In the back of a closet Montserrat stored an old plastic tree. She pulled it out and dragged it to the living room, along with a box full of glass ornaments. She strung lights around it. The tree looked shabby, but she plugged the lights in and contemplated her handiwork.
Montserrat pulled the curtain aside, looking at the building on the other side of the street where someone was having a party. On the floor below her they were playing “Campana Sobre Campana.” She went to her office, pulled out the headphones, and put on a tape with Huizar’s “Pecado Capital” that she’d traded in exchange for a couple of bootleg Mot?rhead tapes two years before and listened to “Nota Roja.”
She opened one of the books she’d bought and found a story about a group of amateur sorcerers in Washington who, in January of 1941, had tried to cast a spell against Hitler. The story had made it into an issue of Life. “The death that comes to you, let it come to him,” they had said as they stuck pins into a doll made to look like Hitler.
Wilhelm Ewers had a section on sympathetic magic—though he didn’t call it that—and another on reflecting hexes, and now she turned to that. She wondered what Ewers would have been up to if he hadn’t died. Would he still be roaming around Mexico? Or would he have tried his luck somewhere else? He was an opportunist, after all. And what flavor of magic would he serve his acolytes nowadays? Clarimonde Bauer had reprinted his book with no changes to the text, but he would have altered it. Made it sound attractive for modern readers.
You are special and therefore you deserve this knowledge, he would have said. Or else, You are not special, but I could make you so very special. Either way worked; he had tried both approaches depending on whom he spoke to. Ewers contradicted himself when it suited his purposes; one section of his book negated a previous one. Yet his words had a rhythm to them, a musicality. It was a bizarre comparison, but it made sense to her. Ewers made you dance to his waltz. After the first few notes, you knew the steps and kept on going.
The practice of hitobashira in ancient Japan involved the self-sacrifice of a person to ensure the safety of a building. In China human victims were sacrificed to the spirits of ancestors; nowadays human figures drawn on painted paper are offered instead. Aun, King of Sweden, offered his nine sons in sacrifice to prolong his life. In Iceland we find the term blót, which means to sacrifice, though, after the introduction of Christianity, the meaning was changed to “curse.”
Her finger carefully underlined the word “curse.” She turned the page.
To reverse the flow of a curse, reflect it. Should the sorcerer cast a spell for illness, respond with a spell for health to neutralize it. Should the curse be of a more significant proportion, then a sacrifice may be required. The greater the magic, the greater the price.
Montserrat looked at the corkboard decorated with Ewers’s photos and crossed her arms. She tried to picture him this time not as a grinning fellow at a Mexican high-society party, performing parlor tricks for Alma Montero and her friends, but younger. In the days when his parents organized boisterous reunions. Merely a kid with an imagination, and this made her remember Tristán and the times she wrapped him in old bedsheets and pretended he was a ghost rising from the grave.
But Wilhelm Ewers had been neglected after his brother’s death. He’d grown up alone in a distant, large house, with no playmates to joke with him. My parents heaped praise upon my older brother and left me to spend lonely afternoons in my room, anticipating my early demise, he’d written.
An angry little kid who had been informed he was special and the rest of the world was beneath him. She slid her headphones off her ears, letting them rest on the back of her neck.
* * *
—
She picked up Tristán the following evening around seven. The palm trees lining the avenue that led them into Las Lomas were glowing bright with Christmas lights, but otherwise the festivities were subdued in this part of the city. Neatly trimmed hedges hid expensive houses, and sober driveways sneaked behind tall walls. People in Las Lomas had real gardens, with purple bougainvilleas and pale roses, unlike everyone in Montserrat’s sphere, who made do with potted plants.
This area was “exclusive,” which also meant people had good security. Even if Clarimonde Bauer was still living at the address on the invitation, they could be chased away by bodyguards. They could also end up in jail, if the lady got nasty, and Montserrat did not want to have conversations with cops again. But there was nothing left to do but roll the dice.
They turned left, taking a side street. It was practically impossible to see the numbers on some of these houses or the names of the streets. Nobody cared to put up the proper signage, because if you lived there, you knew where you were headed.
“I think it’s that one,” Tristán said.
Montserrat stopped the car and stared at the house Tristán had pointed out. A white wall surrounded it, and there was a silver metal gate. Behind it you could glimpse a house with a coarse gray exterior. Las Lomas had no single overwhelming style. The rich constructed their homes in whatever fashion they fancied, with Spanish-inspired stucco houses sitting next to Porfirian style mansions. The Brutalist also had its place, as evidenced by Bauer’s home.
Montserrat rang the bell. A servant came out and peered at them through the bars of the gate.
“We’re here to see Clarimonde Bauer,” she said.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No. But please hand her this and tell her it’s about Wilhelm Ewers,” Montserrat said, pulling out one of the sheets of paper with Ewers’s writing.
The servant did not look convinced, but he came back after a few minutes and opened the gate for them, and they walked the wide stone path leading toward the front door of the house.
The inside of Clarimonde’s home was pure and simple: bright lights, polished cement floors, rough white walls. It had the feeling of a fortress, impenetrable, and the living room was all steel and glass furniture, except for the white couch where Clarimonde Bauer sat, dressed in matching white, as if color had been drained from this home.
Clarimonde Bauer’s hair was a light blond, worn in a low chignon. Her blouse and trousers were made of linen, and she had silver bracelets around her arms and rings on almost every finger. A vase with a flower and a bowl with fruit had been set atop a coffee table. There were markers and pencils stacked on one end of the table.
She had a large sketchbook and a piece of charcoal and was busy sketching when they walked in. She was drawing a still life. The first page of Ewers’s letter lay by her side.
“One must have hobbies,” Clarimonde said, still focused on her drawing. “Or else the mind atrophies.”
“When you were young your hobby was acting,” Montserrat said.
“That was a long time ago. I know your voices, but not your names. You are Abel’s little friends.”
“How do you know our voices?” Tristán asked.
“From the dub you made.”
“Then you have the film,” Montserrat said.
Clarimonde’s glasses were rimless and her eyes, when she glanced up at them, were green. “Of course.”
They were standing in front of her now. Clarimonde gestured for them to sit and they did, trying to balance themselves on an uncomfortable white couch that matched the one Clarimonde sat on. The woman set her drawing pad down on the table.