Chronicles of a Death Foretold

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 1 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The pursuit of love is like falconry

GIL VICENTE

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 2 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

CHAPTER 1 ON THE DAY THEY WERE GOING TO KILL him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty

in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He’d dreamed he was going

through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was

happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit. “He was

always dreaming about trees,” Placida Linero, his mother, told me twenty-seven years later,

recalling the details of that distressing Monday. “The week before, he’d dreamed that he

was alone in a tinfoil airplane and flying through the almond trees without bumping into

anything,” she said to me. She had a well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of

other people’s dreams, provided they were told her before eating, but she hadn’t noticed any

ominous augury in those two dreams of her son’s, or in the other dreams of trees he’d

described to her on the mornings preceding his death.

Nor did Santiago Nasar recognise the omen. He had slept little and poorly, without

getting undressed, and he woke up with a headache and a sediment of copper stirrup on his

palate, and he interpreted them as the natural havoc of the wedding revels that had gone on

until after midnight. Furthermore: all the many people he ran into after leaving his house at

five minutes past six and until he was carved up like a pig an hour later remembered him as

being a little sleepy but in a good mood, and he remarked to all of them in a casual way that

it was a very beautiful day. No one was certain if he was referring to the state of the

weather. Many people coincided in recalling that it was a radiant morning with a sea breeze

coming in through the banana groves, as was to be expected in a fine February of that

period. But most agreed that the weather was funereal, with a cloudy, low sky and the thick

smell of still waters, and that at the moment of the misfortune a thin drizzle was falling like

the one Santiago Nasar had seen in his dream grove. I was recovering from the wedding

revels in the apostolic lap of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, and I only awakened with the

clamour of the alarm bells, thinking they had turned them loose in honour of the bishop.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 3 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

Santiago Nasar put on a shirt and pants of white linen, both items unstarched, just

like the ones he’d put on the day before for the wedding. It was his attire for special

occasions. If it hadn’t been for the bishop’s arrival, he would have dressed in his khaki outfit

and the riding boots he wore on Mondays to go to The Divine Face, the cattle ranch he’d

inherited from his father and which he administered with very goodjudgment but without

much luck. In the country he wore a .357 Magnum on his belt, and its armoured bullets,

according to what he said, could cut a horse in two through the middle. During the partridge

season he would also carry his falconry equipment. In the closet he kept a Mannlicher

Schoenauer .30-06 rifle, a .300 Holland & Holland Magnum rifle, a .22 Hornet with a

double-powered telescopic sight, and a Winchester repeater. He always slept the way his

father had slept, with the weapon hidden in the pillowcase, but before leaving the house that

day he took out the bullets and put them in the drawer of the night table. “He never left it

loaded,” his mother told me. I knew that, and I also knew that he kept the guns in one place

and hid the ammunition in another far removed so that nobody, not even casually, would

yield to the temptation of loading them inside the house. It was a wise custom established

by his father ever since one morning when a servant girl had shaken the case to get the

pillow out and the pistol went off as it hit the floor and the bullet wrecked the cupboard in

the room, went through the living room wall, passed through the dining room of the house

next door with the thunder of war, and turned a life-size saint on the main altar of the

church on the opposite side of the square to plaster dust. Santiago Nasar, who was a young

child at the time, never forgot the lesson of that accident.

The last image his mother had of him was of his fleeting passage through the

bedroom. He’d wakened her while he was feeling around trying to find an aspirin in the

bathroom medicine chest, and she turned on the light and saw him appear in the doorway

with a glass of water in his hand. So she would remember him forever. Santiago Nasar told

her then about the dream, but she didn’t pay any great attention to the trees.

“Any dream about birds means good health,” she said.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 4 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

She had watched mm from the same hammock and in the same position in which I

found her prostrated by the last lights of old age when I returned to this forgotten village,

trying to put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards.

She could barely make out shapes in full light and had some medicinal leaves on her

temples for the eternal headache that her son had left her the last time he went through the

bedroom. She was on her side, clutching the cords at the head of the hammock as she tried

to get up, and there in the half shadows was the baptistry smell that had startled me on the

morning of the crime.

No sooner had I appeared on the threshold than she confused me with the memory

of Santiago Nasar. “There he was,” she told me. “He was dressed in white linen that had

been washed in plain water because his skin was so delicate that it couldn’t stand the noise

of starch.” She sat in the hammock for a long time, chewing pepper cress seeds, until the

illusion that her son had returned left her. Then she sighed: “He was the man in my life.”

I saw him in her memory. He had turned twenty-one the last week in January, and

he was slim and pale and had his father’s Arab eyelids and curly hair. He was the only child

of a marriage of convenience without a single moment of happiness, but he seemed happy

with his father until the latter died suddenly, three years before, and he continued seeming

to be so with his solitary mother until the Monday of his death. From her he had inherited a

sixth sense. From his father he learned at a very early age the manipulation of firearms, his

love for horses, and the mastery of high-flying birds of prey, but from him he also learned

the good arts of valour and prudence. They spoke Arabic between themselves, but not in

front of Placida Linero, so that she wouldn’t feel excluded. They were never seen armed in

town, and the only time they brought in their trained birds was for a demonstration of

falconry at a charity bazaar. The death of his father had forced him to abandon his studies at

the end of secondary school in order to take charge of the family ranch. By his nature,

Santiago Nasar was merry and peaceful, and openhearted.

On the day they were going to kill him, his mother thought he’d got his days mixed

up when she saw him dressed in white. “I reminded him that it was Monday,” she told me.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 5 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

But he explained to her that he’d got dressed up pontifical style in case he had a chance to

kiss the bishop’s ring. She showed no sign of interest. “He won’t even get off the boat,” she

told him. “He’ll give an obligatory blessing, as always, and go back the way he came. He

hates this town.”

Santiago Nasar knew it was true, but church pomp had an irresistible fascination

for him. “It’s like the movies,” he’d told me once. The only thing that interested his mother

about the bishop’s arrival, on the other hand, was for her son not to get soaked in the rain,

since she’d heard him sneeze while he was sleeping. She advised him to take along an

umbrella, but he waved good-bye and left the room. It was the last time she saw him.

Victoria Guzman, the cook, was sure that it hadn’t rained that day, or during the

whole month of February. “On the contrary,” she told me when I came to see her, a short

time before her death. “The sun warms things up earlier than in August.” She had been

quartering three rabbits for lunch, surrounded by panting dogs, when Santiago Nasar

entered the kitchen. “He always got up with the face of a bad night,” Victoria Guzman

recalled without affection. Divina Flor, her daughter, who was just coming into bloom,

served Santiago Nasar a mug of mountain coffee with a shot of cane liquor, as on every

Monday, to help him bear the burden of the night before. The enormous kitchen, with the

whispers from the fire and the hens sleeping on their perches, was breathing stealthily.

Santiago Nasar swallowed another aspirin and sat down to drink the mug of coffee in slow

sips, thinking just as slowly, without taking his eyes off the two women who were

disembowelling the rabbits on the stove. In spite of her age, Victoria Guzman was still in

good shape. The girl, as yet a bit untamed, seemed overwhelmed by the drive of her glands.

Santiago Nasar grabbed her by the wrist when she came to take the empty mug from him.

“The time has come for you to be tamed,” he told her.

Victoria Guzman showed him the bloody knife.

“Let go of her, white man,” she ordered him seriously. “You won’t have a drink of

that water as long as I’m alive.”

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 6 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

She’d been seduced by Ibrahim Nasar in the fullness of her adolescence. She’d

made love to him in secret for several years in the stables of the ranch, and he brought her

to be a house servant when the affection was over. Divina Flor, who was the daughter of a

more recent mate, knew that she was destined for Santiago Nasar’s furtive bed, and that idea

brought out a premature anxiety in her. “Another man like that hasn’t ever been born again,”

she told me, fat and faded and surrounded by the children of other loves. “He was just like

his father,” Victoria Guzman answered her. “A shit.” But she couldn’t avoid a wave of fright

as she remembered Santiago Nasar’s horror when she pulled out the insides of a rabbit by

the roots and threw the steaming guts to the dogs.

“Don’t be a savage,” he told her. “Make believe it was a human being.”

Victoria Guzman needed almost twenty years to understand that a man accustomed

to killing defenceless animals could suddenly express such horror. “Good heavens,” she

explained with surprise. “All that was such a revelation.” Nevertheless, she had so much

repressed rage the morning of the crime that she went on feeding the dogs with the insides

of the other rabbits, just to embitter Santiago Nasar’s breakfast. That’s what they were up to

when the whole town awoke with the earthshaking bellow of the bishop’s steamboat.

The house was a former warehouse, with two stories, walls of rough planks, and a

peaked tin roof where the buzzards kept watch over the garbage on the docks. It had been

built in the days when the river was so usable that many seagoing barges and even a few tall

ships made their way up there through the marshes of the estuary. By the time Ibrahim

Nasar arrived with the last Arabs at the end of the civil wars, seagoing ships no longer came

there because of shifts in the river, and the warehouse was in disuse. Ibrahim Nasar bought

it at a cheap price in order to set up an import store that he never did establish, and only

when he was going to be married did he convert it into a house to live in. On the ground

floor he opened up a parlour that served for everything, and in back he built a stable for

four animals, the servants’ quarters, and a country kitchen with windows opening onto the

dock, through which the stench of the water came in at all hours. The only thing he left

intact in the parlour was the spiral staircase rescued from some shipwreck. On the upper

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 7 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

floor, where the customs offices had been before, he built two large bedrooms and five

cubbyholes for the many children he intended having, and he constructed a wooden balcony

that overlooked the almond trees on the square, where Placida Linero would sit on March

afternoons to console herself for her solitude. In the front he kept the main door and built

two full-length windows with lathe-turned bars. He also kept the rear door, except a bit

taller so that a horse could enter through it, and he kept a part of the old pier in use. That

was always the door most used, not only because it was the natural entry to the mangers and

the kitchen, but because it opened onto the street that led to the new docks without going

through the square. The front door, except for festive occasions, remained closed and

barred. Nevertheless, it was there, and not at the rear door, that the men who were going to

kill him waited for Santiago Nasar, and it was through there that he went out to receive the

bishop, despite the fact that he would have to walk completely around the house in order to

reach the docks.

No one could understand such fatal coincidences. The investigating judge who

came from Riohacha must have sensed them without daring to admit it, for his impulse to

give them a rational explanation was obvious in his report. The door to the square was cited

several times with a dime-novel title: “The Fatal Door.” In reality, the only valid

explanation seemed to be that of Plلcida Linero, who answered the question with her

mother wisdom: “My son never went out the back door when he was dressed up. It seemed

to be such an easy truth that the investigator wrote it down as a marginal note, but he didn’t

include it in the report.

Victoria Guzman, for her part, had been categorical with her answer that neither

she nor her daughter knew that the men were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him. But in

the course of her years she admitted that both knew it when he came into the kitchen to

have his coffee. They had been told it by a woman who had passed by after five o’clock to

beg a bit of milk, and who in addition had revealed the motives and the place where they

were waiting. “I didn’t warn him because I thought it was drunkards’ talk,” she told me.

Nevertheless, Divina Flor confessed to me on a later visit, after her mother had died, that

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 8 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

the latter hadn’t said anything to Santiago Nasar because in the depths of her heart she

wanted them to kill him. She, on the other hand, didn’t warn him because she was nothing

but a frightened child at the time, incapable of a decision of her own, and she’d been all the

more frightened when he grabbed her by the wrist with a hand that felt frozen and stony,

like the hand of a dead man.

Santiago Nasar went through the shadowy house with long strides, pursued by

roars of jubilation from the bishop’s boat. Divina Flor went ahead of him to open the door,

trying not to have him get ahead of her among the cages of sleeping birds in the dining

room, among the wicker furniture and the pots of ferns hanging down in the living room,

but when she took the bar down, she couldn’t avoid the butcher hawk hand again. “He

grabbed my whole pussy,” Divina Flor told me. “It was what he always did when he caught

me alone in some corner of the house, but that day I didn’t feel the usual surprise but an

awful urge to cry.” She drew away to let him go out, and through the half-open door she

saw the almond trees on the square, snowy in the light of dawn, but she didn’t have the

courage to look at anything else. “Then the boat stopped tooting and the cocks began to

crow,” she told me. “It was such a great uproar that I couldn’t believe there were so many

roosters in town, and I thought they were coming on the bishop’s boat.” The only thing she

could do for the man who had never been hers was leave the door unbarred, against Plلcida

Linero’s orders, so that he could get back in, in case of emergency. Someone who was never

identified had shoved an envelope under the door with a piece of paper warning Santiago

Nasar that they were waiting for him to kill him, and, in addition, the note revealed the

place, the motive, and other quite precise details of the plot. The message was on the floor

when Santiago Nasar left home, but he didn’t see it, nor did Divina Flor or anyone else until

long after the crime had been consummated.

It had struck six and the street lights were still on. In the branches of the almond

trees and on some balconies the coloured wedding decorations were still hanging and one

might have thought they’d just been hung in honour of the bishop. But the square, covered

with paving stones up to the front steps of the church, where the bandstand was, looked like

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 9 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

a trash heap, with empty bottles and all manner of debris from the public festivities. When

Santiago Nasar left his house, several people were running toward the docks, hastened

along by the bellowing of the boat.

The only place open on the square was a milk shop on one side of the church,

where the two men were who were waiting for Santiago Nasar in order to kill him. Clotilde

Armenta, the proprietress of the establishment, was the first to see him in the glow of dawn,

and she had the impression that he was dressed in aluminium. “He already looked like a

ghost,” she told me. The men who were going to kill him had slept on the benches,

clutching the knives wrapped in newspapers to their chests, and Clotilde Armenta held her

breath so as not to awaken them. They were twins: Pedro and Pablo Vicario. They were

twenty-four years old, and they looked so much alike that it was difficult to tell them apart.

“They were hard-looking, but of a good sort,” the report said. I, who had known them since

grammar school, would have written the same thing. That morning they were still wearing

their dark wedding suits, too heavy and formal for the Caribbean, and they looked

devastated by so many hours of bad living, but they’d done their duty and shaved. Although

they hadn’t stopped drinking since the eve of the wedding, they weren’t drunk at the end of

three days, but they looked, rather, like insomniac sleepwalkers. They’d fallen asleep with

the first breezes of dawn, after almost three hours of waiting in Clotilde Armenta’s store,

and it was the first sleep they had had since Friday. They had barely awakened with the first

bellow of the boat, but instinct awoke them completely when Santiago Nasar came out of

his house. Then they both grabbed the rolled-up newspapers and Pedro Vicario started to

get up.

“For the love of God,” murmured Clotilde Armenta. “Leave him for later, if only

out of respect for his grace the bishop.”

“It was a breath of the Holy Spirit,” she often repeated. Indeed, it had been a

providential happening, but of momentary value only. When they heard her, the Vicario

twins reflected, and the one who had stood up sat down again. Both followed Santiago

Nasar with their eyes as he began to cross the square. “They looked at him more with pity,”

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 10 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

Clotilde Armenta said. At that moment the girls from the nuns’ school crossed the square,

trotting in disorder inside their orphans’ uniforms.

Plلcida Linero was right: the bishop didn’t get off his boat. There were a lot of

people at the dock in addition to the authorities and the schoolchildren, and everywhere one

could see the crates of well-fattened roosters they were bearing as a gift for the bishop,

because cockscomb soup was his favourite dish. At the pier there was so much firewood

piled up that it would have taken at least two hours to load. But the boat didn’t stop. It

appeared at the bend in the river, snorting like a dragon, and then the band of musicians

started to play the bishop’s anthem, and the cocks began to crow in their baskets and

aroused all the other roosters in town.

In those days the legendary paddle-wheelers that burned wood were on the point of

disappearing, and the few that remained in service no longer had player pianos or bridal

staterooms and were barely able to navigate against the current. But this one was new, and

it had two smokestacks instead of one, with the flag painted on them like armbands, and the

wheel made of planks at the stern gave it the drive of a seagoing ship. On the upper deck,

beside the captain’s cabin, was the bishop in his white cassock and with his retinue of

Spaniards. “It was Christmas weather,” my sister Margot said. What happened, according to

her, was that the boat whistle let off a shower of compressed steam as it passed by the

docks, and it soaked those who were closest to the edge. It was a fleeting illusion: the

bishop began to make the sign of the cross in the air opposite the crowd on the pier, and he

kept on doing it mechanically afterwards, without malice or inspiration, until the boat was

lost from view and all that remained was the uproar of the roosters.

Santiago Nasar had reason to feel cheated. He had contributed several loads of

wood to the public solicitudes of Father Carmen Amador, and in addition, he himself had

chosen the capons with the most appetising combs. But it was a passing annoyance. My

sister Margot, who was with him on the pier, found him in a good mood and with an urge to

go on with the festivities in spite of the fact that the aspirins had given him no relief. “He

didn’t seem to be chilly and was only thinking about what the wedding must have cost,” she

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 11 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

told me. Cristo Bedoya, who was with them, revealed figures that added to his surprise.

He’d been carousing with Santiago Nasar and me until a little before four; he hadn’t gone to

sleep at his parents’, but stayed chatting at his grandparents’ house. There he obtained the

bunch of figures that he needed to calculate what the party had cost. He recounted that they

had sacrificed forty turkeys and eleven hogs for the guests, and four calves which the

bridegroom had set up to be roasted for the people on the public square. He recounted that

205 cases of contraband alcohol had been consumed and almost two thousand bottles of

cane liquor, which had been distributed among the crowd. There wasn’t a single person, rich

or poor, who hadn’t participated in some way in the wildest party the town had ever seen.

Santiago Nasar was dreaming aloud.

“That’s what my wedding’s going to be like,” he said. “Life will be too short for

people to tell about it.”

My sister felt the angel pass by. She thought once more about the good fortune of

Flora Miguel, who had so many things in life and was going to have Santiago Nasar as well

on Christmas of that year. “I suddenly realised that there couldn’t have been a better catch

than him,” she told me. “Just imagine: handsome, a man of his word, and with a fortune of

his own at the age of twenty-one.” She used to invite him to have breakfast at our house

when there were manioc fritters, and my mother was making some that morning. Santiago

Nasar accepted with enthusiasm.

“I’ll change my clothes and catch up with you,” he said, and he realised that he’d

left his watch behind on the night table. “What time is it?”

It was six twenty-five. Santiago Nasar took Cristo Bedoya by the arm and led him

toward the square.

“I’ll be at your house inside of fifteen minutes,” he told my sister.

She insisted that they go together right away because breakfast was already made.

“It was a strange insistence,” Cristo Bedoya told me. “So much so that sometimes I’ve

thought that Margot already knew that they were going to kill him and wanted to hide him

in your house.” Santiago Nasar persuaded her to go on ahead while he put on his riding

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 12 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

clothes, because he had to be at The Divine Face early in order to geld some calves. He

took leave of her with the same wave with which he’d said good-bye to his mother and went

off toward the square on the arm of Cristo Bedoya. It was the last time she saw him.

Many of those who were on the docks knew that they were going to kill Santiago

Nasar. Don Lلzaro Aponte, a colonel from the academy making use of his good retirement,

and town mayor for eleven years, waved to him with his fingers. “I had my own very real

reasons for believing he wasn’t in any danger anymore,” he told me. Father Carmen

Amador wasn’t worried either. “When I saw him safe and sound I thought it had all been a

fib,” he told me. No one even wondered whether Santiago Nasar had been warned, because

it seemed impossible to all that he hadn’t.

In reality, my sister Margot was one of the few people who still didn’t know that

they were going to kill him. “If I’d known, I would have taken him home with me even if I

had to hog-tie him,” she declared to the investigator. It was strange that she hadn’t known,

but it was even stranger that my mother didn’t know either, because she knew about

everything before anyone else in the house, in spite of the fact that she hadn’t gone out into

the street in years, not even to attend mass. I had become aware of that quality of hers ever

since I began to get up early for school. I would find her the way she was in those days,

pale and stealthy, sweeping the courtyard with a homemade broom in the ashen glow of

dawn, and between sips of coffee she would proceed to tell me what had happened in the

world while we’d been asleep. She seemed to have secret threads of communication with

the other people in town, especially those her age, and sometimes she would surprise us

with news so ahead of its time that she could only have known it through powers of

divination. That morning, however, she didn’t feel the throb of the tragedy that had been

gestating since three o’clock. She’d finished sweeping the courtyard, and when my sister

Margot went out to meet the bishop she found her grinding manioc for the fritters. “Cocks

could be heard,” my mother is accustomed to saying, remembering that day. She never

associated the distant uproar with the arrival of the bishop, however, but with the last

leftovers from the wedding.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 13 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

Our house was a good distance from the main square, in a mango grove on the

river. My sister Margot had gone to the docks by walking along the shore, and the people

were too excited with the bishop’s visit to worry about any other news. They’d placed the

sick people in the archways to receive God’s medicine, and women came running out of

their yards with turkeys and suckling pigs and all manner of things to eat, and from the

opposite shore came canoes bedecked with flowers. But after the bishop passed without

setting foot on land, the other repressed news assumed its scandalous dimensions. Then it

was that my sister Margot learned about it in a thorough and brutal way: Angela Vicario,

the beautiful girl who’d gotten married the day before, had been returned to the house of her

parents, because her husband had discovered that she wasn’t a virgin. “I felt that I was the

one who was going to die,” my sister said. “But no matter how much they tossed the story

back and forth, no one could explain to me how poor Santiago Nasar ended up being

involved in such a mix-up.” The only thing they knew for sure was that Angela Vicario’s

brothers were waiting for him to kill him.

My sister returned home gnawing at herself inside to keep from crying. She found

my mother in the dining room, wearing a Sunday dress with blue flowers that she had put

on in case the bishop came by to pay us a call, and she was singing the fado about invisible

love as she set the table. My sister noted that there was one more place than usual.

“It’s for Santiago Nasar,” my mother said. “They told me you’d invited him for

breakfast.”

“Take it away,” my sister said.

Then she told her. “But it was as if she already knew,” she said to me. “It was the

same as always: you begin telling her something and before the story is half over she

already knows how it came out.” That bad news represented a knotty problem for my

mother. Santiago Nasar had been named for her and she was his godmother when he was

christened, but she was also a blood relative of Pura Vicario, the mother of the returned

bride. Nevertheless, no sooner had she heard the news than she put on her high-heeled

shoes and the church shawl she only wore for visits of condolence. My father, who had

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 14 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

heard everything from his bed, appeared in the dining room in his pyjamas and asked in

alarm where she was going.

“To warn my dear friend Plلcida,” she answered. “It isn’t right that everybody

should know that they’re going to kill her son and she the only one who doesn’t.”

“We’ve got the same ties to the Vicarios that we do with her,” my father said.

“You always have to take the side of the dead,” she said.

My younger brothers began to come out of the other bedrooms. The smallest,

touched by the breath of tragedy, began to weep. My mother paid no attention to them; for

once in her life she didn’t even pay any attention to her husband.

“Wait a minute and I’ll get dressed,” he told her.

She was already in the street. My brother Jaime, who wasn’t more than seven at the

time, was the only one who was dressed for school.

“You go with her,” my father ordered.

Jaime ran after her without knowing what was happening or where they were

going, and grabbed her hand. “She was going along talking to herself,” Jaime told me.

“Lowlifes,” she was saying under her breath, “shitty animals that can’t do anything that isn’t

something awful.” She didn’t even realise that she was holding the child by the hand. “They

must have thought I’d gone crazy,” she told me. “The only thing I can remember is that in

the distance you could hear the noise of a lot of people, as if the wedding party had started

up again, and everybody was running toward the square.” She quickened her step, with the

determination she was capable of when there was a life at stake, until somebody who was

running in the opposite direction took pity on her madness.

“Don’t bother yourself, Luisa Santiaga,” he shouted as he went by. “They’ve

already killed him.”

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 15 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

CHAPTER 2

BAYARDO SAN ROMAN, THE MAN WHO had given back his bride, had turned up for

the first time in August of the year before: six months before the wedding. He arrived on

the weekly boat with some saddlebags decorated with silver that matched the buckle of his

belt and the rings on his boots. He was around thirty years old, but they were well-

concealed, because he had the waist of P a novice bullfighter, golden eyes, and a skin

slowly roasted by saltpetre. He arrived wearing a short jacket and very tight trousers, both

of natural calfskin, and kid gloves of the same colour. Magdalena Oliver had been with him

on the boat and couldn’t take her eyes off him during the whole trip. “He looked like a

fairy,” she told me. “And it was a pity, because I could have buttered him and eaten him

alive.” She wasn’t the only one who thought so, nor was she the last to realise that Bayardo

San Roman was not a man to be known at first sight.

My mother wrote to me at school toward the end of August and said in a casual

postscript: “A very strange man has come.” In the following letter she told me: “The strange

man is called Bayardo San Roman, and everybody says he’s enchanting, but I haven’t seen

him.” Nobody knew what he’d come for. Someone who couldn’t resist the temptation of

asking him, a little before the wedding, received the answer: “I’ve been going from town to

town looking for someone to marry.” It might have been true, but he would have answered

anything else in the same way, because he had a way of speaking that served to conceal

rather than to reveal.

The night he arrived he gave them to understand at the movies that he was a track

engineer, and spoke of the urgency for building a railroad into the interior so that we could

keep ahead of the river’s fickle ways. On the following day he had to send a telegram and

he transmitted it on the key himself, and in addition, he taught the telegrapher a formula of

his so that he could keep on using the worn-out batteries. With the same assurance he talked

about frontier illnesses with a military doctor who had come through during those months

of conscription. He liked noisy and long-lasting festivities, but he was a good drinker, a

mediator of fights, and an enemy of cardsharps. One Sunday after mass he challenged the

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 16 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

most skillful swimmers, who were many, and left the best behind by twenty strokes in

crossing the river and back. My mother told me about it in a letter, and at the end she made

a comment that was very much like her: “It also seems that he’s swimming in gold.” That

was in reply to the premature legend that Bayardo San Roman not only was capable of

doing everything, and doing it quite well, but also had access to endless resources.

My mother gave him the final blessing in a letter in October: “People like him a

lot,” she told me, “because he’s honest and has a good heart, and last Sunday he received

communion on his knees and helped with the mass in Latin.” In those days it wasn’t

permitted to receive communion standing and everything was in Latin, but my mother is

accustomed to noting that kind of superfluous detail when she wants to get to the heart of

the matter. Nevertheless, after that consecrated verdict she wrote me two letters in which

she didn’t say anything about Bayardo San Roman, not even when it was known very well

that he wanted to marry Angela Vicario. Only a long time after the unfortunate wedding did

she confess to me that she actually knew him when it was already too late to correct the

October letter, and that his golden eyes had caused the shudder of a fear in her.

“He reminded me of the devil,” she told me, “but you yourself had told me that

things like that shouldn’t be put into writing.”

I met him a short while after she did, when I came home for Christmas vacation,

and I found him just as strange as they had said. He seemed attractive, certainly, but far

from Magdalena Oliver’s idyllic vision. He seemed more serious to me than his antics

would have led one to believe, and with a hidden tension that was barely concealed by his

excessive good manners. But above all, he seemed to me like a very sad man. At that time

he had already formalised his contract of love with Angela Vicario.

It had never been too well established how they had met. The landlady of the

bachelors’ boardinghouse where Bayardo San Roman lived told of how he’d been napping

in a rocking chair in the parlour toward the end of September, when Angela Vicario and her

mother crossed the square carrying two baskets of artificial flowers. Bayardo San Roman

half-awoke, saw the two women dressed in the unforgiving black worn by the only living

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 17 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

creatures in the morass of two o’clock in the afternoon, and asked who the young one was.

The landlady answered him that she was the youngest daughter of the woman with her and

that her name was Angela Vicario. Bayardo San Roman followed them with his look to the

other side of the square.

“She’s well-named,” he said.

Then he rested his head on the back of the rocker and closed his eyes again.

“When I wake up,” he said, “remind me that I’m going to marry her.”

Angela Vicario told me that the landlady of the boardinghouse had spoken to her

about that occurrence before Bayardo San Roman began courting her. “I was quite startled,”

she told me. Three people who had been in the boarding-house confirmed that it had taken

place, but four others weren’t sure. On the other hand, all the versions agreed that Angela

Vicario and Bayardo San Roman had seen each other for the first time on the national

holiday in October during a charity bazaar at which she was in charge of singing out the

raffle numbers. Bayardo San Roman came to the bazaar and went straight to the booth run

by the languid raffler, who was in mourning, and he asked her the price of the music box

inlaid with mother-of-pearl that must have been the major attraction of the fair. She

answered him that it was not for sale but was to be raffled off.

“So much the better,” he said. “That makes it easier and cheaper besides.”

She confessed to me that he’d managed to impress her, but for reasons opposite

those of love. “I detested conceited men, and I’d never seen one so stuck-up,” she told me,

recalling that day. “Besides, I thought he was a Jew.” Her annoyance was greater when she

sang out the raffle number for the music box, to the anxiety of all, and indeed, it had been

won by Bayardo San Roman. She couldn’t imagine that he, just to impress her, had bought

all the tickets in the raffle.

That night, when she returned home, Angela Vicario found the music box there,

gift-wrapped and tied with an organdy bow. “I never did find out how he knew that it was

my birthday,” she told me. It was hard for her to convince her parents that she hadn’t given

Bayardo San Roman any reason to send her a gift like that, and even worse, in such a

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 18 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

visible way that it hadn’t gone unnoticed by anyone. So her older brothers, Pedro and Pablo,

took the music box to the hotel to give back to its owner, and they did it with such a rush

that there was no one to witness them come and then not leave. Since the only thing the

family hadn’t counted upon was Bayardo San Roman’s irresistible charm, the twins didn’t

reappear until dawn of the next day, foggy with drink, bearing once more the music box,

and bringing along, besides, Bayardo San Roman to continue the revels at home.

Angela Vicario was the youngest daughter of a family of scant resources. Her

father, Poncio Vicario, was a poor man’s goldsmith, and he’d lost his sight from doing so

much fine work in gold in order to maintain the honour of the house. Pure sima del Carmen,

her mother, had been a schoolteacher until she married for ever. Her meek and somewhat

afflicted look hid the strength of her character quite well. “She looked like a nun,” my wife

Mercedes recalls. She devoted herself with such spirit of sacrifice to the care of her husband

and the rearing of her children that at times one forgot she still existed. The two oldest

daughters had married very late. In addition to the twins, there was a middle daughter who

had died of nighttime fevers, and two years later they were still observing a mourning that

was relaxed inside the house but rigorous on the street. The brothers were brought up to be

men. The girls had been reared to get married. They knew how to do screen embroidery,

sew by machine, weave bone lace, wash and iron, make artificial flowers and fancy candy,

and write engagement announcements. Unlike other girls of the time, who had neglected

the cult of death, the four were past mistresses in the ancient science of sitting up with the

ill, comforting the dying, and enshrouding the dead. The only thing that my mother

reproached them for was the custom of combing their hair before sleeping. “Girls,” she

would tell them, “don’t comb your hair at night; you’ll slow down seafarers.” Except for

that, she thought there were no better-reared daughters. “They’re perfect,” she was

frequently heard to say. “Any man will be happy with them because they’ve been raised to

suffer.” Yet it was difficult for the men who married the two eldest to break the circle,

because they always went together everywhere, and they organised dances for women only

and were predisposed to find hidden intentions in the designs of men.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 19 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

Angela Vicario was the prettiest of the four, and my mother said that she had been

born like the great queens of history, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. But

she had a helpless air and a poverty of spirit that augured an uncertain future for her. I

would see her again year after year during my Christmas vacations, and every time she

seemed more destitute in the window of her house, where she would sit in the afternoon

making cloth flowers and singing songs about single women with her neighbours. “She’s all

set to be hooked,” Santiago Nasar would tell me, “your cousin the ninny is.” Suddenly, a

little before the mourning for her sister, I passed her on the street for the first time dressed

as a grown •woman and with her hair curled, and I could scarcely believe it was the same

person. But it was a momentary vision: her penury of spirit had been aggravated with the

years. So much so that when it was discovered that Bayardo San Roman wanted to marry

her, many people thought it was an outsider’s scheming.

The family took it not only seriously but with great excitement. Except Pura

Vicario, who laid down the condition that Bayardo San Roman should identify himself

properly. Up till then nobody knew who he was. His past didn’t go beyond that afternoon

when he disembarked in his actor’s getup, and he was so reserved about his origins that

even the most demented invention could have been true. It came to be said that he had

wiped out villages and sown terror in Casanare as troop commander, that he had escaped

from Devil’s Island, that he’d been seen in Pernambuco trying to make a living with a pair

of trained bears, and that he’d salvaged the remains of a Spanish galleon loaded with gold in

the Windward Passage. Bayardo San Roman put an end to all those conjectures by a simple

recourse: he produced his entire family.

There were four of them: the father, the mother, and two provocative sisters. They

arrived in a Model T Ford with official plates, whose duck-quack horn aroused the streets at

eleven o’clock in the morning. His mother, Alberta Simonds, a big mulatto woman from

Curacao, who spoke Spanish with a mixture of Papiamento, in her youth had been

proclaimed the most beautiful of the two hundred most beautiful women in the Antilles.

The sisters, newly come into bloom, were like two restless fillies. But the main attraction

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 20 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

was the father: General Petronio San Roman, hero of the civil wars of the past century, and

one of the major glories of the Conservative regime for having put Colonel Aureliano

Buenda to flight in the disaster of Tucurinca. My mother was the only one who wouldn’t go

to greet him when she found out who he was. “It seems all right to me that they should get

married,” she told me. “But that’s one thing and it’s something altogether different to shake

hands with the man who gave the orders for Gerineldo Mلrquez to be shot in the back.” As

soon as he appeared in the window of the automobile waving his white hat, everybody

recognised him because of the fame of his pictures. He was wearing a wheat-coloured linen

suit, high-laced cordovan shoes, and gold-rimmed glasses held by a clasp on the bridge of

his nose and connected by a chain to a buttonhole in his vest. He wore the Medal of Valour

on his lapel and carried a cane with the national shield carved on the pommel. He was the

first to get out of the automobile, completely covered with the burning dust of our bad

roads, and all he had to do was appear on the running board for everyone to realise that

Bayardo San Roman was going to marry whomever he chose.

It was Angela Vicario who didn’t want to marry him. “He seemed too much of a

man for me,” she told me. Besides, Bayardo San Roman hadn’t even tried to court her, but

had bewitched the family with his charm. Angela Vicario never forgot the horror of the

night on which her parents and her older sisters with their husbands, gathered together in

the parlour, imposed on her the obligation to marry a man whom she had barely seen. The

twins stayed out of it. “It looked to us like woman problems,” Pablo Vicario told me. The

parents’ decisive argument was that a family dignified by modest means had no right to

disdain that prize of destiny. Angela Vicario only dared hint at the inconvenience of a lack

of love, but her mother demolished it with a single phrase: “Love can be learned too.”

Unlike engagements of the time, which were long and supervised, theirs lasted

only four months due to Bayardo San Roman’s urgings. It wasn’t any shorter because Pura

Vicario demanded that they wait until the family mourning was over. But the time passed

without anxiety because of the irresistible way in which Bayardo San Roman arranged

things. “One night he asked me what house I liked best,” Angela Vicario told me. “And I

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 21 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

answered, without knowing why, that the prettiest house in town was the farmhouse

belonging to the widower Xius.” I would have said the same. It was on a windswept hill,

and from the terrace you could see the limitless paradise of the marshes covered with purple

anemones, and on clear summer days you could make out the neat horizon of the Caribbean

and the tourist ships from Cartagena de Indias. That very night Bayardo San Roman went to

the social club and sat down at the widower Xius’s table to play a game of dominoes.

“Widower,” he told him, “I’ll buy your house.”

“It’s not for sale,” the widower said.

“I’ll buy it along with everything inside.”

The widower Xius explained to him with the good breeding of olden days that the

objects in the house had been bought by his wife over a whole lifetime of sacrifice and that

for him they were still a part of her. “He was speaking with his heart in his hand,” I was told

by Dr. Dionisio Iguarلn, who was playing with them. “I was sure he would have died

before he’d sell a house where he’d been happy for over thirty years.” Bayardo San Roman

also understood his reasons.

“Agreed,” he said. “So sell me the house empty.”

But the widower defended himself until the end of the game. Three nights later,

better prepared, Bayardo San Roman returned to the domino table.

“Widower,” he began again, “what’s the price of the house?”

“It hasn’t got a price.”

“Name any one you want.”

“I’m sorry, Bayardo,” the widower said, “but you young people don’t understand

the motives of the heart.”

Bayardo San Roman didn’t pause to think.

“Let’s say five thousand pesos,” he said.

“You don’t beat around the bush,” the widower answered him, his dignity aroused.

“The house isn’t worth all that.”

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 22 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

“Ten thousand,” said Bayardo San Roman. “Right now and with one bill on top of

another.”

The widower looked at him, his eyes full of tears. “He was weeping with rage,” I

was told by Dr. Dionisio Iguarلn, who, in addition to being a physician, was a man of

letters. “Just imagine: an amount like that within reach and having to say no from a simple

weakness of the spirit.” The widower Xius’s voice didn’t come out, but without hesitation he

said no with his head.

“Then do me one last favour,” said Baynardo San Roman. Wait for me here for

five minutes.

Five minutes later, indeed, he returned to the social club with his silver-trimmed

saddlebags, and on the table he laid ten bundles of thousand-peso notes with the printed

bands of the State Bank still on them. The widower Xius died two months later. “He died

because of that,” Dr. Dionisio Iguarلn said. “He was healthier than the rest of us, but when

you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.” But

not only had he sold the house with everything in it; he asked Bayard San Roman to pay

him little by little because he didn’t even have an old trunk where he could keep so much

consolation money.

No one would have thought, nor did anyone say, that Angela Vicario wasn’t a

virgin. She hadn’t known any previous fiance and she’d grown up along with her sisters

under the rigour of a mother of iron. Even when it was less than two months before she

would be married, Pura Vicario wouldn’t let her go out alone with Bayardo San Roman to

see the house where they were going to live, but she and the blind father accompanied her

to watch over her honour. “The only thing I prayed to God for was to give me the courage

to kill myself,” Angela Vicario told me. “But he didn’t give it to me.” She was so distressed

that she had resolved to tell her mother the truth so as to free herself from that martyrdom,

when her only two confidantes, who worked with her making cloth flowers, dissuaded her

from her good intentions. “I obeyed them blindly,” she told me, “because they made me

believe that they were experts in men’s tricks.” They assured her that almost all women lost

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 23 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

their virginity in childhood accidents. They insisted that even the most difficult of husbands

resigned themselves to anything as long as nobody knew about it. They convinced her,

finally, that most men came to their wedding night so frightened that they were incapable of

doing anything without the woman’s help, and at the moment of truth they couldn’t answer

for their own acts. “The only thing they believe is what they see on the sheet,” they told her.

And they taught her old wives’ tricks to feign her lost possession, so that on her first

morning as a newlywed she could display open under the sun in the courtyard of her house

the linen sheet with the stain of honour.

She got married with that illusion. Bayardo San Roman, for his part, must have got

married with the illusion of buying happiness with the huge weight of his power and

fortune, for the more the plans for the festival grew, the more delirious ideas occurred to

him to make it even larger. He tried to hold off the wedding for a day when the bishop’s

visit was announced so that he could marry them, but Angela Vicario was against it.

“Actually,” she told me, “the fact is I didn’t want to be blessed by a man who cut off only

the combs for soup and threw the rest of the rooster into the garbage.” Yet, even without the

bishop’s blessing, the festival took on a force of its own so difficult to control that it got out

of the hands of Bayardo San Roman and ended up being a public event.

General Petronio San Roman and his family arrived that time on the National

Congress’s ceremonial boat, which remained moored to the dock until the end of the

festivities, and with them came many illustrious people who, even so, passed unnoticed in

the tumult of new faces. So many gifts were brought that it was necessary to restore the

forgotten site of the first electrical power plant in order to display the most valuable among

them, and the rest were immediately taken to the former home of the widower Xius, which

had already been prepared to receive the newly weds. The groom received a convertible

with his name engraved in Gothic letters under the manufacturer’s seal. The bride was given

a chest with table settings in pure gold for twenty-four guests. They also brought in a ballet

company and two waltz orchestras that played out of tune with the local bands and all the

groups of brass and accordion players who came, animated by the uproar of the revelry.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 24 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

The Vicario family lived in a modest house with brick walls and a palm roof,

topped by two attics where in January swallows got in to breed. In front it had a terrace

almost completely covered with flowerpots, and a large yard with hens running loose and

with fruit trees. In the rear of the yard the twins had a pigsty, with its sacrificial stone and

its disembowelling table, which had been a good source of domestic income ever since

Poncio Vicario had lost his sight. Pedro Vicario had started the business, but when he went

into military service, his twin brother also learned the slaughterer’s trade.

The inside of the house barely had enough room in -which to live, and so the older

sisters tried to borrow a house when they realised the size of the festival. “Just imagine,”

Angela Vicario told me, “they’d thought about Plلcida Linero’s house, but luckily my

parents stubbornly held to the old song that our daughters would be married in our pigpen

or they wouldn’t be married at all.” So they painted the house its original yellow colour,

fixed up the doors, repaired the floors, and left it as worthy as was possible for such a

clamorous wedding. The twins took the pigs off elsewhere and sanitised the pigsty with

quicklime, but even so it was obvious that there wasn’t enough room. Finally, through the

efforts of Bayardo San Roman, they knocked down the fences in the yard, borrowed the

neighbouring house for dancing, and set up carpenters’ benches to sit and eat on under the

leaves of the tamarind trees.

The only unforeseen surprise was caused by the groom on the morning of the

wedding, for he was two hours late in coming for Angela Vicario and she had refused to get

dressed as a bride until she saw him in the house. “Just imagine,” she told me. “I would

have been happy even if he hadn’t come, but never if he abandoned me dressed up.” Her

caution seemed natural, because there was no public misfortune more shameful than for a

woman to be jilted in her bridal gown. On the other hand, the fact that Angela Vicario dared

put on the veil and the orange blossoms without being a virgin would be interpreted

afterwards as a profanation of the symbols of purity. My mother was the only one who

appreciated as an act of courage the fact that she had played out her marked cards to the

final consequences. “In those days,” she explained to me, “God understood such things.”

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 25 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

But no one yet knew what cards Bayardo San Roman was playing. From the moment he

finally appeared in frock coat and top hat until he fled the dance with the creature of his

torment, he was the perfect image of a happy bridegroom.

Nor was it known what cards Santiago Nasar was playing. I was with him all the

time, in the church and at the festival, along with Cristo Bedoya and my brother Luis

Enrique, and none of us caught a glimpse of any change in his manner. I’ve had to repeat

this many times, because the four of us had grown up together in school and later on in the

same gang at vacation time, and nobody could have believed that one of us could have a

secret without its being shared, particularly such a big secret.

Santiago Nasar was a man for parties, and he had his best time on the eve of his

death calculating the expense of the wedding. He estimated that they’d set up floral

decorations in the church equal in cost to those for fourteen first-class funerals. That

precision would haunt me for many years, because Santiago Nasar had often told me that

the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him, and that day he

repeated it to me as we went into the church. “I don’t want any flowers at my funeral,” he

told me, hardly thinking that I would see to it that there weren’t any the next day. En route

from the church to the Vicarios’ house he drew up the figures for the coloured wreaths that

decorated the streets, calculated the cost of the music and the rockets, and even the hail of

raw rice with which they received us at the party. In the drowsiness of noon, the newly

weds made their rounds in the yard. Bayardo San Roman had become our very good friend,

a friend of a few drinks, as they said in those days, and he seemed very much at ease at our

table. Angela Vicario, without her veil and bridal bouquet and in her sweat-stained satin

dress, had suddenly taken on the face of a married woman. Santiago Nasar calculated, and

told Bayardo San Roman, that up to then the wedding was costing some nine thousand

pesos. It was obvious that Angela took this as an impertinence. “My mother taught me

never to talk about money in front of other people, ” she told me. Bayardo San Roman, on

the other hand, took it very graciously and even with a certain pride.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 26 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

“Almost,” he said, “but we’re only beginning. When it’s all over it will be twice

that, more or less.”

Santiago Nasar proposed proving it down to the last penny, and his life lasted just

long enough. In fact, with the final figures that Cristo Bedoya gave him the next day on the

docks, forty-five minutes before he died, he ascertained that Bayardo San Roman’s

prediction had been exact.

I had a very confused memory of the festival before I decided to rescue it piece by

piece from the memory of others. For years they went on talking in my house about the fact

that my father had gone back to playing his boyhood violin in honour of the newly weds,

that my sister the nun had danced a merengue in her doorkeeper’s habit, and that Dr.

Dionisio Iguarلn, who was my mother’s cousin, had arranged for them to take him off on

the official boat so he wouldn’t be here the next day when the bishop arrived. In the course

of the investigations for this chronicle I recovered numerous marginal experiences, among

them the free recollections of Bayardo San Roman’s sisters, whose velvet dresses with great

butterfly wings pinned to their backs with gold brooches drew more attention than the

plumed hat and row of war medals worn by their father. Many knew that in the confusion of

the bash I had proposed marriage to Mercedes Barcha as soon as she finished primary

school, just as she herself would remind me fourteen years later when we got married.

Really, the most intense image that I have always held of that unwelcome Sunday was that

of old Poncio Vicario sitting alone on a stool in the centre of the yard. They had placed him

there thinking perhaps that it was the seat of honour, and the guests stumbled over him,

confused him with someone else, moved him so he wouldn’t be in the way, and he nodded

his snow-white head in all directions with the erratic expression of someone too recently

blind, answering questions that weren’t directed at him and responding to fleeting waves of

the hand that no one was making to him, happy in his circle of oblivion, his shirt cardboard-

stiff with starch and holding the lignum vitae cane they had bought him for the party.

The formal activities ended at six in the afternoon, when the guests of honour took

their leave. The boat departed with all its lights burning, and with a wake of waltzes from

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 27 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

the player piano, and for an instant we were cast adrift over an abyss of uncertainty, until

we recognised each other again and plunged into the confusion of the bash. The newlyweds

appeared a short time later in the open car, making their way with difficulty through the

tumult. Bayardo San Roman shot off rockets, drank cane liquor from the bottles the crowd

held out to him, and got out of the car with Angela Vicario to join the whirl of the

cumbiamba dance. Finally, he ordered us to keep on dancing at his expense for as long as

our lives would reach, and he carried his terrified wife off to his dream house, where the

widower Xius had been happy.

The public spree broke up into fragments at around midnight, and all that remained

was Clotilde Armenta’s establishment on one side of the square. Santiago Nasar and I, with

my brother Luis Enrique and Cristo Bedoya, went to Maria Alejandrina Cervantes’s house

of mercies. Among so many others, the Vicario brothers were there and they were drinking

with us and singing with Santiago Nasar five hours before killing him. A few scattered

embers from the original party must still have remained, because from all sides waves of

music and distant fights reached us, sadder and sadder, until a short while before the

bishop’s boat bellowed.

Pura Vicario told my mother that she had gone to bed at eleven o’clock at night

after her older daughters had helped her clean up a bit from the devastation of the wedding.

Around ten o’clock, when there were still a few drunkards singing in the square, Angela

Vicario had sent for a little suitcase of personal things that were in the dresser in her

bedroom, and she asked them also to send a suitcase with everyday clothes; the messenger

was in a hurry. Pura Vicario had fallen into a deep sleep, when there was knocking on the

door. “They were three very slow knocks,” she told my mother, “but they had that strange

touch of bad news about them.” She told her that she’d opened the door without turning on

the light so as not to awaken anybody and saw Bayardo San Roman in the glow of the street

light, his silk shirt unbuttoned and his fancy pants held up by elastic suspenders. “He had

that green colour of dreams,” Pura Vicario told my mother. Angela Vicario was in the

shadows, so she saw only her when Bayardo San Roman grabbed her by the arm and

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 28 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

brought her into the light. Her satin dress was in shreds and she was wrapped in a towel up

to the waist. Pura Vicario thought they’d gone off the road in the car and were lying dead at

the bottom of the ravine.

“Holy Mother of God,” she said in terror. “Answer me if you’re still of this world.”

Bayardo San Roman didn’t enter, but softly pushed his wife into the house without

speaking a word. Then he kissed Pura Vicario on the cheek and spoke to her in a very deep,

dejected voice, but with great tenderness. “Thank you for everything, Mother,” he told her.

“You’re a saint.

Only Pura Vicario knew what she did during the next two hours, and she went to

her grave with her secret. “The only thing I can remember is that she was holding me by the

hair with one hand and beating me with the other with such rage that I thought she was

going to kill me,” Angela Vicario told me. But even that she did with such stealth that her

husband and her older daughters, asleep in the other rooms, didn’t find out about anything

until dawn, when the disaster had already been consummated.

The twins returned home a short time before three, urgently summoned by their

mother. They found Angela Vicario lying face down on the dining room couch, her face all

bruised, but she’d stopped crying. “I was no longer frightened,” she told me. “On the

contrary: I felt as if the drowsiness of death had finally been lifted from me, and the only

thing I wanted was for it all to be over quickly so I could flop down and go to sleep.” Pedro

Vicario, the more forceful of the brothers, picked her up by the waist and sat her on the

dining room table.

“All right, girl,” he said to her, trembling with rage, “tell us who it was.”

She only took the time necessary to say the name. She looked for it in the

shadows, she found it at first sight among the many, many easily confused names from this

world and the other, and she nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly

with no will whose sentence has always been written.

“Santiago Nasar,” she said.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 29 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

CHAPTER 3

THE LAWYER STOOD BY THE THESIS OF homicide in legitimate defence of honour,

which was upheld by the court in good faith, and the twins declared at the end of the trial

that they would have done it again a thousand times over for the same reason. It was they

who gave a hint of the direction the defence would take as soon as they surrendered to their

church a few minutes after the crime. They burst panting into the parish house, closely

pursued by a group of roused-up Arabs, and they laid the knives, with clean blades, on

Father Amador’s desk. Both were exhausted from the barbarous work of death, and their

clothes and arms were soaked and their faces smeared with sweat and still living blood, but

the priest recalled the surrender as an act of great dignity.

“We killed him openly,” Pedro Vicario said, “but we’re innocent.”

“Perhaps before God,” said Father Amador.

“Before God and before men,” Pablo Vicario said. “It was a matter of honour.”

Furthermore, with the reconstruction of the facts, they had feigned a much more

unforgiving bloodthirstiness than really was true, to such an extreme that it was necessary

to use public funds to repair the main door of Placida Linero’s house, which was all chipped

with knife thrusts. In the panopticon of Riohacha, where they spent three years awaiting

trial because they couldn’t afford bail, the older prisoners remembered them for their good

character and sociability, but they never noticed any indication of remorse in them. Still, in

reality it seemed that the Vicario brothers had done nothing right with a view to killing

Santiago Nasar immediately and without any public spectacle, but had done much more

than could be imagined to have someone to stop them from killing him, and they had failed.

According to what they told me years later, they had begun by looking for him at

Maria Alejandrina Cervantes’s place, where they had been with him until two o’clock. That

fact, like many others, was not reported in the brief. Actually, Santiago Nasar was no longer

there at the time the twins said they went looking for him, because we’d left on a round of

serenades, but in any case, it wasn’t certain that they’d gone. “They never would have left

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 30 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

here,” Maria Alejandrina Cervantes told me, and knowing her so well, I never doubted it.

On the other hand, they did go to wait for him at Clotilde Armenta’s place, where they knew

that almost everybody would turn up except Santiago Nasar. “It was the only place open,”

they declared to the investigator. “Sooner or later he would have to come out,” they told me,

after they had been absolved. Still, everybody knew that the main door of Plلcida Linero’s

house was always barred on the inside, even during the daytime, and that Santiago Nasar

always carried the keys to the back door with him. That was where he went in when he got

home, in fact, while the Vicario twins had been waiting for him for more than an hour on

the other side, and if he later left by the door on the square when he went to receive the

bishop, it was for such an unforeseen reason that the investigator who drew up the brief

never did understand it.

There had never been a death more foretold. After their sister revealed the name to

them, the Vicario twins went to the bin in the pigsty where they kept their sacrificial tools

and picked out the two best knives: one for quartering, ten inches long by two and a half

inches wide, and the other for trimming, seven inches long by one and a half inches wide.

They wrapped them in a rag and went to sharpen them at the meat market, where only a few

stalls had begun to open. There weren’t very many customers that early, but twenty-two

people declared they had heard everything said, and they all coincided in the impression

that the only reason the brothers had said it was so that someone would come over to hear

them. Faustino Santos, a butcher friend, saw them enter at three-twenty, when he had just

opened up his innards table, and he couldn’t understand why they were coming on a

Monday and so early, and still in their dark wedding suits. He was accustomed to seeing

them on Fridays, but a little later, and wearing the leather aprons they put on for

slaughtering. “I thought they were so drunk,” Faustino Santos told me, “that not only had

they forgotten what time it was, but what day it was too.” He reminded them that it was

Monday.

“Everybody knows that, you dope,” Pablo Vicario answered him good-naturedly.

“We just came to sharpen our knives.”

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 31 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

They sharpened them on the grindstone, and the way they always did: Pedro

holding the knives and turning them over on the stone, and Pablo working the crank. At the

same time, they talked with the other butchers about the splendour of the wedding. Some of

them complained about not having gotten their share of cake, in spite of their being working

companions, and they promised them to have some sent over later. Finally, they made the

knives sing on the stone, and Pablo laid his beside the lamp so that the steel sparkled.

“We’re going to kill Santiago Nasar,” he said.

Their reputation as good people was so well-founded that no one paid any

attention to them. “We thought it was drunkards’ baloney,” several butchers declared, just as

Victoria Guzman and so many others did who saw them later. I was to ask the butchers

sometime later whether or not the trade of slaughterer didn’t reveal a soul predisposed to

killing a human being. They protested: “When you sacrifice a steer you don’t dare look into

its eyes.” One of them told me that he couldn’t eat the flesh of an animal he had butchered.

Another said that he wouldn’t be capable of sacrificing a cow if he’d known it before, much

less if he’d drunk its milk. I reminded them that the Vicario brothers sacrificed the same

hogs they raised, which were so familiar to them that they called them by their names.

“That’s true,” one of them replied, “but remember that they didn’t give them people’s names

but the names of flowers.” Faustino Santos was the only one who perceived a glimmer of

truth in Pablo Vicario’s threat, and he asked him jokingly why they had to kill Santiago

Nasar since there were so many other rich people who deserved dying first.

“Santiago Nasar knows why,” Pedro Vicario answered him.

Faustino Santos told me that he’d still been doubtful, and that he reported it to a

policeman who came by a little later to buy a pound of liver for the mayor’s breakfast. The

policeman, according to the brief, was named Leandro Pornoy, and he died the following

year, gored in the jugular vein by a bull during the national holidays, so I was never able to

talk to him. But Clotilde Armenta confirmed for me that he was the first person in her store

when the Vicario twins were sitting and waiting there.

Clotilde Armenta had just replaced her husband behind the counter. It was their

usual system. The shop sold milk at dawn and provisions during the day and became a bar

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 32 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

after six o’clock in the evening. Clotilde Armenta would open at three-thirty in the morning.

Her husband, the good Don Rogelio de la Flor, would take charge of the bar until closing

time. But that night there had been so many stray customers from the wedding that he went

to bed after three o’clock without closing, and Clotilde Armenta was already up earlier than

usual because she wanted to finish before the bishop arrived.

The Vicario brothers came in at four-ten. At that time only things to eat were sold,

but Clotilde Armenta sold them a bottle of cane liquor, not only because of the high regard

she had for them but also because she was very grateful for the piece of wedding cake they

had sent her. They drank down the whole bottle in two long swigs, but they remained stolid.

“They were stunned,” Clotilde Armenta told me, “and they couldn’t have got their blood

pressure up even with lamp oil.” Then they took off their cloth jackets, hung them carefully

on the chair backs, and asked her for another bottle. Their shirts were dirty with dried sweat

and a one-day beard gave them a backwoods look. They drank the second bottle more

slowly, sitting down, looking insistently toward Plلcida Linero’s house on the sidewalk

across the way, where the windows were dark. The largest one, on the balcony, belonged to

Santiago Nasar’s bedroom. Pedro Vicario asked Clotilde Armenta if she had seen any light

in that window, and she answered him no, but it seemed like a strange thing to be interested

in.

“Did something happen to him?” she asked.

“No,” Pedro Vicario replied. “Just that we’re looking for him to kill him.”

It was such a spontaneous answer that she couldn’t believe she’d heard right. But

she noticed that the twins were carrying two butcher knives wrapped in kitchen rags.

“And might a person know why you want to kill him so early in the morning? she

asked.

“He knows why,” Pedro Vicario answered.

Clotilde Armenta examined them seriously: she knew them so well that she could

tell them apart, especially ever since Pedro Vicario had come back from the army. “They

looked like two children,” she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she’d

always felt that only children are capable of everything. So she finished getting the jug of

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 33 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

milk ready and went to wake her husband to tell him what was going on in the shop. Don

Rogelio de la Flor listened to her half-awake.

“Don’t be silly,” he said to her. “Those two aren’t about to kill anybody, much less

someone rich.”

When Clotilde Armenta returned to the store, the twins were chatting with Officer

Leandro Pornoy, who was coming for the mayor’s milk. She didn’t hear what they were

talking about, but she supposed that they had told him something about their plans from the

way he looked at the knives when he left.

Colonel Lلzaro Aponte had just got up a little before four. He’d finished shaving

when Officer Leandro Pornoy revealed the Vicario brothers’ intentions to him. He’d settled

so many fights between friends the night before that he was in no hurry for another one. He

got dressed calmly, tied his bow tie several times until he had it perfect, and around his

neck he hung the scapular of the Congregation of Mary, to receive the bishop. While he

breakfasted on fried liver smothered with onion rings, his wife told him with great

excitement that Bayardo San Roman had brought Angela Vicario back home, but he didn’t

take it dramatically.

“Good Lord!” he mocked. “What will the bishop think!”

Nevertheless, before finishing breakfast he remembered what the orderly had just

told him, put the two bits of news together, and discovered immediately that they fit like

pieces of a puzzle. Then he went to the square, going along the street to the new dock,

where the houses were beginning to liven up for the bishop’s arrival. “I can remember with

certainty that it was almost five o’clock and it was beginning to rain,” Colonel Lلzaro Aponte told me. Along the way three people stopped him to inform him in secret that the

Vicario brothers were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him, but only one person could tell

him where.

He found them in Clotilde Armenta s store. “When I saw them I thought they were

nothing but a pair of big bluffers,” he told me with his personal logic, “because they weren’t

as drunk as I thought.” Nor did he interrogate them concerning their intentions, but took

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 34 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

away their knives and sent them off to sleep. He treated them with the same self-assurance

with which he had passed off his wife’s alarm.

“Just imagine!” he told them. “What will the bishop say if he finds you in that

state!”

They left. Clotilde Armenta suffered another disappointment with the mayor’s

casual attitude, because she thought he should have detained the twins until the truth came

out. Colonel Aponte showed her the knives as a final argument.

“Now they haven’t got anything to kill anybody with,” he said.

“That’s not why,” said Clotilde Armenta. “It’s to spare those poor boys from the

horrible duty that’s fallen on them.”

Because she’d sensed it. She was certain that the Vicario brothers were not as

eager to carry out the sentence as to find someone who would do them the favour of

stopping them. But Colonel Aponte was at peace with his soul.

“No one is arrested just on suspicion,” he said. “Now it’s a matter of warning

Santiago Nasar, and happy new year.”

Clotilde Armenta would always remember that Colonel Aponte’s chubby

appearance evoked a certain pity in her, but on the other hand I remembered him as a happy

man, although a little bit off due to the solitary spiritualist practises he had learned through

the mails. His behaviour that Monday was the final proof of his silliness. The truth is that

he didn’t think of Santiago Nasar again until he saw him on the docks, and then he

congratulated himself for having made the right decision.

The Vicario brothers had told their plans to more than a dozen people who had

gone to buy milk, and these had spread the news everywhere before six o’clock. It seemed

impossible to Clotilde Armenta that they didn’t know in the house across the way. She

didn’t think that Santiago Nasar was there, since she hadn’t seen the bedroom light go on,

and she asked all the people she could to warn him when they saw him. She even sent word

to Father Amador through the novice on duty, who came to buy milk for the nuns. After

four o’clock, when she saw the lights in the kitchen of Plلcida Linero’s house, she sent the

last urgent message to Victoria Guzman by the beggar woman who came every day to ask

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 35 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

for a little milk in the name of charity. When the bishop’s boat bellowed, almost everybody

was up to receive him and there were very few of us who didn’t know that the Vicario twins

were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him, and, in addition, the reasons were understood

down to the smallest detail.

Clotilde Armenta hadn’t finished dispensing her milk when the Vicario brothers

returned with two other knives wrapped up in newspapers. One was for quartering, with a

strong, rusty blade twelve inches long and three inches wide, which had been put together

by Pedro Vicario with the metal from a marquetry saw at a time when German knives were

no longer available because of the war. The other one was shorter, but broad and curved.

The investigator had made sketches of them in the brief, perhaps because he had trouble

describing them, and all he ventured to say was that this one looked like a miniature

scimitar. It was with these knives that the crime was committed, and both were rudimentary

and had seen a lot of use.

Faustino Santos couldn’t understand what had happened. “They came to sharpen

their knives a second time,” he told me, “and once more they shouted for people to hear that

they were going to cut Santiago Nasar’s guts out, so I believed they were kidding around,

especially since I didn’t pay any attention to the knives and thought they were the same

ones.” This time, however, Clotilde Armenta noticed from the moment she saw them enter

that they didn’t have the same determination as before.

Actually, they’d had their first disagreement. Not only were they much more

different inside than they looked on the outside, but in difficult emergencies they showed

opposite characters. We, their friends, had spotted it ever since grammar school. Pablo

Vicario was six minutes older than his brother, and he was the more imaginative and

resolute until adolescence. Pedro Vicario always seemed more sentimental to me, and by

the same token more authoritarian. They presented themselves together for military service

at the age of twenty, and Pablo Vicario was excused in order to stay home and take care of

the family. Pedro Vicario served for eleven months on police patrol. The army routine,

aggravated by the fear of death, had matured his tendency to command and the habit of

deciding for his brother. He also came back with a case of sergeant’s blennorrhea that

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 36 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

resisted the most brutal methods of military medicine as well as the arsenic injections and

permanganate purges of Dr. Dionisio Iguarلn. Only in jail did they manage to cure it. We, his friends, agreed that Pablo Vicario had suddenly developed the strange dependence of a

younger brother when Pedro Vicario returned with a barrack-room soul and with the novel

trick of lifting his shirt for anyone who wanted to see a bullet wound with seton on his left

side. He even began to develop a kind of fervour over the great man’s blennorrhea that his

brother wore like a war medal.

Pedro Vicario, according to his own declaration, was the one who made the

decision to kill Santiago Nasar, and at first his brother only followed along. But he was also

the one who considered his duty fulfilled when the mayor disarmed them, and then it was

Pablo Vicario who assumed command. Neither of the two mentioned that disagreement in

their separate statements to the investigator, but Pablo Vicario confirmed several times to

me that it hadn’t been easy for him to convince his brother of their final resolve. Maybe it

was really nothing but a wave of panic, but the fact is that Pablo Vicario went into the

pigsty alone to get the other two knives, while his brother agonised, drop by drop, trying to

urinate under the tamarind trees. “My brother never knew what it was like,” Pedro Vicario

told me in our only interview. “It was like pissing ground glass.” Pablo Vicario found him

hugging the tree when he came back with the knives. “He was in a cold sweat from the

pain,” he said to me, “and he tried to tell me to go on by myself because he was in no

condition to kill anybody.” He sat down on one of the carpenters’ benches they’d set up

under the trees for the wedding lunch, and he dropped his pants down to his knees. “He

spent about half an hour changing the gauze he had his prick wrapped in,” Pablo Vicario

told me. Actually, he hadn’t delayed more than ten minutes, but this was something so

difficult and so puzzling for Pablo Vicario that he interpreted it as some new trick on his

brother’s part to waste time until dawn. So he put the knife in his hand and dragged him off

almost by force in search of their sister’s lost honour.

“There’s no way out of this,” he told him. “It’s as if it had already happened.”

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 37 Grabriel Garcia Marquez

They left by way of the pigpen gate with the knives unwrapped, trailed by the

uproar of the dogs in the yards. It was beginning to get light. “It wasn’t raining,” Pablo

Vicario remembered.

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