“You must fill the screen with something for forty-five minutes between commercial breaks. It might as well be a semi-coherent story.”
Tristán found the key and opened the door. “You know who advertises on that show? Those people with astrology hotlines. They must make a bundle by the minute.”
“Also singles hotlines,” she said, remembering the numbers that scrolled across the screen on certain shows late at night.
“Want to have a bite before you head home?” Tristán asked. He went straight to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was a large kitchen. The refrigerator looked like it had recently been rolled into the apartment and so did the stove. A bright yellow phone was attached to a wall.
“You’re cooking?”
Unlike Montserrat, whose mother had been uninterested in teaching her child how to cook, Tristán’s mother had shown him the secrets of the kitchen. He had been her baby, the little one clinging to her skirts. Montserrat’s mother was made of sterner stuff. She barked orders when she was around the house, but she usually got in late anyway, sometimes because of work and sometimes because she’d brought a date home. Montserrat learned to either ignore the men her mother called her “co-workers” instead of her lovers, or to step out and into Tristán’s apartment on the evenings when her mother had company. The Abaids had liked her, anyway, and Tristán’s mother piled her plate high with food.
“I would cook if I had anything decent in the cupboard. But you know how it is. You get used to cooking for two and then it’s too depressing to go back to one. I ate all the beef yesterday. Maybe there’s chicken somewhere.”
Tristán unbuttoned his plaid jacket and tossed it on a counter. Even a simple gesture like that could evoke beauty and grace when Tristán performed it. Now that Montserrat thought about it, today he had looked a bit old Hollywood, his outfit vaguely matching the antique setting. His face had been made for a different decade. Silent films, maybe.
She thought about Montero. She couldn’t remember when the woman had been born. Could she still be alive? If she was still around, it might be a good idea to interview her.
“No chicken. Sushi Ito opened up a few blocks from here,” Tristán said as he rummaged inside the refrigerator and pushed containers aside.
“Sushi Ito is no good. There are real sushi places in the city, you know?”
“Well, I don’t want to go all the way to a decent place. I don’t have any proteins. Fuck. This milk expired.”
Tristán took out a carton of Leche Lala and dumped its contents into the sink. Montserrat peered into his refrigerator. If she was guilty of not having enough food in her apartment, Tristán was guilty of having too much and always eating out anyway. Everything went bad in his refrigerator. He maintained a carefully curated collection of moldy tomatoes and overripe fruits. Montserrat didn’t know why he even bothered venturing into the supermarket if he was going to scarf down enchiladas at the Sanborns anyway. Nevertheless, when the fancy struck him, which, granted, was less and less these days, Tristán could cook a veritable feast. Montserrat knew how to make five dishes, and four of them she’d learned from Tristán’s mom. The lush red of pomegranates and saturated green of pistachios. The scent of rose water and warm bread. That was Tristán’s kitchen, and he hummed an old song as he chopped vegetables. It was usually one of the same melodies his mother used to sing to them.
Montserrat checked the expiration date on a yogurt container.
“Have you ever used those phone lines?” he asked.
She handed him the yogurt, which had also expired, and he began scooping out its contents into the sink. “Have I asked an astrologer to draw my natal chart over the phone?”
“No, the singles hotlines.”
“They’re scams. I’d rather be alone than pretend someone cares about me when they don’t give a damn.”
Tristán seemed to consider that, thoughtful, as he stood by the sink. The light from the refrigerator traced shadows and lines across his face, emphasizing the faint scar under the eye that worried him so much and that he thought marred his looks. A few hairs at his temples glinted silver. He could not have been photographed better if von Sternberg had brought reflectors and lamps into the apartment.
She thought about what Urueta had said, that Ewers believed magic could be performed using film stock, and for a second she believed he wasn’t so off the mark. Maybe certain people could cast spells with one look and a line of dialogue.
Tristán opened the tap, let the water flow, then closed it again and closed the refrigerator door, tearing away the wispy enchantment of light and shadow he’d conjured.
On the refrigerator he had a magnet with the number of a pizza parlor. “Now here’s a truly important question: triple cheese or quadruple cheese?”
She smiled and picked up the receiver. “Quadruple.”
FEATURE
FILM
6
Montserrat still missed the old Cineteca. She fondly recalled watching many films in the Salón Rojo before an inferno that raged for fourteen hours gutted it. They said the person responsible for that mess had been Durán Chávez, that he had fired the people who checked the air-conditioned vaults and made sure the temperatures did not rise above ten degrees Celsius. He’d been trying to save a few pesos, and instead the whole building exploded when the silver nitrate became unstable. But there were also tales of faulty wiring and even arson. There had been a fire at the UNAM Film Archive five years before the one at the Cineteca, and Manuel González Casanova, who designed the storage vaults there, had privately whispered that someone had stolen the reels inside and then torched the place to conceal the crime. If that was the case, perhaps the fire at the Cineteca was also deliberate.
Whatever the reason for the fire, the new facilities were soulless. The original Cineteca had been built atop two of the sound stages of Estudios Churubusco. One could say it had old films in its bone marrow.
The real problem with the new Cineteca was not aesthetic, but practical. Thousands of books, magazines, scripts, and films had been turned into ashes. Montserrat was looking at reduced holdings. Perhaps at some point there might have been more information, but now she was faced with the reality of finding only meager film stubs and capsules. The dregs of cinema, rather than the crown jewels.
In an attempt to be thorough, Montserrat combed through whatever material she could uncover on Urueta and Montero even if the pickings were slim: a few press clippings, publicity pictures of Montero from her heyday as a star, a filmography that didn’t even include all of Urueta’s flicks.
She found nothing about Ewers.
Beyond the Yellow Door. Urueta’s movie…She thought of film turning brittle, growing yellow with age, opaque, full of scratches and blemishes. But sometimes you could immerse film in hot water and restore it to its raw materials; recast it, bring it back to life. A coat of fresh emulsion…but the film Abel Urueta had shot was long gone. She wished she might have been able to see it. There was no trace of it. It had vanished. Just like Ewers, if he’d ever existed. Maybe Abel had told them a tall tale and there was no German occultist with a mysterious past. She’d never heard his name whispered by any of the film junkies she hung out with.