Víctor sat with her in the hospital for thirteen hours straight, as though by doing so he could somehow make up for the long absences of recent years. He did not even leave her bedside to get a solitary bite to eat. And at some point, he realised that she was dead. There was no death rattle, no choking, no spasm, nor were there any last words. Having checked that the weak, erratic pulse of her last days was gone, Víctor pulled the sheet up over her shoulders and went to find a nurse, utterly unaware of the symbolism of the gesture, the belated homecoming of a mantra he had heard a thousand times: wrap up warm, son, it’s cold out.
He picks up the remote control, but before the parade of images begins, he decides to move his chair six feet away from the TV screen. He turns down the sound so he cannot hear the voice. Nobody is going to say anything he doesn’t already know. He places a hand over one side of his glasses, covering his left eye to avoid any interference. He doesn’t want to miss anything. After the opening credits, the screen is filled by a vast expanse of untilled land with only a handful of weeds blown by the occasional gust of wind. This is a scientific documentary, there’s no big budget, no special effects. In fact, there is only a single camera fixed on this general shot and another which will give a close-up of what comes next. Suddenly, from several different points, a black torrent streams out of the ground. At first there are two or three puddles of darkness, but soon almost the entire surface, the whole screen, is black. You need a sharp eye, or, like Víctor, to know the film by heart to realise that what you are seeing is ants. Dozens, hundreds, thousands. This has been shot on the day they reproduce. Or rather not a day, since reproduction takes barely fifteen minutes.
As a result of a genetic command whose trigger and means of transmission have not been wholly determined, a host of sterile females have decided, at this precise moment, not to be so any more. They swarm from the anthill in an explosion of wings so violent that it leaves them stunned, and they fall back to earth, the males throwing themselves on top of them, four, five, as many as eight for every female. Even in the close-ups, it is impossible to see clearly what is happening. The place looks like a war zone. The males become furious, they fight, they bite, and even after they finally manage to conquer a female in the briefest of thrusts, they still stagger about wildly, drunk on hormones.
Although there has been no change in their appearance which might alert the males to the fact that they have been fertilised, once the females have been impregnated, they are left alone. They have a short time to distance themselves by a few metres, dig a hole in the ground and establish a new colony, a task in which only a few will triumph. But before they do so, before they say farewell for ever to the light, they rip off their wings. If all goes well, the fertilised female ant, now a queen, will spend the rest of her life buried several metres underground and wings would simply be a hindrance. The first time he saw this part, Víctor found it so violent that he couldn’t stop trembling and had to hug himself as though someone were trying to rip off his shoulder blades.
The screen begins to clear. Patches of ochre earth reappear amid the black, which, in a matter of seconds, vanishes completely. Soon all that will remain on the surface will be the dark smudges of dead ants that have failed and the dusty gossamer of torn wings.
His mother showed him this tape for the first time when he was twelve. ‘I want to show you something your father filmed before you were born, when he was still involved in research,’ she told him. ‘He never showed you himself because you were too young and I suppose I didn’t put it in the box with the rest of the things I gave you for the same reason. But you’re old enough now to understand it.’ The tape should have reminded him of Martín Losa, and not simply because his father had filmed it, but because it was a meticulous, tangible, scientific response to one of the three questions that had obsessed Víctor during the Saturday mornings they spent together tending to the ant farm: the queen mother, the silence of the ants, their reproduction. And yet every time he watches the tape now, it is his mother who comes to mind. He is thinking about her as he imagines the one thing not shown in this documentary, what it should show: the lives of the mothers holed up in their dark corners, slaves, though they are called queens, subject to the dictates of evolution, oblivious to the fact that if the drones clean and feed them, it is not out of gratitude but to make sure that they go on teeming with life, go on spilling from their bellies larvae in their thousands. Some will be male, others will have wings, though they will not know why until the moment comes, and some will inherit a defect, a genetic mutation, a cruel percentage that dooms them to be crippled or useless. Or blind. Because that, too, is our subject.
Double Feature
La Llave was closed on Mondays so Víctor made the most of the opportunity and went to the cinema. He loved the fact that, at least once a week, he could be part of the audience, exchange the spotlight for the shadows. The Casablanca Cinema, which had opened not long before, lived up to its name that summer by showing a Humphrey Bogart retrospective. The elegance of black and white harked back to times more in keeping with his parents’ generation than his own. Víctor was very taken by Bogart’s easy charm and, without realising it, struck much the same pose when he was smoking, but he could not help but see him as a hackneyed and slightly improbable hero. Although he enjoyed these films, Víctor watched them with the detachment of someone watching an old documentary. Until he saw To Have and Have Not. Lauren Bacall’s first appearance on the screen, late in the film, left him speechless. He saw the film fourteen times. More than once, he showed up at the cinema for the afternoon showing and then, after wolfing down a snack, would return for the evening performance as well. He learned the lines by heart. He bought and devoured the Hemingway novel on which the film was based only to forget it immediately, since Bacall’s character did not appear in the book. He bought the poster and put it up in his bedroom. He collected all the stories, all the gossip about the shooting and the writing of the screenplay. For the first time he envied Bogart, and not because of his screen presence or because in every film he managed to get the booty and, usually, the girl, but because, as Víctor discovered, shortly after filming To Have and Have Not, he married Lauren Bacall. She was only eighteen and he was on the rebound from his second marriage to a woman given to alcoholism and bouts of violence. They were together until cancer carried him off. Another person who died because of nicotine. He read Bacall’s memoirs and cherished the anecdotes she recounted with nostalgia: when Bogart pinched her bottom on set, knowing the camera was filming them only from the waist up; the crippling shyness she felt when she had to look directly at the camera and which, according to critics, explained the ambiguity of her gaze. He wanted to know everything about her. This was not the classic crush teenagers have for actresses. To see her in close-up, hear her husky voice, as assured when talking about love as when humming a blues melody, did not trigger a hard-on or some shameful desire. It never occurred to him to compare Bacall to the women he dated at La Llave. He knew perfectly well that what fascinated him was not a woman, nor even the image of her body on film, but a fantasy. Bacall did not exist. What truly did fascinate him, what prompted him to see over and over a story he already knew by heart, was the light. The way the light glanced off her cheekbones, sank into her eyes, traced the outline of her hips, the way it seemed to pick her out in every shot regardless of how many people were in the frame and accentuate her presence. Whenever she appeared, all the technical phenomena that made her presence on screen possible simply fell away: the spotlights, the camera, the characters on the page, the direction, the brilliant lines Faulkner wrote into the screenplay for her and which she spoke with the same playfully insolent smile; everything. The typewriters were silent and music began to play. Suddenly, he was not watching a film but a living being cradled by light. Every time he saw the film, he emerged from the cinema feeling exhilarated and astounded in equal measure. This was the feeling he wanted to create when he performed, something that went beyond the
simple pleasure of seeing some baffling trick flawlessly executed. This was why he was not content simply to witness the expression of amazement on the faces of his audience for the other six nights of the week. He wanted more.
0.2 Per Cent
Such a small degree of hope is like a minuscule balcony in a poor man’s home. Perhaps it looks out towards the bleak north, perhaps it is not large enough even for one miserable chair and perhaps, over time, it serves only to house three empty flowerpots that once upon a time contained something living. It extends the space of the apartment only in the mind of those who live there. This is its meagre function, and even if it succeeds in this, it is a miracle. Víctor spends little time nurturing this vain 0.2 per cent of hope, and whole days, many of them, regretting that it will not come to pass.
Mr Lápidus
After his first month working at La Llave, Víctor had every reason to be happy. His success on the first night was merely a taste of things to come; so many people came to the second sitting that barely had they opened, than the owner had to start turning people away. Every night the envelope of money was thicker and over the weeks, as he slipped it into his pocket, Víctor no longer heard the jingle of loose change. He always set aside 15 per cent to give to Galván the following Tuesday as soon as he arrived at his lesson. The maestro congratulated him, but he did not ask for details. All he wanted to know was whether the owner of La Llave was happy, a question that was more than answered by the steady increase in the contents of the envelope Víctor gave him each week.
Víctor had had so much practice now that he could perform any piece of close-up magic with his eyes closed. More importantly, he had learned how to handle an audience. He knew exactly which tables he should linger at to perform his best tricks, and those at which he should pause long enough only to go through the motions. With a single glance he could tell who was gullible and who was sceptical, and with a single phrase he was more than capable of dismissing the killjoys, the jokers and those whose sole intention was to sabotage his routine.
He had also learned to work out whether one of the women present would end up sitting next to him, letting him know she was available. When this happened, and it happened often, he would pretend to ignore her until the end of the evening. Only then would he go over and perform a trick just for her. It never failed.
He was enjoying himself. He was young and ambitious and he was in a hurry. He slept little, even revelled in the exhaustion as proof of his passion. He was not in the least worried that things were moving so quickly. He switched partners the way he switched cards. Performed and disappeared without even taking the time to acknowledge the applause. He was constantly surprised by how similar these things were. In sex, as in magic, everything depended on the effort he put in, the groundwork, and as his knowledge increased, he was able to establish general rules which only had meaning when they were successfully applied to a particular case, when they crystallised for a brief but unforgettable moment: an ovation, an orgasm, an embrace.
But such moments were not enough for Víctor. The more confident he grew with the deck of cards in his hands, the more conscious he became of the vast gulf between this work and the great feats he had laboured so hard to prepare himself for. More than once, when he arrived at La Llave, he stood watching the woman preparing the tapas and was forced to accept that there was little difference between the jobs they did. In both cases, the hands displayed a fluid dexterity that seemed almost entirely dissociated from any intervention by the brain.
Galván’s speech about the difference between a typist and a pianist – repeated so often at their lessons that it had become a cliché – now intrigued him. What difference was there exactly? After all, even if a pianist is playing his own work and therefore feels entitled to call himself an artist, when it comes down to it, he is displaying no skills that could not just as easily be attributed to a typist: technical dexterity, speed, accuracy, a sense of rhythm, memory. Obviously we all prefer music to typing. In other words, to put it in terms more relevant to him, you’d have to be starving to prefer tapas over a good magic show. But this simply underscored the problem rather than answering it. Did it all depend on how the performance was received? Was applause the only measure of worth? Even the audience’s amazement, even the astonished gasps of ‘It’s not possible’, no longer had the miraculous effect they had had at first. Because he knew that it was possible. That it was real. That all it required was a little manual dexterity. The euphoria of the first night at La Llave had become simple satisfaction at a job well done.
To Víctor, these doubts were not merely rhetorical. He knew that he was coming to the end of his residency at La Llave and he realised he would have to decide on a new direction for his career. He took it for granted that he wanted to be a professional magician and was surprised to discover that he could make a decent living doing so. But he did not want to spend his life making metaphorical tapas, however much he was applauded.
A second, more concrete and more pressing problem overshadowed the first. It concerned an irritating sound, a name he had heard whispered constantly ever since his first performance at La Llave; the ludicrous name of Mr Lápidus. Often people would come up to congratulate him. ‘Just like Mr Lápidus,’ they would say, ‘You should meet Mr Lápidus.’ ‘If Mr Lápidus could see you …’
He knew who they were talking about. It was impossible not to know: the whole neighbourhood was plastered with photos of the man on posters for the Scala Barcelona: he was bald with a goatee beard, wore a black tuxedo and wire-framed glasses. A flashy shower of gold stars streamed from the magic wand he held, one of which seemed to have landed on his left eyelid, giving him a magical wink. His name was printed in large bold capitals – also gold – across his chest, with the motto: ‘He could steal your soul.’
Rather than being flattered by the comparison, Víctor felt a twinge of scorn when he heard the name. There came a point when the mere mention of it brought a contemptuous smile to his lips. He decided that he had to do something. The following Monday, instead of spending his day off at the cinema, he went to see this Mr Lápidus perform. He was good. Banal, a bit tacky, a little too slick and self-satisfied, but good. He started off with a series of card tricks which, in spite of his appalling habit of strutting around the stage fanning himself, and his tendency to make the cards fly through the air like an acrobat, demonstrated a profound understanding of his craft and an astonishing dexterity. After this, he invited various members of the audience to come onstage to assist in a number of classic, and to Víctor, superfluous tricks: the chest speared by daggers; a number picked at random by a member of the audience which miraculously turns out to be on the magician’s slate. As Lápidus performed he kept up a patter which to Víctor’s ears sounded corny and completely contrived, but which drew gales of laughter from the audience. He constantly brandished a magic wand which he used to embarrass his victims: poking them in the belly if they were fat, tapping them on the nose if they looked confused. After what seemed like nothing more than a piece of clowning he would send the member of the audience back to their seat, only to call them back as they were about to leave the stage:
‘Excuse me, sir, I believe you’ve forgotten something …’
Then, one by one, with astonishing self-assurance, he would hand back various items he had managed to pinch during the conversation. The first items, usually a watch and a wallet, provoked only lukewarm applause, but as the objects became more peculiar, more outlandish, the audience went wild. Even Víctor, carried away by their enthusiasm, almost shouted out ‘It’s not possible’ when the man handed back a tie he had managed to take from his victim. The following day, he told Galván, who gave a mocking smile and said simply: ‘Oh, yes, he has nimble hands, Mr Lápidus.’ After that he refused to be drawn.
Víctor became obsessed with Lápidus. He went back three Mondays in a row to watch him work. He stayed for both performances and each time he chose a different seat so he could watch from ev
ery possible angle. Above all, he spied on Lápidus during the interval when the magician sat at the long bar to have a drink and chat with the waiters, who were constantly on their guard. Even so, as he left to do the second show he would hand back their watch, or the pad and pen they used to jot down orders. Then, as the audience arrived for the second performance, Lápidus would stroll through the theatre. Anyone observing him would think he was simply relaxing between shows, but it was a decisive moment in his performance. This was the point when he chose his victims. Having seen him do this several times, Víctor drew a number of conclusions and began to hatch a daring plan: he would get Lápidus to choose him.
Statistically, a high percentage of those the magician chose wore glasses; this for the simple reason that the audience loved it when he said: ‘Here, you’ll need your glasses, we don’t want you tripping on the stairs on your way down from the stage.’ He probably chose people whose lenses were not too thick; it’s impossible to steal glasses from someone as blind as a bat without their noticing. Being slightly short-sighted gave Víctor a distinct advantage. He would need a watch with a metal clasp – much easier to open than the buckle on a leather watchstrap and consequently more tempting to a magician. There were other useful ruses: he could show up with a girl and seem completely absorbed in her, he could say he was celebrating something. Often, the magician would ask for a round of applause as he called someone up on stage, telling the audience it was their birthday, or that the person was getting married the following day. And when he teased his victims, there would invariably be a few salacious comments about the girlfriend still sitting in the audience. Although Víctor never knew for certain, he suspected that in picking this type of person, Lápidus was making sure the victim was aware that his partner was watching and he would consequently be more distracted. One last, minor detail: it was best for the victim to be seated at a table near the centre aisle so that he did not disturb too many other people when he got up.
The Manual of Darkness Page 13