“What the vultures didn’t carry off-what happened to that, afterward?” Indeed, it is so bumpy that even though Calvino tries to catch Olivia’s eyes, he keeps instead, seeing “her teeth…not as the radiant glow of a smile but as the instruments most suited to their purpose: to be dug into flesh, to sever it, to tear it.”īack at the hotel, they run into a friend, Salustriano, a man from the area, who Olivia questions: Always?’ Olivia asked further, with an insistence I could not explain myself.” They were the ones who cleared the altars and carried the offering to Heaven.” But Olivia is not happy with that answer. Olivia becomes obsessed with what was done with the human remains of the sacrificed. There, they take a tour, visiting places of human sacrifice and Calvino notes “Horror, sacredness, and mystery are consolidated by tourism…we try to imagine the hot blood spurting from the breast split by the stone axe of the priest.” Our subjective, individual selves, I was thinking, find their amplifications and completion only in the unity of the couple.īesides eating, they travel to visit various ruins, including Monte Alban. Olivia’s needs to involve me in her emotions pleased me greatly, because it showed that I was indispensable to her and that, for her, the pleasures of existence could be appreciated only if we shared them. As Olivia eats she asks Calvino, “Did you taste that? Are you tasting that?” Calvino reflects: Their trip contains intense experiences with the extreme, often wildly hot, food of Mexico, perfectly rendered in Calvino’s deliberate, dry style, a style that feels like a membrane over an intensity of emotion underneath. The lower part of the painting was filled by a long caption…The words devoutly celebrated the life and death of the two characters, who had been chaplain and abbess of the convent…The reason for them being painted together was the extraordinary love (this word in the pious, Spanish prose, appeared charged with ultra-terrestrial yearning- that had bound the abbess and her confessor for thirty years, a love so great (the word in its spiritual sense sublimated but did not erase physical emotion) that when the priest came to die, the abbess, twenty years younger, in the space of a single day fell ill and literally expired of love…”Ĭalvino and Olivia are affected by this painting, stunned even: they react by eating. That portrayed a young nun and an old priest standing side by side their hands, slightly apart from their sides, almost touched…The painting had the somewhat crude grace of colonial art, but it conveyed a distressing sensation, like an ache of contained suffering. The story begins with a description of a painting: “Under the Jaguar Sun” uses the concept of, and focus on, taste, and more specifically, cannibalism, to illuminate the primal, the mundane, the sensual, our obsession with death and all consuming love.Ĭalvino and Olivia are traveling through Mexico, and their love, while strong for each other, has become chaste.
He was writing a book that would discuss each of the human senses and completed taste, hearing and smell. “Under the Jaguar Sun” is a story in a small eponymous collection, a collection which Calvino had slowly been putting together before he died in 1985.