Guillermo del Toro - The Fall

He climbed the steps to his fourth-floor apartment, his right knee creaking-literally creaking with every step-a squeak of pain jolting his body again and again.

His name was Angel Guzman Hurtado and he used to be big. He still was big, physically, but at age sixty-five his rebuilt knee hurt all the time and his body fat-what his American doctor called his BMI and what any Mexican would call panza -had overtaken his otherwise powerful figure. He sagged where he used to be taut, and he was taut where he had once been flexible-but big? Angel was always big. Both as a man and as a star-or at least what resembled it in his past life.

Angel had been a wrestler- the Wrestler back in Mexico City. El Angel de Plata. The Silver Angel.

He had begun his career in the 1960s as a rudo wrestler (one of the “bad guys”), but soon found himself embraced, with his trademark silver mask, by the adoring public, and so adjusted his style and altered his persona into a tecnico, one of the “good guys.” Through the years he fashioned himself into an industry: comic books, fotonovelas (corny photo-illustrated magazines narrating his strange and often ridiculous exploits), films, and TV spots. He opened two gyms and bought half a dozen tenements throughout Mexico City, becoming, in his own right, a superhero of sorts. His films spanned all genres: western, horror, sci-fi, secret agent-many times within the same feature. He took on amphibian creatures as well as Soviet spies with equal aplomb in badly choreographed scenes full of library sound effects-always ending with his trademark knockout blow known as the “Angel Kiss.”

But it was with vampires that he discovered his true niche. The silver-masked marvel battled every form of vampire: male, female, thin, fat-and, occasionally, even nude, for alternate versions exhibited only overseas.

But the eventual fall equaled the height of his climb. The more he expanded his brand empire, the more infrequently he trained, and wrestling became a nuisance he needed to put up with. When his movies were box-office hits and his popularity still high, he performed wrestling exhibitions only once or twice a year. His movie Angel vs. The Return of the Vampires (a title that made no syntactic sense, and yet encapsulated his film oeuvre perfectly) found new life in repeated TV airings, and Angel felt compelled by fading fame to produce a cinematic rematch with those caped, fanged creatures that had given him so much.

And so it came to pass that one fine morning he found himself face-to-face with a group of young wrestlers made up as vampires in cheap greasepaint and rubber teeth. Angel himself walked them through a change in fight choreography that would have him wrapped three hours early-his focus less on the film at hand than on enjoying an afternoon martini back at the Intercontinental Hotel.

In the scene, one of the vampires would nearly unmask Angel until he miraculously freed himself with an open-palm blow, his trademark “Angel Kiss.”

But as the scene progressed, filmed amid sweaty technicians at a stifling stage in Churubusco Studios, the younger vampire thespian, perhaps enraptured by the glory of his cinematic debut, applied a bit more force than necessary to their skirmish, and threw the middle-aged wrestler down. As they fell, the vampire adversary landed, both awkwardly and tragically, on his venerable master’s leg.

Angel’s knee snapped with a moist, loud crack, bending into an almost perfect L -the wrestler’s anguished scream muffled by his halfway torn silver mask.

He awoke hours later in a private room at one of Mexico’s best hospitals, surrounded by flowers, serenaded by well-wishers shouting from the street below.

But his leg. It was shattered. Irreparably.

The good doctor explained this to him with genial forthrightness, a man with whom Angel had shared a few afternoons of craps at the country club across from the film studios.

In the months and years that followed, Angel spent a great deal of his fortune trying to repair his broken limb-in hopes of mending his fractured career and recovering his technique-but his skin hardened from the multiple scars crisscrossing the knee, and his bones refused to heal properly.

In a final humiliation, a newspaper revealed his identity to the public, and, without the ambiguity and the mystery of the silver mask, Angel the common man became too pitied to be adored.

The rest happened quickly. As his investments faltered, he worked as a trainer, then bodyguard, then as a bouncer, but his pride remained, and soon he found himself a burly old guy who scared no one. Fifteen years ago, he followed a woman to New York City and overstayed his visa. Now-like most people who end up in tenements-he had no clear idea how he had gotten here, only that he was indeed here, a resident in a building quite similar to one of six he used to own outright.

But thinking of the past was dangerous and painful.

Evenings, he worked as the dishwasher at the Tandoori Palace downstairs, just next door. He was able to stand for hours on busy nights by wrapping lengths of duct tape around two broad splints on either side of his knee, beneath his trousers. And there were many busy nights. Now and then, he cleaned the toilets and swept the sidewalks, giving the Guptas enough reason to keep him around. He had fallen to the bottom of this caste system-so low that now his most valuable possession was anonymity. No one had to know who he once was. In a way, he was wearing a mask again.

For the past two evenings, the Tandoori Palace had remained closed-as had the grocery store next door, the other half of the neo-Bengali emporium the Guptas owned. No word from them, and no sign of their presence, no answer at their phone. Angel started to worry-no, not about them, truthfully, but about his income. The radio talked of quarantine, which was good for health but very bad for business. Had the Guptas fled the city? Perhaps they had gotten caught in some of the violence that had cropped up? In all this chaos, how would he know if they had been shot?

Three months before, they had sent him out to make duplicates of the keys to both places. He had made triplicates-he didn’t know what had possessed him, certainly no dark impulse on his part but only a lesson learned in life: to be prepared for anything.

Tonight, he decided, he would take a look. He needed to know. Just before dawn, Angel hauled himself down to the Guptas’ store. The street was quiet except for a dog, a black husky he had never seen in the neighborhood, barking at him from across the sidewalk-though something stopped the dog from crossing the street.

The Guptas’ store had once been called The Taj Mahal, but now, after generations of graffiti and pamphlet removal, the painted logo had worn away so that only the rosy illustration of the Indian Wonder of the World remained. Strangely, it exhibited too many minarets.

Now, someone had defaced the logo even further, spray-painting a cryptic design of lines and dots in fluorescent orange. The design, cryptic though it was, was fresh. The paint still glistened, a few threads of it slowly dripping at the corners.

Vandals. Here. Yet the locks were in place, the door undamaged.

Angel turned the key. When both bolts slid free, he limped inside.

Everything was silent. The power had been cut, and so the refrigerator was off, all the meats and fish inside gone to waste. Light from the last of the sunset filtered in through the steel shutters over the windows, like an orange-gold mist. Deeper inside, the store was dark. Angel had brought two busted cell phones with him. The call functions did not work, but the screens and batteries still did, and he found that-thanks to a picture of his white wall he snapped during daylight-the screens made excellent lights for hanging on his belt or even strapped to his head for close work.