Everything took place in silence, apart from the occasional liquid plinking as Diaz gently stirred the development fluid. There was no need for instructions to be passed between them. They had worked together like this many times.
When it came to other matters, it was not that they had nothing to say to one another, but rather that there were no words for the things that needed to be said.
They limited themselves to banal exchanges. And never spoke of what was dearest and most troubling to them.
Only once had his uncle referred to such matters. Diaz had perhaps caught something in his nephew’s expression. He had placed his hand on his nephew’s shoulder and said quietly and simply: ‘We shall make them see, Inti. One day we shall make them see.’
Then he had nodded once and removed his hand from Inti’s shoulder.
For such men, in such circumstances, it is good to have an absorbing task that requires intense concentration and can be carried out in near darkness.
But it was strangely appropriate, this silence of theirs. A mute conjuring of silent, flickering ghosts from out of the coiled void.
Inti watched the hurtling of the second hand, knowing that the moment was approaching when he would have to break the silence.
‘Cinco.’
The announcement served as a marker. It gave them the measure of infinity.
Sometimes, as now, while they waited for the tiny images to form in the test strips, other images came unbidden to Inti. These were not memories. The darkroom was where he came to escape the past. A past he barely understood, but which held him in its grip nonetheless. No, these were images of a future in which he found release. He saw the promise of his uncle’s words fulfilled. He saw the moment when, at last, the world was made to see.
‘Diez.’
This was the crucial marker. He always added, with a note of firm, but good-humoured command, his uncle’s name: ‘Diaz.’
And Diaz always smiled the same indulgent smile as he lifted out the first of the strips of film to rinse it in the running water of the washing bath, before transferring it to the final bath, containing fixer.
It didn’t matter to Inti what the film depicted. If he was honest, he wondered why his uncle squandered his talents working for that disgusting Austrian. For Diaz, the perfection of his craft was all that mattered. Inti understood this. The beauty that Diaz was able to create, the masterful interplay of dark and light, the bold compositions, the instinctive understanding and faultless control of movement and depth … these were all things that existed independently of Waechter’s tawdry melodramas. And they were all the things for which Diaz was responsible. They were also, incidentally, the elements for which Waechter, as the director, received the most lavish praise.
It all came down to light and dark and time and chemicals. These comprised his uncle’s stock in trade. And no one understood them better than Diaz. Was it possible to hope that Inti too would one day reach a similar level of familiarity?
In the meantime, he had better keep his mind on the task in hand.
‘Quince minutos.’ He didn’t know why, at fifteen, he always felt the need to make explicit exactly what it was that he was counting out.
Diaz took the developed strip out of the fixer and pegged it to the darkness. The line that traversed the darkroom was hardly visible, just a single silken thread cast out by a bloodthirsty spider.
Diaz turned to Inti, as he always did at this point in the proceedings. The muted, coloured light fogged the circular lenses of his spectacles. Diaz’s gaze was unwavering; watchful, but not appraising; accepting, a little solicitous, but respectful. Inti was well aware of the high regard in which his uncle held him. It weighed heavily on him at times. He was not sure that he was capable of living up to it.
There was something, too, in the nature of an invitation embodied in his uncle’s facing him. Inti sensed the openness there. It was as if his uncle was saying to him, ‘You know, if there ever is anything you want to say to me, you may say it to me any time.’ Or, at its simplest, ‘I am here for you.’
But the only answer Inti ever gave to this invitation was, ‘Veinte.’
Diaz pegged up the second test strip. Brilliant white light swamped the room, chasing out the lambent gloom.
The sudden glare struck Inti as harsh and unwelcome. There was no comfort in it, nowhere to hide. It was almost as if the pain came looking for him.
Inti could see that each strip was now divided into six or seven frames. He was eager to have a closer look at the frames, but it was his uncle’s prerogative to examine the test strips first. Diaz opened up a folding brass eyeglass and held the first of the strips up to the light. When he was satisfied, he passed it on to Inti without comment.
Inti already had his own magnifying glass at the ready.
Barely visible against a grey field of tone, a dark spherical object was repeated in each frame. A smaller, lighter-toned disc was just emerging from the centre of the sphere.
‘What do you think?’ said Diaz.
Inti shrugged without committing himself. He held out his hand for the second test strip.
The same repeated image, but this time the contrast between the now black sphere and paler background was clearer. The lighter-toned detail in the centre of the sphere was bleached to white, and lacked any internal detail.
Inti gave the strips back to his uncle. ‘First one not enough. Second one too much.’
‘What about the exposure? Is the exposure correct?’
‘Of course.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because you shot it, Uncle.’
Diaz smiled and cuffed his nephew affectionately. He waved one of the strips. ‘This one is not much under. Thirteen minutes should do it. No, say thirteen and a half minutes. Do you agree, Inti?’
Inti nodded unhesitatingly. Diaz laid the test strips on the winding bench next to the pin-frame and consulted a notebook. This was his shooting record. In it he had written down the length of the shots to be processed and the lighting conditions for each one. In fact, today it had been a simple shoot. One sequence. A stationary object for a detail that Waechter wanted to insert at the last minute into the film they had believed was finished. The lighting had been constant throughout. That meant the film could be processed in one piece, instead of having to be divided up into separate scenes, each needing its own tests and separate times in the development bath.
Inti had been there at the shoot, working as Diaz’s assistant, turning the camera crank whenever Diaz needed his hands free to pull the focus or move the camera on its tripod. But there had been little that was technically demanding today. They had simply shot the prop from a number of different angles and distances so that Waechter would have a choice when he came to editing.
The light in the darkroom was switched back to safety. Diaz lifted out the complete reel of film and folded over the end, securing it with one of the pins from his lapel. He fastened this loop of film over one of the central pins on the pin-frame. He nodded for Inti to begin winding.
And now Inti was the spider, spinning a web of celluloid. When he had spun out the entire length of film, Diaz plucked the other pin from his lapel and created a second loop at this end to fasten the film securely on to the frame.
Diaz immersed the frame in the bath of developer. Inti began the stopwatch.
As he watched the second hand in its frantic dash to nowhere, he pictured the images forming in the bath of chemicals.
A single unblinking eye placed on a table top, endlessly repeated.
SEVEN
Thick clouds squatted over the city, shutting out the infinite and stifling hope. The sun was nowhere to be seen. They had to settle for a dim, filtered pallor and call it daylight.
It seemed that spring had ventured out but quickly lost heart and thrown in the towel. An existential chill filled the vacancy. Quinn donned the herringbone Ulster once again and hunkered down in it as if he never intended to come out. Even when it wasn’t raining, you felt that it soon would be. The day was something hostile on the other side of a fragile pane.