The Manual of Darkness (6 page)

Martín tried to turn these chores into a game, and although he was not always able to control himself, he tried not to bombard the boy with too much information. For his part, Víctor never complained, nor did he seem to consider this weekly chore to be some terrible imposition, but he showed only limited curiosity, which invariably related to the three things that could not be seen.

The first was the queen ant. Every week, he asked Martín to show him the queen and his father would have to explain that it was impossible, that the queen spent most of her time underground in the deepest cave of the ant farm and that the survival of the whole colony depended on her being present. He showed him photos and drawings of other specimens and told him he could only see her if, in extreme danger, the worker ants were forced to move her to a new habitat.

The second issue Víctor was curious about was reproduction. Martín had explained to him how a virgin becomes queen ant, explained that it was something almost impossible to witness first hand and frequently promised that one day he would show Víctor a documentary about it. Some day. When he was older.

And then there was the issue of language. It was not easy getting a child to understand that, although they could not hear it, the system of communication used by ants was magnificent in its perfection. Tiny glandular secretions by which an individual could communicate essential information to the whole colony. But only what was strictly necessary: what and where to eat; where and from whom to flee. A chemical code that excluded all subjectivity. A language with which it was impossible to create artworks, but equally impossible to waste time. So perfect that it had taken millions of years to evolve.

Víctor could somehow not believe it. He accepted that it might be foolish to expect articulate speech from an ant, but surely there had to be some sound, if only an almost inaudible chirrup. After all, dogs, cats, birds, frogs, crickets, all the animals he knew made
sounds that were more or less appropriate to their size. Even fish made sounds, though you couldn’t hear them because of the water. He imagined that ants would make muffled, high-pitched sounds. He asked over and over, marshalling objections against his father’s explanations, until one day Martín grew tired of it.

‘Come over here,’ he called. Víctor stomped over reluctantly. Martín pointed to the magnifying glass in his lap. ‘Take that, and wait a minute.’ With a pair of tweezers, he plucked one of the ants from the surface of the ant farm and held it up close to the magnifying glass. ‘Look carefully. There’s no rush. When you see its ear, let me know.’

This was hardly a scientific line of reasoning, but it was difficult to refute: if ants had no way of hearing, there was little point in them speaking. Víctor conceded defeat. He gave his father back the magnifying glass and started tracing figures of eights in the dust with the toe of his left shoe. For the first time, instead of arguing, he said nothing, and resolved to find a way to prove his father was wrong. Since then, every Saturday after he had done his share of the chores, he would bring his face close to the ant farm, close his eyes the better to concentrate and, with his ear pressed to the glass, he would walk slowly around all four sides. When he got back to his starting point, he would set off again. He was convinced that one day, he would hear some sound – a tiny shriek, a pitiful whisper – that would prove he was right. Perhaps, he thought, he needed to goad the ants to make some noise, so he tapped the walls with his knuckles every two or three steps. He was prepared to go on doing this for as long as it took.

Martín mistook his son’s stubbornness for boredom and, seeing the boy distracted, he showed him a trick to get his attention. He took a specimen from the formicarium using the myrmecologist’s tweezers, made a fist with his left hand, leaving only a tiny hole in the hollow of his thumb, and put the ant inside. Then, he opened his hand very slowly. Nothing … Víctor stared, open mouthed. Every time, he asked where the ant had gone. Martín told him it was a great mystery, a secret no one would ever know, but so the poor ant would not be lonely, he would send another ant. And then another. Always using the same method. Staggered, Víctor
watched the ants disappear. Sometimes he was tempted to put a finger into the hole but he never dared do it or even to suggest it, fearful that this black hole in his father’s fist might swallow his whole hand.

They spent the mornings doing chores and tricks. Towards noon, Víctor’s mother came to fetch him, put on his coat, gave Martín instructions about how to heat up the meal she had left for him and said her goodbyes, always with the same words:

‘We’ll be back by half-past seven. And whatever you do, be careful with those little jars. One of these days you’re going to kill yourself.’

Every Saturday, as they left, Víctor bowed his head, his body stooped, not because he was sad, but so he could look under his father’s chair for some sign of the ants that had disappeared.

Martín, on the other hand, kept his head high so he could watch them until they reached the door; he always smiled, but he associated their leaving with a certain sadness. He felt somehow as though, in spite of all his tricks, he had failed yet again in his attempt to get Víctor interested in ants. It was only a matter of time until the boy started to complain, to beg to be allowed to spend Saturday mornings playing football, riding his bicycle or playing with his friends. And why not. All boys are fascinated with ants at some point, but not all of them translate this passion into the central thread of their lives. This was what Martín had done, he had gone so far as to pursue a career in entomology, specialising in myrmecology. And he made his living killing them. As a young man he had devoted himself to research. He had travelled half the world to study exotic species: to forests, deserts, mangrove swamps, caves. Of that time, he had only good memories. Then, when Víctor was born, he had taken the only stable job he could find: technical director for a laboratory that made insecticides. This was why, on Saturdays, as he watched the door close on his wife and son, Martín went on staring for a moment into the distance and then, with a sigh, he would put the four or five ‘disappearing’ ants into a test tube, eat the meal his wife had left – almost always cold, in spite of her instructions – then lock himself in the room he had set up as a home laboratory. Perfecting ways of killing. With his little jars.

G
alván had been in the profession almost forty years and it had to be acknowledged that he knew a great deal. He had managed to survive the periods in which, for a short time, magic would suddenly become fashionable, only to be consigned once more to the catacombs and strict devotees. People quickly tired of watching a woman in a box being run through with swords as if she were a kebab, only to emerge in one piece and, most importantly, still smiling. To say nothing of money miraculously discovered in a bag wrapped in paper inside a box … what a surprise! He loathed modern magic. For decades now he had not seen anything that had not already been performed by the greats of the late nineteenth century.

In the early 1970s, when everyone assumed that television would revive interest in magic for the nth time, he had predicted a growing infantilisation of the profession: magicians would come to depend on technology, constantly devising ever more spectacular routines, adopting the style of the circus, abandoning their training, their attention to detail and every last vestige of taste along the way. Anyone without the ambition or the talent to make it in the profession had only to flatter the public, tell jokes or persuade his assistant to wear a skirt that came up to her armpits.

Business was another matter. Since the 1940s, Galván had been running The King of Magic, the only professional shop for magicians in Barcelona that had its own workshop, and one of the oldest in Europe. Now, he was faced with a dilemma: the more he despised the superficial flippancy of the magicians who preened for the cameras and pranced like third-rate dancers, the more affluent the customers who trooped into his shop. Some moron had only to perform the latest flashy trick on-screen and suddenly
children and their parents came rushing to buy the ingenious mechanical gizmo so they could do it themselves. At the same time, and in equal measure, demand for professional supplies increased: sophisticated trunks for escape artists, floating tables for levitation tricks, cages with delicate mechanisms which could be folded down to a few millimetres wide, making it look as though they had disappeared. Galván made these articles in the workshop at the back of the shop, and those who criticised him for contributing to the success of the sort of magic he professed to despise were not wrong. However, it is only fair to consider the options that were available to him: he had long since realised, in spite of his vast theoretical knowledge and considerable dexterity, that he was not born to be a magician. At least not a magician of the stature he required. He lacked the good looks, the bearing, a lightness of gesture, a gravitas, things that were difficult to explain and impossible to learn. On the other hand, as a craftsman he considered himself the equal of anyone and, above all, he knew that, in Barcelona at least, there was no one to compare to him as a teacher. To use his own expression, he could be the world’s best typist, but he would never be a pianist. This was why, in the window of his shop, he still had the little handwritten card, yellow with age, offering to give magic lessons, though by now he did not need the extra money such lessons brought in.

He still had not given up hope of finding a student capable of learning from him the choicest pieces in the history of magic and taking them a step farther, perhaps in some direction that not even he could foresee. A new Houdini, say, though Galván would have despised the comparison and said – as he quickly told Víctor – that Houdini was nothing more than an arrogant bumpkin, feared rather than respected by his contemporaries. Perhaps Peter Grouse was a better example, though history had been unkind to him, and no one now remembered his successes. Let us mention no names, let us just say that he was looking for someone first-class. Could that be Víctor Losa? Had their first lesson been enough for him to sense such greatness in the boy? And if so, what had he meant by his sigh, the sadness, the ambiguity of his prediction?

A number of details counterbalanced these doubts, beginning with Víctor’s bearing, the way he moved, his back straight, eyes
front, hands open. The glint in his eyes as he picked up the deck of cards. The fact that he lacked the irritating habit of smiling more than necessary. Galván had spent his life telling his students: ‘You’re performing magic, not telling jokes.’ There were other things, too, which only someone of his experience could appreciate, like the fact that Víctor never looked at his hands while performing – a common vice among beginners and one that was almost impossible to correct. The voice was important: the boy had the necessary confidence and roundness of tone, although Galván would have to teach him how to project his voice in large theatres. In spite of the natural diffidence of someone picking up a deck of cards for the first time, Víctor did not need to polish his style, the elegant disdain with which he performed, as though the magic
had
to happen, with or without his intervention.

The sigh, then, was a measure of the weight of his responsibility. To teach Víctor everything that Galván knew and to urge him to surpass his master was comparable to setting him on a rollercoaster with no firm ground waiting for him below, only an abyss, an endless cycle, a constant rushing forward towards something new, something better, always something better, an imaginary goal which, if attained, simply meant starting again from the beginning. The more the maestro fuelled this frantic search, the better a magician his student would become. He was doomed to fall from grace: he might be courageous, enthusiastic, perhaps even brilliant, prize-winning, but he would fall from favour in the end. Did Víctor have the strength and the discipline necessary to ride this rollercoaster without being thrown off?

To judge by the enthusiasm with which he presented himself at his second lesson, he was not lacking in determination. When he saw the boy take out the deck of cards, Galván could not help but smile. The cards looked as though they were about to fall to pieces. Clearly Víctor had been practising Hoffmann’s card trick over and over.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ the student said as he sat down at the table, ‘I could pick up the deck and say …’

‘Don’t tell me what you could do.’ The maestro cut him off immediately. ‘Show me …’

Víctor smoothed the green baize mat several times to gain a few
seconds, as though he needed to run through the story before launching into it, then he began:

‘Actually, I’m not a magician.’

‘Stand up,’ Galván commanded.

‘Actually, I’m not a magician,’ Víctor said as he got to his feet, irritated at the interruptions and clutching the deck tensely in his left hand. ‘The thing is, I found this deck of cards and it turns out they have magic powers …’

Galván’s heart skipped a beat. He had heard a thousand different versions of this story. Whenever a magician lacks experience or talent, they play dumb. The most common thing is for the magician to start by saying that, actually, he is not a magician, or he is, but only reluctantly, that objects acquire miraculous powers the moment he picks them up. If it works, it’s a double triumph because the magician has overcome his self-proclaimed lack of ability; if he fails, he has set up a logic by which his failure can be viewed as funny, winning him the sympathy of the audience.

Galván repressed the sigh that welled up inside him so as not to influence Víctor, but he could not help but look at the boy pleadingly: don’t let me down, make me correct the way you hold your cards as often as you like, pick the wrong card, get nervous, drop the whole pack on the floor, but show me something of yourself, show me some talent.