The Manual of Darkness (31 page)

More importantly, between the tip and the point where the thumb had been severed, there was an empty space. Empty. This was the word that tipped the battle in favour of imagination. Something empty can be filled. A neatly folded silk handkerchief would fit in there; scraps of paper bearing mysterious messages, small coins, rings … Of course, he would need time to perfect a means of using this new invention; when and how the cover could be filled and emptied. But he had the essential, something every magician through the ages would like to have invented: an empty space, undetectable, and always to hand, or more precisely, to thumb.

Most importantly, it was universal. One did not need to lose half a thumb, it could be adapted to any size, and still leave an empty space, like the space that invariably exists between the toes and the end of a shoe. Moreover: a magician who had covered his
thumb with this device could show his hands to the audience without worrying, as long as he kept them moving. Arms outstretched, Grouse brought both hands to eye level and shook them like someone who has just washed their hands. He realised at that moment that sight is slower than the mind. We know we are seeing the nails, the knuckles, the hairs, but what we see, what we actually see, is simply the movement of the hand. Ever the perfectionist, Grouse went on working on the prosthesis, creating a bas-relief in the shape of a nail and a number of grooves simulating the wrinkles around the joint. Now he needed only a powder compact, something he stole from one of the ladies aboard the following day. He covered the wood with a fine layer of make-up which further blurred the difference in texture between flesh and wood. There was one final detail which he could not address until they arrived back at port: patenting his invention. Because, unless he was much mistaken, generations of magicians would make use of such prostheses for decades, perhaps centuries, to come. And it was only fair that, just as he had suffered the consequences of his actions, so should he reap the rewards.

H
e always believed there would be one last instant of light. One last useless flicker, like the white dot that lingers when you turn off an old television set. Until recently, he toyed with the idea of carrying something around with him, some gift for his eyes, something worthy of being the last thing he ever saw, a safe-conduct into the world of shadows. He has given up that idea now; no single object in itself has such value. Now he feels that the moment is approaching and he knows exactly what he wants to do.

He draws up a chair to the wardrobe in his bedroom, takes his shoes off, climbs on the chair and opens the trapdoor to the loft space. He feels around, his arms sweeping the space, bringing obstacles raining down on him: blankets and pillows, a rug that stinks of mothballs, old metal cases he has never bothered to open and which, from the racket they make as they fall, might be full of nut and bolts, or tools maybe. He pushes two large bags of clothes back into a corner and, standing on tiptoe, almost crawling into the attic himself, feels his fingers touch the wooden box that once belonged to his father. He drags it towards the edge until he can get a grip on it then jumps down from the chair, clutching the box to him as though it contains a parachute.

He goes into the living room, sits on the floor next to the hi-fi system and opens the box. At first, he tries to search it by touch alone, pushing aside things he recognises immediately: his father’s favourite ties, a handful of photos, a pair of gold cufflinks. He has never dared wear cufflinks. He turns the box over, tipping the contents on to his lap. He carries on sorting through the objects until he hears the sound he has been waiting for: a cassette tape.
He gets up on his knees, crawls over to the stereo and puts it on. Immediately he hears background music, the sound of someone coughing, but Víctor reaches out, finds the controls and manages to rewind the tape to the beginning. In the beginning is silence.

For several seconds all he can hear is the sound of the cassette player. Then, whistling. Over the years he learned the little tune by heart in case he heard it in the street, on a record, on the radio. So he would finally know what the hell his father was whistling just before he died. He never heard it again. Besides, it is only a brief snatch of music, and perhaps Martín Losa was improvising while he was setting out his tools on his workbench: in the background there are three metallic clangs, two hollow thuds as of something plastic, the sound of paper rustling, a ballpoint pen clicking, up and down, up and down. It was one of Martín’s tics. Click, click, click. The Parker pen he was never without. Víctor’s fingers have just found it at the bottom of the box.

He makes himself comfortable, leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. Anyone would do the same in order to concentrate, to listen more attentively, but this small, impulsive action, this miracle which for most people means closing themselves off from the world, is fraught in his case with a terrible contradiction. Because Víctor is closing his eyes so he can see. The workbench, Martín’s thumb clicking away, the arrow logo on the Parker pen. He wants to trace a path through this labyrinth in which he has been lost for weeks, perhaps for years; reach back through these sounds to the moment his father died and see it for the first time. Imagine it, since he has no other way of seeing it now.

He knows that soon he will hear the radio come on in the background. The volume is so low that it is impossible to decipher most of the words spoken by the female announcer. There was a time, though he has played it over and over, when all he could make out was the station jingle – Radio 2 – the name of the programme –
Contrapunto
– and two other names, Saint-Saëns and Stoltzman. And the two instruments mentioned, clarinet and piano, though this is hardly necessary since he
recognises them immediately once the music begins to play. It is playing now. There has been no sound from his father for some time. Just the creaking of his chair, and the pen clicking, slightly exaggerated now, as though Martín is trying to follow the languid rhythm of the first movement. He clearly likes the sonata since he suddenly turns up the volume and the music now takes the foreground. Víctor can see his father’s hand, the precision with which he touches the volume control using thumb and forefinger. He hums along to the melody. He has always found it graceful, beautiful even, but he has never really paid much attention to it, as though unwilling to think of it as anything other than background music.

After a brief silence, the second movement begins.
Allegro animato
, though the controlled performance keeps both the joy and the liveliness in check. Víctor turns the volume all the way up now, not so that he can hear the music more clearly, but the reverse: there is a click in the background and if the assumptions he made all those years ago are correct, he knows that it is not the pen, but a switch. The switch that operates the heater. His mother had the good grace to get rid of it, or perhaps the police or the forensics team kept it, the weapon in this act of criminal stupidity. And yet, Víctor remembers the device, he knows it was not a standard piece but his father’s brilliant solution to a lack of equipment when setting up a home laboratory; it is a bottle warmer. It has a Mickey Mouse sticker on the front.

Rewind, darling, rewind. Listen to it again and experience the surprise. You wanted to see everything for the first time, didn’t you? Well, there you have it. Click: death. Or the prologue to death; the means by which it came about. And who is your father calling to now? Come here, he says. Come on, you stupid thing, I’m not going to hurt you. You can see it, can’t you? His right hand holds the tweezers, dipping them into a test tube to take out an ant. And his left hand? See it with your eyes closed, see it hover in the air, the slight, stupid motion, the quiver of the jar of liquid nicotine.

Stop now. Stop the tape, stop time and think. You have done it a thousand times because this is the point when you hear a sound
you cannot understand. It is a vibration. Or rather two vibrations, one after the other. You used to think it was a buzzer; if such things had existed back then, you might have thought it was a mobile phone vibrating.

Keep thinking about this sound, concentrate on what you cannot understand, pay no attention to those sounds that you unfortunately know all too well, the dull, soft, almost inaudible thud of the plastic jar coming into contact with the bottle warmer. There is nothing to be done now. There are eight seconds left. There will be three more vibrations and a cough that would sound faintly ridiculous if you did not know what it meant. Experience the surprise again, if you like, the paradox between what you can see and what you are hearing. A man is dying, Víctor. He is foaming at the mouth, doubled up in pain, his body spasms so violently that he will wind up on the floor in a preposterous, undignified position, the same position that, half an hour later, you will think is a poor imitation of a cockroach, a man is spitting out his soul, dying without even exercising his right to one last breath, and all you can hear is a slight cough, the creak of wood as the chair tips over, the metallic ping of the tweezers as they fall to the floor and, were it not for the radio, were it not for chance, which has scored your father’s death to a soundtrack that is
allegro animato
, you would hear the only truly revealing sound: silence, Víctor. The silence of death.

But you are not thinking about that, you are thinking about the only question you have never voiced, the one thing about this recording that you have never dared to incorporate into the fiction of your shows. Something you have never even dared to ask your mother. Admit it, damn it, at least admit that this question has haunted your every nightmare, troubled the darkest moments of a life that, only two months ago, you wanted to contemplate from the viewpoint of happiness. Be a man, Víctor. Put the question into words. Why did Martín record his own death? And more specifically: did he know he was going to die? Now that you can formulate the words, can accept their exactness, use them as they are meant to be used, you can ask the question that truly terrifies you: did he kill himself? Did Martín Losa kill himself?

The answer lies in the strange vibration, though you will never know it. No one can ever say you did not try. You listened to it until it bored you. You came up with every possible conjecture. The only thing you failed to do was ask the right person. If you had given the recording to any of your father’s colleagues, to any of his friends at the university, you’d have known that your father’s last wish was to prove you right. To demonstrate that you had been right all along. To leave proof. The vibration is made by certain ants, and it is so common that it even has a name. It is called stridulation. Most species have a hard patch in the upper section of the abdomen, which looks like a scraper. In extreme circumstances, when faced with imminent danger or an unexpected source of food, they move their waist so that this patch rubs against a ridged section of the lower abdomen. This is what you can hear, amplified a hundred times, since your father was holding the ant with tweezers right in front of the microphone, possibly squeezing hard enough to kill it. He did what he needed to do in order to record the sound, so that later that day, or the following Saturday – the first of many he would not live to see – he would be able to say: here, listen to this, this is the sound you’ve been longing to hear. And if his left hand did something it shouldn’t have, if it shook the little jar, took off the lid and placed it in the warmer, perhaps it was because Martín was trying to imagine your face when he told you, your smile when you realised that, between those four glass walls, the thing you most desired to hear did occur from time to time: a muted sound but one filled with meaning.

Is buzzing a language? Would it have been enough for you? Ants don’t have ears, but stridulation is transmitted through the ground and ants detect the surface vibrations in their legs and their bodies. And they run away. Or they rush to eat. Or they look for a safe place for the queen. It would have done you good to know this, to be free of your doubts once and for all, to see with your eyes closed that your father was not thinking about dying, he was thinking about you, about the Saturdays you spent together, about you stubbornly going round and round the ant farm, ear pressed to the glass. You would finally be able to stop the tape, rip it out, burn it, forget about it for ever and not, as you are about to do,
as you are doing now, rush headlong into the six seconds of silence that follow your father’s death. Then three notes on a piano, the same note played three times. This is the beginning of the third movement.
Lento
. This is how it is described, slow and deadly. With the fourth chord comes the mournful voice of the clarinet, a moment you have always found heartbreaking. It is easy to believe that your father must have chosen the music, chosen this moment, the perfect funeral march. There was a time when it fuelled your suspicions. But this is not the sound of death knocking, Víctor. It is simply light bidding you farewell. The last moment has come and gone, Víctor, and you had your eyes closed. And your face is wet with tears.

Are you ready? You have one last task. You can see nothing, but you can do it if you pretend for a moment that you can see a flicker, a ray of light fashioned from memory. Crawl, if you have to. Feel your way across the floor. Pick it all up, the photos, the plastic finger, the Parker pen, the tie, the cufflinks. That thing rolling away is the piece of amber your father proudly showed you. Put everything back in the box, find the stepladder, climb up to the attic and put it back. Hurry now, don’t stop. You know you can’t afford to. After today, you will stumble at every step; the table, the chairs, the doors, every object in the apartment is lying in wait to trip you up when you go astray. These things you can survive, but nothing can protect you from stumbling into the past.