Aurorarama (22 page)

Perhaps he was simply unhappy about being there; perhaps he did not like the idea of having a magician at his wedding, as if the ceremony were just another vaudeville act; perhaps he had
other things on his mind right now that no amount of magic dust could dispel. Tonight, what he appreciated the most, by far, was being with Sybil and warming to her fire. She was as usual a show in herself, as if a spotlight were perpetually pursuing her moves whatever she did. Like a silent film star just lifted from the screen, she glittered on her own plane of existence. He could not imagine anything else flowing through her veins than the champagne she was drinking.

Below them, the curtain had fallen and expectation was rising among the spectators. Many of them, judging by their animation and commentaries, had come before to see the show, but still hadn’t grasped what they had been gasping at. Handy-side’s performances, since the beginning of his residence at the Trilby Temple Theatre, had been, according to rumours and reviews, nothing less than astounding, even to jaded tastes and stage-magic connoisseurs.

Brentford belonged to neither category, but looking at the programme propped on their table he saw nothing unexpected in the titles of the tricks. He knew that Handyside would not do—as if it were beneath him—any card or coin tricks, but just enough legerdemain to prove that he was not a mere button-pusher, and also knew that he would not work with animals. What remained, however, seemed to consist of the usual fare of disappearance, restoration, transportation and so on. If Magic was about pushing the limits, it was obviously about doing so inside a very definite frame, almost a folklore unto itself and mostly made, or so it seemed to Brentford, of references and repetitions: they, were literally, doing it with mirrors.

The curtain opened and Handyside appeared, walking slowly to and fro on the stage, probably selecting in his mind some “volunteers” for the tricks to come. He looked up, rather intently, toward Sybil and Brentford. Toward Sybil, more likely. Brentford had expected more charisma from a man who dubbed
himself magnetic. But the magician, clad in a black cutaway and white waistcoat, was of an uncommanding appearance, with a pock-marked face that his stage makeup did not quite smooth and a quiff that was sprouting from the top of his head in a rather clownish way. Brentford watched him pulling his right glove with his teeth, and could not help smiling when the hand came off, neatly cut at the sleeve.

“Oh, no!” said Handyside, as if sincerely dismayed. “Not again.”

The crowd laughed.

Handyside screwed the hand back in place with a frown and, after having shown his palms with his fingers splayed apart, put his hands in front of his eyes, twisted them quickly and now held between index and thumb two little spheres the size of eyeballs, while his orbits looked empty. Then, apparently blind, he juggled the eyeballs, multiplying them as they went up and down. A third gloved hand joined them, and another, alternating with the balls as they passed through Handyside’s hands. The crowd was motionless, mouths open, breath taken away. Then, as he kept on juggling, the hands and eyes vanished one by one, until all that remained was two eyeballs. Handyside clapped his hand and the eyeballs stood frozen in midair. He walked up to them, picked one, and swallowed it, apparently gulping. Then the other. He put his hands over his eye sockets and when he took them away, of course, his eyes were back in their orbits. The crowd applauded, delirious, as Handyside bowed.

This was, considered Brentford, what magic was about. When the fact that is a trick is even more astonishing than the same thing
really
happening. When human ingenuity is as admirable as any supernatural power. When it is in itself a supernatural power.

A movie screen was then rolled onto the stage. This, too, was standard nowadays. Objects disappeared from the screen
and reappeared in Handyside’s hands, or the other way around. But Handyside had given this an extra twist. The movie showed a table with a vase on it. The magician, his back to the audience, picked out the flowers from the vase, while the editing made them disappear from the screen. He then turned toward the crowd holding the flowers that were—Brentford liked the detail—still a gauzy black-and-white. Once he had finished his bouquet, he asked a lady to come up on the stage. As he offered her the flowers, she realized, as her hands passed through them, that the bouquet was as insubstantial as it was transparent. Then Handyside went back behind the screen and appeared in the movie, black-and-white himself, bouquet in hand. Simultaneously the real Handyside emerged from behind the screen. Exchanging looks with his own greyish image, who was putting the flowers back in the vase, the magician turned the corner of the screen one more time, entering the movie as a colourized version of himself, pushing out of the screen his black-and-white doppelgänger, who carried away the vase. The image now floated on the stage, ghostlike and grey, and, though this version of Handyside looked rather too immaterial to hold them, the vase in his hands was
full of red roses
. It was so eerie Brentford found that his spine was tingling. The two images, the one on the screen and the one on the stage, bowed down and saluted as the curtain fell down under raging applause and cheers.

Sybil turned toward Brentford with enthusiasm.

“Isn’t he wonderful?”

“Hmm …” said Brentford, who was as jealous as he was impressed.

Then an assistant appeared, with paste moon and sun adorning her jet-black hair. Stars painted or tattooed around her shoulders were visible through the flimsy gauze dress she wore, as the night sky would be through a thin veil of clouds. This must be Stella, thought Brentford, as he took a kind of cylinder
from his breast pocket and with a twist turned it into opera glasses. He wasn’t surprised. She was very much what he had expected from Gabriel’s description. Less beauty than charm, not the finest features but irresistible animation, a bit of the girl next door, a bit of a diamond in the rough. Compared with her, Sybil was pretty much the polished and perfect product, the gilded work of art. But then, it is hard to find glamorous a girl who is riding a monocycle, isn’t it?

Stella de Sable, as she was advertised, also held a cornucopia, identifying her as an allegory of Fortune. While she cycled around Handyside, he took the cornucopia from her hands as she passed and showed the audience that it was empty before giving it back to her. He then took a banknote from his vest and, lighting a lucifer match, started to burn the banknote, which he put in the cornucopia as Stella passed in front of him again. Still cycling, she overturned the horn, and an avalanche of banknotes and little tinkling golden coins poured forth, continuing to do so as she circled Handyman another three or four times. The sight of so much money seemed to elate the audience beyond words, and Brentford felt it as a pleasant relief from his constant public money–saving schemes. Handyside soon had money piled up almost to his ankles. Untying his cape, he slowly placed it over the scattered fortune, performed some passes over it, and then swept the cape away, to reveal that everything had of course disappeared. From the audience came
ooh
s and
ahh
s of wonder and disappointment. Handyside tied his cape back across his shoulders and saluted the crowd.

The next trick, however, “A Poll at the Pole, or the Enchanted Election” entertained Brentford a little less. A gang of scene-shifters had positioned a voting booth and a ballot-box, two pieces of furniture that were virtually unknown in those latitudes, except between the pages, if not between the lines, of
A Blast on the Barren Land
. Using the curtain and the box as
props for a magic trick struck Brentford as both a clever but also a somewhat malignant idea.

After volunteers from the audience had checked that the ballot was as empty as the booth, Stella, dressed in the same suffragette costume that Brentford had noticed during the Lenton recording riot, entered the booth, her legs showing below the drawn curtain. She exited a few seconds later holding a large card on which she had drawn a cross under a circle and, booed by some boors in the audience, she voted by casting that Venus symbol into the ballot box. Handyside called her back as she walked away to warn her that cheating was forbidden. Stella pleaded not guilty. But Handyside opened the ballot box and, tipping it to make it spill its contents, revealed hundreds of cascading Venus-sign votes. The audience roared with a kind of laughter Brentford did not like. He found he took it too seriously. Too personally.

A new ballot box was brought out and examined by a spectator, while a sulky Stella was sent back into the booth. Brentford was fairly certain that when Handyside clapped his hands, she would disappear from the booth and find herself in the box, which indeed eventually happened, with Handyside opening the lock and releasing the pirouetting girl to maximum applause.

But this was just the beginning of the trick. Next he requested that members of the audience write down their names and slip them into sealed envelopes being distributed by his assistants. Spectators then proceeded to line up across the stage and place the envelopes in a new ballot box that had been rolled out. A new character, introduced as Little Tommy Twaddle, had made his appearance on the other side of the stage: one of those typical ventriloquist’s dummies, with a big square wooden smile and bulging apple-red cheeks. Handyside sat on a chair, taking the dummy onto his lap. Every time an envelope was put inside the box, and a lever pulled down by Mr. Spencer to
“make sure” it was hermetically closed, the dummy spoke the name aloud, to the amazement of the voter. This went on for a while without a single mistake being made by the dummy.

Eventually, Handyside left Little Tommy Twaddle on the chair and walked to the box, which he opened, releasing the money that had been escamoted from the previous trick. He showed that the box was now empty and put it back on the table. As he walked away, knocks were heard from inside the box. Handyside walked back to it, opened it and produced Little Tommy Twaddle, who jumped out of it like a jack-in-the-box. Even Brentford applauded that one.

The next trick, however, once again left Brentford with a bitter aftertaste, especially after what he had seen and heard that afternoon at the Blazing Building. It was called the “Greenland Wizard” and simulated or mocked an Eskimo shamanic séance. Spenser the Clumsy Conjuror tied Handyside on a sofa after having helped him out of his cutaway, vest, and tie, now folded on a nearby chair. As the lights went dim and Handyside concentrated, a tambourine at the head of the sofa started playing by itself, while the magician’s clothes slowly hovered and moved about like ghosts across the stage, as they were sometimes supposed to do in igloos during shamanic rituals. Brentford recalled that the first explorers had always tried to impress Eskimos with magical tricks (which usually made them disgusted and angry) and, at the same time, mocked their shamans as ventriloquists and conjurors. This trick was quite in the same vein, and Brentford found it rather despicable.

It was then time for a little levitation. The “Fairy Funambulist,” was a rather simple idea. A tightrope was installed on the stage, upon which Stella started to walk with her arms stretched apart, pretending to feel dizzy. Handyside opened a white umbrella whose pattern consisted of a black spiral. He made it spin
in his hand in front of Stella’s eyes, and the girl, now supposedly mesmerized, resumed her walk without any hesitation, the umbrella in her hand. Then, taking a pair of scissors, Handyside cut the rope in front of her. As both ends fell to the floor, Stella stopped, but then took another step and continued the rest of the way suspended in mid-air, closing the umbrella and waking up only as she reached the platform. This was another roaring success.

Stella came down and bowed to the audience, but as she stood up, her head remained stuck in midair, while the rest of her body faded out. Handyside, who sometimes had a bit of the mime about him, looked at the head, scratching his quiff in disbelief, and requested a lit candle to pass under the severed head, while Stella provided lively faces and winks that made Brentford understand what Gabriel would find so attractive in her.

Feigning a sudden inspiration, Handyside blindfolded Stella’s head. Spencer brought him objects collected from the audience, which Handyside then held in front of himself with his back toward the bodiless girl. This routine of guessing things was rather worn out in itself, but mixing it with the Stella illusion made it really uncanny, and all the more so because Handyside, who remained silent, could not be using any word code.

Loud applause ensued, and Brentford was starting to feel dizzy and exhausted from the various humiliations and violations of natural laws he was supposed to have witnessed. Handyside’s relentless inventiveness and the stifling atmosphere below the mezzanine were turning his mind into some white-noisy blank, and if it hadn’t been for the atrocious blizzard outside, he would have been happy to breathe some fresh air.

But there was still the
pièce de résistance
, “Summoning the Spirits.” This time, it wasn’t Stella who joined the magician, but a certain Phoebe, the Phantom Princess, a lithe red-haired girl
in a white gown, whom Sybil, taking Brentford’s opera glasses from his hands, recognized instantly.

“This is the girl I saw in front of the Greenhouse.”

“Who?”

“The one who fainted. I told you,” she said, with a pout of mock reproach. It was one of their most common routines, Sybil complaining that Brentford never listened to her.

The poor Phantom Princess, explained Handyside, had been accidently mesmerized and could not be awakened without risking her life in the process. She had wandered far in the land of the spirits, and could materialize amazing ectoplasms of the deceased. This was not a spectacle for everyone, he added, and children and sensitive women should be spared the sight of it.

The medium
malgré elle
was sitting on a chair, her hands in her lap. Silence and darkness prevailed on the stage and in the audience. Handyside was massaging his left temple, the veins of his forehead bulging from concentration. As he did so, a wisp of smoke started to slither out of the girl’s mouth, slowly morphing into vague, transparent, empty-eyed human faces, with lips seemingly moving. Then one of the shapes developed a full human body and, still attached to Phoebe’s mouth by the train of her gown, made a few spectral steps across the stage. “The ghost walks” whispered someone in the audience, eliciting subdued laughter from the crowd, for in magical slang, that meant that the magician was being paid his due at the end of the show—the rarest and most difficult of all tricks.