Silver Nitrate(80)
She was worried that whatever good luck might have been generated by the spell they’d cast when they dubbed the movie had vanished. Abel was dead, Tristán was probably out of an acting gig, and Montserrat couldn’t even collect a check. This might mean a complete reversal of fortunes.
“I’m great. I went to the basilica on Sunday to thank the Virgin of Guadalupe for helping me out,” her sister said.
“It must have been packed,” Montserrat replied, remembering the processions, the people carrying their statues of the Virgin in their arms and their bouquets of flowers.
The Virgin’s Day marked the beginning of the festivities that would bleed into the first week of January. Their mother had been devoted for a single day of the year and lit her candle and said a prayer every December 12. But others took it much further. Montserrat remembered the people, moving like ants downtown, heading to venerate her image.
It was a spectacle, as were the pastorelas where people dressed up as devils and angels and enacted the play of the Nativity. She wondered what Ewers would have made of those, interested as he was in performances. Religion and magic were not the same, but maybe Ewers had caught the scent of something when he walked downtown and saw such forms of entertainment.
Mexico was syncretism in motion, and Montserrat supposed in a weird way so was Ewers’s magic system. Of course, he bent it the way he wanted, talked his talk of Aryan superiority and ancient lay lines, but he was not exactly original.
There she was again. She wished to chat with her sister and forget about Ewers, but she kept going back to him. Tristán wasn’t wrong about her compulsions.
“Have you put up your Christmas tree?” Araceli asked.
“I forgot,” Montserrat admitted.
“Wow, you must be busy. But you have figured out how you’re spending New Year’s, right? You’re not going to be all alone?”
If Montserrat even hinted that she was planning on being alone, Araceli would never leave the city without her. She shook her head vehemently. “Of course not. I imagine Tristán and I will order takeout.”
“You are an adventurous duo. Then he’s not going anywhere, either.”
“No. It’s the two of us.”
“You should make sure you have a smidgen of Christmas cheer. Put up the tree, go to a party.”
When they were done with their hot chocolate, Montserrat drove her sister back home. Araceli surely noticed that she was distracted, but Montserrat hoped she chalked it up to the imaginary shifts she was working.
On the way home, she stopped at the same store where she’d bought books on Crowley and other occultists and bought more items. She didn’t have money to burn on this stuff, but Tristán was right: they didn’t understand the rules of the game they were playing. More reading material might be useless. Then again, her growing collection, spread across her desk, or resting atop a chair, comforted her. It wasn’t exactly Christmas cheer, like Araceli suggested, but it was keeping her busy.
In the back of a closet Montserrat stored an old plastic tree. She pulled it out and dragged it to the living room, along with a box full of glass ornaments. She strung lights around it. The tree looked shabby, but she plugged the lights in and contemplated her handiwork.
Montserrat pulled the curtain aside, looking at the building on the other side of the street where someone was having a party. On the floor below her they were playing “Campana Sobre Campana.” She went to her office, pulled out the headphones, and put on a tape with Huizar’s “Pecado Capital” that she’d traded in exchange for a couple of bootleg Mot?rhead tapes two years before and listened to “Nota Roja.”
She opened one of the books she’d bought and found a story about a group of amateur sorcerers in Washington who, in January of 1941, had tried to cast a spell against Hitler. The story had made it into an issue of Life. “The death that comes to you, let it come to him,” they had said as they stuck pins into a doll made to look like Hitler.
Wilhelm Ewers had a section on sympathetic magic—though he didn’t call it that—and another on reflecting hexes, and now she turned to that. She wondered what Ewers would have been up to if he hadn’t died. Would he still be roaming around Mexico? Or would he have tried his luck somewhere else? He was an opportunist, after all. And what flavor of magic would he serve his acolytes nowadays? Clarimonde Bauer had reprinted his book with no changes to the text, but he would have altered it. Made it sound attractive for modern readers.
You are special and therefore you deserve this knowledge, he would have said. Or else, You are not special, but I could make you so very special. Either way worked; he had tried both approaches depending on whom he spoke to. Ewers contradicted himself when it suited his purposes; one section of his book negated a previous one. Yet his words had a rhythm to them, a musicality. It was a bizarre comparison, but it made sense to her. Ewers made you dance to his waltz. After the first few notes, you knew the steps and kept on going.
The practice of hitobashira in ancient Japan involved the self-sacrifice of a person to ensure the safety of a building. In China human victims were sacrificed to the spirits of ancestors; nowadays human figures drawn on painted paper are offered instead. Aun, King of Sweden, offered his nine sons in sacrifice to prolong his life. In Iceland we find the term blót, which means to sacrifice, though, after the introduction of Christianity, the meaning was changed to “curse.”