The Manual of Darkness Page 6

  ‘It’s forgotten.’

  ‘But this time, you’re wrong. You want things to carry on as they were before, but that’s not possible. I have to stop, Mario. I don’t know how this thing is going to pan out, I don’t even know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but right now I don’t give a fuck about magic.’

  Galván flinched.

  ‘Don’t say that, Víctor. You owe a lot to magic. You’re a magician. I don’t just mean that it’s your vocation, how you earn your living, that, like me, you probably couldn’t do anything else. It’s something more. This might sound simplistic, but a man is what he does. And you do magic.’

  ‘But right now I can’t perform the one trick I want. To get my eyesight back. There’s nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeve. What do you think? Anyway, you should be happy seeing me like this.’

  ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘Many years ago you predicted I’d be a little wretch. Maybe you don’t remember. We never talked about it. You didn’t even know I’d overheard you. A little wretch and one hell of a magician. Bingo, Mario. It’s all come true, but in the wrong order.’

  ‘Of course I remember. And I’m sorry you overheard. Besides, I was talking about something else.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now. You know why it didn’t bother me? Because I was holding a copy of Hoffmann’s book. You’d just given it to me so I could practise forcing a card. I didn’t know how important it was, but I had the feeling you had just given me the road map to my whole life. At the time, that was all I needed.’

  ‘And you pulled it off, congratulations.’

  ‘But it’s not enough. Now, I need a different map. I have to think about the future. About the immediate future, because this thing is moving fast. I have to start planning for the future that will be here before I know it. Instead, I seem to be spending my days thinking about the past. I’ve been dreaming about my father. I’ve been thinking about Peter Grouse, about Kellar. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the first time you and I met. I feel as if I’m locked inside the Proteus Cabinet, surrounded by mirrors, about to change into a spirit.’

  ‘A spirit? Well, I always did predict great things for you,’ Galván tried to inject a note of humour. ‘If you like, we can convene the Seybert Commission.’

  ‘Don’t fuck around, Mario, this is serious.’

  A Line of Fire

  Hoffmann? The most important thing is that you master his work, that you practise it until your hands hurt, but I’ll tell you who he was. A little history never goes amiss. Professor Hoffmann’s name was not Hoffmann and he was never a professor of anything. He was Angelo John Lewis, attorney. As a magician, he’s not worth even a passing mention in a footnote in the appendix of any specialist reference book. But it would be impossible to write a history of magic without citing 1876, the date Modern Magic was first published in Philadelphia, as a fundamental watershed.

  We know very little about him. He learned magic as a child, but there’s no record that he ever performed in public and there’s no way to know whether it was crippling shyness that stopped him, or lack of talent. He also liked to write so he decided to combine these two passions and set down everything he knew about the magician’s art of his time. What is most surprising is how much he knew, because besides documenting tricks and techniques that had not changed for centuries, beyond the aesthetic changes imposed by fashion, Modern Magic also gave an incredibly detailed account of the latest advances in the profession. And we are not talking about sleight of hand, where techniques could be worked out by logic and intuition. We are talking about sheer engineering, illusions so impressive their inventors could sell out the biggest theatres in the world for months on end.

  The public of the day adored two illusions in particular: disappearances and levitation. Every magician racked his brains – or paid someone to do it for him – to find some way of making increasingly bigger objects or creatures disappear as the audience watched. As for levitation, a skilled engineer could become a millionaire if he could find a way of fitting everyday objects – chairs, tables, beds, carpets – with an undetectable mechanism that could ‘levitate’ a magician’s assistant for a while. Turn on the television today and it’s clear that the passion for these illusions has not died and that a number of magicians have the nerve to perform levitation tricks using the same contraptions described by Hoffmann in the chapter ‘Suspension in the Air’.

  After publishing Modern Magic the bogus professor had to vanish for a while. Had he not done so he might have been killed. It may seem surprising, but the magicians of the day didn’t pull their punches when it came to protecting their secrets. Cases of extortion, bribery, industrial espionage and the outright theft of tricks were not uncommon. Intellectual property over devices and contraptions was so jealously guarded that simply changing a nail or a screw would send someone rushing to the patents office.

  The atmosphere of intense competition was even worse since magicians were not only competing with one another for audiences. Spiritualism, which had taken off a few years earlier, led by the Davenport Brothers, was threatening to eclipse magic. Magicians and spiritualists performed exactly the same illusions onstage, among them a star turn that might be called ‘the magic cabinet’ – an ordinary-looking wardrobe in which apparently inexplicable events occurred.

  Spiritualists attributed these phenomena to the presence of supernatural forces summoned by them. The public accepted this message with something more dangerous than mere credulity: their need to believe in supernatural elements was so intense that the trick always worked, in spite of the crudeness of some of those who performed it.

  Until that point, only the gods – or, at best, their emissaries, the prophets and the saints – had challenged the power of magicians. From the moment the Davenport Brothers and their imitators appeared, magicians discovered that the battle had been brought to earth and must be fought theatre by theatre, seat by seat. Facing down the spiritualists by claiming to have greater powers over invisible forces than they did would not have been clever. And so, they wielded the only weapon that seemed effective against such an onslaught: the truth. If the Davenport Brothers made London audiences tremble with their ‘spirit cabinet’, the following night John Nevil Maskelyne, generally considered to be the finest magician of his generation, opened his performance at the Egyptian Hall with a direct and brutal reference to them: ‘Last night, someone dared to affirm in this same city,’ he told the audience, ‘that the events we are about to witness are the result of higher incorporeal powers. I propose to prove that they are charlatans. I can equal their feats with the aid of nothing more than science and my own ingenuity.’

  It was a sea-change, an act of enormous daring. Having pretended for centuries to possess the ability to perform impossible feats, magicians now saw themselves forced to admit that they performed tricks. In short, that there was no such thing as magic. Rather than fighting for possession of the treasure, they denied the booty existed.

  Only in this context is it possible to explain the publication of Modern Magic. In fact it is likely that Hoffmann wrote it with the best possible intentions: since everything was based on mechanical science, it made sense to collect it into a manual, a sort of encyclopaedia which might open the eyes of the public, force them to understand, to accept once and for all that the marvels they witnessed did not depend on some occult power.

  The truth, however, aside from being a feeble weapon in any argument, frequently has unexpected consequences. A few weeks after Hoffmann’s manual was published, in major cities across the Western world, shops selling magical tricks and paraphernalia found themselves obliged to slash their prices. Overnight, they had gone from being the purveyors of secrets to simple manufacturers. As for the theatres, if they did not empty overnight it was only because impresarios had always padded out magic shows with animal circuses, dancers, clowns and charlatans who now took top billing while the magicians relied for their – much-diminished – s
uccess on their ability to perform Hoffmann’s tricks with finesse.

  Of course, regardless of what the bogus professor’s intentions were, his contemporaries cursed him as a traitor. There had previously been cases where magicians – in professional publications with limited circulation – had revealed the secrets of tricks they had not invented under the pretext of having perfected them. But it was an unprecedented betrayal that someone should reveal everything in a single book, all the more so when that person, aside from revealing other people’s secrets, had never even bothered to put them into practice before an audience. Nor could he be accused of plagiarism, since he was careful to mention – when such information was available – when, where and by whom each trick had been patented, and the costumes and set design usually used in the performance. He frequently included details of the vaudeville plots used as a vehicle for magic tricks. As if this were not enough, he published a second edition in 1879, updated with an appendix which revealed the secrets of the handful of tricks that were not in the first edition.

  In all probability, even he could not foresee the chaos his book, Modern Magic, would unleash; akin to those moments in nature when an aberrant mutation leads to the creation of a whole new species. The date of publication traced a line of fire that forced magicians to choose on which side they stood. If they chose not to cross it, their fate was sealed: their only glory could be that of skilled practitioners of an art which, though obsolete, was quickly relegated to the category of a craft. In this sense, Hoffmann triggered a purely quantitative increase: since access to the secrets was now available for very little outlay, the number of magicians grew exponentially in the decades that followed.

  Those who decided to cross the line were faced with a heroic challenge. To surpass the methods described by Hoffmann was comparable to painting better than Velázquez, being more romantic than Beethoven or giving a more detailed literary reflection of reality than Balzac: it was beyond impossible; it was absurd. They had to invent something different. A few among them tried. Maskelyne came close to succeeding. Houdini managed to do something no less important: he persuaded audiences that he had succeeded. The only person ever to set foot across the line was Peter Grouse, but in doing so, he got burned.

  If They Made Me a King

  It is impossible for Víctor Losa to think of his father without imagining Louis Armstrong’s face. His father was not black, didn’t play the trumpet, or flash his teeth when he smiled. And yet, if he closes his eyes and allows memory to carry him along, it is Armstrong’s face that he sees. As he does so, Víctor’s hips begin to sway in 4/4 time, though it never quite becomes a dance since his feet never leave the ground.

  The song is called ‘If’. A single note is enough for the lyrics to surge up in his memory. ‘If they made me a king/I’d be but a slave to you.’ By the time he was six years old, he knew the lyrics by heart, though he did not understand a single word and – though he often heard the record at home – when he sang it, he made the same pronunciation mistakes as his father. When he was eleven, with the basic English he had learned, his mother’s help and long hours spent with a dictionary, he managed to write out a first, clumsy translation: ‘If I had everything, I’d still be a slave to you. If I ruled the night, stars and moon so bright, still I’d turn for light to you.’

  One might even say that he was able to recognise the melody before he was born. His father had heard or read somewhere that, if you sang the same song regularly, mouth pressed to your wife’s belly, after the fifth month of pregnancy, then after the birth the song would help calm the baby when it cried or needed help in getting to sleep. Every night, for four months, he sang ‘If’, trying to emulate Armstrong’s gravelly voice; he even included the rhythmic, meaningless scat Armstrong crooned between each verse: ‘If the world to me bowed, yet humbly I cling to you. Baa Daa Doo Dee. If my friends were a crowd, I’d turn on my knees to you. Doo Baa Doo Dee.’ When Víctor was born, singing it softly into the child’s ear became a routine, regardless of its supposed benefits: it did not always stop the baby crying.

  The lyrics hardly seemed appropriate for a lullaby. Perhaps Martín Losa chose the song for practical reasons: if he were looking for a way to calm the child he could not find a better ballad than this, slow almost to the point of solemn but with a swing beat that made it miraculously happy and delightful. It was difficult to listen to it just once. When Víctor inherited the record, the needle of the record player had ploughed the grooves so often that Armstrong’s voice sounded as though it were competing with a chorus of crickets. But still he played it. Over the years, he collected every available version of the song, though none seemed to be as good as the original.

  The magical effect, if it had ever had one, vanished when he needed it the most. For Víctor, there came a time when his tears were all too real and his father was not there to sing ‘If’ to him. In fact, it was his absence Víctor mourned, so the very mention of the song made him cry all the more. And yet still he went on playing it, singing it so often that it became a sort of automatic reflex, not only in the face of sorrow, but also when something threatened his peace of mind. Whenever he felt scared or nervous, or when he simply needed to concentrate, the notes to ‘If’ came from his throat unbidden, so changed that they no longer seemed to form a melody. It was a habit Galván supposedly rid him of once and for all, but one would have to come very close to Víctor to know whether the tremulous sound he makes constantly these days is a whimper of grief or the first six notes of ‘If’: B, C, B, A, G, A. Is that it, Víctor? Again? If they made me a king? But they have made you a king. You are king of the world. The finest magician. Dethroned by a song. Song? Which song? This one, Víctor, the same song as always.

  Galván made you strip. First the glasses, then the shirt. Then, when your terrified hands sought refuge in your pockets, he made you take off your trousers. He took away the table and the chairs, stepped back into the darkness and commanded you to sing. You wanted to disappear. Why didn’t you just pick up your clothes and leave? You stayed in order to side with him. Standing there, bashful. Stripped of everything, even your short-sighted eyes naked, you bowed your head and the blurred pile of clothes at your feet made you think there was a dead body lying there, that it was bitterly cold, that the dead body could be you. You made the sound again, a sound like clearing your throat, but now it is recognisably B, C, B, and Galván’s voice kept hammering in your ears, Sing, sing louder, I can’t hear you, Víctor, sing. Perhaps it would have been enough to give form to the melody – after all, he only wanted to make you sing, to make you realise. But then you sang the first line: ‘If they made me a king’. You shivered a little, brought your knees together like the helpless little boy you claimed not to be any more, but you did sing. Softly, out of tune, you sang the first verse almost without moving your lips, and when you reached the second verse, it was not Galván who was urging you on, but Armstrong himself, until you thought you could see his pearly teeth shining in the dark. Or perhaps it was your father. Your father, Víctor. His face, not Armstrong’s. His face bending down as though he could press his lips to the belly of time and ask you to sing to put an end to all the tears, so that your voice rose to sing the third verse at the top of your lungs: ‘If I ruled the earth, what would life be worth, If I hadn’t the right to you Baa-Daa-Baa-Doo Baa-Dah-Boo-Dee’. You thought you could see him smiling, and when you finished you were sure it was him clapping until Galván took a step forward, became visible, his arms wide, and said, ‘Come here, come here, you silly boy,’ and though three minutes earlier you would have sworn undying hatred, you rushed into his arms, which were Armstrong’s arms and your father’s arms and your own arms, hugging them all at once. Put your clothes on, Víctor.

  It worked. When Víctor bent down to pick up his clothes, what lay there no longer looked like a dead body but a moulted skin he had shed. As he put on his clothes he realised he was tired, but he was thankful for the feeling of relief that came with that exhaustio
n. Galván placed the chairs back under the spotlight, told him to take a seat and asked him about the song. Before he got to the important part, Víctor described Armstrong, the white teeth, the gravelly voice, the scat. He mentioned Evans, Hargreaves and Damerell, who had written the music and lyrics, remembering their names from the record sleeve read so often during his childhood. He talked about the versions by John Gary, Perry Como, Billy Eckstine and Dean Martin, pointed out that Art Tatum was the only person to record an instrumental version and ridiculed Mario Lanza’s attempt to turn it into an aria.

  Until that moment, Galván had never heard his student utter more than a dozen words at a time. And so, though this was not the particular information that interested him, he decided not to interrupt, until Víctor mentioned his father for the first time.

  ‘Name?’ he interjected.

  ‘What name?’

  ‘Your father. What was his name?’

  ‘Martín.’

  ‘Martín Losa.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Carry on.’

  ‘My father started singing me this song …’

  ‘Martín Losa,’ the maestro interrupted him again, ‘Martín Losa used to sing this song to his son Víctor …’ then he waved his hand for him to continue.

  Víctor understood what the maestro wanted and tried to please him, though he remained unconvinced. He began uneasily, his words disjointed and vague, feigning detachment, as though the story of this Martín Losa and his son Víctor was really about someone else. Gradually, forced through words into some sort of order, the unfortunate events of his childhood began to conform to a certain logic: feeble and governed principally by luck and recklessness, but a logic nonetheless. He had recalled a thousand times his father’s death almost ten years earlier. His imagination was so attuned to the uncertainties and the miseries he associated with that period of his life that, when he came to recount it, and though the words poured from his mouth in a torrent, every detail naturally began to find its place and the tale took on a surprising consistency. From time to time, he was astonished to find himself relating something he thought he had forgotten, but he had no time to savour the feeling because, like water too long dammed up bursting its banks, the story hurtled on, carrying him with it. The feeling of relief was so great that Víctor was sorry when he came to the end of the story. He said nothing for a moment, searching his memory, and glanced at Galván as though a question from him might help him rescue some important detail from oblivion. The maestro simply nodded, as though Víctor had just performed some new exercise perfectly, and told him to pick up the deck of cards. The lesson was over. Before he said goodbye, Galván gave him a list of the exercises to practise for the following class and the corresponding page numbers in Modern Magic.