The Manual of Darkness (12 page)

The second spiritualist summoned before the commission was Dr Henry Slade, the highest authority on independent writing, for whom they had to pay travel expenses and a two-week hotel
stay, sufficient time to determine that his mediation with the spirits was more effective but just as fraudulent as that of Mrs Patterson. Suffice it to say that one of the investigators, exasperated by all this trickery, concealed a pocket mirror in his hand so that he could observe what was happening under the table. In the report, he described seeing ‘the reflection of fingers, which were clearly not Spiritual, opening the slates and writing the answer’.

As he reads, Víctor wavers between laughter and indignation. In spite of the good intentions of the commission, the report is a catalogue of cheap con-artists performing tricks worthy only of a sideshow puppeteer. Third-rate typists attempting to pass themselves off as pianists. By contrast the commission’s tenacity and consummate zeal in pursuing the investigation seem both admirable and irritating. The report is offensive to his passion for doing things properly. Víctor knows what the spiritualists of the time were capable of.

Fullerton himself, in a separate chapter dealing with the difficulties of his task, explains that they could not find a spiritualist who could justify the considerable success achieved by the movement. From time to time, they would put an ad in the Boston magazine
Banner of Light
, the leading spiritualist publication. These ads were answered by curious characters such as a Dr Rothermel, who claimed to be able to produce sounds from a series of musical instruments merely through psychic force. The instruments were housed in a small portable cabinet covered at the back by a black screen. Rothermel sat on one side, his hands tied to a chair, covered from head to foot with a black curtain. After a few seconds, there was the clear sound of scissors. ‘The Spirits are cutting me loose,’ the charlatan exclaimed, pretending through various twitches and convulsions to be in a trance. Then a hand suddenly appeared in the cabinet and played each of the instruments in turn. ‘We had no difficulty in believing,’ Fullerton wrote in the report, ‘that the hands which were dexterous enough to play the zither with very remarkable skill, under such conditions, behind the curtain, were deft enough to sever the cords.’

The next chapter of the report is devoted to a Mr W. M. Keeler, famous for his mastery of what at the time were called ‘Spiritual
Photographs’, in which mysterious figures of angelic or diabolical aspect would appear next to the subject of the photograph. Receiving a letter inviting him to appear before the commission, Keeler responded, agreeing to perform three séances for the sum of $300, payable in advance, the fee to be non-returnable whether or not his efforts proved satisfactory. He also clearly stated that there might be no results because of ‘the antagonistic element which might be produced by those persons not in perfect sympathy with the cause’. In addition he wanted guarantees that he would be alone when developing the images in the dark room since the spirits were particularly vulnerable at such moments.

Víctor is growing impatient. He doesn’t believe in spirits, nor did he expect that he would stumble on some astonishing revelation in the report, but he did expect a modicum of professional dignity. He goes back to the first page and checks the date again: 1887. It seems impossible that the commission could not find anyone capable of doing a decent job. It is as if a literary commission could not find a single decent poem in the whole of the seventeenth century. He begins to skim through the report, lingers only over the beginning of a paragraph or the capital letters indicating someone’s name, until he gets to page 77, where he stumbles on Harry Kellar. Knowing that he performed an independent writing illusion in his stage show with sealed slates similar to those used by Slade, the commission asked him to appear. Kellar, it goes without saying, did not pass up the invitation. On the contrary, he was more than happy to impress the commission, and he did not do so with some illegible scrawl, but with seven sealed slates on which appeared sentences in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Chinese, Japanese, classical Arabic and Gujarati. The report even includes good old Fullerton’s regret that the last three cannot be reproduced since his machine does not have the requisite characters.

Víctor stops reading and thinks about Galván. The maestro always insisted that Kellar was little more than an imitator and a braggart, but he must be given credit for his ambition: when he set himself to a task, he pulled out all the stops. Víctor goes back to his reading. It seems that one of the investigators dared to voice an objection: clearly the texts were quite long and exquisitely
calligraphed, had been written beforehand, and Kellar had made them appear by some simple sleight of hand. Unruffled, the magician took out a double-sided slate, showed both sides to those present to prove that it was indeed blank and handed it to the investigator, asking him to write down a question, which he did, handing it back face down so that Kellar could not see it. The investigator wrote: ‘How tall is the Washington Monument?’ Kellar took the slate and a piece of chalk, and held it beneath the table for only a few seconds, during which time the investigators noticed no suspicious movements on his part. When he showed it to them again, on the other side of the slate were the words ‘We have never visited the Washington Monument, therefore can not give its height.’ Brilliant. In spite of his insolence, it has to be said that of all those summoned to appear before the commission, he was the one who did a good job. Although the report never deviates from its neutral, pseudo-scientific tone, it is possible to detect the investigators’ pleasure that, after decades of cheap tricks, they have finally witnessed something pure. Not because Kellar did not use trickery. On the contrary, of all those who appeared before the commission, he was the only one to admit to doing so. And his frankness proved such a devastating blow to the spiritualists that the investigators never met again. Only one of them, a man named Horace Howard Furness, continued with the investigation on his own. Although the basis of the commission was such that only those sessions at which all members were present were valid, they granted Furness the right to add a series of appendices to the report, in which he recounted his attempts to obtain one single proof of communication with the spirits in whatever form. Moochers who claimed to be able to read a letter without taking it from the envelope only to return it, with a sizeable invoice, and clear signs of tampering; queens of the underworld who charged recently widowed women exorbitant sums for reciting supposed messages from the beyond, closing their throats to produce voices that sounded both masculine and ghostly.

Víctor is sorry the tribunal has disappeared; he would like to see Furness’s face right now. The tone of his appendix is ruthless and cynical and there is a barely controlled fury when he comes to describe the various crude methods used by spiritualists to profit
from other people’s grief. He wants to go on reading, but the chalk marks disappear. Víctor protests:

‘Fullerton! Tell me something – according to the title, this is only a preliminary report!’ He waits for a few seconds but there is no reply. ‘There has to be something more! A definitive report, a list of conclusions … You spent all the money, the least you could have done was adjourn the commission. No? Nothing?’ When he realises that the commission will not rematerialise, his voice drops to a whisper and he says, almost to himself, ‘It’s not possible. Long ago, Galván told me that the commission met one last time, about two years later. Peter Grouse summoned them. I’m just a student, but Galván … He can’t be wrong. Bah!’ He heaves a sigh. ‘Grouse hoodwinked them. That’s why they’re playing possum.’

As he says the word ‘possum’, he falls into a deep sleep, one mercifully devoid of images, though he is still walking on a tightrope.

W
hen they ask whether he is claustrophobic, he immediately says no. It is hardly likely that the MRI scanner will be as dark, as cramped, as airless as the inside of the Proteus Cabinet. As the table moves into the tunnel, Víctor thinks of the countless women, magicians’ assistants, who, down the centuries, found themselves confined in boxes and trunks of every shape and size. Beautiful women, though usually petite. Anonymous women. Women with small heads. The human head is the one thing no magic trick can shrink or fold or reduce in size. Víctor could not possibly work as a magician’s assistant because from the nape of his neck to the tip of his nose measures more than twenty-two centimetres, the maximum depth of the hidden compartments in every stage contraption.

They have him remove all metal objects, including his glasses, so now he cannot see clearly this machine which is slowly devouring him. Everything is white. Or perhaps it’s just the light that seems milky, as though filtered through a white curtain. The final instructions come over the speakers just before the MRI scan begins: he is to keep still, try to relax, keep his eyes closed at all times. He should let them know if it gets too much for him, though if that happens they would need to start over again. He closes his left eye and immediately a lump comes to his throat: he could swear that the halo, the veil, the full moon, the wafer, is now also in his right eye. It’s not possible. He is about to scream for them to get him out of there, to lash out with his arms, his feet, kicking nervously, but a reassuring voice once again commands him to close his eyes and relax. We’re about to start, it says. He does as he is told. Or tries to. Five metallic taps indicate that the magnetic resonance imaging has started. In the fifteen minutes that follow,
all he senses is the table moving back and forward slightly and a series of irritating noises. Like a terrible piece of disco music from which everything but the percussion has been stripped away. Or worse, like a washing machine full of screws. It is strange: his whole body is relaxed, he does not move a muscle, does not even blink. He could be at home, in bed, asleep. If he were to open his eyes now, he thinks, Lauren Bacall would greet him from the opposite wall. He thinks about tombs. About white cradles. He thinks about Galván’s island, the white light spilling from the ceiling, can almost hear Galván’s voice saying, ‘Pick a card.’

Pick a card. Víctor dares not smile, afraid he might interfere with the MRI scan. Every Tuesday, during the first year of their lessons together, Galván crushed him, forced him to practise again and again until he finally mastered the technique of forcing a card. There are many ways to make the victim in a trick believe he is freely picking a card when in fact he is choosing one previously selected by the magician. There are mathematical methods in which the magician pretends the selection depends purely on numerical chance. Others are mechanical: the card is marked, or has a corner cut away, or is in a particular position in the deck. But a good magician, a real magician, one of the scant few who, in Galván’s words, are worthy of the name, cannot resort to such crude bungling. Such a magician has to fan out the deck, to pass the cards from one hand to the other, bringing them close to the victim at precisely the right moment, making his voice hypnotic, pick a card, any card, any one at all. He has to put himself in his victim’s shoes, to know exactly what he is thinking and act on that knowledge, speeding up or slowing down so that when the victim finally closes his nervous fingers, it is on the predetermined card and no other. Every Tuesday, Galván would demonstrate the trick once. Pick a card, he would say. Time after time, Víctor tried by any means possible to ensure the maestro failed: he would pick the first card, the last, pretend to choose one only to pick the next at the last minute; allow the whole deck to be dealt out so that Galván had to start again from the beginning. Never, not once, did Galván fail to identify his card correctly. He would tell him what it was even before Víctor looked at it: two of clubs, he would say, almost always in a whisper, his mouth half closed, lips
clenching one of his endless cigarette butts. King of hearts, five of spades. He was always right. And whenever Víctor asked him to explain the trick once and for all, the maestro would merely bring his hand up to his forehead and say: ‘It’s all in here. There is no trick.’ Then he would ask Víctor to do it.

For a long time, Víctor thought Galván was cheating. It took a whole year, but in time his hands became just as skilled. Galván had been right. It was possible. Nor was it definite that his mind had anything to do with his success. It was sheer manual dexterity. The hands knew. The hands knew which card the victim wanted to pick and simply offered it to him.

Why am I thinking about all this now? Oh yes, the white light. The island. ‘Here are your glasses, señor,’ a voice says. ‘Señor,’ the voice comes again and with it a gentle tap on his shoulder, ‘your glasses.’

The table, with Víctor lying face up, has emerged from the scanner. He takes the glasses the nurse is holding out and puts them on. In only a wink, he knows that the halo is still there in his right eye but, rather than being panicked, he feels a mysterious sense of peace. Fate has forced a card on him and on it is written his future. His immediate future. He is going blind. It is only a matter of days. It seems futile to resist. He cannot change the card. He picked what he picked; it was always going to be the one that fate dealt him. There is no more frenzied pursuit in his brain, no more useless running away. Blind. There is peace, even if he knows that it is the meek, regretful peace of those who surrender in the face of defeat. Like a conquered village, he must stop dreaming of some unattainable victory and begin to think about survival.

A
fter six months of lessons, Galván suggested he make his debut at a children’s party. Víctor immediately agreed and the maestro did nothing to curb his excitement, though he knew that children were the toughest possible audience. Contrary to what most people believe, children are not remotely innocent when it comes to magic; they treat magicians with scepticism and laugh at even the smallest failure. Perhaps in order to lessen the chance of stage fright before his debut, or perhaps because he thought the time had come for him to fend for himself, Galván spared Víctor these details, telling him only the date and time of the performance. Víctor would have to entertain the guests for forty-five minutes. The party, to celebrate the eleventh birthday of a boy named Manuel, was to take place on the outskirts of Barcelona.