“The Cipher of Fire” included long paragraphs on radiesthesia. This was not surprising, considering it was Ewers’s specialty. Ewers associated fire with passion, transformation, and willpower—the phoenix, reborn from its ashes, appeared as a common motif, but the fire salamander also received lovingly detailed paragraphs. He placed telepathy, illusions, and defensive magic in this chapter.
There was no hierophant who could control air by itself. This element was a wild card, something that altered the other elements and was not found alone. Only a master magician, such as Ewers himself, could hope to control fire, earth, and water, and gain access to the ever-elusive aether or “air.”
Movies were interesting to Ewers because they seemed to bring together all the four elements he relied on with his magic system. The silver nitrate used in films came from the earth; the spooling film was to him like a river of images; and the carbon arc lamps used to project movies were close to torches in his estimation, and thus connected to fire. These elements were unified and perfect with the inclusion of sound, which he identified as the air element. Air was an amplifier, like old audio systems, like Vitaphone, had amplified sound.
Films were also spectacles, and Ewers seemed to be fascinated by the idea of many people coming together to increase the power of a spell. Movies were a perfect amalgam of all the magical elements Ewers sought to harness, but Montserrat wasn’t sure whether he had become interested in them before he met Alma Montero or after. According to his letter, his realization of the value of film came upon a screening of one of her movies, but Alma had made it clear Ewers was a wannabe performer by the time she met him.
Montserrat turned to the “Cipher of Fire” chapter and looked for the section on defensive magic. There were two pages on warding charms, which included the advice to “burn candles” to dispel noxious spirits—she supposed Abel had gotten the idea for the white candles from there—and a small spell that necessitated the pricking of a finger. You’d then smear the blood on a white handkerchief and draw a rune, tying it in three knots, and top it all off by burning a stick of incense in front of this bundle.
Montserrat’s sister liked burning incense and had left a package of sticks at her apartment. She didn’t have a proper incense burner, so she simply dangled the stick atop a cup. As for the handkerchief, Montserrat pricked her finger but did not draw Ewers’s rune, instead tracing the word “shield” on a cloth napkin. She did this because she didn’t fancy Ewers’s complicated runes, but also because magic, from what Ewers seemed to be saying, was an exercise in belief and the self.
She didn’t think it mattered as much whether you drew a rune or a word. It was the process of concentrating on the ritual that might yield results. Runes were important, personal, to Ewers. They meant nothing to her, and so she went with a word that did have the significance she sought.
Now, whether this would work was another question. And it could be that Tristán and she were simply going crazy in unison, but in the event that there were indeed murderous sorcerers lurking around the city, Montserrat decided to be prepared. Her meeting with Alma had, despite her indifferent fa?ade in front of Tristán, jolted her a little.
After she was done knotting the handkerchief, she pushed her chair back and contemplated the corkboard that was now pinned with photos of Ewers along with notes and drawings. Her office was becoming a laboratory for understanding The House of Infinite Wisdom.
She zeroed in on one photo of Ewers surrounded by pale socialites and grinning men in their fine suits, all of them with wineglasses in hand. Where would she and Tristán have fit in with a crowd like that? Nowhere. In the late 1930s, in Chihuahua, where Tristán’s father had lived before moving to Tamaulipas, merchants accused Middle Easterners of carrying diseases, of unfair business practices. They called them Turks, no matter where they came from, they said aboneros should be expelled from the country, like the Chinese had been kicked out. By the late 1950s, when Ewers presided over his crowd of admirers, Mexico City was warming up to certain Lebanese businesspeople who wielded their wealth as an entry card into society, but it didn’t mean a poor boy like Tristán would have been welcomed with open arms. It also meant Montserrat, with her swarthy complexion and large nose, would not have made a good impression on those snobs.
Nevertheless, Ewers struck her as an opportunistic, slippery creature. A man who would not see a problem in draining as much money or knowledge from those he considered unsuitable companions before discarding them. They might have been allowed to attend one party, two, before being tossed away. Ewers had been a vampire, with his little book under his arm and his honeyed tongue serving as mesmeric tools.
Was studying him dangerous, as Tristán said? She supposed she could pretend nothing was amiss, erase the man from her mind, but that would only leave them more defenseless. Ignorance was not protection.
Montserrat copied the instructions for the spell on a piece of paper. She could give them to Tristán the next morning, if he was available. Or else she might call him that night.
Handkerchief in pocket, Montserrat took the subway to San Cosme. The trick in Mexico City was to know your method of transportation. Some neighborhoods should be approached only by subway, and others were fine for driving. Montserrat preferred not to take her car when it came to Santa María la Ribera, although the subway came with its own set of problems.
The car she boarded was crowded, which she’d expected, but the guy who practically slammed her against a pole and almost made her trip painfully reminded her of the benefits of her vehicle. Two teens laughed as they watched her wobble and hang on to a seat. She glared at them, thinking of Ewers’s hexes. Paint a rune on the back of a spider and then crush it in your left hand: so those who have wronged you shall be crushed in turn.
She turned her head, glancing at the window of the subway car. Everyone’s reflections were smudged in the glass; she was nothing but a blurry shape surrounded by other shapes. There was a guy a head taller than her standing behind her, looking down. She could see the muddled reflection of his head in the glass. Sometimes pervs tried to cop a feel or look down a lady’s shirt, and she stood with her elbow at the ready in case he got close. She’d jab him in the ribs. Her leg still ached, and she closed her eyes and snapped them open when the train reached her station.
Nando used to exhibit his wares at El Chopo, selling videotapes to darketos, punks, and other alternative types until internal strife with the civil association that controlled the vendors forced him to look for another place to hawk his wares. He decided he didn’t want to rent a storefront and settled on selling items from his apartment.
Nando sold cassette tapes and records that his cousin from Tijuana purchased in the USA and mailed to him, but when Betamax and later VHS hit the market, he settled on movies as his item of choice. Later, he concentrated on memorabilia, which fetched a higher price.
Nando lived on Fresno, three blocks from the Moorish Kiosk, in an ugly building that had been once painted “Mexican pink” and now looked like it was caked in dirt. The colonia had once aimed for a French look, with its Art Nouveau museum of glass and iron standing as a witness to great expectations that had long been dashed as the area grew grayer and more impoverished. Nando’s apartment building did not have that old European flair some buildings sported, with mansard roofs and iron work. Instead, it looked like a box of tissues with squares carved to form windows.