Under the Jaguar Sun Read Online Free PDF

sleepy, the throne is comfortable, overstuffed; you have only to close your eyes and relax against the back, while apparently maintaining your usual position. Whether you are asleep or awake, it is all the same: nobody notices. As for your corporal needs, it is no secret to anyone that the throne has an opening, like any self-respecting throne; twice a day they come to change the pot. More frequently, if it stinks.
    In short, everything is foreordained to spare you any movement whatsoever. You would have nothing to gain by moving, and everything to lose. If you rise, if you take even a few steps, if you lose sight of the throne for an instant, who can guarantee that when you return you will not find someone else sitting on it? Perhaps someone who resembles you, identical to you. Go ahead then and try to prove you are the king, not he! A king is denoted by the fact that he is sitting on the throne, wearing the crown, holding the scepter. Now that these attributes are yours, you had better not be separated from them even for a moment.
    There is the problem of stretching the legs, avoiding numbness, stiffened joints; to be sure, this is a serious inconvenience. But you can always kick, raise your knees, huddle up on the throne, sit there Turkish-fashion: naturally, for brief periods, when matters of State permit. Every evening those charged with the washing of the feet arrive and take off your boots for a quarter-hour; in the morning the deodorizing squad rubs your armpits with tufts of scented cotton.
    The eventuality of your being seized with carnal desires has also been foreseen. Carefully chosen and trained court ladies, from the sturdiest to the most slender, are at your disposal, in turn, to ascend the steps of the throne and approach your timorous knees with their full skirts, gauzy and fluttering. The things that can be done, while you remain on the throne and they offer themselves frontally or from behind or at an angle, are various, and you can perform them in a few instants or, if the duties of the Realm grant you enough free time, you can linger a bit longer, say even three-quarters of an hour. In this case it is a good idea to have the curtains of the baldaquin drawn, to remove the king’s intimacy from outside gazes, as the musicians play caressing melodies.
    In sum, the throne, once you have been crowned, is where you had best remain seated, without moving, day and night. All your previous life has been only a waiting to become king; now you are king; you have only to reign. And what is reigning if not this long wait? Waiting for the moment when you will be deposed, when you will have to take leave of the throne, the scepter, the crown, and your head.
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    T HE hours are slow to pass; in the throne room the lamplight is always the same. You listen to time flowing by: a buzz like a wind; the wind blows along the corridors of the palace or in the depths of your ear. Kings do not have watches: it is assumed that they are the ones who govern the flow of time; submission to the rules of a mechanical device would be incompatible with regal majesty. The minutes’ uniform expanse threatens to bury you like an avalanche of sand: but you know how to elude it. You have only to prick up your ears in order to recognize the sounds of the palace, which change from hour to hour: in the morning the trumpet blares for the flag-raising on the tower; the trucks of the royal household unload hampers and casks in the courtyard of the stores; the maidservants beat the carpets on the railing of the loggia; at evening the gates creak as they are closed, a clatter rises from the kitchens, from the stables an occasional whinny indicates that it is currying time.
    The palace is a clock: its ciphered sounds follow the course of the sun; invisible arrows point to the change of the guard on the ramparts with a scuffle of hobnailed boots, a slamming of rifle-butts, answered by the crunch of gravel under the tanks kept ready on the