Monserrat
There is a double-feature at the Meralta tonight - the old movie theater tucked away on an otherwise rather quiet street in the Red Light District. Quiet is relative here. There is a brothel across the way, redlights on in the picture windows, and a low-key hash parlour with the clever name, HASH PARLOUR written in soap on the window. The goods are hidden behind bamboo blinds, but there is light and music just inside. A long, narrow alley bisects the block and spills out behind the Meralta. The logo of a greasy spoon gleams in neon between the dark buildings, which sketch and skew strangely together at this hour of the night. The low throb of bass from the club a block away, the crowded shout of laughter as a group of co-eds spills out onto the sidewalk, debating whether to tramp down to the strip club, or try to find a cab with the persistently loopy logic of the well-intoxicated.
BARELY LEGAL: XXX has top billing, and the bored clerk in the glass ticket booth brilliant like with a sickly white flourescent flare hands out tickets to a semi-steady stream of seedy types without every asking which of the two movies offered his customers wish to see.
Nazarín is below BARELY LEGAL: XXX on the Marquee. They haven't the proper accent for the i, so it is capitalized. NazarIn in big block letter.
That is the movie William has been directed to see.
"Buy a ticket," she instructed into his voice mail. In a low voice made of smoke and whiskey. The smallest laugh. "I do not believe in charity."
William How will our hero appear, one wonders? There is the noise of a host of bikers who host as angels host understand: all fury and sound. Maybe he is one of them? But they pass by.
Here is a sleek town-car, its armored carapace inscrutable as it glides toward the quiet street and the Meralta, and the only thing that can be guessed about whoever is within is that they've got money. Maybe the person within is a gangster of the elegant savage school of gangsterism? But the town-car pauses only to allow a burly man to get out and purchase cigarettes, and it is clear after a moment that our hero is not in the car and is not the burly man. Maybe he is one of the young men who comes pouring out of the Has Parlour, their eyes pink, their smiles varying shades of out-of-their-minds? Maybe he's the one with torn jeans, paper-clips and safety pins thrust through the skin of his jaw -- a beard of wire. But no, they pass too. What about that man, over there? He almost looks as if he were dressed for a wedding or a black tie occasion and has been separated from his party, and his tuxedo has to be a few decades out of fashion -- thankfully for him a good suit never goes out of style, hmn? And it's just possible that there are movie nerds enough to recognize a simulcram of the suit Timothy Dalton's James Bond wore in A License to Kill.
He's strolling easily down the street toward the theater, and he even stops in front of it for a moment, eyes flickering over the marquee just in time for a rather wry movement of his mouth. Amusement, or something like it. Certainly amusement, the sort-of head-shakey amusement belonging to one who's just had one put over on him. He pats himself down as he approaches the window and taps two fingers imperiously against the glass of the ticket booth in order to recall that clerk's attention from a chatroom. "One for Barely Legal," he says, and he has our hero's voice. A voice that is the sort of somber people expect not to stay somber for long, as if behind that resonance there's a smile waiting in the wings -- there's some oratory, some compliment, some passionate avowal, just readying itself for its cue. Liveliness. His voice gives the impression that if you scratch him with your nail there's something essentially present there. Something forceful. Something to be remembered by. He is charismatic, our hero, or could be.
The bored ticket-taker couldn't be less helpful when he slides the ticket to BARELY LEGAL XXX over, and William could not be less interested in the life of a bored ticket-taker when he catches their eye and winks - giving the clerk cause to blink - and then takes the ticket and strolls into the lobby.
He doesn't bother with buying popcorn, though he does regard the candy with interest. He's fairly certain that particular candy bar was discontinued back in the 80s. He knows what time it is; and even so, he heads to the men's room, where he is abandoned to privacy until he emerges ten or so minutes later and walks into Nazarín.
Monserrat There are two theaters in the Meralta: downstairs and upstairs. The doors are propped open to Barely Legal, the several iterations of which (all appear to be the thirtieth of their name) are on constant streaming rotation in the downstairs theater. The air is redolent of popcorn and, shall we call them, secretions? - and a bored looking prostitute hangs out just inside the open doors, texting and snapping her gum. She herself seems barely legal, though in an infinitely more used-up way than the doe-eyed co-eds in brief flickering contrast on the screen.
She does not notice our hero, or anyone else. Not until they feel her up. Or shoot her up. One or the other will pull her away from her twitter feed and texting.
--
The Meralta was never a movie palace, but it did aspire to grandeur, once upon a time. Our hero has his choice of curving staircases opening off the lobby, leading up into darkness where the second theater shows the classic Mexican film.
Threadbare red velvet beneath his feet, and worn faux marble beneath his hand if it skims the bannister. A moment for the eyes to adjust to the too-dim sconces lining the walls; a view over the lobby, the clerk returning to his chat room, eyes glazed with the reflected light from his laptop window.
The dusty candy display, the filthy popcorn dispenser.
The doors here are open too, propped open. On the screen, in flickering black and white, a slim young girl wrapped in a headscarf staggers through an open square, while the handsome priest fingers his rosary and prays.
She is seated three rows up, arms open wide to either side, rather like Christ on the cross. One leg across the other, desultory, her dark head aslant, her eyes affixed to the screen as the prostitute climbs through the noble priest's shuttered windows until the scene changes.
Then and only then does she lift her dark eyes from the screen and settle them directly on him, finding him whereever he may be in the darkness. The edge of a half-smile, carved into a shapely mouth and a visage like marble.
"I am surprised you came." Her voice, in his presence, is lighter and brighter than when mechanized and digitized and compressed. There is no particular accent to it, but her words are too precise to be entirely American. "I confess it."
Call it the weight of age.
William He was not lost in the dark. William stood, looking up at the screen while the slim young girl wrapped in a headscarf staggered through an open square, while the handsome priest fingered his rosary and prayed, a figure cut out've the theatre's gloom by the light of the film. He patted his pockets with the unmistakable air of a man who was about to take out a cigarette case, unclasp it, and smoke. He is probably the sort of man who'd bend his golden head to the cigarette, the better to flick a cynical or laughing look up at the target of his next remark. But instead, he undid his bowtie as if he were one of those in the other theatre, preparing to squeeze some enjoyment out've - er - life. And William swept a look around the theater, of course. Saw the woman, desultory, dark, and casual as a mistress or an artist or an actress. Saw no one else.
But she did not react immediately. She did not so much as look at him, unless briefly. And William waited, with the kind of patience belonging to vampires, and turned his head back to the screen, standing at his ease in the front of the theatre. He is not a tall man, William, though he may once have been accounted tall, coming to only five feet and eight inches. It is a height that has never done him harm, and he seems perfectly capable of being taken by bemused absorption in Nazarín.
It's possible that he is remembering a time before film. It's possible, just, that he remembers long years before the movies, long years before the movies learned how to truly echo life in colour, and that the first time he saw a colour film the dessicated lump of cold red meat in his chest spasmed, and he thought: That's not how the sun looked. They've got it wrong. But the thought hadn't been as one with certainty as this man who looks forever-young usually contrives to appear. It's possible. But is it likely? Perhaps not.
Either way, once she speaks, he turns and offers Monserrat a smile directly. The film-light flickers through his hair like a halo, gives him a shadow-crown. The smile: Engaging boy, and encouraging: "Very good, if that's the least of your sins. I stand-by, ready to hear and offer absolution."
A swift stride or two, something leggy and energetic, forceful, brings him up the stairs and into her row, where-upon he offers the creature his hand.
Monserrat "Clever boy." The edge of her smile deepens, and finds some gleaming answer in her eyes as he offers her absolution, some facsimile of it. And climbs the steps with that same engagement, that same energy that animated his retort. "But I have already been blessed and absolved of all my once-and-future sins."
When he is half-way to her, she stands and stands and stands, not so much straightening as unfolding impossibly long limbs from their lazy arrangement in the threadbare velvet seats to something more alert. She was perhaps his height before she added rather casual four inch heels to the ensemble and now, therefore, towers above him as she holds out a slim white hand and a long white arm. Cool as the first kiss of winter, smooth as glass.
When he draws abreast of her, she takes the time and care - takes out the time and care - to look him up and down. Head to toe and toe to head and back again, lingering on his eyes, his feet, his hands in this order. There is a decided note of appreciation in the frank assessment of her gaze - the appreciation of a drover for a particularly fine pack mule, and no more.
"Monserrat," an earnest pressure of her palm to his. A certain grip. A show of strenght, and perhaps a test of the same. "I think that is all the name you will require."
William There is a sound in the back of his throat: the opening salvo of a chuckle -- a glint of sound that doesn't seek to become light or brightness or fire. The glint: that's enough, accompanied as it is by the deepening of his smile, the crooking of it into an asymmetrical thing. "Oh-ho? By who or by what?" His voice is stripped of challenge and shies away from mockery by dint of being rather dryly chiding -- inquiry sans fangs.
William is either too patient or too slowed down and well-used to taking his tithe of time to find anything odd or hackle-raising in the tone of Monserrat's appreciation: or perhaps he is a beatific creature -- an angel, of sorts, happy with existence for existence's sake, and easy in the moment. His gaze is to all appearances frank, if not precisely open. The blue eyes manage to just refrain from twinkling, though a twinkle warning has been generally issued. In the theatre, looking at the dark-haired kindred, her bloodline enshadowed, enshrouded, his eyes are an obfuscated blue. William does not take the four or so inches she tops him by in good part, but that's only because he doesn't seem to regard it. He adjusts any expectations he may have had about looking physically down on the monster before him and that is that. She presses his palm, and he squeezes her hand.
"I suspect that name suits you," says he. "Mine is William." He switches languages, then, from All-American American to Spanish, heavily influenced by Mexicans in California, to gauge by the accent. "Have you seen the film before?"
Monserrat "By myself first and foremost," a dry chiding, a dry return, her voice deepening with the crisp heat of a longstanding bemusement. There is the faintest pause. Deliberate, deliberative certainly, for the creature now beside him is nothing if not considered.
"I have always believed," settled back into the theater seats, she crosses one long, long leg over the other. Her tone is lightly conversational, as if they were discussing their favorite Superbowl commercials, or the ideal week to visit Disneyland. "you see," and lightly confidential, though in this tone serves curtain rather than mirror, masking whatever lies beneath all the more. " - that we are blessed rather than damned.
"And our sins forgiven, one and all."
--
"Mmm," a faint noise of acknowledgment when he remarks that her name sutis her. "Monserrat, of Clan Ventrue." She is in profile to him, the hook of her half-smile just visible in the flickering half-light. Smug enough that she expects him, when called to do so, to parrot the lie though perhaps not to believe in it. "A pleasure, William."
Then, her chin rising to the screen, she tips her head aslant to take in his accented Spanish. And nods, and replies in kind, "I have." Her own Spanish is European. With a Catalan lilt, should he have the ear for it. "Shall I tell you how it ends?"
William It is difficult to tell whether or not William waits for Monserrat to be seated out of an adherance to chivalry (ladies' first) or because the square-cut window to the projector room distracts him for a second and his eyes snag there. Either way: He takes a seat only a moment after she does. He takes the seat beside her as if they were friends or on a date and he pulls his suit-pants up with the tiny gesture of the habitually elegant and then slouches his spine against the faux-velvet faded tatter-red seatback. Synchronization, he crosses his leg too, ankle on his knee, long-fingered hand on his ankle, a ring to glint cold gold in the dark like a promise of things to come.
Monserrat, of Clan Ventrue. He huffs a chuckle, this one more fully realized than that which had glinted, sharp, in his throat before. Bright boy. Keep him around for eternity. That was somebody's idea. There are men who can chuckle and giggle and generally seem like idiots or hucksters. Then there are men like William, who, when they appear surprised into betraying amusement, seem only as if they're fully entering the conversation, sweeping the clouds away from it, making it real. "I wouldn't have pegged you for a blueblood," says he, as angelic as you'd ever please.
He's still speaking Spanish, and if his accent is Mexican, then he is fluent enough: "Don't, 'til I guess. The priest loses his faith and is ruined by women. Everybody and everything he loves turns on him. In the end, he's a broken man, and one wonders what - if anything - one was supposed to learn."
Monserrat And she in turn forsakes the screen as he breathes out that chuckle, as the laugh finds deeper resonance somewhere in his throat and chest. Her eyes quick and dark upon his features, the only light within them the glimmer reflected from the screen. An encapsulation of the body of the work before them.
"Would you not." No implied query leavens the words themselves, and her voice is a careless decrescendo. "Perhaps that is why I am so often misunderstood."
Her attention remains on him now, unyielding to the pleasures of the screen. The dark sweep of the story, the endless humiliations and betrayals to which the saintly priest is subjected throughout his long road to perdition. Now comes the madwoman to set his home on fire.
"A fair guess. Men are always ruined by women. And the virtuous are beset on all sides by the world. Though perhaps the lesson is more evident than you imagine."
A well life well-lived," and still, and still, and still, dark eyes simmering on his angelic countenance. " - and a poor life badly lived end in much the same way."
The coil of her half-smile deepens. "Which is to say, the gallows. And faith be damned."
William "What, because you won't be pegged," says he, the golden remnants of that deep-throated chuckle hinted at yet, ruins surfacing in his tone: which is the equivalent of a shrug. "Well sure, that's an invitation to misunderstandings. Let's take a moment," and it is possible to imagine him malicious, though he has grown blander, "to bow our heads and pray for those who don't realize they've accepted the invitation, eh?"
His eyes flicker unwillingly from Monserrat when the madwoman comes to set the priest's home afire. That dessicated red muscle again: it does not spasm but only imagine it does, or did once. Gone with the Wind. Tara Burning, and how many lives were really lost when the Sunset Syndicate gave a private screening to kindred. How many were unprepared by the sudden wet blanket of flame that was not there: heat they could not feel: consumption they could only see. Then William turns his attentive gaze back to the woman, a faint smile on his lips, caught in his eyes, bestowed like a thundercloud or a star on his brow.
"How stark your assessment. Did your Sire teach you your inclination for this philosophy or did you spring fully formed from his brow?"
"But I must defend the easiness with which I reached my guess and disagree with you on one point." When she'd been in profile, when the line of her throat had been proffered just so, he'd studied it. Perhaps he'd thought: A waste, to find no pulse there, and no outlet for hunger but a cold one. "Men are sometimes ruined by their brothers."
Monserrat "There will be times to come, William," she returns, dark voice whetted now. A gleam of something well-honed beneath. A knife, a blade, a glittering scalpel, the edge slicing nearly, firmly into tissue beneath. " - when I think I shall not like your tongue.
"Not tonight," reassurance, this, some bemused simulacrum of it, and a sense of laughter deep and resonant swallowed back into her lungs, subsumed beneath her cold, pale skin. "Tonight you have amused me, and therefore I forgive all."
--
She has uncurled her long legs, now, planted both feet in their high heels solidly on the ground and leveraged herself up with the easy grace of a black swan gliding on some mirrored lake.
"My Sire was a man of great faith," slung across the back of her chair, a wrap of dark cashmere. She lifts it and slings it around her shoulders with evident ease, then dips low to retrieve one last belonging - a small leather clutch, black as sin. " - and little understanding.
"Call me self-made."
Standing straight now, she edges past him and begins to walk carefully down the steps. She says nothing more until she has nearly reached the side door, but then she turns, tugging on a leather glove.
"They are showing O Pagador de Promessas one week hence.
"You will join me. Won't you."
William He is on his feet when she stands. This time it is undoubtedly because of a chivalrous impulse, because he has been honed these many years into a courteous creature, and thus courtesy has become as a shadow is to a body. An action that requires a courteous reaction occurs; the courteous reaction is already occuring. He is on his feet when she stands, all leashed energy, enabled to offer his hand should her ballet of leaving give him a space to do so, and otherwise he stands inches shy of her in those heels and he is playing at ornament.
"I'm happy to hear it. And should the night come you find your forgiveness difficult to reach," says he, "tell me in words. I'll remind you that we are blessed."
When she passes, our hero -- for he is our hero, let us not forget -- reclaims his seat, though a different one, one arm slung over the back of the seat beside him, his head aslant. His is not a conscious echo, and his eyes are tracking Monserrat down the stairs. To the side-door. His eyes are on her glove. The pale hand disappearing within. He inhales and exhales: just like a real boy!
And says, "Bet on it. I'll see you then, Monserrat."
There is a double-feature at the Meralta tonight - the old movie theater tucked away on an otherwise rather quiet street in the Red Light District. Quiet is relative here. There is a brothel across the way, redlights on in the picture windows, and a low-key hash parlour with the clever name, HASH PARLOUR written in soap on the window. The goods are hidden behind bamboo blinds, but there is light and music just inside. A long, narrow alley bisects the block and spills out behind the Meralta. The logo of a greasy spoon gleams in neon between the dark buildings, which sketch and skew strangely together at this hour of the night. The low throb of bass from the club a block away, the crowded shout of laughter as a group of co-eds spills out onto the sidewalk, debating whether to tramp down to the strip club, or try to find a cab with the persistently loopy logic of the well-intoxicated.
BARELY LEGAL: XXX has top billing, and the bored clerk in the glass ticket booth brilliant like with a sickly white flourescent flare hands out tickets to a semi-steady stream of seedy types without every asking which of the two movies offered his customers wish to see.
Nazarín is below BARELY LEGAL: XXX on the Marquee. They haven't the proper accent for the i, so it is capitalized. NazarIn in big block letter.
That is the movie William has been directed to see.
"Buy a ticket," she instructed into his voice mail. In a low voice made of smoke and whiskey. The smallest laugh. "I do not believe in charity."
William How will our hero appear, one wonders? There is the noise of a host of bikers who host as angels host understand: all fury and sound. Maybe he is one of them? But they pass by.
Here is a sleek town-car, its armored carapace inscrutable as it glides toward the quiet street and the Meralta, and the only thing that can be guessed about whoever is within is that they've got money. Maybe the person within is a gangster of the elegant savage school of gangsterism? But the town-car pauses only to allow a burly man to get out and purchase cigarettes, and it is clear after a moment that our hero is not in the car and is not the burly man. Maybe he is one of the young men who comes pouring out of the Has Parlour, their eyes pink, their smiles varying shades of out-of-their-minds? Maybe he's the one with torn jeans, paper-clips and safety pins thrust through the skin of his jaw -- a beard of wire. But no, they pass too. What about that man, over there? He almost looks as if he were dressed for a wedding or a black tie occasion and has been separated from his party, and his tuxedo has to be a few decades out of fashion -- thankfully for him a good suit never goes out of style, hmn? And it's just possible that there are movie nerds enough to recognize a simulcram of the suit Timothy Dalton's James Bond wore in A License to Kill.
He's strolling easily down the street toward the theater, and he even stops in front of it for a moment, eyes flickering over the marquee just in time for a rather wry movement of his mouth. Amusement, or something like it. Certainly amusement, the sort-of head-shakey amusement belonging to one who's just had one put over on him. He pats himself down as he approaches the window and taps two fingers imperiously against the glass of the ticket booth in order to recall that clerk's attention from a chatroom. "One for Barely Legal," he says, and he has our hero's voice. A voice that is the sort of somber people expect not to stay somber for long, as if behind that resonance there's a smile waiting in the wings -- there's some oratory, some compliment, some passionate avowal, just readying itself for its cue. Liveliness. His voice gives the impression that if you scratch him with your nail there's something essentially present there. Something forceful. Something to be remembered by. He is charismatic, our hero, or could be.
The bored ticket-taker couldn't be less helpful when he slides the ticket to BARELY LEGAL XXX over, and William could not be less interested in the life of a bored ticket-taker when he catches their eye and winks - giving the clerk cause to blink - and then takes the ticket and strolls into the lobby.
He doesn't bother with buying popcorn, though he does regard the candy with interest. He's fairly certain that particular candy bar was discontinued back in the 80s. He knows what time it is; and even so, he heads to the men's room, where he is abandoned to privacy until he emerges ten or so minutes later and walks into Nazarín.
Monserrat There are two theaters in the Meralta: downstairs and upstairs. The doors are propped open to Barely Legal, the several iterations of which (all appear to be the thirtieth of their name) are on constant streaming rotation in the downstairs theater. The air is redolent of popcorn and, shall we call them, secretions? - and a bored looking prostitute hangs out just inside the open doors, texting and snapping her gum. She herself seems barely legal, though in an infinitely more used-up way than the doe-eyed co-eds in brief flickering contrast on the screen.
She does not notice our hero, or anyone else. Not until they feel her up. Or shoot her up. One or the other will pull her away from her twitter feed and texting.
--
The Meralta was never a movie palace, but it did aspire to grandeur, once upon a time. Our hero has his choice of curving staircases opening off the lobby, leading up into darkness where the second theater shows the classic Mexican film.
Threadbare red velvet beneath his feet, and worn faux marble beneath his hand if it skims the bannister. A moment for the eyes to adjust to the too-dim sconces lining the walls; a view over the lobby, the clerk returning to his chat room, eyes glazed with the reflected light from his laptop window.
The dusty candy display, the filthy popcorn dispenser.
The doors here are open too, propped open. On the screen, in flickering black and white, a slim young girl wrapped in a headscarf staggers through an open square, while the handsome priest fingers his rosary and prays.
She is seated three rows up, arms open wide to either side, rather like Christ on the cross. One leg across the other, desultory, her dark head aslant, her eyes affixed to the screen as the prostitute climbs through the noble priest's shuttered windows until the scene changes.
Then and only then does she lift her dark eyes from the screen and settle them directly on him, finding him whereever he may be in the darkness. The edge of a half-smile, carved into a shapely mouth and a visage like marble.
"I am surprised you came." Her voice, in his presence, is lighter and brighter than when mechanized and digitized and compressed. There is no particular accent to it, but her words are too precise to be entirely American. "I confess it."
Call it the weight of age.
William He was not lost in the dark. William stood, looking up at the screen while the slim young girl wrapped in a headscarf staggered through an open square, while the handsome priest fingered his rosary and prayed, a figure cut out've the theatre's gloom by the light of the film. He patted his pockets with the unmistakable air of a man who was about to take out a cigarette case, unclasp it, and smoke. He is probably the sort of man who'd bend his golden head to the cigarette, the better to flick a cynical or laughing look up at the target of his next remark. But instead, he undid his bowtie as if he were one of those in the other theatre, preparing to squeeze some enjoyment out've - er - life. And William swept a look around the theater, of course. Saw the woman, desultory, dark, and casual as a mistress or an artist or an actress. Saw no one else.
But she did not react immediately. She did not so much as look at him, unless briefly. And William waited, with the kind of patience belonging to vampires, and turned his head back to the screen, standing at his ease in the front of the theatre. He is not a tall man, William, though he may once have been accounted tall, coming to only five feet and eight inches. It is a height that has never done him harm, and he seems perfectly capable of being taken by bemused absorption in Nazarín.
It's possible that he is remembering a time before film. It's possible, just, that he remembers long years before the movies, long years before the movies learned how to truly echo life in colour, and that the first time he saw a colour film the dessicated lump of cold red meat in his chest spasmed, and he thought: That's not how the sun looked. They've got it wrong. But the thought hadn't been as one with certainty as this man who looks forever-young usually contrives to appear. It's possible. But is it likely? Perhaps not.
Either way, once she speaks, he turns and offers Monserrat a smile directly. The film-light flickers through his hair like a halo, gives him a shadow-crown. The smile: Engaging boy, and encouraging: "Very good, if that's the least of your sins. I stand-by, ready to hear and offer absolution."
A swift stride or two, something leggy and energetic, forceful, brings him up the stairs and into her row, where-upon he offers the creature his hand.
Monserrat "Clever boy." The edge of her smile deepens, and finds some gleaming answer in her eyes as he offers her absolution, some facsimile of it. And climbs the steps with that same engagement, that same energy that animated his retort. "But I have already been blessed and absolved of all my once-and-future sins."
When he is half-way to her, she stands and stands and stands, not so much straightening as unfolding impossibly long limbs from their lazy arrangement in the threadbare velvet seats to something more alert. She was perhaps his height before she added rather casual four inch heels to the ensemble and now, therefore, towers above him as she holds out a slim white hand and a long white arm. Cool as the first kiss of winter, smooth as glass.
When he draws abreast of her, she takes the time and care - takes out the time and care - to look him up and down. Head to toe and toe to head and back again, lingering on his eyes, his feet, his hands in this order. There is a decided note of appreciation in the frank assessment of her gaze - the appreciation of a drover for a particularly fine pack mule, and no more.
"Monserrat," an earnest pressure of her palm to his. A certain grip. A show of strenght, and perhaps a test of the same. "I think that is all the name you will require."
William There is a sound in the back of his throat: the opening salvo of a chuckle -- a glint of sound that doesn't seek to become light or brightness or fire. The glint: that's enough, accompanied as it is by the deepening of his smile, the crooking of it into an asymmetrical thing. "Oh-ho? By who or by what?" His voice is stripped of challenge and shies away from mockery by dint of being rather dryly chiding -- inquiry sans fangs.
William is either too patient or too slowed down and well-used to taking his tithe of time to find anything odd or hackle-raising in the tone of Monserrat's appreciation: or perhaps he is a beatific creature -- an angel, of sorts, happy with existence for existence's sake, and easy in the moment. His gaze is to all appearances frank, if not precisely open. The blue eyes manage to just refrain from twinkling, though a twinkle warning has been generally issued. In the theatre, looking at the dark-haired kindred, her bloodline enshadowed, enshrouded, his eyes are an obfuscated blue. William does not take the four or so inches she tops him by in good part, but that's only because he doesn't seem to regard it. He adjusts any expectations he may have had about looking physically down on the monster before him and that is that. She presses his palm, and he squeezes her hand.
"I suspect that name suits you," says he. "Mine is William." He switches languages, then, from All-American American to Spanish, heavily influenced by Mexicans in California, to gauge by the accent. "Have you seen the film before?"
Monserrat "By myself first and foremost," a dry chiding, a dry return, her voice deepening with the crisp heat of a longstanding bemusement. There is the faintest pause. Deliberate, deliberative certainly, for the creature now beside him is nothing if not considered.
"I have always believed," settled back into the theater seats, she crosses one long, long leg over the other. Her tone is lightly conversational, as if they were discussing their favorite Superbowl commercials, or the ideal week to visit Disneyland. "you see," and lightly confidential, though in this tone serves curtain rather than mirror, masking whatever lies beneath all the more. " - that we are blessed rather than damned.
"And our sins forgiven, one and all."
--
"Mmm," a faint noise of acknowledgment when he remarks that her name sutis her. "Monserrat, of Clan Ventrue." She is in profile to him, the hook of her half-smile just visible in the flickering half-light. Smug enough that she expects him, when called to do so, to parrot the lie though perhaps not to believe in it. "A pleasure, William."
Then, her chin rising to the screen, she tips her head aslant to take in his accented Spanish. And nods, and replies in kind, "I have." Her own Spanish is European. With a Catalan lilt, should he have the ear for it. "Shall I tell you how it ends?"
William It is difficult to tell whether or not William waits for Monserrat to be seated out of an adherance to chivalry (ladies' first) or because the square-cut window to the projector room distracts him for a second and his eyes snag there. Either way: He takes a seat only a moment after she does. He takes the seat beside her as if they were friends or on a date and he pulls his suit-pants up with the tiny gesture of the habitually elegant and then slouches his spine against the faux-velvet faded tatter-red seatback. Synchronization, he crosses his leg too, ankle on his knee, long-fingered hand on his ankle, a ring to glint cold gold in the dark like a promise of things to come.
Monserrat, of Clan Ventrue. He huffs a chuckle, this one more fully realized than that which had glinted, sharp, in his throat before. Bright boy. Keep him around for eternity. That was somebody's idea. There are men who can chuckle and giggle and generally seem like idiots or hucksters. Then there are men like William, who, when they appear surprised into betraying amusement, seem only as if they're fully entering the conversation, sweeping the clouds away from it, making it real. "I wouldn't have pegged you for a blueblood," says he, as angelic as you'd ever please.
He's still speaking Spanish, and if his accent is Mexican, then he is fluent enough: "Don't, 'til I guess. The priest loses his faith and is ruined by women. Everybody and everything he loves turns on him. In the end, he's a broken man, and one wonders what - if anything - one was supposed to learn."
Monserrat And she in turn forsakes the screen as he breathes out that chuckle, as the laugh finds deeper resonance somewhere in his throat and chest. Her eyes quick and dark upon his features, the only light within them the glimmer reflected from the screen. An encapsulation of the body of the work before them.
"Would you not." No implied query leavens the words themselves, and her voice is a careless decrescendo. "Perhaps that is why I am so often misunderstood."
Her attention remains on him now, unyielding to the pleasures of the screen. The dark sweep of the story, the endless humiliations and betrayals to which the saintly priest is subjected throughout his long road to perdition. Now comes the madwoman to set his home on fire.
"A fair guess. Men are always ruined by women. And the virtuous are beset on all sides by the world. Though perhaps the lesson is more evident than you imagine."
A well life well-lived," and still, and still, and still, dark eyes simmering on his angelic countenance. " - and a poor life badly lived end in much the same way."
The coil of her half-smile deepens. "Which is to say, the gallows. And faith be damned."
William "What, because you won't be pegged," says he, the golden remnants of that deep-throated chuckle hinted at yet, ruins surfacing in his tone: which is the equivalent of a shrug. "Well sure, that's an invitation to misunderstandings. Let's take a moment," and it is possible to imagine him malicious, though he has grown blander, "to bow our heads and pray for those who don't realize they've accepted the invitation, eh?"
His eyes flicker unwillingly from Monserrat when the madwoman comes to set the priest's home afire. That dessicated red muscle again: it does not spasm but only imagine it does, or did once. Gone with the Wind. Tara Burning, and how many lives were really lost when the Sunset Syndicate gave a private screening to kindred. How many were unprepared by the sudden wet blanket of flame that was not there: heat they could not feel: consumption they could only see. Then William turns his attentive gaze back to the woman, a faint smile on his lips, caught in his eyes, bestowed like a thundercloud or a star on his brow.
"How stark your assessment. Did your Sire teach you your inclination for this philosophy or did you spring fully formed from his brow?"
"But I must defend the easiness with which I reached my guess and disagree with you on one point." When she'd been in profile, when the line of her throat had been proffered just so, he'd studied it. Perhaps he'd thought: A waste, to find no pulse there, and no outlet for hunger but a cold one. "Men are sometimes ruined by their brothers."
Monserrat "There will be times to come, William," she returns, dark voice whetted now. A gleam of something well-honed beneath. A knife, a blade, a glittering scalpel, the edge slicing nearly, firmly into tissue beneath. " - when I think I shall not like your tongue.
"Not tonight," reassurance, this, some bemused simulacrum of it, and a sense of laughter deep and resonant swallowed back into her lungs, subsumed beneath her cold, pale skin. "Tonight you have amused me, and therefore I forgive all."
--
She has uncurled her long legs, now, planted both feet in their high heels solidly on the ground and leveraged herself up with the easy grace of a black swan gliding on some mirrored lake.
"My Sire was a man of great faith," slung across the back of her chair, a wrap of dark cashmere. She lifts it and slings it around her shoulders with evident ease, then dips low to retrieve one last belonging - a small leather clutch, black as sin. " - and little understanding.
"Call me self-made."
Standing straight now, she edges past him and begins to walk carefully down the steps. She says nothing more until she has nearly reached the side door, but then she turns, tugging on a leather glove.
"They are showing O Pagador de Promessas one week hence.
"You will join me. Won't you."
William He is on his feet when she stands. This time it is undoubtedly because of a chivalrous impulse, because he has been honed these many years into a courteous creature, and thus courtesy has become as a shadow is to a body. An action that requires a courteous reaction occurs; the courteous reaction is already occuring. He is on his feet when she stands, all leashed energy, enabled to offer his hand should her ballet of leaving give him a space to do so, and otherwise he stands inches shy of her in those heels and he is playing at ornament.
"I'm happy to hear it. And should the night come you find your forgiveness difficult to reach," says he, "tell me in words. I'll remind you that we are blessed."
When she passes, our hero -- for he is our hero, let us not forget -- reclaims his seat, though a different one, one arm slung over the back of the seat beside him, his head aslant. His is not a conscious echo, and his eyes are tracking Monserrat down the stairs. To the side-door. His eyes are on her glove. The pale hand disappearing within. He inhales and exhales: just like a real boy!
And says, "Bet on it. I'll see you then, Monserrat."
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