‘Three months? Are you mad? That’s not even time …’
‘This is a masterpiece,’ Galván interrupted him, picking up his pages and placing them under the spotlight once again. ‘I’m not going to allow your doubts to get in the way of making it possible.’
‘Wait, wait.’ These were the first real words of praise Víctor had received from Galván. He would have liked to have the time to savour them. ‘Wait. Supposing you’re right. Suppose I am capable of learning this story by heart, of reciting it on stage for, I don’t know, let’s say an hour and a half. That’s a lot of supposing, but right now I’ll let it go. What about the rest?’
‘The rest of what?’
‘My father, for example. We know how to project his image on to the stage, but someone …’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll be your father.’
Víctor said nothing. For the first time he began to think it might be possible, especially if they worked together.
‘But … what I’ve written, it’s lunacy. Read it again and you’ll see. I’ve got planets orbiting in the palm of my hand, oranges appearing out of thin air, jets of water spilling from nowhere …’ He suddenly stopped. Galván was staring at him, grinning like a lunatic and gesturing for him to go on. ‘The Black Art,’ Víctor said suddenly. He looked down at the black floor and said it again as though he needed to be sure. ‘The Black Art.’
‘You have just crossed the line of fire,’ said Galván. ‘Welcome. I guarantee you won’t get burned. It’s so simple … A sheet of glass across the stage. With not a speck of dust on it. Tilted at a forty-five-degree angle so it reflects my image. I am in the pit, no one can see me. I am your father. Or rather, my reflection is your father’s ghost. You are behind the sheet of glass. There is an ant farm at your feet. The rest of the stage looks completely empty. An assistant dressed entirely in black moves around the stage, revealing things at precisely the right moment so it seems as though they appear by magic.’
‘But … what’s the hurry? Three months isn’t much time.’
‘Or it’s a lot of time, depending on who you ask. I’m a sick man. It’s only natural that I’m in a hurry. Besides, I want to spend my time setting up a museum, remember?’ Galván bent down again and lifted the metal box. ‘There are a few precious things I want to exhibit. And for that, I need you to be a success. If you are, you’ll make a lot of money. And my fifteen per cent will go a long way to financing the museum.’
‘We haven’t even got a name.’
‘What do you think about Espectros?’
Víctor started putting moisturiser on his face. The idea of him wearing white make-up to stand out against the back backcloth had also been Galván’s.
‘Espectros,’ he said to the mirror. ‘Spectres.’
At first it hadn’t seemed much of a name. He had not really felt comfortable with it since the premiere in Barcelona when the critic from La Vanguardia headed his review with the eloquent pun Espectracular! The opening night took place in Barcelona, of course. His mother sitting in the front row. How he missed his mother. Madrid, Valencia, Bilbao, Seville. Sold out. ‘Never have magic and theatre been so perfectly combined,’ someone had written. Víctor could not remember who, or where. The show had toured every provincial capital in Spain, every major theatre festival. And two years later, just as Víctor was beginning to tire of it, when he barely found any wonder in the routine, Galván had asked him:
‘Do you think you could do it in English?’
Spectres. London. Before that, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Oslo and Milan. Theatre festivals: Edinburgh, Avignon. Two years touring before finally coming to London. Maskelyne, Cooke and Grouse. Dircks and Pepper. Galván and Losa. Vikter Loussa. He lit a cigarette and blew a puff of smoke towards the mirror. Martín Losa and his son Víctor. Suddenly he felt as though this happy nostalgia was poisoning his blood. He needed fresh air. He knew that when he went outside he would run into the stragglers who hung around talking about the show. He knew that somewhere among them would be a woman waiting for him. It was one of the perks of an international tour. Someone would always come up to him, usually under the pretext of asking for an autograph, or would bump into him accidentally on purpose while they pretended to read the poster for the show. Víctor left the dressing room thinking that tonight he would rather be alone. Go on floating through the mists of time. Spend a few hours without having to say a word. His throat was dry, and he was all too aware of the irony. While Galván sweated in the pit to give life to his father’s ghost and the assistant contorted himself, weaving through the darkness and making wonders appear, all he had to do to bring the show together was talk, endlessly, ceaselessly. Víctor Losa; the man who did not believe in words.
23°C
He brings his face close so he can see the screen and the thermostat controls properly and selects the temperature: 23 degrees. What a relief. He has just made his first decision. It is what Galván has said to him a thousand times over the past few days. It is what his own mind tells him constantly, though he isn’t listening: you have to stop thinking about the problem and start focusing all your energy on the solution. Solutions, plural. But not too many. This is the first one. Twenty-three degrees all year round. He will never have to touch the thermostat again. What else? One solution for each problem. Something simple, something routine, something that does not force him to spend the rest of his life worrying about the small things.
He moves through the apartment. Energetic, almost happy. He goes into the bathroom. He doesn’t need all these potions and concoctions. A neutral shower gel. Something that’s both body-wash and shampoo. Towels. Fresh towels once a week. The laundry service. He doesn’t have to worry about money. Or does he? He has earned much more than he can ever possibly spend, especially now that his life is about to get smaller. But it’s no use to him sitting in the bank. Of course, there are specially adapted ATMs But this is not the kind of solution he’s looking for. He needs to have money at home. A lot of money. What else?
He goes into the bedroom. What is he going to do with Lauren Bacall? Leave her there, hanging on the wall even though he can’t see her? Dream about her at night? His guardian angel, a sweet companion. The bed. Who is going to make the bed? He goes into the living room. He sees the television and it almost makes him laugh. He keeps walking. Eating, dressing, sleeping, a basic level of hygiene. Surely there must be something else. Surely he must be forgetting something. He goes into the workshop. The museum. The gift. He doesn’t even know what to call it. He has spent years postponing the decision of what to do with all these props and automata. They were supposed to be a gift for Galván’s museum, but the idea no longer makes any sense. The museum will never be anything more than a project. All Galván thinks about now is dying. Víctor fumbles in the air for the wires that hold up Harry Kellar’s levitation table. Eighty-five wires chemically treated so as not to stand out against the black backcloth, suspended from the ceiling by a complex system of counterweights to make sure the table is always horizontal and does not tilt as it rises into the air. And a single lever to activate it. A work of art that no one has been able to improve on in a hundred years. Kellar stole the idea from Maskelyne, but improved on it. Having hovered some six feet above the stage for a few minutes, it would rise to ghostly strains played by the orchestra and move through the air. Through the air. God, the bastard was ambitious! He even floated over the heads of the audience.
He lets go of the cables and wipes the dust from his fingers. This is no time to think about the past. He needs to get out of this room, to go on thinking about solutions, yet he lingers. Everything in this place touches him. Recently he has begun to mistrust things. It is as though they are conspiring against him. He can almost hear them whispering behind his back, plotting to disappear together. Sometimes, he creeps through the apartment with extraordinary care, and not because he is afraid of bumping into something, quite the reverse: he is afraid that one day everything will disappear,
and no matter which way he turns, all he will find is a vacuum.
He opens the Proteus Cabinet and sits down. Perhaps this is one possible solution: to slide back the mirror and disappear. Become a spirit. Cross the frontier. Play the lead in this disappearance rather than the victim. Tell the world and all the things in it: ‘There you stay.’ But there is only one frontier: that which separates what exists from what no longer exists.
A Just Man
Galván was touched to think of Grouse dusting off the leather case before slipping his well-oiled picklocks and his copies of Modern Magic and A Magician’s Tour inside. He imagined him standing on the poop deck of the ship taking him to America, dreaming perhaps that the line traced by the ship’s wake might at some point cross those of Maskelyne and Kellar to create a symbolic triangle. He found it moving to think of Grouse arriving at the port of New York alone, bewildered by his ignorance of the New World, perhaps astonished by his own daring, and above all obsessed with the idea of meeting Kellar. With this in mind, when he took the train to Philadelphia, not even waiting to get to the city, he immediately struck up a conversation with his fellow travellers to try to ascertain the address of the Egyptian Hall. The first three people he asked had never heard of the place. The fourth recognised the name but seemed to remember that it had closed some years earlier.
The first few days in the city were enough to dispel Grouse’s doubts about the possibility of running into Kellar. Given the magician’s famous penchant for turning his every move into a public performance, it is hardly surprising that each morning Grouse found some mention of him in the newspapers over breakfast: a gala benefit, a celebrated performance in his home town of Erie; a very public reunion with the Fakir of Ava, the magician to whom he owed his early years of training … Anything and everything was worthy of appearing in the papers. Fortunately, Kellar seemed inclined to rest for a while after his travels, or at the very least to limit his trips to Boston and Philadelphia. Grouse had only to do what he did best: wait, and prepare for the encounter.
In the meantime, there was much to do. The corner of page 198 of his copy of A Magician’s Tour was turned down, marking the passage where Kellar recounted his appearance before the Seybert Commission. In a few clumsy sentences the magician gave a vague and incomplete account of the circumstances surrounding the establishment of this ‘spiritualists tribunal’. On the other hand he spent several pages describing his appearances before the commissioners and the ease with which he left them open mouthed. Perhaps in search of some credibility which even he seemed to doubt, he announced that the commission was about to publish a final report confirming Kellar’s testimony and putting an end to the spiritualists’ claims once and for all. Not content with this, Kellar went on to give an account of one of his most brilliant performances, at which the victim was one Edwin Booth, a famous actor of the day, and which was witnessed by Horace Howard Furness, a member of the commission. Apparently, the magician had made fun of Booth using his own particular version of the Proteus Cabinet. He had closed himself into it with the actor for only a few seconds, during which time, to the actor’s astonishment, his hat was transferred to the magician’s head, and vice versa; then mysterious hands appeared from the aperture in the cabinet and threw a tambourine at the great tragedian. When the cabinet doors opened, Furness pestered the actor with questions about what he had seen and heard while he was inside and, more particularly, whether it was possible this had been the work of spirits. Booth replied, ‘I think that it is the devil!’ though he had to repeat himself and finally had to shout into Furness’s ear trumpet since the man was profoundly deaf.
Grouse did not need to investigate the Proteus Cabinet; he knew the history of the illusion and its successful variations. The original had been of such simplicity that it commanded respect. A seemingly ordinary wooden wardrobe, seven to eight feet in height by four or five feet square, supported on short legs, so as to exclude the idea of any communication with the floor or a trapdoor, and two folding doors. Inside, it was covered in wallpaper, like most domestic wardrobes of the period, and in the centre there was a narrow pillar from which hung a small oil lamp so that the audience could see inside.
The trick was based on the same principle Maskelyne used to display a decapitated Cooke in the Egyptian Hall. Two movable mirrors mounted on hinges were fixed to the back corners. When closed, they met at the central column and reflected the sides of the cabinet, creating the illusion that the cabinet was empty since the audience assumed they could see the back. The magician’s assistant would hide behind the mirrors before the trick, and the magician would then open the doors to show the audience that it was apparently empty. As soon as the doors were closed, the assistant would push the mirrors back against the sides of the cabinet, where they disappeared since the backs of the mirrors were lined with the same wallpaper as the rest of the wardrobe. When the magician opened the cabinet, the assistant would appear to the astonished gasps of the audience. To prove that he was flesh and blood, he would even climb out and walk around the stage.
Over time, the appearance of the cabinet changed somewhat to adapt to the various different scenarios magicians used. Maskelyne himself had been responsible for some of the most important enhancements. But it was not the magicians but the spiritualists who discovered the best use for it: they replaced the two mirrors with a single mirror set into the back corner, which left considerably more room inside the cabinet. No one made better use of this improvement than the Davenport Brothers. A member of the public was invited to step inside with one of the brothers, who had been tied up with ropes to the volunteer’s satisfaction. The other brother remained onstage and entertained the audience with a speech about the electrical transmutation of spirits. Meanwhile, inside the cabinet, disembodied hands played all manner of tricks on the hapless volunteer: played a flute in his ear, placed wigs and hats on his head, sprinkled him with flour, whatever might provoke the surprise and astonishment of the audience when they saw him re-emerge, faced flushed, from the cabinet. As if this were not enough, from time to time a ghostly hand would appear through the aperture in the centre of the cabinet ringing a bell.
Every magician understood the principles behind the Proteus Cabinet and appreciated it for the range of illusions it afforded in spite of its simplicity. Even a writer as dull witted as Hoffmann had been able to describe it in no more than thirty-five lines together with a simple diagram. It clearly did not matter to Kellar that the illusion was well known, since he mentioned it at least thirty times in his memoir. He even noted that he had a new one made by local craftsmen in every city he visited so as not to have to transport it with him. He never explained precisely what he used it for, nor did he reveal how the illusion worked.
But what intrigued Peter Grouse was the mention of the Seybert Commission, whose formation and subsequent investigations had not been acknowledged by the London press and therefore had not come to his attention. A group of university scholars assembled to give an opinion on whether spirits could be said to exist and what truth there was to the claims of those who purported to be able to communicate with them. Sixty thousand dollars to fund such an undertaking? Because this, in truth, was the real focus of his interest: that someone should have donated such a sum to study phenomena which any aficionado of magic could explain.
Grouse decided to go directly to the source. Although Kellar maintained that the commission had not yet published a final report on their investigations, Grouse also knew that the magician was not exactly scrupulous when it came to reporting such matters. Besides, almost four years had passed since A Magician’s Tour was first published. Though Grouse suspected that the true goal of the commission was to spend Seybert’s money on travel and lavish meals, it was nonetheless possible that it had since published something to justify its activities. He found his answer on his first visit to the university, and he did not even have to steal it; in fact, he had only to ask. The eagerness with which the librarian pressed a copy of the pr
eliminary report on him made it clear the institution was proud of its role in something that he considered to be arrant nonsense.
He immediately set about reading it. Like Galván and Víctor more than a century later, in fact like anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the history of magic, the more he read, the more astonished he became. Nor was it a quick read. He had to spend four mornings at the library in order to wade through the 150 pages of the report. However, in spite of his reading difficulties, he too reached the obvious conclusion: the members of the commission, honest but credulous men, had not encountered a single spiritualist capable of dressing up his claims with even a modicum of craftsmanship. He was not surprised that the commission had been bowled over by Kellar’s skill after so many third-rate spiritualists. The report only truly aroused his interest when he came to Furness’s appendices. Although in the main body of the report, Reverend Fullerton had endeavoured to maintain a strait-laced neutrality, Furness seemed intent on writing an adventure novel. He recounted his experiences in the first person, amused himself by detailing the circumstances of each disastrous encounter and described these self-professed mediums with biting sarcasm. More importantly, he seemed to bring to the task a sort of vengeful vitality, a violent scepticism and moral rage, as though he had concluded that the very idea of the existence of spirits was an insult to his intelligence. Peter Grouse was sufficiently acquainted with the human condition to realise that it was precisely the reverse. Furness’s rage at being duped could only be explained by his desperate need to believe. This was why he had continued to pursue his investigations, outside the aegis of the commission. His sarcasm concealed a deep, fervent, frustrated desire to happen on the exception, that one, perhaps unique, encounter that would allow him to finally let go, to exclaim: ‘They really do exist!’