Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [66]
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