Montserrat was honestly surprised. Tristán leaned against the doorway and smiled charmingly, brushing a piece of lint off his shirt. “I’d play a detective.”
“A detective? Holmes or Marlowe?”
“Marlowe, I guess. I get to stand in a suit, light filtering through the blinds, glass in hand. It’s for a brand of whiskey. Print and TV commercials. My face would be on billboards. It’s not a soap, but the money is good.”
“Forget soaps. Tristán, that’s amazing!”
Tristán smiled again. This time it wasn’t his crisp, canned smile, but a genuine one. He looked boyish and a little bashful when he smiled like that, the years melting off him.
When they were young they had played by the train tracks in Pantaco, wielding wooden planks as swords, reciting dialogue they scribbled on napkins.
Near the tracks were vast storage facilities filled with grain, a veritable ocean of corn, wheat, and rice, just a few paces from rickety fences with plenty of holes that were no deterrent for eager children.
The kids in the neighborhood would dare one another to jump into the gigantic piles of grain. They traded gruesome descriptions of rodents hiding in the corn, waiting to gnaw children’s toes off. They whispered stories of people who had choked to death, suffocated by the grain. Stories to scare each other, and yet, there was real danger in this adventure. One had to climb up to the rafters, walking along a wooden beam like a trapeze artist. The dive into the grain was a good seven-or ten-meter jump.
Tristán wouldn’t jump alone. Montserrat remembered plummeting into the grain, Tristán’s hand firmly grasping her own. She remembered the way her stomach lurched for a second, the sweaty palms, the gasp escaping their lips. For a fraction of a second it felt as if they were weightless.
Then came the cushion of grain beneath their bodies and Tristán’s wide, crooked smile as he turned to look at her, buried to his waist in kernels of corn. That smile before the dentist fixed his teeth, before the TV studio showed him how to grin for the flustered fans, before the world wore him down.
Montserrat slid her hands into her pockets and smiled back at him.
Tristán turned away and finished readying himself. They marched up to Urueta’s apartment with a good bottle of wine as an offering. When Abel opened the door, Montserrat remembered a photo of the director she’d seen in a book about the history of Mexican cinema. He still sported a little mustache and his hair was slicked back in the same style as it had been in the 1950s. He had a firm, pleasant voice that paired well with his tweed jacket and the gray knit vest with big buttons. He watched Montserrat and Tristán with the eye of a connoisseur, of a casting director.
“I’m so glad you are joining us. Tristán said you are a fan of old horror movies.”
“We both are,” Montserrat said as they sat down in the dining room. Behind Abel there was an old cabinet filled with dusty china and knickknacks. Cameras from different eras, photos in silver frames, a stack of greeting cards. The table was set with some of that same ancient china, the glasses dusted off and filled with wine.
“Who is your favorite director?”
“I like Tod Browning,” Montserrat said. “I like all the RKO horror movies, too. Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People is a classic. Val Lewton produced wonderful work on a tiny budget.”
“My father knew Browning. Back in the day, they shot films in different languages using different cast and crews but the same sets. My father was part of the crew on the Spanish-language Dracula. Browning shot in the daytime, the Spanish language crew shot at night. Have you heard of that?”
“Yes. With the Dunning method they could use a previously shot backdrop behind the actors, and therefore save money that way. No need to shoot a crowd scene twice. They’d substitute the silver in a black-and-white print with yellow dye and by lighting the set the right way, with yellow-orange lights against a blue background, you could create a rudimentary rear projection method.”
She’d told Tristán this dinner was stupid, but she was actually nervous about making an appearance. She didn’t want to seem too eager or too guarded, and she feared giving the wrong impression. Tristán was charming; she knew herself barely tolerable. Not that she wished to strike a sour note, but her favorite topics—forgotten films, horror, sound—were seldom the things others talked about. People’s eyes glazed over when she spoke, if she deigned to speak. Sometimes, at parties or reunions, she preferred to simply stand in a corner and pretend she’d lost the ability to string words together.
She was rude, that’s what people said, but she didn’t want to be rude to Abel Urueta. She wanted him to like her.
“What a delight. Your girlfriend does know her old films,” Abel said, beguiled rather than indifferent to her. She was used to indifference and smiled.
“Oh, Montserrat is not my girlfriend,” Tristán said with a careless chuckle. How annoying, his nonchalance, and how annoying, too, the little jab of pain that accompanied it.
It shouldn’t have bothered her, because he had spoken a true fact, and yet for a second there was that uncomfortable snagging of her heart before she shook her head and brushed the feeling away.
“We’ve been friends forever. She kept me from getting my ass kicked when I was a kid.”
“She’s a tiny thing, Tristán.”
“Back then I was short, too. I didn’t stretch up until I was fifteen. When my family moved to Mexico City the kids around our building made fun of my accent. I was from up north, my accent was thick, and the neighborhood was full of bullies who’d beat me up for the fun of it. But Montserrat knocked them down with her cane.”
It was true about the accent. You couldn’t tell where Tristán had originated anymore, he’d smoothed all his edges, but once upon a time he’d had the thickest of accents. It had been the same story with Pedro Infante. They had dubbed him in his first film because his accent was too thick and producers doubted he’d make it big. He was raw. That’s what they had said about Infante in the beginning. Infante proved them wrong, though. And Tristán had possessed a similar rawness that he’d polished to a fine sheen.
“A cane?” Abel asked.
“I limped,” Montserrat said, cutting into the chicken breast on her plate and shrugging. “I had to have surgeries to fix my foot. The kids called me Frankenstein because of my scar. Or they’d call me Peg Leg. I’d swing my cane around and beat the little pricks. When they laughed at Tristán, I beat them, too.”
“And when you grew up you both went into the entertainment business. Did you attend university together?”
“God, no,” Tristán said. “I dropped out of high school to act.”
“What did your family say about that?”
“They had their reservations.”
That was such a euphemism that Montserrat couldn’t muffle a snort. Tristán’s father had wanted his youngest boy to become a lawyer or a dentist, and they’d had a legendary row when Tristán quit school. The only reason why his old man had relented was because Tristán brought in good money back then, and they could use his paycheck—Tristán’s dad was having a rough patch.