“Call me immature then, because it sounds reasonable to me,” he said, spreading his arms. “It’s twenty years of foreplay, Momo. Do you want to wait a few more decades until I can’t masticate my own food? ’Cause I’ll love you until then and feed you pureed prunes, but it would be a shame to start living together at eighty-nine and die of a heart attack the first time we have sex.”
“That is the most disgusting declaration I’ve ever heard,” she said flatly, and then she couldn’t help it, she laughed. Tristán laughed, too, and now he felt stupid, but he supposed that was fine. It was okay to be stupid when it came to Montserrat.
“It is, isn’t it?” he said.
They hugged. She clung tightly to him, tighter than she’d ever held him. His arms wrapped around her, chasing shadows away.
“What do you want me to say? I recite dialogue, I can’t write it,” he whispered, his voice soft against her ear.
“You’re a silly tomato,” she blurted, not even knowing what she said. She was forgetting the meaning of words and how to speak them.
“A silly tomato!”
She could feel his smile, but her face was buried against his chest, and he was running a hand through her hair. She couldn’t bear to look at him.
“You can’t drive my car, I won’t let you. I won’t do your laundry, I won’t sew your buttons, and if you don’t pick up after yourself, I’ll toss you out,” she said, whip-quick.
“I’ll cook. Believe me, we’ll live longer,” he said, his fingers sliding down her cheek, tipping up her chin.
“You’re an asshole,” she said.
“You going to kiss me or what?” he asked, voice husky, and was rewarded with the tremor of her lashes. “At least I’m not the only nervous one,” he said, savoring the startled look on her face as she stared up at him.
She wanted to punch him. “You probably kiss like in the movies and I’ll die of embarrassment.”
“Well, fuck me, I kiss well, yes. That’s a plus. Now who’s the silly tomato?” he asked, stepping back and arching an eyebrow at her. “Wanna make out in your car tonight?”
She did punch him on the arm then, not hard, but to make sure he didn’t get too cocky.
Across the avenue, a vendor of tamales was pushing a cart, his strident whistle calling forth customers. A boy carrying a big boom box was walking on the other side of the street, spewing loud notes through the night air. “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” or at least a cover of it, was playing on the radio.
“Come on, dinner is on me,” Tristán said, pointing at the vendor and slipping his hand in his jacket, looking for his wallet.
This was life, they figured. Not a fabulous medley of spells, hexes, and intoxicating power, but the simple, ordinary assembly of sights and sounds that were nevertheless a wonder, for they were viewing and listening to them together. She laced her hand with his and they crossed the street in a hurry, laughing and telling the man to wait one second for them.
Author’s Note
In 2010 I published a story called “Flash Frame” in a very small press anthology titled Cthulhurotica. That story was reprinted in The Book of Cthulhu in 2011 and gave me a certain amount of caché among the Lovecraftian circle. It was the tale of a pornographic film screened at an old movie theater that seems to attract a disturbing crowd and has eerie side effects on the narrator, a journalist looking for a scoop. This was the seed from which Silver Nitrate was born. Cultists, old movies, and a fire appear in the short story, and re-emerge in the novel, albeit in radically different ways.
The color yellow showed up in “Flash Frame” and became something of a leitmotif in my fiction. It appeared in the short stories “The Yellow Door” and “Sleep Walker.” It again popped up in the mushrooms of Mexican Gothic and the novella The Return of the Sorceress. Over and over again, this color yellow. Why? There is of course The King in Yellow, that well-loved example of Weird fiction by Robert W. Chambers. Yellow is associated with romantic decadence thanks to The Yellow Book, a British quarterly literary periodical that was published in the nineteenth century. “The Yellow Wallpaper” details the descent of one woman into madness. Gautier spoke of language “veined with the greenness of decomposition,” but my color is yellow.
The Nazis did have a bizarre medley of occult interests. From lay lines to astrology, hollow earth theories to Tibetan expeditions, they built a mythology that supported their racist concepts. Goebbels believed that cinema was one of the most effective propaganda instruments and sought to consolidate and control this industry.
There is a common phrase I grew up with in Mexico: “mejorar la raza.” It translates to “better the race” and means you should marry whiter, more European-looking people, so, although there was no Wilhelm Friedrich Ewers in the 1950s in Mexico City, he might not have been unwelcome.
Ewers is a composite of many occultists, although the spark of inspiration for him was Arnold Krumm-Heller, who indeed made his way to Mexico. Ewers derives his surname from Hanns Heinz Ewers, a novelist, early scriptwriter, correspondent of occultist Aleister Crowley, and Nazi supporter. He might have also been a secret agent, who traveled to Mexico to persuade revolutionary Pancho Villa to attack the United States. Ewers fell out of favor among Nazi officials due to his homosexuality. His assets were seized, and his books were banned in 1934. He died in 1943. His most famous story, “The Spider,” is the tale of a man who falls in love with a mysterious woman named Clarimonde who lives across the street from him.
Much of the information on films is true even if Abel Urueta is made up. He is named after Mexican film director Chano Urueta, who was responsible for dozens and dozens of films, including many horror flicks （El Monstruo Resucitado, La Bruja）。 His first name comes courtesy of actor Abel Salazar, who played Alberto de Morcef in an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Nitrate film is highly flammable, and it’s also true that although in the United States there was a switch toward a safer alternative in the 1950s, other countries continued to use nitrate stock because it could be purchased cheaply. Francoist Spain bought large amounts of nitrate film at a discount.
In the United States foley art, the reproduction of sound effects, owed its name to Jack Foley, but in Mexico it was a different story. The efectos de sala were nicknamed after a different man: sound technician Gonzalo Gavira. Hence the terms “hacer un Gavira” or “montar un gavirazo.”
There are several lost films I thought about when writing this novel. One is London After Midnight: the last existing print of this movie was destroyed in a fire in an MGM vault in 1967. Another is Carlos Enrique Taboada’s Jirón de Niebla, which was supposedly stolen as part of a complex case of political intrigue. In life, like they say, truth is stranger than fiction.
For Orrin Grey,
monster maker
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Barton Hewett, Jeremy Lutter, Carlos Morales, and Gabriela Rodriguez for their information and assistance in matters of film and audio editing. Thanks also to my editor, Tricia Narwani, and my agent, Eddie Schneider.
If this book had a soundtrack, it would probably consist of John Carpenter’s film scores, the Italians Do It Better collective, the Canadian band July Talk, the obscure Mexican post-punk band La Sangre de Alicia, Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love album, Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Possess Your Heart,” and the soundtrack from Phantom of the Paradise, all of which I listened to on rotation while writing Silver Nitrate.