Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online

Words without meaning, after all. Only your imagination imposes raving words on those formless reverberations.
    You might as well imagine that when you rap your knuckles on the wall, drumming at random, someone else, listening God knows where in the palace, believes he can understand words, sentences. Try it. Without giving it any thought. Now what are you doing? Why do you concentrate so, as if you were spelling, making words? What message do you think you are sending down this wall? “You, too, usurper before me ... I have defeated you ... I could have killed you...” What are you doing? Are you trying to justify yourself to an invisible sound? Whom are you entreating? “I spared your life .... If your turn comes ... remember...” Who do you think there is down below, striking the wall? Do you think your predecessor is still alive, the king you drove from the throne, from this throne where you are sitting? Is he the prisoner you had sealed up in the deepest cell of the palace?
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    Y OU spend every night listening to the underground tom-tom, trying in vain to decipher its messages. But you harbor the suspicion that it is only a noise you have in your ears, the throbbing of your heart in upheaval, or the recollection of a rhythm that surfaces in your memory and reawakens fears, remorse. In train journeys at night the rumble of the wheels, always the same, is transformed, as you doze, into repeated words; it becomes a kind of monotonous chant. It is possible, nay, probable, that every undulation of sounds is transformed, in your ear, into the lament of a prisoner, the curses of your victims, the ominous panting of your enemies whom you cannot manage to kill....
    You are wise to listen, not to let your attention lapse even for an instant; but you must be convinced of this: it is yourself you hear, it is within you that the ghosts acquire voices. Something, you are incapable of saying even to yourself is trying painfully to make itself heard....You are not convinced? You want absolute proof that what you hear comes from within you, not from outside?
    Absolute proof you will never have. Because it is true that the dungeons of the palace are filled with prisoners, supporters of the deposed sovereign, courtiers suspected of disloyalty, strangers caught in the roundups your police carry out periodically as a precautionary intimidation, and then the victims end up forgotten in high-security cells.... Since all these people keep shaking their chains day and night, or rattle their spoons against the bars, chanting protests, striking up seditious songs, it would be only natural if some echo of their din came all the way up to you, even though you have had walls and floors soundproofed, and have sheathed this hall with heavy draperies. It is not impossible that from those very dungeons there comes what seemed to you before a cadenced rapping but now has become a kind of deep, grim thunder. Every palace stands on cellars where someone is buried alive or where some dead man cannot find peace. You need not bother covering your ears with your hands: you will go on hearing them all the same.
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    D O not become obsessed with the noises of the palace, unless you wish to be snared in them as in a trap. Go out! Run away! Rove! Outside the palace spreads the city, the capital of the realm, your realm! You have become king not to possess this sad, dark palace, but the city, various and pied, clamorous, with its thousand voices!
    The city is stretched out in the night, curled up, it sleeps and snores, dreams and growls: patches of shadow and light shift every time it rolls over on this side or on that. Every morning the bells ring festively, or warningly, or in alarm: they send messages, but you can never trust what they really want to tell you. With their tolling for the dead you hear, mingled by the wind, some lively dance music; in the festive pealing, an explosion of infuriated voices. It is the breathing of the city to