The Prestige

from him before. He was urging me to stay.

Outside the window the cold afternoon sky was darkening and the Pennine rain continued to fall. An icy draught came persistently from the windows. Kate threw another log on the fire.

PART TWO

Alfred Borden

1

I write in the year 1901.

My name, my real name, is Alfred Borden. The story of my life is the story of the secrets by which I have lived my life. They are described in this narrative for the first and last time; this is the only extant copy.

I was born in 1856 on the eighth day of the month of May, in the coastal town of Hastings. I was a healthy, vigorous child. My father was a tradesman of that borough, a master wheelwright and cooper. Our house at number 105 Manor Road was in a long, curving terrace built along the side of one of the several hills which Hastings comprises. Behind the house was a steep and secluded valley where sheep and cattle grazed during the summer months, but at the front the hill rose up, lined with many more houses, standing between us and the sea. It was from those houses, and from the farms and businesses around, that my father took his trade.

Our house was larger and taller than others in the road, because it was built over the gateway that led to the yard and sheds behind. My room was on the street side of the house, directly above the gateway, and because only the wooden floorboards and some thin lath-and-plaster lay between me and the open air the room was noisy through every day of the year, and viciously cold in the winter months. It was in that room that I slowly grew up and became the man that I am.

That man is Le Professeur de la Magie, and I am a master of illusions.

It is time to pause, even so early, for this account is not intended to be about my life in the usual habit of autobiographers, but is, as I have said, about my life's secrets. Secrecy is intrinsic to my work.

Let me then first consider and describe the method of writing this account. The very act of describing my secrets might indeed be construed as a betrayal of myself, except of course that as I am an illusionist I can make sure you only see what I wish you to see. A puzzle is implicitly involved.

It is therefore only fair that I should from the beginning try to elucidate those closely connected subjects — Secrecy and the Appreciation Of Secrecy.

Here is an example.

There almost invariably comes a moment during the exercise of my profession when the prestidigitator will seem to pause. He will step forward to the footlights, and in the full glare of their light will face the audience directly. He will say, or if his act is silent he will seem to say, 'Look at my hands. There is nothing concealed within them.' He will then hold up his hands for the audience to see, raising his palms to expose them, splaying his fingers so as to prove nothing is gripped secretly between them. With his hands held thus he will rotate them, so that the backs are shown to the audience, and it is established that his hands are, indeed, as empty as it is possible to be. To take the matter beyond any remaining suspicion, the magician will probably then tweak lightly at the cuffs of his jacket, pulling them back an inch or two to expose his wrists, showing that nothing is there concealed either. He then performs his trick, and during it, moments after this incontrovertible evidence of empty- handedness he produces something from his hands: a fan, a live dove or rabbit, a bunch of paper flowers, sometimes even a burning wick. It is a paradox, an impossibility! The audience marvels at the mystery, and applause rings out.

How could any of this be?

The prestidigitator and the audience have entered into what I term the Pact of Acquiescent Sorcery. They do not articulate it as such, and indeed the audience is barely aware that such a Pact might exist, but that is what it is.

The performer is of course not a sorcerer at all, but an actor who plays the part of a sorcerer and who wishes the audience to believe, if only temporarily, that he is in contact with darker powers. The audience, meantime, knows that what they are seeing is not true sorcery, but they suppress the knowledge and acquiesce to the selfsame wish as the performer’s. The greater the performer's skill at maintaining the illusion, the better at this deceptive sorcery he is judged to be.

The act of showing the hands to be empty, before revealing that despite appearances they could not have been, is itself a constituent of the Pact. The Pact implies special conditions are in force. In normal social intercourse, for instance, how often does it arise that someone has to prove that his hands are empty? And consider this: if the magician were suddenly to produce a vase of flowers without first suggesting to the audience that such a production was impossible, it would seem to be no trick at all. No one would applaud.

This then illustrates my method.

Let me set out the Pact of Acquiescence under which I write these words, so that those who read them will realize that what follows is not sorcery, but the appearance of it.

First let me in a manner of speaking show you my hands, palms forward, fingers splayed, and I will say to you (and mark this well): 'Every word in this notebook that describes my life and work is true, honestly meant and accurate in detail.'

Now I rotate my hands so that you may see their backs, and I say to you: 'Much of what is here may be checked against objective records. My career is noted in newspaper files, my name appears in books of biographical reference.'

Finally, I tweak at the cuffs of my jacket to reveal my wrists, and I say to you: 'After all, what would I have to gain by writing a false account, when it is intended for no one's eyes but my own, perhaps those of my immediate family, and the members of a posterity I shall never meet?'

What gain indeed?

But because I have shown my hands to be empty you must now expect not only that an illusion will follow, but that you will acquiesce in it!

Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent.

I have misdirected you with the talk of truth, objective records and motives. Just as it is when I show my hands to be empty I have omitted the significant information, and now you are looking in the wrong place.

As every stage magician well knows there will be some who are baffled by this, some who will profess to a dislike of being duped, some who will claim to know the secret, and some, the happy majority, who will simply take the illusion for granted and enjoy the magic for the sake of entertainment.

But there are always one or two who will take the secret away with them and worry at it without ever coming near to solving it.

#############

Before I resume the story of my life, here is another anecdote that illustrates my method.

When I was younger there was a fashion in the concert halls for Oriental Magic. Most of it was performed by European or American illusionists dressed and made up to look Chinese, but there were one or two genuine Chinese magicians who came to Europe to perform. One of these, and perhaps the greatest of them all, was a man from Shanghai called Chi Linqua, who worked under the stage name Ching Ling Foo.

I saw Ching perform only once, a few years ago at the Adelphi Theatre in Leicester Square. At the end of the show I went to the stage door and sent up my card, and without delay he graciously invited me to his dressing room. He would not speak of his magic, but my eye was taken by the presence there, on a stand beside him, of his most famous prop: the large glass bowl of goldfish, which, when apparently produced from thin air, gave his show