Tristán and Abel followed Montserrat down the long hallway with mirrors. Her t-shirt that day had The Hunger written on it and her hair was tied up in a messy bun. She looked as plain as usual, but it was a plainness Tristán liked, even if he teased her about it. He wouldn’t have known what to do if Montserrat had suddenly decided to color her hair or slip into tight dresses. Part of their unspoken agreement, he thought, was that Montserrat must always remain the same. She must be a constant in his life, his true north.
There was a monstrous selfishness to this attitude. He understood this the same way he realized he was sometimes annoyingly childish in his demands and affection. But it was the only way he truly knew how to love someone.
“I made a duplicate of the film so we could work with that to produce a final mix, but I wanted you to at least see the original nitrate print one time,” Montserrat said, as they approached a door. “I was afraid the film might have shrunk, or that I wouldn’t have the right projector and equipment to work with it, but I can play this film fine. I’m not sure I’d want to be projecting an entire film with no assistant—you want two people switching reels and you want to be in a safety booth—but it’s a few minutes of film.”
“Then the film is in good shape,” Abel said nervously.
“You’ll see,” she said, holding a door open for them.
Tristán and Abel entered a small screening room with only three rows of seats. Tristán had been there on previous occasions. Antares had been top of the line, once. A 35-millimeter projection room, an editing room with a sturdy Moviola, a KEM and two computers that could run Avid, multiple editing bays with MIDI synchronizers: it was nothing to sniff at. But from what Tristán had heard, courtesy of Montserrat, Antares wasn’t doing so hot anymore. The equipment was aging, and there were new players in the market. Audiomaster 3000, which had already swallowed several other companies, dominated the dubbing market in no small part because of their ties to Televisa. Things were getting worse now that Audiomaster was the only dubbing studio capable of recording in stereo rather than the monoaural system once prevalent in Mexico.
Magic, if it does exist, would sure be helpful right about now, Tristán thought. Antares could use it, and so could Montserrat with the way her career was going. Then again, so could he.
Tristán and Abel picked their seats while Montserrat fiddled with the projector. Abel clutched the typewritten pages of the old movie script he had kept. He coughed and muttered to himself. Tristán, on the other hand, tossed a mint into his mouth. Montserrat had warned him there would be absolutely no smoking inside the studio, and he had to have a palliative.
The reel began with no fanfare, interrupting the darkness of the room, and he gazed at the screen.
Tristán had seen many films and never paid much attention to the stock they were shot on. That kind of trivia was best left for people like Montserrat or Abel to discuss. To him, it didn’t matter, and it must not have mattered to many others because Montserrat had mentioned that the majority of silver nitrate films had been recycled to extract the silver and celluloid.
But as he looked at the screen, he finally understood what those granules of silver could do for a film in the hands of a skilled director. There was a clarity to the images that belied their age, a depth to the shadows that made them almost touchable, and a luminosity that entranced the eye.
The first shot was of an empty altar with black draperies. Then two people walked into the frame, dressed in dark clothes. On the left was a beautiful woman, her hair pulled back with a ribbon across her forehead. Her hairstyle made her look like a Greek priestess, but her eyes were vacant or glancing in the wrong direction, away from her co-star, as though she were searching for a cue card. Clarimonde Bauer might have been a wannabe starlet, but she did not know what to do in front of the camera.
The man on the right was Abel Urueta, as young as they’d seen him in the album, a pale scarf tied around his neck. Clean-shaven, with the light hitting his face, he looked younger still. His mouth, twisted into a boyish smirk, added to that sense of greenness. Abel had wished his smirk to appear knowing, but instead it made him look panicked. He had been made to stand behind a camera, not in front of it.
Tristán had memorized the lines they would speak into the microphones that night. Even though Abel clutched the pages, and even though it was too dark to peek at them right that instant, he knew the words that were being mutely spoken on screen, and his lips traced each syllable.
“I greet you upon this most sacred of hours,” Abel was saying.
“I greet you as the moon bares her face to the sky,” the woman replied.
Two more lines, spoken in the silence of the projection room, and then a curtain was lifted in the background, and a hooded figure stepped forward. He walked without haste, his face shielded from the camera. Although Tristán could not be sure, this being black-and-white, he had a feeling the cape he wore would have been yellow, same as the gloves that encased his hands. It was a hunch.
The figure stopped suddenly and removed his cape, letting it fall upon the ground and finally showing his face. Although Tristán had not understood Ewers’s magnetism from gazing at a still photograph, he was now able to appreciate the man’s talent for showmanship.
Ewers had a fluidity that was ripe for the camera. Fittingly, he reminded Tristán of silent film actors, and he wondered if Alma Montero had tutored her lover in the art of theatrical gestures and movements, showing him how they shot movies in her day.
Ewers’s silver pendant glittered against his chest. He laced his hands together and moved them up, almost covering his face with them, then pulling them down as his lips parted.
“I greet you as the light that cleanses the dark,” his lips said.
The black-and-white backdrop rose, revealing a multitude of elaborate silver candelabra arranged behind the trio, the curtain of darkness substituted with a curtain of light as the candles gleamed like tiny diamonds.
“Give me your hands, dearest brother and sister, for now we call upon the Lords of Air, the Princes in Yellow, to witness our rites.”
There were more lines like this, sentences that Tristán could not comprehend—the mumbo jumbo dreamed up by screenwriters. In the background came attendants bearing implements that they laid upon the altar. A knife, a walking stick, two porcelain bowls.
The next scene would see the heroine tied upon that altar and then quickly rescued by her boyfriend. But for now, the screen remained exclusively occupied by the three performers, and although Ewers’s words were pompous and Clarimonde Bauer looked vacantly at the camera and Abel was much too nervous, the sum of all these elements was a vivid, enticing sequence rather than an amateurish disaster.
“Witness my might, for I am Sorcerer of Sorcerers, and I anoint myself the lord and master. The king is I,” Ewers said. Or he would have said, if the sound had been recorded on film. Again he laced his hands together, as if holding up an invisible crown while his two acolytes fell to their knees.
Slowly the man placed that invisible crown upon his head and stared at the screen. The light hit his eyes, making them shimmer as he lowered his hands. Then came nothing but blackness, and the reel ended and the lights went up.