The Manual of Darkness (53 page)

‘I
’
m really grateful to Víctor,’ Galván’s daughter says.

‘It’s the least he could do,’ says Alicia. ‘After all, it was your father who taught him …’

‘I wasn’t talking about that. Yesterday, he came to the workshop to go over the preparations and asked me if I would rent the place to him.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘He wants to give lessons. He said he would like to give them here. And that, if we help him, he’ll bring all the old contraptions he and my father built …’

‘The museum.’

‘Exactly. You don’t know what a weight off my shoulders that is. I’ve spent a lot of time here this past week, in this empty hall … I don’t know how to explain it …’

‘Don’t worry. I understand, honestly I do.’

They are at one end of the hall, by the green door. Downstairs, they can hear the murmuring voices of the first guests.

‘Make sure you get a good seat,’ the daughter says, squeezing Alicia’s hand one last time. ‘It’s going to be a full house.’

As the people file in, Alicia rushes to take the seat in the middle of the front row. She doesn’t want to miss a thing. She is curious. She has no idea what Víctor is going to do. Several times over the past few days she offered to help him, but he declined, saying that he was not organising a show, just one trick, a small homage that would be easy to prepare. Despite this, she knows that he has spent hours every day shut away in the workshop at The King of Magic. So it can’t be that easy. She scans the stage, looking for some clue, but it is completely bare. The space is barely lit and the stage and the backcloth and the sides are all black.

There is a deafening knock on the green door, then another, as if someone has arrived with an urgent message. The audience, still standing in the aisles, laughing and chatting, immediately rushes to sit down. Alicia turns round in her seat. The door is flung open and Víctor stands on the threshold. His face is deathly serious, and he waits until there is complete silence. He is dressed in black from head to toe. Recently shaved. Impeccable. Alicia cannot help but glance at his shoes. She wishes she had X-ray vision so she could see his toenails.

Víctor wanders between the seats. He has no cane. Alicia holds her breath. All it would take is for someone to have left a bag, an umbrella, lying around … Mentally she runs through their lessons as she watches him: counting steps, hand correctly positioned in front of him, the imperceptible glide of his foot on the carpet, testing to feel where the surface changes so he will know where to turn right.

As he passes Alicia on his way to the three steps that lead up to the stage, Víctor does not pause, but stretches out his arm towards her and drops something into her lap. It is a small, weightless object. She brings it up to her face and recognises the block of wood she gave him almost two months ago so he could practise sanding. Except it is no longer a block. She quickly takes her mobile phone out of her bag, presses a key so the screen will light up and brings it close to the piece of wood. She can make out the shape of a fingernail, the wrinkles round the knuckle. It is a hollow cover. She bites her lip, takes a deep breath. She has known for days that at some point this evening, what with the stress of the previous months and the excitement of seeing Víctor up on the stage, her mixed feelings of sadness and joy at finally having reached her goal … Well, anyway, she knew that at some point she was going to cry. She is prepared, she almost wants to cry now. She has an unopened packet of tissues in her bag. But it’s too soon.

‘Mario Galván died when I was forty years old,’ Víctor says suddenly, standing in the middle of the stage.

There is scattered applause followed by a tense
shh
demanding silence. For Galván. For Víctor’s comeback.

‘Everything I know, I owe to him,’ he continues. ‘Everything I am. Including this.’

He brings his hand up and extends the Auzinger cane. He comes to the front of the stage and begins to pace from one side to the other. Instead of using the cane to detect the edge of the stage, he brandishes it, like someone holding up a trophy. Alicia’s gaze darts from his feet to his ramrod-straight torso, from peril to poise, from the floor to the hand holding the cane. For the first time she notices the slight tan on Víctor’s face and realises its significance. Though it could be make-up.

‘This,’ Víctor repeats, waving the cane, ‘is a prosthesis which does much more than help me walk. It is a reminder of who I am, of my limits and the resources I possess to help me overcome them. Or, at least, get close to doing so.’

Alicia remembers the reviews she read before she met Víctor, how they mentioned his mastery of drama, his charisma, the power of his voice.

‘I climbed these steps for the first time more than twenty years ago, walked through that green door and stepped into this room. Mario was waiting for me.’ As he speaks, he moves back to the centre of the stage. ‘But I didn’t know he was here until he welcomed me.’

There is the rasp of a lighter, and a flickering flame appears at the end of the cane. Víctor dips the cane, pointing it towards the stage, and slowly spins around, tracing a circle which immediately erupts into flame. This is not a symbol, an illusion. It is a fire. One that quickly surrounds him, the flames coming up to his knees, threatening to lick at his clothes. Snaking, crackling, giving off a plume of black smoke. Someone behind Alicia gasps. Her fists are clenched so tightly that, although she does not realise it, she is imprinting the outline of the wooden thumb on the palm of her hand. The spotlights have gone out; the only thing now illuminating Víctor’s body is the flames.

‘Mario taught me that time surrounds us with a line of fire.’ Calmly, as though his blindness makes it possible to ignore the flames encircling him, he points with the cane, first behind him, then in front of him. ‘And although I regularly struggle to cross that line, he knew that it is impossible.’

He takes a large pace to one side, as though to step out of the circle, but the fire follows him. He starts walking quickly towards
the back of the stage. Nobody, not even the professional magicians in the audience, is wondering how the trick is done, what prop makes it possible for the flames to move like this, without ever breaking the perfect circle that surrounds Víctor. They are all worried about his safety, because the flames now rise above his hips and the smoke is getting thicker.

‘The future and the past encircle us,’ Víctor says, still pacing the stage. ‘Only the stories we tell ourselves make possible the illusion of crossing the line. Only words, in the brief instant before they fade, can carry us, carry messages from the other side of the fire. Every word that is uttered is a memory or a prediction.’ By now he is at the front of the stage and the circle has become a blazing wall of flame that reaches his chest. Víctor seems unruffled. He gestures along the front row with a sweeping movement of his head as though taking his leave of them. For ten unbearable seconds, he is silent. Then he begins walking backwards, talking all the while.

‘And only the present can protect us. In exchange, it insists that we keep on walking. That we carry it with us all the way to the grave.’ He has stopped in the exact centre of the stage. With one last surge, the flames rise until they envelop him completely. Now, the only indication that he is still there is the sound of his voice, calm, as though none of this is happening. ‘Until we disappear, consumed by the fire.’

The flames are suddenly extinguished and the spotlights come on. The stage is completely bare. Alicia blinks, as though pretending to fight back the smoke which still hangs in the air rather than the tears she has been trying to suppress ever since she realised that the end was coming, the inevitable end, Víctor’s disappearance. The audience is now applauding wildly while she, her face tense, her fist clutching a hollow block of wood, imagines him in the future, hiding in the darkness of this same room, scrutinising a newly arrived student before greeting him with an instantly recognisable sound; perhaps not the rasp of a lighter, perhaps the noise of a Parker pen, click, click, preparing to pass on the power of a few words which, he hopes, will resonate, beyond the tomb, beyond the flames, in the luminous gallery where he will discover that a Monet portrait has stopped time, where he
will listen intently to the whispered exchanges between Milton and Galileo, entertain those present with some humble illusion when Bach tires of playing the piano, and perhaps smile if he should hear them say: it’s not possible.

T
he late 19th century is the most fascinating period in the history of magic, not simply for the dazzling audacity, importance and enduring appeal of the illusions developed during the period, but for the immense wealth of anecdotes about the people who performed those illusions. The autobiographies of Houdini and of his hero, Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, are well known. If you are interested in the treasures of the period but do not want to spend time and money at antiquarian book auctions, you can easily find facsimile editions of Harry Kellar’s
A Magician’s Tour
and Hoffmann’s
Modern Magic
on the internet. But no one, not even in these original sources, succeeds in describing the people and the milieu in which they moved with the skill of Jim Steinmeyer. His books –
Hiding the Elephant
(Carroll & Graf, New York, 2003) and
The Glorious Deception
(idem, 2005) – are real treasures, not only for the entertaining, rigorous and detailed technical information they provide, but also for the glimpses they afford of Steinmeyer’s profound understanding of the human condition, the compulsion to invent, and the nature of deception.

The magicians in this book existed in real life, and used many of the gadgets and contraptions I attribute to them here, but I should point out that I have treated them as fictional characters; attributed to them thoughts, words and actions which are not necessarily true. For example, though Harry Kellar had a famously explosive temper, it is unthinkable that he would have been capable of the act of calculated cruelty against my good guy, Peter Grouse.

The shop, El Rey de la Magia, really is on calle Princesa in Barcelona. Established in 1881, it is one of the oldest specialist magic shops in the world and delights in the impeccable management and unfathomable wisdom of Josep Maria Martínez,
magician, sage and maestro. In recent years he has also managed a museum and a theatre dedicated to magic.

The Seybert Commission also existed. The excerpts from its preliminary report are quoted verbatim.

For decades, the Egyptian Hall was the venue for every conceivable kind of magical and pseudo-scientific performance. It was housed in 171 Piccadilly, now an office block.

A
maestro from my own childhood, a man named Pepe Marín, taught us to tell stories. I have always known I owe him a great debt, but have never found a means to repay it.

The hands of Ignasi Hendersson as, blindly, he plays a Bach fugue, have taught me more than any book could.

Rosa Montero, Antonia González, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Oscar López, Yolanda Cespedosa, Víctor Pinyol, José Ovejero, Santiago del Rey and Pere Sureda were generous in their comments on the first draft of the book. Their eyes see more clearly than mine.

An angel by the name of Pílar sparked the first flame that became this novel. La Peña Diamant filled the days with wonder. Juan Arenillas gave me the indispensible Doctor Leber. At the far end of the tunnel were dazzling lights: Kirsty, Angela, Cecilia and Joao, Patrice, Carmen Pinilla, all those publishers who lit up half the world with my lies. Thanks to the team at Edhasa in Buenos Aires, I know that in my next life I want to come back as a porteño. Emma Noble performed magic in Sydney: she pointed to the heavens and produced flashes of lightning.

My mother made the miracle of silence possible month after month. Daniel Fernández waited and hoped with grace. Gloria at Agencia Balcells understood from the very beginning. Miguel Oros liquefied nicotine. The Vásquez Montoya family (and Hernán, and Soco) practised the magic of hospitality. It was in their house in La Calera that I visualised Víctor’s cane for the first time.

Berta taught me to read music. I owe Elena for many unforgettable lessons. For example that 2/4 time is for walking, and 3/4
for dancing. Then came Joan Pere with a blast of air that is still keenly felt.

Josep Maria Martínez was the greatest possible magic teacher; I probably his worst pupil.

And Yolanda brought the radiant light of life.