Under the Jaguar Sun by Calvino Italo

Author:Calvino, Italo [Calvino, Italo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Europe, Fiction - General, Classics, Short Stories, Social life and customs, European, Calvino, Italian, Translations into English, General, Literary, Italo, Modern fiction, Literature: Classics, Historical, Italy, fiction, Literary Criticism, History
ISBN: 9780156927949
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1990-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

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gotten you on a throne that is no longer a throne. The regular unfolding of palace life is a sign that the coup has taken place, a new king sits on a new throne, your sentence has been pronounced and it is so irrevocable that there is no need to carry it out in a hurry. . . .

Stop raving. Everything heard moving in the palace corresponds precisely to the rules you have laid down: the army obeys your orders like a prompt machine : the ritual of the palace does not allow the slightest variation in setting and clearing the table, in drawing the curtains or unrolling the ceremonial carpets according to the instructions received; the radio programs are those you decreed once and for all. The situation is in your grip; nothing eludes your will or your control. Even the frog that croaks in the basin, even the uproar of the children playing blind-man's-buff, even the old chamberlain's sprawl down the stairs: everything corresponds to your plan, everything has been thought out by you, decided, pondered, before it became audible to your ear. Not even a fly buzzes here if you do not wish it.

But perhaps you have never been so close to losing everything as you are now, when you think you have everything in your grip. The responsibility of conceiving the palace in its every detail, of containing it in your mind, subjects you to an exhausting strain. The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.

Near the throne there is an angle of the wall from which every now and then you hear a kind of reverberation:

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