Suddenly Urueta leaped forward and let go of his glass. It shattered, making Montserrat jump in her seat. Urueta snatched the album she had been holding from her, feverishly turning the pages. “Look at this! A review from 1959 talking about my excellent sense of timing! Look at me here, on the set of The Opal Heart in a Bottle. A career doesn’t vanish from one day to the next! We were all cursed!”
Urueta took a big breath then slowly walked back to the couch in front of them and sat down, closing the album and placing it on his lap. He smiled, the corners of his lips lifting only a tad.
“I guess you can see now why it’s a bad idea to interview me. I’m a crazy old man.”
“You’re not crazy,” Tristán said.
Montserrat was surprised by the sureness and honesty in his voice. So far, Tristán’s attitude had been one of wry amusement. But he sounded sincere. He did like the old man.
“Maybe you had bad taste in friends back in the sixties, but you’re not crazy,” Tristán added with a shrug, showing a little of his trademark mordancy after all.
“Thank you for that.”
They were quiet. Urueta’s living room, which she’d found cozy on previous occasions, now seemed to her stuffy, and the man’s antiques and knickknacks had an air of stale sadness. The broken glass shards lay scattered between them.
“I don’t normally talk about this, this story…about Ewers because…when I said I talked about ‘the curse’ at parties, I did, but I was drunk when I brought it up. I learned not to, after a while. People stare, they think you’re a nut. But I like you both. You’re good people and I’m telling you the whole story, the whole truth,” Urueta said, looking at Tristán, then at Montserrat. “I don’t want to be interviewed about that movie, but I will agree to do it if you help me. I do need help.”
“I can ask the TV show if they’d pay for the interview,” Montserrat suggested.
Urueta shook his head. “I don’t want money. I want your help in completing the film.”
“I don’t get it.”
Urueta placed his hands on the album, gripping it tight. He looked like a starlet who is about to sign an important contract, all nerves and sudden shyness.
“I’ve thought long and hard about what happened with Beyond the Yellow Door. All that lousy luck. I abandoned any magic practices after that, but my friend José kept at it, and he had a theory that everything that happened was because we didn’t complete the spell. Ewers died, Alma confiscated the reels, and we were never able to finish the dubbing. He said we caused a short circuit. And we didn’t pull the breaker. I want to finalize that film.”
“But you can’t,” Montserrat said. “You don’t have the film anymore, and Ewers is dead. He can’t provide the voice work. You said you needed three people.”
“Two men, one woman: that’s us,” Urueta said excitedly.
“I’ve played many roles, Abel, but I’m no sorcerer and neither is Montserrat,” Tristán said.
“I know that, but maybe it’ll work anyway. We dubbed two of the three scenes. It was the third scene that we didn’t get to work on. And I still have the pages Ewers gave us. I didn’t throw them out.”
“Even if we agreed to provide the voices, we don’t have the film.”
Urueta sat up straight. His nervousness was bleeding away. “I have that scene. It’s the only can of film I was able to hide before Alma pounced on us.”
“You have a can with a nitrate print in this apartment? That thing heats up, you’re toast,” Montserrat said in horror. “It can continue to burn even under water!”
The Kineopticon in London, Laurier Palace in Montreal, Esmeralda Theater in Chile, the Madrid Film laboratories, the Cinémathèque headquarters on the Rue de Courcelles. Nitrate fires through the decades. The ingredients of film—nitric acid, methyl alcohol, cotton liners—were the same as those for explosives. Burnt offerings for an invisible god, that’s what nitrate was.
“It’s not in the oven. It’s in the freezer!” Abel protested.
Montserrat had a vision of TV dinners and cuts of meat stacked against a metal canister. She hoped he didn’t mean that freezer.
“It’s perfectly safe, all right? I shot a whole movie with that film stock, I’m not going to be lighting a match anywhere near it.”
“You do have it?” Tristán asked.
“Of course I do!” Urueta said vehemently. “Do you think we could dub it?”
Montserrat didn’t reply. Instead, she pried Tristán’s whiskey from his hand and took a swig.
7
The end of October was their season, when sugar skulls adorned the windows of bakeries for the Day of the Dead and the video stores tried to push their horror catalogue onto customers. On Channel 5, there might be a late-night movie marathon. The Cineteca and the art clubs went for higher brow fare, Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, or Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. It was the time to read out loud the mordant rhymes about death printed in the morning edition and smile at the cartoons done in the style of Posada, but also the perfect week to pop a copy of A Nightmare on Elm Street into the videocassette player, followed by the remake of The Blob.
Yet Montserrat was quiet that year. She wasn’t deriving much joy from the last week of the month. The latest issue of Fangoria in Spanish lay discarded on the table between them, even though Tristán had bought it expressly for her: he could live without pictures of latex monsters. Montserrat looked her usual self, complete with a t-shirt that said “The Howling” in distinctive red letters, but it didn’t feel like her.
Tristán raised his cup of bad coffee to his lips and watched her. How Montserrat could fuck up something as simple as coffee, he didn’t know, but she managed it. He had to admit she could cook meatballs the way his mother did, though. It was the one dish she had been able to master.
“Are we going to help Abel or what, then?” he asked, because they had been circling around the topic for the past twenty minutes, and he was getting tired of her scowls and the way she sat, arms crossed, frustrated and anxious at the same time. Abel had begged him to beg Montserrat in turn, and Tristán had tried his best to bring up the topic organically and failed. It was time for a direct offensive.
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t want to do it, tell him. You don’t have to look at an old bit of film he stuck in a freezer.”
Montserrat stared at him, her voice firm. “I love the idea of getting a glimpse of a few minutes of Beyond the Yellow Door. It’s all I can think about lately.”
“Then what the hell is going on?”
She stood up and went into the kitchen. He heard her opening the refrigerator, and the sound of an ice tray slapped against the sink.
“I don’t want to get Abel’s hopes up,” she said.
“What?”
Montserrat walked back into the room, a glass filled with Fanta in one hand and a mug in the other. She set both of them down on the round table and sat down across from him.
“He thinks this is a spell, Tristán. Not any spell, but a spell that is going to break whatever curse was placed on him. He expects something to happen after we finish. What will he do when no one’s phoning to give him an Ariel next month?”