Under the Jaguar Sun
Italo Calvino
Language: English
Pages: 96
ISBN: 0156927942
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses of taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico’s fiery chiles and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, “Under the Jaguar Sun.” In “A King Listens,” a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant’s thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. “The Name, the Nose” drives to a startling conclusion as men across time and space pursue the women whose aromas have enchanted them. Mordant and deliciously offbeat, this trio of tales is a treat from a master of short fiction.
“[Calvino is] a learned, daring, ingeniously gifted magus . . . Under the Jaguar Sun . . . fuses fable with neuron . . . The reader is likely to salivate.” — Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review
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. WHILE 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
or put on disks wanted only to transmit precise, unequivocal messages to you. Since you mounted the throne, it is not music you listen to, but only the confirmation of how music is used: in the rites of high society, or to entertain the populace, to safeguard traditions, culture, fashion. Now you ask yourself what listening used to mean to you, when you listened to music for the sole pleasure of penetrating the design of the notes. Once, to be happy, you had only to sketch a “tralalalà” with
recalls—and somehow stands for—everything that remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness. In any case, I would prefer the reader to consider Under the Jaguar Sun not as something Calvino started and left unfinished but simply as three stories written in different periods of his life.
had to visit other provinces on the candidate’s tour, and offered to accompany us for part of our itinerary. At one point on the trip he showed us some recent excavations not yet overrun by tourists. A stone statue rose barely above the level of the ground, with the unmistakable form that we had learned to recognize on the very first days of our Mexican archeological wanderings: the chacmool, or half-reclining human figure, in an almost Etruscan pose, with a tray resting on his belly. He looks
like a rough, good-natured puppet, but it was on that tray that the victims’ hearts were offered to the gods. “Messenger of the gods—what does that mean?” I asked. I had read that de inition in a guidebook. “Is he a demon sent to earth b^ the gods to collect the dish with the offering? Or an emissary from human beings who must go to the gods and offer them the food?” “Who knows?” Salustiano answered, with the suspended attitude he took in the face of unanswerable questions, as if listening to