The Manual of Darkness (24 page)

Galván opens his mouth but he cannot bring himself to say a word. He crosses over to the bed, sits down and says nothing. For the first time Víctor, too, is silent. It is impossible to know whether he is still expecting the maestro to answer or whether he has registered the refusal implicit in his silence. Víctor sits down next to him. Or rather, he slumps, he falls back as though someone has suddenly yanked away the cable that has been supplying him with this frantic energy. Galván puts an arm around his shoulder. Before he speaks, the maestro takes several deep breaths. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I’ve been here for a while now and I still haven’t recovered from climbing the stairs. All the air disappears out of the holes in my lungs and I can’t seem to get my breath. You’re talking about
going halfway round the world and I can barely manage a few steps.’

Galván could leave it at that. He could pretend this is the only reason to reject the suggestion, assume that his terrible health might at least invoke Víctor’s sympathy. But he knows he is going to say more. He cannot help it. After all, he is Víctor’s teacher. Much more than that: he is his friend, his mentor, and – why not admit it? – his father. ‘Besides,’ he says, and perhaps he squeezes Víctor’s shoulder before continuing, ‘maybe you’ll never forgive me for this, but I have to tell you it’s a stupid idea. It’s a mistake. You’re in no fit state to travel, Víctor. Look at you – you’re wearing one black sock and one brown one. You haven’t shaved in over a month. You’re looking to the past to create a future. But the only thing that matters now is the present. And the present is already set in stone. For both of us. Mine is simple: I’m going to die. Today, tomorrow, next month, before the year is out. And I’m going to die properly. In my own home. Your present is to call ONCE, the National Organization for the Blind, they’re the only ones who can help you now. They know about these things. They have specialists, people who can teach you. You want a magic wand, you want to take it with you to the ends of the earth, drive it into the ground and roar “Burn, O Earth!” just like Kellar. But you don’t need a wand, Víctor, you need a cane. A white cane. And someone who can teach you how to use it.’

They do not argue. Mercifully. Víctor gets to his feet, goes out into the corridor and walks to the door, dragging his feet as though Galván’s words have brought him down to earth. He throws the door open. Galván understands the gesture. He follows Víctor and stands in the doorway, trying to think of some parting words, something that might take away some of the bitterness of this fruitless encounter. There is nothing to say. He brings his hand up and strokes Víctor’s face, his coarse beard. Víctor takes his hand, perhaps to push it away, but maintains contact for a moment. They are antennae. They are almost like ants.

The maestro slowly heads down the stairs. He has already gone three flights when he hears Víctor close the door. Then he takes his mobile phone from his pocket, calls directory enquiries and
asks for the number of ONCE. It is the only thing he can do for him.

Víctor goes back to his room and sits on the bed. He knows Galván is right. He tries to think about the future, but his imagination is tired, filled with nostalgia, it is suspended on the step where he stood two months ago, twenty-two years ago, more than a century ago, lost in the secret compartment of a cabinet, hounded by shadows and spectres. He stares at Lauren Bacall. He cannot see her, but he knows that she is there. There are those who believe in ghosts. He points to the floor. His lips curve into an ignoble, disbelieving smile and in a barely audible voice, he says: ‘Burn, O Earth!’

G
iven his difficulty with long sentences, it is hard to believe that Peter Grouse developed a taste for reading. On the other hand, it is possible that the simple fact of getting through Hoffmann’s indigestible prose convinced him that he was capable of swallowing anything. Or perhaps books were simply the answer to the question of how he intended to spend Maskelyne’s money. Whatever the case, the only traces of him in the decade following his triumph at the Egyptian Hall derive from the four fundamental books on the history of magic published in England at the time. Two of these were memoirs by famous magicians: those of Jean Robert-Houdin, a Frenchman who is universally considered to be the father of modern magic, and those of Colonel Stodare, inventor of many of the popular illusions of the period, among them the Decapitated Head trick that made Maskelyne such a handsome profit. The other two were academic studies of the theatre and prestidigitation, both published in 1881. In all four cases, the authors agreed to reveal the workings of a number of important illusions that had become obsolete – either because they had been overperformed, or because they had been superseded by some new method. There is, of course, no proof that Grouse read any of these writers, but one would have to be a firm believer in coincidence to come up with another way to explain the fact that, between 1880 and 1890, he made his living from the phenomena they described. For the only trace of him during the decade is the series of improvements he devised for classic illusions, registered by him at the Patent Office in London. Though, in general, these consisted of seemingly minor technical enhancements, they breathed new life into the illusions: a velvet sheath on a wire muffled the sound which might attract the
audience’s attention, pulleys attached to a trapdoor made it easier for ghosts, as they appeared from vaults, not to be so pitifully motionless. It would not be accurate to say that Grouse changed the profession, since, in the end, he was still a thief. The difference was that now, he stole ideas rather than objects and gave them back much improved. He paid in advance, naturally. It appears that learning to read, however difficult it may have been, proved to be a good investment. Now he did not have to go out to steal. It is easy to imagine him spending his nights shut up in his room reading by candlelight, and his days perfecting technical improvements and patenting them.

Galván had bought first editions of all four books for exorbitant sums at antiquarian book fairs. He kept them under lock and key in a display case in the workshop, together with a first edition of
Modern Magic
, and unlike with the rest of his vast collection, he never loaned these books to Víctor. At best, he allowed him to look through the glass, as though contemplating a sacred relic. ‘Even I don’t touch them,’ he would say. He did, however, persuade Víctor to read Harry Kellar’s
A Magician’s Tour
, which, according to the available evidence, was responsible for Grouse’s next appearance in public.

‘It’s a recent edition,’ Galván said. ‘It’s not likely to fall apart in your hands like the others. Besides, this one is much more important; this is the book that brought Grouse out of his decade of darkness.’

Víctor read the title page, where, next to the information that it had first been published in Chicago in 1890, it gave the author as ‘HARRY KELLAR, EDITED BY HIS FAITHFUL “FAMILIAR,” “SATAN, JUNIOR”’, a device that allowed him to refer to himself in the third person, so that he would not have to deny himself praise.

Kellar had been a real character. Born to a poor family in Erie, Pennsylvania, he had been a seminarian and as a boy had earned his living as assistant to the Fakir of Ava. He toured with the Davenport Brothers when they began their career as spiritualists and must have learned something from them to judge by the facility with which he appropriated other people’s illusions later in his career. Although his fictitious, satanic familiar is careful not
to mention the fact, accounts by his contemporaries confirm that he was a terrible magician; or rather, he was all thumbs, incapable of performing the most basic sleight of hand using coins or cards or cubes, which any aficionado is required to master. Even with something as simple as palming a card, he was obliged to resort to clumsy mechanical solutions. And yet, perhaps through the audacity of ignorance, he managed to hold his audience spellbound.

Though he knew many triumphs and was, for decades, considered the finest magician in the world, he bankrupted himself several times over but always found the strength to start again. In 1867 he claimed to have left Chicago by train, but he had barely made it as far as Rose Hill cemetery when the conductor forced him to get off since he did not have the money for the ticket. He walked for hours along snowy roads, keeping his spirits up by noting the fact that there were twenty-seven lamp-posts for every mile. He finally arrived in Waukegan, where he persuaded various people to extend him credit for the rental of the Phoenix theatre, the printing of the posters, the four dollars he needed for a performer’s licence, even the two packs of cards he required for the show. Three weeks after he opened, the theatre was still sold out every night.

In August 1875 he survived the shipwreck of the boat that was taking him from Rio to London via Cape Verde. Kellar had embarked after a long tour of Latin America, and when the ship went down, he lost not only all the props for his stage show, but two huge trunks containing a myriad objects collected during his tour: stuffed birds, a Mexican suit valued at $500 together with gold and silver coins from the countries he had visited. The last straw, however, was that, having been rescued by a French ship, he arrived back in London to discover he was utterly penniless: his bankers, Duncan, Sherman and Co., to whom he had sent the substantial receipts from his American tour, had been declared bankrupt. And yet a few short months later, he was once again performing in Lima to great acclaim. He survived an epidemic of Java fever, which forced him to take to his bed, where he spent two months in delirium, and, no sooner was he well, than he
immediately set off on a tour of Australia. Starting again was his speciality.

If there is one thing Kellar cannot be accused of it is a lack of ambition. In 1871, he toured Mexico with a show so spectacular he was forced to reserve an entire train to carry his equipment. Aside from Mexico City, he visited Pueblo and Veracruz. The press accused him of being ‘the devil himself’ and his fame spread so quickly that even the
bandidos
did not dare attack his train. In Cape Town, people wrote letters to the newspapers complaining that this man, who was manifestly capable of bending supernatural forces to his will, should dare to present himself as a mere performer of mechanical tricks.

He was a much better self-publicist than he was a magician. Shortly after arriving in Calcutta, at the invitation of a British colonel’s wife, he met with Englinton, a well-known spiritualist at the time. The object of this meeting was to convince Kellar that spiritualists were indeed capable of controlling the forces of nature and to discourage his mission to expose them as charlatans. On 25 January 1882, the magician wrote two letters to the editor of the
Indian Daily News
. In one of these he wrote that Englinton had apparently caused a series of slate writings to appear from former acquaintances of Kellar who were now dead. In the other, he recounted a seance in which the spiritualist caused the entire group to levitate. In neither case did he directly attribute the phenomena to spiritual intervention; he admitted that he had thoroughly examined the room in which the seances were conducted and confessed himself unable to find a logical explanation for the events. A week later, however, in another letter, he announced that he himself would perform these illusions, which he had since decided were mere trickery, in a theatre in the city. Which theatre was, of course, immediately sold out without the need to pay for a single advertisement.

Some of the feats that were to make him a legend were the result of a basic understanding of chemistry. In 1874, for example, in deepest Patagonia, the commandant of the penal colony in Punta Arenas asked him to perform something that might impress the natives, whom he refers to in his account as ‘half-naked savages’. Kellar ‘
began to harangue them by means of an interpreter, and
when a large number had gathered, surprised and startled them by a variety of sleight of hand tricks; then assuming a fierce look he told them he could burn the earth if he so desired and to prove it, he would set the ground on fire. Now the land of Punta Arenas is covered to a considerable depth with white sand. While Kellar had been mystifying the natives, his assistant had mixed some chlorate of potash and white sugar in equal parts and filled a deep hole in the sand with it, without attracting attention
.’ Kellar had only to thrust his wand into the ground – having carefully dipped it in sulphuric acid beforehand – and a huge column of flame appeared as he roared the words: ‘Burn, O Earth!’

Víctor devoured all 212 pages that very night, arriving breathless, and a devoted admirer, at the final paragraph in which Kellar’s satanic alter ego took his leave: ‘
Having thus briefly sketched the more or less supernatural and decidedly checkered career of my great master, I, his “familiar”, and in this instance his scribe, take leave of him and my polite readers for the time being. We shall meet again, however, if my readers are by any means interested in what I have set down. Wizards and sorcerers are immortal, and their fame, at any rate, lives after them. The Magician, like the King, lives for ever
.’

Patagonia, Australia, Mexico, the South Seas, Calcutta, boats and trains, natives, aristocrats, castaways and soldiers. Of course Kellar’s life was fascinating. As was his tale, even if it was clearly embroidered by an overheated imagination and an undeniable passion for self-promotion. Kellar had journeyed to places untouched by man, had frequented legendary sailors, and distant tribes, and he had embellished his story with passionate descriptions of flora and fauna, anthropological commentary, weather reports about the cold in the Suez Canal. He even claimed that, all the way from Singapore in late August 1883, he had heard the explosion of the volcano Krakatoa, which sundered the island in two, covering the Java Sea and the southern part of the China Sea in a thick layer of ash.