Tristán sat in his chair, suddenly remembering his days of drug-dazed abandonment. There had been a feeling he had chased back then, which had been close to what the film had captured. Something sweet and dark and beautiful.
“The whole of the film, it wasn’t like that,” Abel said, as if guessing his thoughts. “But this and the other two sequences, they were like a dream, weren’t they?”
Or a nightmare, Tristán thought. Although maybe the difference didn’t matter to people like Montserrat and Abel, children who had wanted to hold the hands of monsters and ride fabulous celluloid beasts.
“I thought it was a bit like Cocteau when I shot it. But I had forgotten it. I had forgotten how beautiful it would look on screen,” Abel continued and smiled. “There’s magic there, isn’t there? Real magic.”
It was in that moment that Tristán finally understood Montserrat’s reticence, because the way the old man looked right at that instant, with all the hope in the world brimming from behind his tired eyes, made his heart ache a little.
The film was gorgeous. But so was that old vampire movie Nosferatu that Montserrat had taken him to see at an arts club that also doubled as a bar in the Condesa. The glow of Ewers’s pale hair was almost a blinding fire, but so was Harlow’s mane, and he had seen a dozen sequences draped in beautiful shadows, like the ones in this film, on a dozen screens. When they watched The Old Dark House, The Mummy, when Lugosi grinned at them across the ages.
This was no different from that: it was the alchemy of moviemaking, not of sorcerers.
Tristán’s silence must have betrayed him. Abel turned his head quickly, looked at him with anxious eyes.
“The missing ingredient is the sound, of course. Once we hear it with sound, you’ll get the full effect.”
Abel Urueta’s face was wasted and brittle. It almost hurt to look at him after seeing him walk across the screen in his youth, full of promise, with his smile betraying his nerves like now, decades later, his lips curved into another agitated grin.
And for a few seconds Tristán wished with all his might that there really were spells and curses could be lifted.
“Yes, there’s magic,” Tristán said gently. Although he was egotistical by nature, he also had moments of great generosity and tenderness, and he esteemed the old man. He was a weirdo, but so were he and Montserrat.
The door behind them opened, and Montserrat walked into the room, hands in her pockets. She smiled at them shyly, as if tiptoeing into a church, and he could tell by the way her eyes shone that she was as excited about this bit of film as Abel.
“Are you gentlemen ready to record a few lines?” she asked.
Tristán turned to Abel, who was still holding the pages with a death grip. The director nodded.
8
Montserrat arrived with the fury of a sudden autumn rain, stomping into his apartment, dry-cleaned clothes in hand. Her frizzy hair was like a dark cloud above her head. He did not understand her sour face at first, but the source of the problem became quickly apparent: it was Abel Urueta, again, like a musical motif that gets repeated when the monster is about to pounce on an actor.
“I warned you we were getting his hopes up,” she said. “Last night he phoned, and he spent thirty minutes telling me about Ewers.”
“Hmm,” Tristán said distractedly. He was trying to pick a tie and regarded the choices he’d laid on the bed with skepticism. “What about the little sorcerer boy?”
“Ewers had to leave Germany in 1941, after Hitler passed a law kicking out practitioners of ‘secret doctrines.’？”
“What exactly is a secret doctrine?” he asked, his interest stoked for a second.
“Anything to do with magnetic healers, astrologists, faith healers, all that stuff. But occultism was fine for military applications, so some people were able to escape punishment by working for the Nazis. And even though Ewers sometimes said he had left Germany before the end of the war, he also said he practiced radiesthesia to save his neck.”
“You’ve lost me,” Tristán admitted.
“Swinging pendulums around to locate Allied ships and sink them.”
“That could be useful background for your story.”
“Maybe it would be, if I could believe it and confirm it. Urueta has several different background stories for Ewers: he left in 1941; no, he stayed; no, he wasn’t working for the Navy and maybe he’d been conscripted by them.” Montserrat shook her head. “Besides, that’s not the point. Abel’s talking magic and counting the days until the spell begins to work,” she said, pointing up at the ceiling, presumably at Abel’s apartment.
“You enjoy chatting with him!”
“Seven days since we dubbed the film and seven days of calls. He’s even calling me at my job. He phones more than once. Yesterday he called three times. This is serious.”
Tristán sighed and tried to maneuver her out of the bedroom, but Montserrat stood her ground. She practically hissed at him. So she was going to be in that kind of mood today.
“What are you going to do about this?”
“We didn’t promise him results.”
“No, but that’s what he wants. He’s asked twice if I did the dubbing correctly. He even wants me to screen the nitrate print again, and he keeps calling me. You told me you’d phone him.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“He’s drinking too much. Double whiskey hour is turning into double whiskey evening.”
“Oh, Abel downs a drink or two, but it’s no big deal.”
“I guess you’re not one to judge.”
Tristán frowned, prickled by the implication. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Montserrat met his eyes. “Talk with Abel.”
“I’ll have a chat with him.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, tonight or tomorrow. Sometime next week,” he said, his irritation mounting. He hated it when people pressured him, most of all Montserrat, because she was aware that he hated it. He also hated reminders, he hated veiled threats, and he hated the way she was pursing her lips at him.
“He called at eleven p.m. last night.”
“I need to finish getting ready. Can I have my suits?”
“The bill wasn’t paid, and I had to cover it myself. Let me find the receipt,” she muttered, as she tried to fish inside her purse with one hand while holding the hangers with the other.
“Oh, give me that!” he said angrily, tugging at the hangers. “I should tell the cleaning lady to pick it up next time. Then I wouldn’t have neurotic fights over my clothes.”
Montserrat opened her mouth in surprise. Two seconds later she tossed the garment bags in his face.
“Yeah, you should pay the cleaning lady to pick up your clothes,” she said. “You should pay a cab driver to take you places, too. In fact, why don’t you start doing that right now?”
“For fuck’s sake, Momo, I have an appointment with Dora! I thought you were giving me a lift!”
“I’m not your chauffeur.”
She left, slamming the door shut so hard he thought it would fall off its hinges. Tristán hurried to his bedroom and changed. As he buttoned his shirt and stood in front of the mirror, he noticed that the tap was dripping again. It was unbelievable that his brand-new apartment could have plumbing issues, but it was the second time that week that he’d closed the tap only to find a trickle of water flowing when he walked into the bathroom later in the day. He did not want to call a plumber.