Kamchatka

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Authors: Marcelo Figueras
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he was any good at was being a messenger boy. Not only was little Erik fast, but he had a lot of stamina for his age; he could run and run practically all day. And in the spring, when the frozen surface of the Hudson had barely melted, he was always the first to dive in: swimming was his great passion.
    When Houdini began his career, he called himself Eric the Great, but later on, inspired by his famous French forerunner RobertHoudin, he decided to call himself Harry Houdini.
    When Houdini first started performing, his assistant was his little brother Theo.

    Houdini met Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner in 1894; they married two weeks later and after that she was always his assistant. (In the film, she was played by Janet Leigh, who was Tony Curtis’s wife in real life.)
    Houdini offered a reward to anyone who could defeat him with handcuffs, straitjackets, shackles, by locking him up in cages, in jail cells, in coffins, by throwing him into water weighed down with chains, claiming there was nothing he could not escape from. He was right; he never paid out a single reward. He often escaped from prisons to the mystification of dozens of journalists and the cheers of prisoners delighted to see that it really was possible to escape.
    Houdini’s most spectacular escape was the Chinese Water Torture Cell, where he spent four minutes suspended upside down underwater, escaping from his bonds before the very eyes of his enraptured audience.
    Houdini’s mother Cecilia Weisz died in 1913, plunging him into terrible grief.
    Houdini kept on going in spite of everything and became the most famous escape artist in history, a true artist, a man no one could contain, who made freedom his vocation.
    One not insignificant distinction made in the book (it opened my eyes) was the difference between what we call a magician (who is really just an illusionist, he has no magic powers, he just pretends he has) and an escape artist. Houdini belonged to the second category. He hated illusionists because they sullied the purity of his art: illusionists claim they can do things they can’t actually do whereas an escape artist only claims to be able to do things he actually can do, using no tricks apart from his peak physical condition and his ability to control his body. This was not a minor distinction to Houdini, who expended enormous effort on unmasking tricksters and frauds. Magicians deal in lies. Escape artists, on the other hand, dedicate themselves to the truth.

    Although at the time I didn’t notice anything missing, I should mention here that the book didn’t give any information about certain things that, as time went by, would come to obsess me: for example, the reason why the Weisz family decided to leave Budapest and cross the Atlantic. Or why little Erik was inspired to try his hand as an escapologist. Lastly, and most importantly, the thing I wanted to know more than anything in the world, the one thing I longed to know, the question that kept me awake at night, was how the hell did he do it?

24
FUGITIVES
    In deciding on a barbecue, papá made two mistakes. First, he had forgotten to buy charcoal, and second he went ahead anyway, figuring sticks and small pieces of wood would do. The fire burned out far too fast, which not only meant eating half-raw steak for dinner, it also meant having to sit through a lecture from mamá on the different combustible properties of wood and charcoal.
    In desperation, the Midget and I resorted to eating fruit. In general we only liked bananas and mandarin oranges, which could be peeled easily, or grapes – any kind of fruit we could prepare ourselves because unlike other mothers – Bertuccio’s mother, for example – our mother was incapable of so much as peeling an orange for us. But that night hunger got the better of us. We would have shelled a coconut with our bare teeth if necessary. We opted for apples. The Midget started massacring his fruit. Mamá lit a

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