The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More(53)
‘I do other things. I buy maps and complicated navigating charts and pin them up all around my room. I spend hours looking at them blindfold, trying to see them, trying to read the small lettering of the place-names and the rivers. Every evening for the next four years, I proceed with this kind of practice.
‘By the year 1933 – that is only last year – when I am twenty-eight years old, I can read a book. I can cover my eyes completely and I can read a book right through.
‘So now at last I have it, this power. For certain I have it now, and at once, because I cannot wait with impatience, I include the blindfold act in my ordinary conjuring performance.
‘The audience loves it. They applaud long and loud. But not one single person believes it to be genuine. Everyone thinks it is just another clever trick. And the fact that I am a conjurer makes them think more than ever that I am faking. Conjurers are men who trick you. They trick you with cleverness. And so no one believes me. Even the doctors who blindfold me in the most expert way refuse to believe that anyone can see without his eyes. They forget there may be other ways of sending the image to the brain.’
‘What other ways?’ I asked him.
‘Quite honestly, I don’t know exactly how it is I can see without my eyes. But what I do know is this; when my eyes are bandaged, I am not using the eyes at all. The seeing is done by another part of my body.’
‘Which part?’ I asked him.
‘Any part at all so long as the skin is bare. For example, if you put a sheet of metal in front of me and put a book behind the metal, I cannot read the book. But if you allow me to put my hand around the sheet of metal so that the hand is seeing the book, then I can read it.’
‘Would you mind if I tested you on that?’ I asked.
‘Not at all,’ he answered.
‘I don’t have a sheet of metal,’ I said. ‘But the door will do just as well.’
I stood up and went to the bookshelf. I took down the first book that came to hand. It was Alice in Wonderland. I opened the door and asked my visitor to stand behind it, out of sight. I opened the book at random and propped it on a chair the other side of the door to him. Then I stationed myself in a position where I could see both him and the book.
‘Can you read that book?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Of course not.’
‘All right. You may now put your hand around the door, but only the hand.’
He slid his hand around the edge of the door until it was within sight of the book. Then I saw the fingers on the hand parting from one another, spreading wide, beginning to quiver slightly, feeling the air like the antennae of an insect. And the hand turned so that the back of it was facing the book.
‘Try to read the left page from the top,’ I said.
There was silence for perhaps ten seconds, then smoothly, without pause, he began to read: ‘Have you guessed the riddle yet?’ the Hatter said, turning to Alice again. ‘No, I give it up,’ Alice replied: ‘What’s the answer?’ ‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said the Hatter. ‘Nor I,’ said the Hare. Alice sighed wearily. ‘I think you might do something better with the time,’ she said, ‘than waste it asking riddles with no answers …’
‘It’s perfect!’ I cried. ‘Now I believe you! You are a miracle!’ I was enormously excited.
‘Thank you, doctor,’ he said gravely. ‘What you say gives me great pleasure.’
‘One question,’ I said. ‘It’s about the playing-cards. When you held up the reverse side of one of them, did you put your hand around the other side to help you to read it?’
‘You are very perceptive,’ he said. ‘No, I did not. In the case of the cards, I was actually able to see through them in some way.’
‘How do you explain that?’ I asked.