Read Under the Jaguar Sun for Free Online

specifically devised to produce secret reports conforming to the official models. Threatening or comforting as it may be, the future that unfolds on those pages no longer belongs to you, it does not resolve your uncertainty. What you want revealed is something quite different, the fear and the hope that keep you awake, holding your breath, in the night: what your ears try to learn, about yourself, about your fate.
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    T HIS palace, when you ascended the throne, at the very moment when it became your palace, became alien to you. Advancing at the head of the coronation procession, you walked through it for the last time, amid torches and flabella, before retiring to this hall which it is neither prudent nor in accord with royal protocol for you to leave. What would a king do, roaming through corridors, offices, kitchens? There is no longer any place for you in the palace, save this hall.
    The recollection of the other rooms, as you saw them the last time, quickly faded in your memory: and for that matter, bedecked as they were for the festivity, they were unrecognizable places, you would have got lost in them.
    Sharper in your memory are certain glimpses remaining from the battle, when you moved to attack the palace at the head of your then loyal followers (who are now surely preparing to betray you): balustrades shattered by mortar explosions, breaches in the walls singed by fires, pocked by volleys of bullets. You can no longer think of it as the same palace in which you are seated on the throne; if you were to find yourself in it again, that would be a sign that the cycle has completed its course and your ruin is dragging you off, in your turn.
    Still earlier, in the years you spent plotting at the court of your predecessor, you saw yet another palace, because certain apartments and not others were assigned to staff of your rank, and because your ambitions focused on the transformations you would bring about in the appearance of those places once you became king. The first order every new king issues, the moment he is installed on the throne, is to alter the arrangement and purpose of every room, the furniture, the wall-hangings, the plaster decoration. You did this, too, and you thought you would thus mark your real possession. On the contrary, you simply cast more memories in the grinder of oblivion, from which nothing is ever recovered.
    To be sure, the palace contains some so-called historic chambers, which you would like to see again, even though they have been redone from top to bottom, to give them back the antique aspect lost with the passing years. But those rooms have recently been opened to tourists. You must stay well away from them; curled up on your throne, you recognize in your calendar of sounds the visiting days by the noise of the buses that stop in the plaza, the blathering of the guides, the chorus of amazed exclamations in various languages. Even on the days when the rooms are closed, you are formally advised against venturing there: you would stumble over the cleaning squad’s brooms, the buckets, the drums of detergent. At night you would be lost, blocked by the reddening eyes of the alarm signals that bar your path, and in the morning you would find yourself trapped by parties armed with video cameras, regiments of old ladies with false teeth, wearing blue veils over their permanents, and obese gentlemen with flowered shirts hanging outside their trousers and with broad-brimmed straw hats on their heads.
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    W HILE your palace remains unknown to you and unknowable, you can try to reconstruct it bit by bit, locating every shuffle, every cough at a point in space, imagining walls around each acoustical sign, ceilings, pavements, giving form to the void in which the sounds spread and to the obstacles they encounter, allowing the sounds themselves to prompt the images. A silvery tinkle is not simply a spoon that has fallen from the saucer where it was balanced, but is also a corner of a table