Free The Monkey Grammarian by Octavio Paz Page A

blue and red paint, it was covered with huge black, green, and dark purple spots: the fingerprints of the rains and the years. Just below the parapets, in a horizontal line running the length of the wall, a series of little balconies could be seen, each one crowned with a dome mindful of a parasol. The wooden blinds were faded and eaten away by the years. Some of the balconies still bore traces of the designs that had decorated them: garlands of flowers, branches of almond trees, little stylized parakeets, seashells, mangoes. There was only one entrance, an enormous one, in the center: a Moorish archway, in the form of a horseshoe. It had once been the elephant gateway, and hence its enormous size was completely out of proportion to the dimensions of the group of buildings as a whole. I took Splendor by the hand and we crossed through the archway together, between the two rows of beggars on either side. They were sitting on the ground, and on seeing us pass by they began whining their nasal supplications even more loudly, tapping their bowls excitedly and displaying their stumps and sores. With great gesticulations a little boy approached us, muttering something or other. He was about twelve years old, incredibly thin, with an intelligent face and huge, dark, shining eyes. Some disease had eaten away a huge hole in his left cheek, through which one could see some of his back teeth, his gums, and redder still, his tongue, moving about amid little bubbles of saliva—a tiny crimson amphibian possessed by a raging, obscene fit of agitation that made it circle round and round continuously inside its damp grotto. He babbled on endlessly. Although he emphasized his imperious desire to be listened to with all sorts of gestures and gesticulations, it was impossible to understand him since each time he uttered a word, the hole made wheezes and snorts that completely distorted what he was saying. Annoyed by our failure to understand, he melted into the crowd. We soon saw him surrounded by a group of people who began praising his tongue-twisters and his sly ways with words. We discovered that his loquacity was not mere nonsensical babble: he was not a beggar but a poet who was playing about with deformations and decompositions of words.
     
    The main courtyard was a rectangular esplanade that had surely been the outdoor “audience chamber,” a sort of hall outside the palace itself, although within the walls surrounding it, in which the princes customarily received their vassals and strangers. Its surface was covered with loose dirt; once upon a time it had been paved with tiles the same pink color as the walls. The esplanade was enclosed by walls on three sides: one to the south, another to the east, and another to the west. The one to the south was the Gateway through which we had entered; the other two walls were not as long and not as high. The one to the east was also topped with a parapet, whereas the one to the west had a gable-end roofed over with pink tiles. Like the Gateway, the entryway let into both the other walls was an arch in the form of a horseshoe, although smaller. Along the east wall” there was repeated the same succession of little balconies as on the outer face of the Gateway wall, all of them also crowned with parasol domes and fitted out with wooden blinds, most of which had fallen to pieces. On days when the princes received visitors, the women would conceal themselves behind these blinds so as to be able to contemplate the spectacle below without being seen. Opposite the main wall, on the north side of the quadrangle, was a building that was not very tall, with a stairway leading to it which, despite its rather modest dimensions, nonetheless had a certain secret stateliness. The ground floor was nothing more than a massive cube of mortar, with no other function than to serve as a foundation for the upper floor, a vast rectangular hall bordered on all sides by an arcade. Its arches reproduced, on a smaller