The Manual of Darkness (8 page)

Then, just as in the old days, comes the lecture. Galván tells Víctor he has no right to go to pieces like this without a fight, reminds him he is the finest magician in the world, not because of some jury’s decision at a festival, but because they have both been working towards that goal for years, ever since Víctor was a wide-eyed brat. He has a moral obligation to himself, Galván warns, and to Galván who has led him by the hand all the way and has no intention of letting go now. He lingers over the memories of the tough times, the faith and the tenacity that brought them through. He tries to imply that even if his worst fears are realised, even if he loses the sight in both eyes, Víctor will still be the best magician in the world because the true miracles take place in the mind; performing them is simply mechanics, muscular memory. He does not need to be able to see to be who he is. Until Víctor
cuts him off. For the first time, he looks Galván in the eye and says calmly:

‘Do you understand, Mario?’

‘I understand. You’ve been thrown a curveball.’

‘I’m not talking about that. This is the first time you’ve been wrong. In all these years, you’ve always known what was best for me better than I knew myself. You only had to say the word and I knew which way to go. Not only in magic.’

‘OK, OK,’ Galván modestly tries to interrupt.

‘Let me finish.’ Víctor cuts him short. He is serious, curt, determined, as though he has spent years honing the words he is about to say. ‘I hope you know how grateful I am to you, though I never found a way of telling you that when we first met, I was just a kid who wanted to learn how to do magic. I didn’t even know why. A lot of good things have happened to me since and I know better than anyone what it took to make them happen. But I also know that none of it would have been possible if you hadn’t always been there, showing me the way. You’ve been good to me. That stuff about your fifteen per cent was below the belt. I’m sorry.’

‘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.’

H
offmann? 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 – success 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.

I
t 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.’