Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [65]
“Spencer the Clumsy Conjuror” was, thank God, finishing his routine to polite applause. Brentford had seen the act before, maybe done by the same man (the name Spencer conjured something in his mind that he could not exactly place), and felt rather impatient with it all. He knew it was now a standard feature in magic shows to let a supposedly incompetent assistant drop things and show the ropes, the better to amaze the spectators with the performance to come, but nevertheless the sight of an old man bungling his tricks on purpose saddened Brentford more than it amused him.
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