The Manual of Darkness (5 page)

He cannot linger over such trivial details. To identify each of these objects would take him centuries. Besides, if he goes on thinking like this, he might succumb to the temptation of wondering about the one vital piece of information he still does not have: what is
he
doing here? Because he has never disappeared by magic. Or he doesn’t believe he has.

He does another few clumsy strokes, pulling himself forward with the instinctive doggedness of a long-distance swimmer. When he tilts his head from time to time to breathe, the subtle changes in the light around him lead him to think that days and nights are passing and nothing is happening. The suspicion that it may take years before he arrives at his goal does not discourage him. On the contrary, it confirms that he is floating on the sea of the past, drawn by a current of dates that have elapsed and which he will only be able to explain when he finally gets close enough to make out the details of the cabinet and work out which version it is. Because he has owned a number of cabinets. Just as he decides to throw out his arms and allow the current to take him where it will, a great wave knocks the breath out of his lungs, tosses him
in the air like a puppet and deposits him, dazed, on a smooth, hard surface. He rolls over half a dozen times before he manages to stand up. He touches his neck, his ribs, unable to believe that no bones have been broken.

He walks around the cabinet, estimating its size with an expert eye, runs his fingers over the wood. He notes that at head height on both doors there are holes roughly the size of a fist. It could be the work of the Davenport Brothers or one of their many imitators. But then he notices that there is a small lock with a key sticking out of it. Perfect, there can be no doubt now. This is Harry Kellar’s cabinet.

‘Peter Grouse?’ he asks.

He knows Grouse is inside. He wants to throw himself at the cabinet, fling the doors open and welcome him with a hug, but a nagging doubt prevents him. During his years as an apprentice, Grouse was a role model for him. His legend illuminated every difficult moment, and in times of success, when he wanted to pay homage to the greats, Grouse was always the first name that came to him. And he realises that, having spent so much time watching himself in this symbolic mirror over the years, his mind has created an impossible photograph in which Grouse is the spitting image of him. A little older, perhaps. He does not want to open the doors now to discover some fat, bald man with bad breath. Or the reverse, someone unbearably handsome.

‘Mario?’ a dull voice finally asks from inside the cabinet. ‘Is that Mario Galván?’

‘Yes,’ Víctor answers. ‘It’s Mario.’

‘I’ve been waiting for you for over a hundred years.’ The voice is not in the least reproachful. It is a little difficult to understand because it is almost drowned out by a maddening peal of bells. ‘Did you bring mine?’

‘Of course,’ Víctor says.

He half-turns the key and opens the doors but the mirror inside simply reflects his own image, barely lit by the tiny flame of a match, an oil lamp, perhaps a gas lamp that someone is holding up. Víctor squints and discovers that in his left hand he is holding the cap of a pen. Well, he has to call it something. It looks like a finger, or to be precise, half a finger. Half a thumb neatly severed
at the phalange. But it is made of plastic or some thin, flexible material and hollow inside. In fact, he is wearing it over his own thumb like a cap. He holds it up, pronounces Grouse’s name twice, or three times, and, confused when there is no reply, closes the cabinet again. Immediately, there are three loud knocks from inside. It is the sound of flesh on wood, but to Víctor it sounds like bass chords from some instrument and he rushes to open the cabinet again. Even he does not know why he is in such a hurry, but he has the feeling that if he waits even a second longer, if he allows the fourth chord to sound, the swell of time will burst its banks again and sweep him far away from here, from the cabinet, from any possibility of finding some purpose to this moment and giving it meaning.

‘Idiot!’ he mutters to himself, shaking his head as he turns the key again. ‘You’d think I’d never seen this cabinet before. Grouse must be hiding behind the mirror.’

He opens the doors, pushes the mirror gently; it swings back on a large hinge.

‘Who said more than a hundred years?’ The voice coming out of the darkness now is a male voice speaking with irrefutable authority. ‘It’s only been thirty-two.’

‘It’s not possible,’ Víctor says.

‘What do you mean it’s not possible?’

‘It’s impossible,
Papá
,’ Víctor insists. ‘There’s no such thing as spirits. And don’t take my word for it, it’s been proven. You only have to read the Seybert Commission Report. It was published in 1887.’

‘A worthless piece of drivel,’ his father answers.

‘Not at all. It’s pure science. It’s in the library of the University of Pennsylvania. And it concludes that …’

‘Don’t talk to me about science, son. You want proof?’ The sound of footsteps, the cabinet shakes slightly and Martín Losa, Víctor’s father, appears before him. ‘Look at this,’ he says, holding out his left hand.

Víctor hesitates for a moment. He stares into his face and, although this confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is indeed his father, he finds it hard to accept the flagrant temporal incongruity, since this man is the same age as he is. However, he
is not surprised to see the line of ants marching across the ghost’s forehead.

‘I’m telling you, it’s not possible,’ he insists.

But, in the end, he looks down and sees that there is a dark mark on the outstretched hand, what seems at first to be a dry, amber stain like nicotine, but as he examines it more closely it turns out to be wet, bubbling, and though he cannot bring himself to touch it, he would swear that it is blood, and that it extends far beyond the fingers, that it starts at the thumb, which has been severed right in the middle, runs down to the wrist, to the elbow from which it trickles, almost gushes, to the floor. A puddle is forming.

‘Cockroaches don’t have blood,
Papá
, or at least not much,’ says Víctor, trying to keep his voice calm.

He scans the darkness in the hope of finding a cloth, a piece of string, something he could use to make a tourniquet and staunch the flow. He puts his hand to the wound and applies pressure, he is soaked too now, but still the blood spurts.

‘You always turn up too late,
hijo
,’ his father says. And seeing that Víctor, preoccupied by trying to stop the blood, does not answer or apologise, he insists: ‘You treat everything in life as if it’s a game, and you always turn up too late.’

The wound does not seem to hurt, though Víctor would swear he can see his father’s face growing paler by the second; it is ashen, almost translucent, as though the blood loss will soon cause him to disappear. Suddenly, he realises there is only one way to stop the haemorrhage. He has to take the plastic cap off his own thumb and put it on his father’s. Although by now he is aware that this is a dream and that there is no logic to how it will unfold, it seems obvious that the only reason for the presence of this cap is because he has a mission to accomplish. He pulls at it and is surprised to find that it does not come off as easily as expected. He tries twice or three times, then, convinced that there is no time to lose, he brings the thumb to his mouth and sinks his teeth into the cap. It finally comes off and Víctor places it over his father’s thumb, although he cannot help but notice a tattered shred of flesh protruding from the hole, nor the wetness that is now soaking down his own arm, and he stands rigid, motionless, bewildered, and sees
that he has pulled off half his own thumb, and all he can think to do is scream, scream with a voice that is not even his own, fill his lungs and create a racket loud enough to break through the barrier of sleep, back to life. To wake him up.

The first thing he does when he opens his eyes is look at his hands. Obviously, there is no blood, but a small groove on his thumb makes him think that he may have bitten it while he was asleep. He glances around the dark room. From the smell of tobacco, it seems as though he has barely slept. On the nightstand, a cigarette butt is still smouldering in the overflowing ashtray. Is it possible that he has only just fallen asleep? That this gruelling struggle has lasted only a few minutes?

Fragments of the real world begin to filter through to his brain: he needs to see an optician. And find Galván. He must be expecting an explanation, and probably an apology for his sudden disappearance last night. He needs to focus for a moment, shake off the last wisps of the dream and remember what exactly did happen yesterday, but the very idea panics him. At some point before he fell asleep, for some reason, he warned himself not to remember on pain of some terrible punishment. He knows that if he should take a single step in the direction indicated by memory, there will be no going back, as for someone who leaps towards the first stone in order to cross a river only to find that it is barely big enough to stand on so he must jump to the next and so on, forced to keep jumping from stone to stone towards a far shore he cannot see, which may not even exist. Still lying down, he looks up. If only, at this very moment, the three of invisible diamonds which Galván flicked towards him last night would fall from the ceiling, spiralling like the last dead leaf. If only it would, it might close this unbearable loop in time. Víctor sits up suddenly and turns on the light. Opposite the bed is an enormous black-and-white poster in which Lauren Bacall is holding a match to her face, daring the onlooker to hold her gaze. It has been there for years. The title,
To Have and Have Not
, is written across her chest in red capital letters. If he looks at it with only his left eye, he sees a white halo where the title should be. With his right eye, he can read it, but only thanks to the black outline on the letters. Oh, Víctor.

He gets up and shuffles down the corridor. He opens a door and goes into the studio. Well, studio, museum, junk room. He has never decided what to call the room nor what to do with everything inside it. He has kept it for years, intending to give it all to Galván as a gift, but the maestro has long since given up his plan of opening a museum. Víctor needs to decide what to do with it. Or at least sort it out, organise things, make it useful.

He goes over to the Proteus Cabinet, examines it closely, and is astonished by how accurately he managed to reproduce it in his dream. If only he felt calm enough to revel in the memories evoked by these things. He need only caress the wooden cabinet to conjure the image of his hands and Galván’s hands, the plane and chisel, the dirt and the sawdust, all the hours they spent making it, the interminable arguments provoked by trying to settle on the precise model they were going to replicate: the Davenport model, the maestro insisted. No, Kellar’s model, Víctor objected. In the end, they followed Kellar’s design. But this one has a key. And if he were to open it, the almost inaudible sound of the hinges would take him back to a happier time, more than happy, to one of the high points of his life, since this cabinet came with him on his second world tour, its doors open like a bow, sharing in the applause and the bravos, the thunderous clamour of a success that has continued to this day. But Víctor did not come in here for that. Quite the opposite, he came in to close it. It is a symbolic gesture. There is nothing inside to hide or to protect. It is empty. All it harbours is the dust of time. And this is precisely what he wants to shut inside as he gives the key a full turn and is thankful for the supreme ease with which the bolt slides into place.

M
artín Losa built an ant farm on the terrace in the spring of 1973, convinced that Víctor, who had just turned five, was old enough to learn the basics about the world of ants. It was a glass box, open at the top, half filled with soil. A metre by a metre and a half. From the centre, a small wooden bridge rose up to a transparent box in which the ants’ food was placed. It would have been easy to take a colony from any natural anthill with enough worker ants, drones, soldiers and virgin queens, and transplant it, along with the soil, into the glass box. However, Martín wanted to reproduce the natural process that occurs when a recently fertilised queen pulls off her wings, digs a hole in the soil and founds a new colony with only the help of the worker ants that stream from her belly as larvae. He had failed on two previous attempts. For the third, he allowed himself to enrich the soil with nutrients: an egg, two spoonfuls of honey, a few drops of vitamins, some mineral salts, half a litre of water and five grams of Malayan seaweed gelatine. Within a few months the population of the colony numbered thousands.

Martín spent his Saturday mornings on the care required to maintain the colony, and he insisted his son Víctor take part, believing that there was no better entertainment for him: cleaning out the bodies which piled up in a corner; checking the humidity of the soil and regulating when necessary; replenishing the food in the little box and, above all, making sure that there were at least two fingers of water in the little moat that ran around the ant farm. In doing so, satisfying the one condition his wife had imposed before allowing him to put an ant farm on the terrace: that its inhabitants would never invade the house. However, as Martín believed that death was an unnecessarily cruel way to punish the
curiosity of the ants, every Saturday he brushed the internal walls of the formicarium with talc. At first, Víctor liked to watch the ants climb over and over only to slip and fall back on to the soil.