“Runes?”
They strolled next to a vendor displaying rugs and others selling heavy rotary telephones from the fifties.
“There were many magic systems in Europe in the early part of the century. Krumm-Heller, the physician I told you about before, he studied runes and also developed a therapeutic system based on scents.”
“A belief in nice-smelling candles sounds innocent enough to me,” Tristán said. He was taking off his glasses now, biting at their arm.
“Krumm-Heller also believed that certain races were inferior to others.”
“That is definitely not innocent,” Tristán added, shaking his head. He put the sunglasses on again. “Was every occultist a racist?”
“Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society, also talked about higher and inferior races and the evolution of humans. Guido von List conceived of a magical runic alphabet and thought humanity had entered a cycle of decadence and was firmly in favor of eugenics. Then we have J?rg Lanz von Liebenfels, who was also an occultist and believed the Aryan people were threatened by lower races.”
“But was he a Nazi, then?” Montserrat asked. “You haven’t answered that question.”
“Maybe he was a soldier,” Tristán ventured. “Wehrmacht.”
“No, he wasn’t a soldier. He was an occultist. But plenty of occultists had bizarre racial theories, and Ewers wasn’t above listening to what pro-Nazi groups had to say. He mentioned the Vril Society and the Germanenorden. He claimed he stole knowledge from them.” Urueta took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead with it. “He was opportunistic, would befriend anyone who might assist him. Let’s finish looking at this aisle and then we can head back to my apartment. I’ll tell you more there.”
They spent another half hour at La Lagunilla even though Urueta did not acquire anything else.
When they reached the apartment the old man offered to pour all of them a brandy, and they sat down in the living room.
Tristán relieved himself of his sunglasses and accepted a brandy. Urueta leaned back in his chair and removed his shoes with a groan, then he donned a pair of slippers. The plastic bag with the two watches had gone into one of the many drawers of a cabinet. On a coffee table Montserrat spied a thick stack of old issues of Cahiers du Cinema.
“The Lagunilla bleeds me dry. It takes a lot of energy to look at the merchandise and figure out what’s what.”
“You were speaking of Ewers,” Montserrat said, quickly, wishing to jump back on the subject.
“Mmm? Yes. It’s funny, I haven’t spoken about him in a long time. I have a friend, José López, who would tell you that you should never speak of the dead. But then again, you are interested in him, and I seldom have interested guests.”
“You said Ewers stole knowledge. How?”
Urueta rubbed his hands together before taking a sip of brandy. “Ewers was not that different from many men who came before him. His occultist ideas were a mishmash of other ideas. Inspired by people like Krumm-Heller, Ewers thought Aryans were a superior race and therefore endowed with the capacity for spellcasting, but he also thought the Aztec and Inca were capable of such feats. And Mexicans, due to this ancestry, could also achieve a certain level of magic mastery.”
“But Mexicans are not Aztecs any more than all Italians are descendants of Roman generals,” Montserrat said.
“I’m definitely not Aztec,” Tristán said with a shrug. “Both of my grandparents were from Beirut.”
“Ewers’s concepts were, shall we say, a little fantastic. He saw parallels between European runes and Aztec and Maya ideograms and glyphs. His true innovations, the element that made him popular in Mexico in the late fifties, were his mishmashes of ideas about film and magic. Tell me, have either of you heard of Anton LaVey? He was the founder of the Church of Satan.”
“I don’t think LaVey was his real name,” Montserrat said. Since she was friends with Cornelia, she got to hear a bit about the topics that they covered on her show, and LaVey had come up at one point.
“Of course not. Everyone reinvents themselves. Rudolf ‘von’ Sebottendorf was no ‘von,’ either. LaVey was a showman, and so was Ewers. But if you asked him, he’d tell you his affinity for orbiting around movie stars and directors wasn’t so he could get a taste of showbiz: Ewers believed films were magical.”
“Where did he come up with that idea?” Tristán asked. “I know we talk about movie magic, but that’s a stretch.”
“Aleister Crowley, probably one of the most famous occultists that ever lived, organized the Rite of Saturn, a play performed in 1910. Crowley then went on to oversee several other theatrical performances. His idea was to embed ceremonial magic within the play. Certain gestures, certain costumes and symbols, were authentic and used by occultists. Ewers believed that Crowley was on the right track, that magic rites needed to be performed in front of a large audience, whose energies would power the spells being cast. But he didn’t think theater was the right medium for this.”
“Film,” Montserrat said. “A lot more people will see a movie than your average play. I guess they’re more immersive, too.”
Urueta snapped his fingers and nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly! Crowley wanted to induce a state of ecstasy in his audience; Ewers thought they would be better used as a battery. He also thought film had particular properties which intensified magic.”
“Such as?”
“The film was shot with silver nitrate stock because silver is a powerful conduit for spells.”
“In 1961?” Montserrat replied, incredulous. “It was phased out long before that.”
“They were still using nitrocellulose film base in Europe. Franco’s people bought nitrate stock that Kodak was trying to dispose of on the cheap, and Madrid Film used that to shoot flicks. We got ours from the USSR. It was unusual, but then the whole production was unusual. And you should see nitrate film stock when it is screened! The whites look like bleached linen, the blacks are so rich you feel you could bury your hands in that velvet darkness,” Urueta said, his eyes wide with childlike glee. “God, the film looked beautiful.”
Beautiful and liable to burst into flames, Montserrat thought. That’s exactly what had happened at the Cineteca some ten years before. Hundreds of Mexican films had been lost in a fire that had probably been caused when a loose wire made the nitrate film stock in the vaults explode. She’d heard of Moviolas blowing up when the sun’s rays focused on a lens. Nonsense, probably, but scary enough to make you careful around nitrate film.
“It must have been expensive to shoot with an outdated film stock,” Tristán said.
“Not as much as you’d think, and anyway Ewers had a wealthy patron,” Urueta said. For the first time since he had begun talking about the occultist, the old man looked uncomfortable. He shifted in his seat. “But yes, there were expensive choices, and the production schedule was not ideal. The complicated sound mixing meant we would have to spend more time in post-production.”
“How?” Montserrat asked. “Was the film scoring going to be laborious?”