing him how they shot movies in her day.
Ewers’s silver pendant glittered against his chest. He laced his hands together and moved them up, almost covering his face with them, then pulling them down as his lips parted.
“I greet you as the light that cleanses the dark,” his lips said.
The black-and-white backdrop rose, revealing a multitude of elaborate silver candelabra arranged behind the trio, the curtain of darkness substituted with a curtain of light as the candles gleamed like tiny diamonds.
“Give me your hands, dearest brother and sister, for now we call upon the Lords of Air, the Princes in Yellow, to witness our rites.”
There were more lines like this, sentences that Tristán could not comprehend—the mumbo jumbo dreamed up by screenwriters. In the background came attendants bearing implements that they laid upon the altar. A knife, a walking stick, two porcelain bowls.
The next scene would see the heroine tied upon that altar and then quickly rescued by her boyfriend. But for now, the screen remained exclusively occupied by the three performers, and although Ewers’s words were pompous and Clarimonde Bauer looked vacantly at the camera and Abel was much too nervous, the sum of all these elements was a vivid, enticing sequence rather than an amateurish disaster.
“Witness my might, for I am Sorcerer of Sorcerers, and I anoint myself the lord and master. The king is I,” Ewers said. Or he would have said, if the sound had been recorded on film. Again he laced his hands together, as if holding up an invisible crown while his two acolytes fell to their knees.
Slowly the man placed that invisible crown upon his head and stared at the screen. The light hit his eyes, making them shimmer as he lowered his hands. Then came nothing but blackness, and the reel ended and the lights went up.
Tristán sat in his chair, suddenly remembering his days of drug-dazed abandonment. There had been a feeling he had chased back then, which had been close to what the film had captured. Something sweet and dark and beautiful.
“The whole of the film, it wasn’t like that,” Abel said, as if guessing his thoughts. “But this and the other two sequences, they were like a dream, weren’t they?”
Or a nightmare, Tristán thought. Although maybe the difference didn’t matter to people like Montserrat and Abel, children who had wanted to hold the hands of monsters and ride fabulous celluloid beasts.
“I thought it was a bit like Cocteau when I shot it. But I had forgotten it. I had forgotten how beautiful it would look on screen,” Abel continued and smiled. “There’s magic there, isn’t there? Real magic.”
It was in that moment that Tristán finally understood Montserrat’s reticence, because the way the old man looked right at that instant, with all the hope in the world brimming from behind his tired eyes, made his heart ache a little.
The film was gorgeous. But so was that old vampire movie Nosferatu that Montserrat had taken him to see at an arts club that also doubled as a bar in the Condesa. The glow of Ewers’s pale hair was almost a blinding fire, but so was Harlow’s mane, and he had seen a dozen sequences draped in beautiful shadows, like the ones in this film, on a dozen screens. When they watched The Old Dark House, The Mummy, when Lugosi grinned at them across the ages.
This was no different from that: it was the alchemy of moviemaking, not of sorcerers.
Tristán’s silence must have betrayed him. Abel turned his head quickly, looked at him with anxious eyes.
“The missing ingredient is the sound, of course. Once we hear it with sound, you’ll get the full effect.”
Abel Urueta’s face was wasted and brittle. It almost hurt to look at him after seeing him walk across the screen in his youth, full of promise, with his smile betraying his nerves like now, decades later, his lips curved into another agitated grin.