In 1998, my father riffled a red deck of playing cards while we attended a family reunion on the outskirts of Bogota, Colombia. He asked me to pick one, and I told him to stop when his fingers reached the middle of the pack. As he closed his eyes, I pulled out the ace of hearts and placed it near the end. He ordered me to think hard about my random selection, and then pretended to write something on the inside of his left arm.

“Concentrate,” he said while I watched him roll up his sleeves. “This won’t work unless you focus on your card.”

He pretended to be lost. He looked around, shook his head and grabbed a newspaper by a fireplace. After selecting a faded page, he set it on fire, gathered the gray-white ashes and gently spread them over his slightly tanned arm. Two dark figures slowly appeared on his grayish skin: “A♥.”

I was fascinated. It wasn’t the first trick my dad had performed for me — since I was 8, coins had frequently come out of my “dirty ears” and ropes had disentangled themselves from impossible knots — but this was certainly the first one that captivated me. I begged him to tell me how he had done it. Like a parrot, he repeated over and over again a conversation-ending mantra that I would soon adopt. “A magician never reveals his secrets,” he stated sternly. Of course, that argument lacked prescriptive force for a 10-year-old, and several days of relentless questioning later, he finally caved in. He made me quite aware, however, that he wasn’t going to teach how me to do it.

Soon after, my father drove me to the School of Magical Arts of Bogota, an old, spacious edifice that housed a magic school, a theater and a remarkable shop crammed with variegated paper flowers, disappearing wands, jumbo decks, vintage posters and rabbit-size contraptions. There, he said, I would finally learn the secret...