Free The Manual of Darkness by Enrique de Hériz

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.

If They Made Me a King
     
    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.’
    One might even say that he was able to recognise the melody before he was born. His father had heard or read somewhere that, if you sang the same song regularly, mouth pressed to your wife’s belly, after the fifth month of pregnancy, then after the birth the song would help calm the baby when it cried or needed help in getting to sleep. Every night, for four months, he sang ‘If’, trying to emulate Armstrong’s gravelly voice; he even included the rhythmic, meaningless scat Armstrong crooned between each verse: ‘If the world to me bowed, yet humbly I cling to you. Baa Daa Doo Dee. If my friends were a crowd, I’d turn on my knees to you. Doo Baa Doo Dee.’ When Víctor was born, singing it softly into the child’sear became a routine, regardless of its supposed benefits: it did not always stop the baby crying.
    The lyrics hardly seemed appropriate for a lullaby. Perhaps Martín Losa chose the song for practical reasons: if he were looking for a way to calm