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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.
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    N EAR the throne there is an angle of the wall from which every now and then you hear a kind of reverberation: distant blows, like knocking at a door. Is there someone rapping on the other side of the wall? But perhaps it is more a pilaster than a wall, a support that juts out, a hollow column, perhaps a vertical duct that runs through all the floors of the palace from the cellars to the roof, a flue, for example, that begins at the furnaces. Along this route sounds are transmitted through the entire height of the building; at one point of the palace, there is no knowing on which floor, but surely above or below the throne room something is striking the duct. Something or someone. Someone is striking cadenced blows with his fist; the muffled reverberation suggests that the raps come from far off. Blows that emerge from a dark profundity, yes, from below; a knocking that rises from underground. Are these raps signals?
    Stretching out one arm, you can bang your fist against the corner. You repeat the blows as you have just heard them. Silence. Ah, there! they are heard again. The order of the pauses and the frequence are slightly changed. You repeat this time, too. Wait. Once more, you do not have to wait long for a reply. Have you established a dialogue?
    For a dialogue you must know the language. A series of raps, one after the other, a pause, then more, isolated raps: can these signals be translated into a code? Is someone forming letters, words? Does someone want to communicate with you, does he have urgent things to say to you? Try the simplest key: one rap,
a
; two raps,
b
....Or try Morse, make an effort to distinguish short sounds and long sounds....At times it seems to you that the transmitted message has a rhythm, as in a musical phrase: this would also prove a wish to attract your attention, to communicate, to speak to you.... But this is not enough for you: if the raps follow one another with regularity they must form a word, a sentence.... And now you would already like to impose on the bare drip of sounds your desire for reassuring words: “Your Majesty ... we ... your loyal subjects ... will foil all plots ... long life...’’Is this what they are saying to you? Is this what you manage to decipher, trying to apply all conceivable codes? No, nothing of the sort comes out. If anything, the message that emerges is entirely different, more on the order of: “Bastard dog usurper ... vengeance ... you will be overthrown....”
    Calm down. Perhaps it is all your imagination. Only chance combines the letters and words in this way. Perhaps these are not even signals: it could be the slamming of a door in a draft, or a child bouncing his ball, or someone hammering nails. Nails...“The coffin ... your coffin...’’—now the raps form these words—“I will emerge from this coffin ... and you will enter it ... buried alive...”