Read Under the Jaguar Sun for Free Online Page A

covered with a linen cloth with lace fringe, in the light from a high window over which boughs of wistaria hang; a soft thud is not only a cat that has leaped upon a mouse, but is also a damp, moldy space beneath some steps, closed off by planks bristling with nails.
    The palace is a construction of sounds that expands one moment and contracts the next, tightens like a tangle of chains. You can move through it, guided by the echoes, localizing creaks, clangs, curses, pursuing breaths, rustles, grumbles, gurgles.
    The palace is the body of the king. Your body sends you mysterious messages, which you receive with fear, with anxiety. In an unknown part of this body, a menace is lurking, your death is already stationed there; the signals that reach you warn you perhaps of a danger buried in your own interior. The body seated askew on the throne is no longer yours, you have been deprived of its use ever since the crown encircled your head; now your person is spread out through this dark, alien residence that speaks to you in riddles. But has anything really changed? Even before, you knew little or nothing about what you were. And you were afraid of it, as you are now.
    The palace is a weft of regular sounds, always the same, like the heart’s beat, from which other sounds stand out, discordant, unexpected. A door slams. Where? Someone runs down steps, a stifled cry is heard. Long, tense minutes pass. A prolonged, shrill whistle resounds, perhaps from a window in the tower. Another whistle replies, from below. Then silence.
    Does some story link one sound to another? You cannot help looking for a meaning, concealed perhaps not in single, isolated noises but between them, in the pauses that separate them. And if there is a story, does that story concern you? Will some series of consequences involve you finally? Or is it simply another indifferent episode among the many that make up the daily life of the palace? Every story you seem to divine brings you back to yourself, nothing happens in the palace unless the king has some part in it, active or passive. From the faintest clue you can derive an augury of your fate.
    Perhaps the threat comes more from the silences than from the sounds. How many hours has it been since you heard the changing of the sentries? And what if the squad of guards faithful to you has been captured by the conspirators? Why has the familiar banging of pots not been heard from the kitchens? Have your trusted cooks perhaps been replaced by a team of killers, accustomed to sheathing all their actions in silence, poisoners now silently steeping the foods in cyanide...?
    Perhaps danger lurks in regularity itself. The trumpeter sounds the usual blast at the exact hour, as on every other day; but do you not sense that he is doing this with too much precision? Do you not catch a strange insistence in the rolling of the drums, an excess of zeal? The patrol’s marching tread that reechoes along its round seems today to beat a lugubrious cadence, almost like a firing squad’s.... The tracks of the tanks pass over the gravel almost without a creak, as if the mechanisms had been oiled more abundantly than usual: perhaps in the prospect of a battle?
    Perhaps the troops of the guard are no longer those who were faithful to you....Or perhaps, without their being replaced, they have gone over to the side of the conspirators.... Perhaps everything continues as before, but the palace is already in the hands of the usurpers; they have not arrested you yet because, after all, you no longer count for anything. They have forgotten 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....
    Â 
    S TOP raving. Everything heard moving in the palace corresponds precisely to the rules you have laid down: the army obeys