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- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 1 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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 wellconcealed,
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- "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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- "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 cardboardstiff
- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
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- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- 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.
- "Just the opposite," Pedro recalled. "There was a sea wind and you could still
- count the stars with your finger." The news had been so well spread by then that Hortensia
- Baute opened her door precisely as they were passing her house, and she was the first to
- weep for Santiago Nasar. "I thought they'd already killed him," she told me, "because I saw
- the knives in the light from the street lamp and it looked to me like they were dripping
- blood." One of the few houses open on that misbegotten street was that of Prudencia Cotes,
- Pablo Vicario's fiancee. Whenever the twins passed by there at that time, and especially on
- Fridays when they were going to the market, they would drop in to have their first cup of
- coffee. They pushed open the door to the courtyard, surrounded by the dogs, who
- recognised them in the half light of dawn, and they greeted Prudencia Cotes's mother in the
- kitchen. Coffee wasn't ready yet.
- "We'll leave it for later," Pablo Vicario said. "We're in a hurry now."
- "I can imagine, my sons," she said. "Honour doesn't wait."
- But in any case, they waited, and this time it was Pedro Vicario who thought his
- brother was wasting time on purpose. While they were drinking their coffee, Prudencia
- Cotes came into the kitchen in all her adolescent bloom, carrying a roll of old newspapers
- to revive the fire in the stove. "I knew what they were up to," she told me, "and I didn't only
- agree, I never would have married him if he hadn't done what a man should do." Before
- leaving the kitchen, Pablo Vicario took two sections of newspaper from her and gave them
- to his brother to wrap the knives in.
- Prudencia Cotes stood waiting in the kitchen until she saw them leave by the
- courtyard door, and she went on waiting for three years without a moment of
- discouragement until Pablo Vicario got out of jail and became her husband for life.
- "Take good care of yourselves," she told them.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 38 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- So Clotilde Armenta had good reason when it seemed to her that the twins weren't
- as resolute as before, and she served them a bottle of rotgut rum with the hope of getting
- them dead drunk.
- "That day," she told me, "I realised just how alone we women are in the world!"
- Pedro Vicario asked to borrow her husband's shaving implements, and she brought him the
- brush, the soap, the hanging mirror, and the safety razor with a new blade, but he shaved
- with his butcher knife. Clotilde Armenia thought that was the height of machismo. "He
- looked like a killer in the movies," she told me. But as he explained to me later, and it was
- true, in the army he'd learned to shave with a straight razor and couldn't do it any other way
- ever since. His brother, for his part, shaved in a more humble way, with Don Rogelio de la
- Flor's borrowed safety razor. Finally, they drank the bottle in silence, very slowly, gazing
- with the boobish look of early risers at the dark window in the house across the way, while
- fake customers buying milk they didn't need and asking for food items that didn't exist went
- in and out with the purpose of seeing whether it was true that they were waiting for
- Santiago Nasar to kill him.
- The Vicario brothers would not see that window light up. Santiago Nasar went into
- the house at four-twenty, but he didn't have to turn on any light to reach his bedroom
- because the bulb on the stairway stayed lit through the night. He threw himself onto his bed
- in the darkness and with his clothes on, since he had only an hour in which to sleep, and
- that was how Victoria Guzman found him when she came up to wake him so he could
- receive the bishop. We'd been together at Maria Alejandrina Cervantes's until after three,
- when she herself sent the musicians away and turned out the lights in the dancing courtyard
- so that her pleasurable mulatto girls could go to bed by themselves and get some rest.
- They'd been working without cease for three days, first taking care of the guests of honour
- in secret, and then turned loose, the doors wide open for those of us still unsated by the
- wedding bash. Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, about whom we used to say that she would go
- to sleep only once and that would be to die, was the most elegant and the most tender
- woman I have ever known, and the most serviceable in bed, but she was also the strictest.
- She'd been born and reared here, and here she lived, in a house with open doors, with
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 39 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- several rooms for rent and an enormous courtyard for dancing lit by lantern gourds bought
- in the Chinese bazaars of Paramaribo. It was she who did away with my generation's
- virginity. She taught us much more than we should have learned, but she taught us above all
- that there's no place in life sadder than an empty bed. Santiago Nasar lost his senses the first
- time he saw her. I warned him: "'A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a
- life of pain. But he didn't listen to me, dazzled by Maria Alejandrina Cervantes's illusory
- calls. She was his mad passion, his mistress of tears at the age of fifteen, until Ibrahim
- Nasar drove him out of the bed with a whip and shut him up for more than a year on The
- Divine Face. Ever since then they were still linked by a serious affection, but without the
- disorder of love, and she had so much respect for him that she never again went to bed with
- anyone if he was present. During those last vacations she would send us off early with the
- pretext that she was tired, but she left the door unbarred and with a lamp lighted in the hall
- so that I could come in secretly.
- Santiago Nasar had an almost magical talent for disguises, and his favourite sport
- was to confuse the identities of the mulatto girls. He would rifle the wardrobe of some to
- disguise the others, so that they all ended up feeling different from themselves and like the
- ones they weren't. On a certain occasion, one of them found herself repeated in another with
- such exactness that she had an attack of tears. "I felt like I'd stepped out of the mirror," she
- said. But that night Maria Alejandrina Cervantes wouldn't let Santiago Nasar indulge
- himself for the last time in his tricks as a transformer, and she prevented it with such flimsy
- pretexts that the bad taste left by that memory changed his life. So we took the musicians
- with us for a round of serenades, and we continued the party on our own, while the Vicario
- twins were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him. It was he who got the idea, at almost four
- o'clock, to go up the widower Xius's hill and sing for the newly weds.
- Not only did we sing under the windows, but we set off rockets and fireworks in
- the gardens, yet we didn't perceive any sign of life inside the farmhouse. It didn't occur to
- us that there was no one there, especially because the new car was by the door with its top
- still folded down and with the satin ribbons and bouquets of wax orange blossoms they had
- hung on it during the festivities. My brother Luis Enrique, who played the guitar like a
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 40 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- professional at that time, improvised a song with matrimonial double meanings in honour of
- the newlyweds. Until then it hadn't rained; on the contrary, the moon was high in the sky
- and the air was clear, and at the bottom of the precipice you could see the trickle of light
- from the Saint Elmo's fire in the cemetery. On the other side you could make out the groves
- of blue banana trees in the moonlight, the sad swamps, and the phosphorescent line of the
- Caribbean on the horizon. Santiago Nasar pointed to an intermittent light at sea and told us
- that it was the soul in torment of a slave ship that had sunk with a cargo of blacks from
- Senegal across from the main harbour mouth at Cartagena de Indias. It wasn't possible to
- think that his conscience was bothering him, although at that time he didn't know that the
- ephemeral married life of Angela Vicario had come to an end two hours before. Bayardo
- San Roman had taken her to her parents' house on foot so that the noise of the motor
- wouldn't betray his misfortune in advance, and he was back there alone and with the lights
- out in the widower Xius's happy farmhouse.
- When we went down the hill my brother invited us to have some breakfast of fried
- fish at one of the lunch stands in the market, but Santiago Nasar was against it because he
- wanted to get an hour's sleep before the bishop arrived. He went along the riverbank with
- Cristo Bedoya, passing the poor people's eating places that were beginning to light up by
- the old harbour, and before turning the corner he waved good-bye. It was the last time we
- saw him.
- Cristo Bedoya, whom he had agreed to meet later on at the docks, took leave of
- him at the back door of his house. The dogs barked at him as usual when they heard him
- come in, but he calmed them down in the half light with the tinkling of his keys. Victoria
- Guzman was keeping watch over the coffeepot on the stove when he passed by the kitchen
- on his way into the house.
- "White man," she called to him, "coffee will be ready soon."
- Santiago Nasar told her that he'd have some later, and he asked her to tell Divina
- Flor to wake him up at five-thirty and bring him a clean change of clothes, just like the ones
- he had on. An instant after he'd gone to bed, Victoria Guzman got the message from
- Clotilde Armenta sent via the milk beggar. At five-thirty she followed his orders to wake
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 41 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- him, but she didn't send Divina Flor and went up to the bedroom herself with the suit of
- pure linen, because she never missed a chance to keep her daughter away from the claws of
- the seigneur.
- Maria Alejandrina Cervantes had left the door of her house unbarred. I took leave
- of my brother, crossed the veranda where the mulatto girls' cats were sleeping curled up
- among the tulips, and opened the bedroom door without knocking. The lights were out, but
- as soon as I went in I caught the smell of a warm woman and I saw the eyes of an
- insomniac leopard in the darkness, and then I didn't know anything else about myself until
- the bells began to ring.
- On his way to our house, my brother went in to buy some cigarettes at Clotilde
- Armenia's store. He'd drunk so much that his memories of that encounter were always quite
- confused, but he never forgot the fatal drink that Pedro Vicario offered him. "It was liquid
- fire," he told me. Pablo Vicario, who had fallen asleep, awoke with a start when he heard
- him come in, and he showed him the knife.
- "We're going to kill Santiago Nasar," he told him.
- My brother doesn't remember it. "But even if I did remember, I wouldn't have
- believed it," he told me many times. "Who the fuck would ever think that the twins would
- kill anyone, much less with a pig knife!" Then they asked him where Santiago Nasar was,
- because they'd seen the two of them together, and my brother didn't remember his own
- answer either. But Clotilde Armenta and the Vicario brothers were so startled when they
- heard it that it was left established in the brief in separate declarations. According to them,
- my brother said: "Santiago Nasar is dead." Then he delivered an episcopal blessing,
- stumbled over the threshold, and staggered out. In the middle of the square he crossed paths
- with Father Amador, who was going to the dock in his vestments, followed by an acolyte
- ringing the bell and several helpers carrying the altar for the bishop's field mass. The
- Vicario brothers crossed themselves when they saw them pass.
- Clotilde Armenta told me that they'd lost their last hopes when the priest passed by
- her place. "I thought he hadn't got my message," she said. Nonetheless, Father Amador
- confessed to me many years later, retired from the world in the gloomy Calafell Rest Home,
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 42 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- that he had in fact received Clotilde Armenta's message and others more peremptory while
- he was getting ready to go the docks. "The truth is I didn't know what to do," he told me.
- "My first thought was that it wasn't any business of mine but something for the civil
- authorities, but then I made up my mind to say something in passing to Plلcida Linero."
- Yet when he crossed the square, he'd forgotten completely. "You have to understand," he
- told me, "that the bishop was coming on that unfortunate day." At the moment of the crime
- he felt such despair and was so disgusted with himself that the only thing he could think of
- was to ring the fire alarm.
- My brother Luis Enrique entered the house through the kitchen door, which my
- mother left unlocked so my father wouldn't hear us come in. He went to the bathroom
- before going to bed, but he fell asleep sitting on the toilet, and when my brother Jaime got
- up to go to school he found him stretched out face down on the tile floor and singing in his
- sleep. My sister the nun, who wasn't going to wait for the bishop because she had an eightyproof
- hangover, couldn't get him to wake up. "It was striking five when I went to the
- bathroom," she told me. Later, when my sister Margot went in to bathe before going to the
- docks, she managed with great effort to drag him to his bedroom. From the other side of
- sleep he heard the first bellows of the bishop's boat without awakening. Then he fell into a
- deep sleep, worn out by his carousing, until my sister the nun rushed into the bedroom,
- trying to put her habit on as she ran, and woke him up with her mad cry: "They've killed
- Santiago Nasar!"
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 43 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- CHAPTER 4
- THE DAMAGE FROM THE KNIVES WAS only a beginning for the unforgiving autopsy
- that Father Carmen Amador found himself obliged to perform in Dr. Dionisio Iguaran's
- absence. "It was as if we killed him all over again after he was dead," the aged priest told
- me in his retirement at Calafell. "But it was an order from the mayor, and orders from the
- barbarian, stupid as they might have been, had to be obeyed." It wasn't entirely proper. In
- the confusion of that absurd Monday, Colonel Aponte had had an urgent telegraphic
- conversation with the governor of the province, and the latter authorised him to take the
- preliminary steps while he sent an investigating magistrate. The mayor was a former troop
- commander with no experience in matters of law, and he was too conceited to ask anyone
- who knew where he should begin. The first thing that bothered him was the autopsy. Cristo
- Bedoya, who was a medical student, managed to get out of it because of his intimate
- friendship with Santiago Nasar. The mayor thought that the body could be kept under
- refrigeration until Dr. Dionisio Iguarلn came back, but he couldn't find a human-sized
- freezer, and the only one in the market that would serve the purpose was out of order. The
- body had been exposed to public view in the centre of the living room, lying on a narrow
- iron cot while they were building a rich man's coffin for it. They'd brought in fans from the
- bedrooms and some neighbouring houses, but there were so many people anxious to see it
- that they had to push back the furniture and take down the bird cages and pots of ferns, and
- even then the heat was unbearable. In addition, the dogs, aroused by the smell of death,
- increased the uneasiness. They hadn't stopped howling since I went into the house, when
- Santiago Nasar was still in his death throes in the kitchen and I found Divina Flor weeping
- in great howls and holding them off with a stick.
- "Help me," she shouted to me. "What they want is to eat his guts."
- We locked them up in the stable. Plلcida Linero later ordered them taken to some
- place far off until after the funeral. But toward noon, no one knew how, they escaped from
- where they were and burst madly into the house. Plلcida Linero, just once, lost her grip.
- "Those shitty dogs!" she shouted. "Kill them!"
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 44 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- The order was carried out immediately and the house was silent again. Until then
- there hadn't been any concern at all for the state of the body. The face had remained intact,
- with the same expression it wore when he was singing, and Cristo Bedoya had put the
- intestines back in place and wrapped the body in linen strips. Nevertheless, in the afternoon
- a syrup-coloured liquid began to flow from the wounds, drawing flies, and a purple blotch
- appeared on the upper lip and spread out very slowly, like the shadow of a cloud on water,
- up to the hairline. His face, which had always been easy-going, took on a hostile
- expression, and his mother covered it with a handkerchief. Colonel Aponte understood then
- that they couldn't wait any longer and he ordered Father Amador to perform the autopsy. "It
- would be worse digging him up a week later," he said. The priest had studied medicine and
- surgery at Salamanca, but had entered the seminary before he was graduated, and even the
- mayor knew that his autopsy would have no legal standing. Nevertheless, he made him
- carry out the order.
- It was a massacre, performed at the public school with the help of the druggist,
- who took notes, and a first-year medical student who was here on vacation. They had only a
- few instruments for minor surgery available and the rest were craftsmen's tools. But despite
- the havoc wrought on the body, Father Amador's report seemed in order and the
- investigator incorporated it in the brief as a useful piece of evidence.
- Seven of the many wounds were fatal. The liver was almost sliced in pieces by two
- deep cuts on the anterior side. He had four incisions in the stomach, one of them so deep
- that it went completely through, and destroyed, the pancreas. He had six other, lesser
- perforations in the transverse colon and multiple wounds in the small intestine. The only
- one he had in the back, at the level of the third lumbar vertebra, had perforated the right
- kidney. The abdominal cavity was filled with large clots of blood, and in the midst of the
- morass of gastric contents appeared a medal of gold that Santiago Nasar had swallowed at
- the age of four. The thoracic cavity showed two perforations: one in the second right rib
- space that affected the lung, and another quite close to the left armpit. He also had six
- minor wounds on his arms and hands, and two horizontal cuts: one on the right thigh and
- the other in the abdominal muscles. He had a deep stab in the right hand. The report says:
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 45 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- "It looked like a stigma of the crucified Christ." The encephalic mass weighed sixty grams
- more than that of a normal Englishman, and Father Amador noted in the report that
- Santiago Nasar had a superior intelligence and a brilliant future. Nevertheless, in the final
- note he pointed out a hypertrophy of the liver that he attributed to a poorly cured case of
- hepatitis. "That is to say," he told me, "he had only a few years of life left to him in any
- case." Dr. Dionisio Iguarلn, who in fact had treated Santiago Nasar for hepatitis at the age
- of twelve, recalled that autopsy with indignation. "Only a priest could be so dumb," he told
- me. "There was never any way to make him understand that we tropical people have larger
- livers than greenhorn Galician Spaniards." The report concluded that the cause of death had
- been a massive haemorrhage brought on by any one of the seven major wounds.
- They gave us back a completely different body. Half of the cranium had been
- destroyed by the trepanation, and the lady-killer face that death had preserved ended up
- having lost its identity. Furthermore, the priest had pulled out the sliced-up intestines by the
- roots, but in the end he didn't know what to do with them, and he gave them an angry
- blessing and threw them into the garbage pail. The last onlookers ranged about the
- schoolhouse windows lost their curiosity, the helper fainted, and Colonel Lلzaro Aponte,
- who had seen and caused so many repressive massacres, became a vegetarian as well as a
- spiritualist. The empty shell, stuffed with rags and quicklime and sewed up crudely with
- coarse twine and baling needles, was on the point of falling apart when we put it into the
- new coffin with its silk quilt lining. "I thought it would last longer that way," Father
- Amador told me. Just the opposite happened, and we had to bury him hurriedly at dawn
- because he was in such bad shape that it was already unbearable in the house.
- A cloudy Tuesday was breaking through. I didn't have the courage to sleep at the
- end of that oppressive time, and I pushed on the door of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes's
- house in case she hadn't put up the bar. The gourd lamps were burning where they hung
- from the trees, and in the courtyard for dancing there were several wood fires with huge
- steaming pots where the mulatto girls were putting mourning dye onto their party clothes. I
- found Maria Alejandrina Cervantes awake as always at dawn, and completely naked as
- always when there weren't any strangers in the house. She was squatting like a Turkish
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 46 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- houri on her queenly bed across from a Babylonic platter of things to eat: veal cutlets, a
- boiled chicken, a pork loin, and a garnishing of plantains and vegetables that would have
- served five people. Disproportionate eating was always the only way she could ever mourn
- and I'd never seen her do it with such grief. I lay down by her side with my clothes on,
- barely speaking, and mourning too in my way. I was thinking about the ferocity of Santiago
- Nasar's fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his
- death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination. I
- dreamed that a woman was coming into the room with a little girl in her arms, and that the
- child was chewing without stopping to take a breath, and that half-chewed kernels of corn
- were falling into the woman's brassiere. The woman said to me: "She crunches like a nutty
- nuthatch, kind of sloppy, kind of slurpy." Suddenly I felt the anxious fingers that were
- undoing the buttons of my shirt, and I caught the dangerous smell of the beast of love lying
- by my back, and I felt myself sinking into the delights of the quicksand of her tenderness.
- But suddenly she stopped, coughed from far off, and slipped out of my life.
- "I can't," she said. "You smell of him." Not just I. Everything continued smelling
- of Santiago Nasar that day. The Vicario brothers could smell him in the jail cell where the
- mayor had locked them up until he could think of something to do with them. "No matter
- how much I scrubbed with soap and rags, I couldn't get rid of the smell," Pedro Vicario told
- me. They'd gone three nights without sleep, but they couldn't rest because as soon as they
- began to fall asleep they would commit the crime all over again. Now, almost an old man,
- trying to explain to me his condition on that endless day, Pablo Vicario told me without any
- effort: "It was like being awake twice over." That phrase made me think that what must
- have been most unbearable for them in jail was their lucidity.
- The room was ten feet square, and had a very high skylight with iron bars, a
- portable latrine, a washstand with its pitcher and basin, and two makeshift beds with straw
- mats. Colonel Aponte, under whose orders it had been built, said that no hotel existed that
- was more humane. My brother Luis Enrique agreed, because one night they'd locked him
- up after a fight among musicians, and the mayor allowed him the charity of having one of
- the mulatto girls stay with him. Perhaps the Vicario brothers could have thought the same
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 47 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- thing at eight o'clock in the morning, when they felt themselves safe from the Arabs. At that
- moment they were comforted by the honour of having done their duty, and the only thing
- that worried them was the persistence of the smell. They asked for lots of water, laundry
- soap, and rags, and they washed the blood from their arms and faces, and they also washed
- their shirts, but they couldn't get any rest. Pedro Vicario asked for his laxatives and
- diuretics and a roll of sterile gauze so he could change his bandage, and he succeeded in
- having two urinations during the morning. Nevertheless, life was becoming so difficult for
- him as the day advanced that the smell took second place. At two in the afternoon, when the
- heaviness of the heat should have melted them, Pedro Vicario couldn't stay there lying on
- the bed, but the same weariness prevented him from standing. The pain in his groin had
- reached his throat, his urine was shut off, and he suffered the frightful certainty that he
- wouldn't sleep ever again for the rest of his life. "I was awake for eleven months," he told
- me, and I knew him well enough to know that it was true. He couldn't eat any lunch. Pablo
- Vicario, for his part, ate a little bit of everything they brought him, and fifteen minutes later
- unloosed a pestilential diarrhoea. At six in the afternoon, while they were performing the
- autopsy on Santiago Nasar's corpse, the mayor was summoned urgently because Pedro
- Vicario was convinced that his brother had been poisoned. "He was turning into water right
- in front of me," Pedro Vicario told me, "and we couldn't get rid of the idea that it was some
- trick of the Turks." Up till then he'd overflowed the portable latrine twice and the guard on
- watch had taken him to the town hall washroom another six times. There Colonel Aponte
- found him, in the doorless toilet boxed in by the guard, and pouring out water so fluently
- that it wasn't too absurd to think about poison. But they put the idea aside immediately
- when it was established that he had only drunk the water and eaten the food sent by Pura
- Vicario. Nonetheless, the mayor was so impressed that he had the prisoners taken to his
- house under a special guard until the investigating judge came and transferred them to the
- panoptic prison in Riohacha.
- The twins' fear was in response to the mood in the streets. Revenge by the Arabs
- wasn't dismissed, but no one, except the Vicario brothers, had thought of poison. It was
- supposed, rather, that they would wait for nightfall in order to pour gasoline through the
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 48 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- skylight and burn up the prisoners in their cell. But even that was too easy a supposition.
- The Arabs comprised a community of peaceful immigrants who had settled at the beginning
- of the century in Caribbean towns, even in the poorest and most remote, and there they
- remained, selling coloured cloth and bazaar trinkets. They were clannish, hardworking, and
- Catholic. They married among themselves, imported their wheat, raised lambs in their
- yards, and grew oregano and eggplants, and playing cards was their only driving passion.
- The older ones continued speaking the rustic Arabic they had brought from their homeland,
- and they maintained it intact in the family down to the second generation, but those of the
- third, with the exception of Santiago Nasar, listened to their parents in Arabic and answered
- them in Spanish. So it was inconceivable that they would suddenly abandon their pastoral
- spirit to avenge a death for which we all could have been to blame. On the other hand, no
- one thought about reprisals from Plلcida Linero's family, who had been powerful and
- fighting people until their fortune ran out, and had bred more than two barroom killers who
- had been preserved by the salt of their name.
- Colonel Aponte, worried by the rumours, visited the Arabs family by family and
- that time, at least, drew a correct conclusion. He found them perplexed and sad, with signs
- of mourning on their altars, and some of them sitting on the ground and wailing, but none
- harboured ideas of vengeance. The reaction that morning had grown out of the heat of the
- crime, and even the very leaders admitted that in no case would it have gone beyond a
- beating. Furthermore, it was Susana Abdala, the centenarian matriarch, who recommended
- the prodigious infusion of passion flowers and absinthe that dried up Pablo Vicario's
- diarrhoea and unleashed at the same time his brother's florid flow. Pedro Vicario then fell
- into an insomniac drowsiness and his recovered brother earned his first sleep without
- remorse. That was how Pure sima Vicario found them at three o'clock in the morning on
- Tuesday when the mayor brought her to say good-bye to them. The whole family left, even
- the older sisters with their husbands, on Colonel Aponte's initiative. They left without
- anyone's noticing, sheltered by public exhaustion, while the only survivors of that
- irreparable day among us who were awake were burying Santiago Nasar. They were
- leaving until spirits cooled off, according to the mayor's decision, but they never came
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 49 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- back. Pura Vicario wrapped the face of the rejected daughter in a cloth so that no one would
- see the bruises, and she dressed her in bright red so nobody might think she was mourning
- her secret lover. Before leaving she asked Father Amador to confess her sons in jail, but
- Pedro Vicario refused, and convinced his brother that they had nothing to repent. They
- remained alone, and on the day of their transfer to Riohacha they had so far recovered and
- were so convinced that they were right that they didn't want to be taken out by night, as had
- happened with the family, but in broad daylight and with their faces showing. Poncio
- Vicario, the father, died a short time later. "His moral pain carried him off," Angela Vicario
- told me. When the twins were absolved, they remained in Riohacha, only a day's trip from
- Manaure, where the family was living. Prudencia Cotes went there to marry Pablo Vicario,
- who learned to work with precious metals in his father's shop and came to be an elegant
- goldsmith. Pedro Vicario, without love or a job, re-enlisted in the armed forces three years
- later, earned his first sergeant's stripes, and one fine morning his patrol went into guerrilla
- territory singing whorehouse songs and was never heard of again.
- For the immense majority of people there was only one victim: Bayardo San
- Roman. They took it for granted that the other actors in the tragedy had been fulfilling with
- dignity, and even with a certain grandeur, their part of the destiny that life had assigned
- them. Santiago Nasar had expiated the insult, the brothers Vicario had proved their status as
- men, and the seduced sister was in possession of her honour once more. The only one who
- had lost everything was Bayardo San Roman: "poor Bayardo," as he was remembered over
- the years. Still, no one had thought of him until after the eclipse of the moon the following
- Saturday, when the widower Xius told the mayor that he'd seen a phosphorescent bird
- fluttering over his former home, and he thought it was the soul of his wife, who was going
- about demanding what was hers. The mayor slapped his brow, but it had nothing to do with
- the widower's vision.
- "Shit!" he shouted. "I'd completely forgotten about that poor man!"
- He went up the hill with a patrol and found the car with its top down in front of the
- farmhouse, and he saw a solitary light in the bedroom, but no one answered his knocks. So
- they broke down a side door and searched the rooms, which were lighted by the traces of
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 50 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- the eclipse. "Things looked like they were under water," the mayor told me. Bayardo San
- Roman was unconscious on the bed, still the way Pura Vicario had seen him early Tuesday
- morning, wearing his dress pants and silk shirt, but with his shoes off. There were empty
- bottles on the floor and many more unopened beside the bed, but not a trace of food. "He
- was in the last stages of ethylic intoxication," I was told by Dr. Dionisio Iguarلn, who had
- given him emergency treatment. But he recovered in a few hours, and as soon as his mind
- had cleared, he threw them out of the house with the best manners he was capable of.
- "Nobody fucks with me," he said. "Not even my father with his war veteran's
- balls."
- The mayor informed General Petronio San Roman of the episode, down to the last
- literal phrase, in an alarming telegram. General San Roman must have followed his son's
- wishes to the letter, because he didn't come for him, but sent his wife with their daughters
- and two other older women who seemed to be her sisters. They came on a cargo boat,
- locked in mourning up to their necks because of Bayardo San Roman's misfortunes, and
- with their hair hanging loose in grief. Before stepping onto land, they took off their shoes
- and went barefoot through the streets up to the hilltop in the burning dust of noon, pulling
- out strands of hair by the roots and wailing loudly with such high-pitched shrieks that they
- seemed to be shouts of joy. I watched them pass from Magdalena Oliver's balcony, and I
- remember thinking that distress like theirs could only be put on in order to hide other,
- greater shames.
- Colonel Lلzaro Aponte accompanied them to the house on the hill, and then Dr.
- Dionisio Iguarلn went up on the mule he kept for emergencies. When the sun let up, two
- men from the town government brought Bayardo San Roman down in a hammock hanging
- from a pole, wrapped up to his neck in a blanket and with a retinue of wailing women.
- Magdalena Oliver thought he was dead.
- "Collons de déu!" she exclaimed. "What a waste!"
- He was laid out by alcohol again, but it was hard to believe they were carrying a
- living person, because his right arm was dragging on the ground, and as soon as his mother
- put it back inside the hammock it would fall out again, so that he left a trail on the ground
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 51 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- from the edge of the precipice to the deck of the boat. That was all that we had left of him:
- the memory of a victim.
- They left the farmhouse the way it was. My brothers and I would go up to explore
- it on carousing nights when we were home on vacation, and each time we found fewer
- things of value in the abandoned rooms. Once we rescued the small valise that Angela
- Vicario had asked her mother for on her wedding night, but we didn't pay any great
- attention to it. What we discovered inside seemed to be a woman's natural items for hygiene
- and beauty, and I only learned their real use when Angela Vicario told me many years later
- which things were the old wives' artifices she had been instructed in so as to deceive her
- husband. It was the only trace she'd left in what had been her home as a married woman for
- five hours.
- Years later when I came back to search out the last pieces of testimony for this
- chronicle, not even the embers of Yolanda Xius's happiness remained. Things had been
- disappearing little by little, despite Colonel Lلzaro Aponte's determined vigilance, even the
- full-length closet with six mirrors that the master craftsmen of Mom-pox had had to
- assemble inside the house because it wouldn't fit through the door. At first the widower
- Xius was overjoyed, thinking that all those were the posthumous recourses of his wife in
- carrying off what was hers. Colonel Lلzaro Aponte made fun of him. But one night it
- occurred to him to hold a spiritualist seance in order to clear up the mystery, and the soul of
- Yolanda Xius confirmed in her own handwriting that it was in fact she who was recovering
- the knick-knacks of her happiness for her house of death. The house began to crumble. The
- wedding car was falling apart by the door, and finally nothing remained except its weatherrotted
- carcass. For many years nothing was heard again of its owner. There is a declaration
- by him in the brief, but it is so short and conventional that it seems to have been put
- together at the last minute in order to comply with an unavoidable requirement. The only
- time I tried to talk to him, twenty-three years later, he received me with a certain
- aggressiveness and refused to supply even the most insignificant fact that might clarify a
- little his participation in the drama. In any case, not even his family knew much more about
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 52 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- him than we did, nor did they have the slightest idea of what he had come to do in a mislaid
- town, with no other apparent aim than to marry a woman he had never seen."
- Of Angela Vicario, on the other hand, I was always receiving periodic news that
- inspired an idealised image in me. My sister the nun had been going about the upper
- Guajira for some time trying to convert the last idolaters, and she was in the habit of
- stopping and chatting with Angela in the village baked by Caribbean salt where her mother
- had tried to bury her alive. "Regards from your cousin," she would always tell me. My
- sister Margot, who also visited her during the first years, told me she had bought a solid
- house with a large courtyard with cross ventilation, the only problem being that on nights of
- high tide the toilets would back up and fish would appear flopping about in the bedrooms at
- dawn. Everyone who saw her during that time agreed that she was absorbed and skilled at
- her embroidery machine, and that by her industry she had managed to forget.
- Much later, during an uncertain period when I was trying to understand something
- of myself by selling encyclopaedias and medical books in the towns of Guajira, by chance I
- got as far as that Indian death village. At the window of a house that faced the sea,
- embroidering by machine during the hottest hour of the day, was a woman half in
- mourning, with steel-rimmed glasses and yellowish grey hair, and hanging above her head
- was a cage with a canary that didn't stop singing. When I saw her like that in the idyllic
- frame of the window, I refused to believe that the woman there was who I thought it was,
- because I couldn't bring myself to admit that life might end up resembling bad literature so
- much. But it was she: Angela Vicario, twenty-three years after the drama.
- She treated me the same as always, like a distant cousin, and answered my
- questions with very good judgment and a sense of humour. She was so mature and witty
- that it was difficult to believe that she was the same person. What surprised me most was
- the way in which she'd ended up understanding her own life. After a few minutes she no
- longer seemed as aged to me as at first sight, but almost as young as in my memory, and
- she had nothing in common with the person who'd been obliged to marry without love at
- the age of twenty. Her mother, in her grouchy old age, received me like a difficult ghost.
- She refused to talk about the past, and for this chronicle I had to be satisfied with a few
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 53 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- disconnected phrases from her conversations with my mother, and a few others rescued
- from my memories. She had gone beyond what was possible to make Angela Vicario die in
- life, but the daughter herself had brought her plans to naught because she never made any
- mystery out of her misfortune. On the contrary, she would recount it in all its details to
- anyone who wanted to hear it, except for one item that would never be cleared up: who was
- the real cause of her damage, and how and why, because no one believed that it had really
- been Santiago Nasar. They belonged to two completely different worlds. No one had ever
- seen them together, much less alone together. Santiago Nasar was too haughty to have
- noticed her: "Your cousin the booby," he would say to me when he had to mention her.
- Besides, as we said at that time, he was a sparrow hawk. He went about alone, just like his
- father, nipping the bud of any wayward virgin who began showing up in those woods, but
- in town no other relationship ever came to be known except for the conventional one he
- maintained with Flora Miguel, and the stormy one with Maria Alejandrina Cervantes,
- which drove him crazy for fourteen months. The most current version, perhaps because it
- was the most perverse, was that Angela Vicario was protecting someone who really loved
- her and she had chosen Santiago Nasar's name because she thought her brothers would
- never dare go up against him. I tried to get that truth out of her myself when I visited her
- the second time, with all my arguments in order, but she barely lifted her eyes from the
- embroidery to knock them down. "Don't beat it to death, cousin," she told me. "He was the
- one."
- Everything else she told without reticence, even the disaster of her wedding night.
- She recounted how her friends had instructed her to get her husband drunk in bed until he
- passed out, to feign more embarrassment than she really felt so he'd turn out the light, to
- give herself a drastic douche of alum water to fake virginity, and to stain the sheet with
- Mercurochrome so she could display it the following day in her bridal courtyard. Her
- bawds hadn't counted on two things: Bayardo San Roman's exceptional resistance as a
- drinker, and the pure decency that Angela Vicario carried hidden inside the stolidity her
- mother had imposed. "I didn't do any of what they told me," she said, "because the more I
- thought about it, the more I realised that it was all something dirty that shouldn't be done to
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 54 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- anybody, much less to the poor man who had the bad luck to marry me." So she let herself
- get undressed openly in the lighted bedroom, safe now from all the acquired fears that had
- ruined her life. "It was very easy," she told me, "because I'd made up my mind to die."
- The truth is that she spoke about her misfortune without any shame in order to
- cover up the other misfortune, the real one, that was burning in her insides. No one would
- even have suspected until she decided to tell me that Bayardo San Roman had been in her
- life forever from the moment he'd brought her back home. It was a coup de grace.
- "Suddenly, when Mama began to hit me, I began to remember him," she told me. The
- blows hurt less because she knew they were for him. She went on thinking about him with a
- certain surprise at herself while she was lying on the dining room couch sobbing. "I wasn't
- crying because of the blows or anything that had happened," she told me. "I was crying
- because of him." She kept on thinking about him while her mother put arnica compresses
- on her face, and even more when she heard the shouting in the street and the fire alarm bells
- in the belfry, and her mother came in to tell her she could sleep now because the worst was
- over.
- She'd been thinking about him for a long time, without any illusions, when she had
- to go with her mother to get her eyes examined in the hospital at Riohacha. They stopped
- off on the way at the Hotel del Puerto, whose owner they knew, and Pura Vicario asked for
- a glass of water at the bar. She was drinking it with her back to her daughter when the latter
- saw her own thoughts reflected in the mirrors repeated around the room. Angela Vicario
- turned her head with a last breath and watched him pass by without seeing her and saw him
- go out of the hotel. Then she looked at her mother with her heart in shreds. Pura Vicario
- had finished drinking, dried her lips on her sleeve, and smiled at her from the bar with her
- new glasses. In that smile, for the first time since her birth, Angela Vicario saw her as she
- was: a poor woman devoted to the cult of her defects. "Shit," she said to herself. She was so
- upset that she spent the whole trip back home singing aloud, and she threw herself on her
- bed to weep for three days.
- She was reborn. "I went crazy over him," she told me, "out of my mind." She only
- had to close her eyes to see him, she heard him breathing in the sea, the blaze of his body in
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 55 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- bed would awaken her at midnight. Toward the end of that week, unable to get a moment's
- rest, she wrote him the first letter. It was a conventional missive, in which she told him that
- she'd seen him come out of the hotel, and that she would have liked it if he had seen her.
- She waited in vain for a reply. At the end of two months, tired of waiting, she sent him
- another letter in the same oblique style as the previous one, whose only aim seemed to be to
- reproach him for his lack of courtesy. Six months later she had written six letters with no
- reply, but she comforted herself with the certainty that he was getting them.
- Mistress of her fate for the first time, Angela Vicario then discovered that hate and
- love are reciprocal passions. The more letters she sent the more the coals of her fever
- burned, but the happy rancour she felt for her mother also heated up. "Just seeing her would
- turn my stomach," she told me, "but I couldn't see her without remembering him." Her life
- as a rejected wife continued on, simple as that of an old maid, still doing machine
- embroidery with her friends just as before she had made cloth tulips and paper birds, but
- when her mother went to bed she would stay in the room until dawn writing letters with no
- future. She became lucid, overbearing, mistress of her own free will, and she became a
- virgin again just for him, and she recognised no other authority than her own nor any other
- service than that of her obsession.
- She wrote a weekly letter for over half a lifetime. "Sometimes I couldn't think of
- what to say," she told me, dying with laughter, "but it was enough for me to know that he
- was getting them." At first they were a fiancee's notes, then they were little messages from
- a secret lover, perfumed cards from a furtive sweetheart, business papers, love documents,
- and lastly they were the indignant letters of an abandoned wife who invented cruel illnesses
- to make him return. One night, in a good mood, she spilled the inkwell over the finished
- letter and instead of tearing it up she added a postscript: "As proof of my love I send you
- my tears." On occasion, tired of weeping, she would make fun of her own madness. Six
- times the post-mistresses were changed and six times she wore their complicity. The only
- thing that didn't occur to her was to give up. Nevertheless, he seemed insensible to her
- delirium; it was like writing to nobody.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 56 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- Early one windy morning in the tenth year, she was awakened by the certainty that
- he was naked in her bed. Then she wrote him a feverish letter, twenty pages long, in which
- without shame she let out the bitter truths that she had carried rotting in her heart ever since
- that ill-fated night. She spoke to him of the eternal scars he had left on her body, the salt of
- his tongue, the fiery furrow of his African tool. On Friday she gave it to the postmistress
- who came Friday afternoons to embroider with her and pick up the letters, and she was
- convinced that that final alleviation would be the end of her agony. But there was no reply.
- From then on she was no longer conscious of what she wrote nor to whom she was really
- writing, but she kept on without quarter for seventeen years.
- Halfway through one August day, while she was embroidering with her friends,
- she heard someone coming to the door. She didn't have to look to see who it was. "He was
- fat and was beginning to lose his hair, and he already needed glasses to see things close by,"
- she told me. "But it was him, God damn it, it was him!" She was frightened because she
- knew he was seeing her just as diminished as she saw him, and she didn't think he had as
- much love inside as she to bear up under it. His shirt was soaked in sweat, as she had seen
- him the first time at the fair, and he was wearing the same belt, and carrying the same
- unstitched leather saddlebags with silver decorations. Bayardo San Roman took a step
- forward, unconcerned about the other astonished embroiderers, and laid his saddlebags on
- the sewing machine.
- "Well," he said, "here I am."
- He was carrying a suitcase with clothing in order to stay and another just like it
- with almost two thousand letters that she had written him. They were arranged by date in
- bundles tied with coloured ribbons, and they were all unopened.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 57 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- CHAPTER 5
- FOR YEARS WE COULDN'T TALK ABOUT anything else. Our daily conduct,
- dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single
- common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of
- many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren't
- doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living
- without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.
- Many never got to know. Cristo Bedoya, who went on to become a surgeon of
- renown, never managed to explain to himself why he gave in to the impulse to spend two
- hours at his grandparents' house until the bishop came instead of going to rest at his
- parents', who had been waiting for him since dawn to warn him.
- But most of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and did not
- consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honour are sacred monopolies, giving
- access only to those who are part of the drama. "Honour is love," I heard my mother say.
- Hortensia Baute, whose only participation was having seen two bloody knives that weren't
- bloody yet, felt so affected by the hallucination that she fell into a penitential crisis, and one
- day, unable to stand it any longer, she ran out naked into the street. Flora Miguel, Santiago
- Nasar's fiancee, ran away out of spite with a lieutenant of the border patrol, who prostituted
- her among the rubber workers on the Vichada. Aura Villeros, the midwife who had helped
- bring three generations into the world, suffered a spasm of the bladder when she heard the
- news and to the day of her death had to use a catheter in order to urinate. Don Rogelio de la
- Flor, Clotilde Armenta's good husband, who was a marvel of vitality at the age of eightysix,
- got up for the last time to see how they had hewn Santiago Nasar to bits against the
- locked door of his own house, and he didn't survive the shock. Plلcida Linero had locked
- that door at the last moment, but with the passage of time she freed herself from blame. "I
- locked it because Divina Flor had sworn to me that she'd seen my son come in," she told
- me, "and it wasn't true." On the other hand, she never forgave herself for having mixed up
- the magnificent augury of trees with the unlucky one of birds, and she succumbed to the
- pernicious habit of her time of chewing pepper cress seeds.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 58 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- Twelve days after the crime, the investigating magistrate came upon a town that
- was an open wound. In the squalid wooden office in the town hall, drinking pot coffee laced
- with cane liquor against the mirages of the heat, he had to ask for troop reinforcements to
- control the crowd that was pouring in to testify without having been summoned, everyone
- eager to show off his own important role in the drama. The magistrate was newly graduated
- and still wore his black linen law school suit and the gold ring with the emblem of his
- degree, and he had the airs and the lyricism of a happy new parent. But I never discovered
- his name. Everything we know about his character has been learned from the brief, which
- several people helped me look for twenty years later in the Palace of Justice in Riohacha.
- There was no classification of files whatever, and more than a century of cases were piled
- up on the floor of the decrepit colonial building that had been Sir Francis Drake's
- headquarters for two days. The ground floor would be flooded by high tides and the
- unbound volumes floated about the deserted offices. I searched many times with the water
- up to my ankles in that lagoon of lost causes, and after five years rummaging around only
- chance let me rescue some 322 pages filched from the more than 500 that the brief must
- have contained.
- The judge's name didn't appear on any of them, but it was obvious that he was a
- man burning with the fever of literature. He had doubtless read the Spanish classics and a
- few Latin ones, and he was quite familiar with Nietzsche, who was the fashionable author
- among magistrates of his time. The marginal notes, and not just because of the colour of the
- ink, seemed to be written in blood. He was so perplexed by the enigma that fate had
- touched him with, that he kept falling into lyrical distractions that ran contrary to the rigour
- of his profession. Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so
- many coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammelled fulfilment
- of a death so clearly foretold.
- Nevertheless, what had alarmed him most at the conclusion of his excessive
- diligence was not having found a single clue, not even the most improbable, that Santiago
- Nasar had been the cause of the wrong. The friends of Angela Vicario who had been her
- accomplices in the deception went on saying for a long time that she had shared her secret
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 59 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- with them before the wedding, but that she hadn't revealed any name. In the brief, they
- declared: "She told us about the miracle but not the saint." Angela Vicario, for her part,
- wouldn't budge. When the investigating magistrate asked her with his oblique style if she
- knew who the decedent Santiago Nasar was, she answered him impassively: "He was my
- perpetrator."
- That's the way she swears in the brief, but with no further precision of either how
- or where. During the trial, which lasted only three days, the representative of the people put
- his greatest effort into the weakness of that charge. Such was the perplexity of the
- investigating magistrate over the lack of proof against Santiago Nasar that his good work at
- times seemed ruined by disillusionment. On folio 416, in his own handwriting and with the
- druggist's red ink, he wrote a marginal note: Give me a prejudice and I will move the world.
- Under that paraphrase of discouragement, in a merry sketch with the same blood ink, he
- drew a heart pierced by an arrow. For him, just as for Santiago Nasar's closest friends, the
- victim's very behaviour during his last hours was overwhelming proof of his innocence.
- On the morning of his death, in fact, Santiago Nasar hadn't had a moment of doubt,
- in spite of the fact that he knew very well what the price of the insult imputed to him was.
- He was aware of the prudish disposition of his world, and he must have understood that the
- twins' simple nature was incapable of resisting an insult. No one knew Bayardo San Roman
- very well, but Santiago Nasar knew him well enough to know that underneath his worldly
- airs he was as subject as anyone else to his native prejudices. So the murdered man's refusal
- to worry could have been suicide. Besides, when he finally learned at the last moment that
- the Vicario brothers were waiting for him to kill him, his reaction was not one of panic, as
- has so often been said, but rather the bewilderment of innocence.
- My personal impression is that he died without understanding his death. After he'd
- promised my sister Margot that he would come and have breakfast at our house, Cristo
- Bedoya took him by the arm as they strolled along the dock and both seemed so
- unconcerned that they gave rise to false impressions. "They were both going along so
- contentedly," Merne Loiza told me, "that I gave thanks to God, because I thought the matter
- had been cleared up." Not everybody loved Santiago Nasar so much, of course. Polo
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 60 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- Carrillo, the owner of the electric plant, thought that his serenity wasn't innocence but
- cynicism.
- "He thought that his money made him untouchable," he told me. Fausta Lopez, his
- wife, commented: "Just like all Turks." Indalecio Pardo had just passed by Clotilde
- Armenta's store and the twins had told him that as soon as the bishop left, they were going
- to kill Santiago Nasar. Like so many others, he thought these were the usual fantasies of
- very early risers, but Clotilde Armenta made him see that it was true, and she asked him to
- get to Santiago Nasar and warn him.
- "Don't bother," Pedro Vicario told him. "No matter what, he's as good as dead
- already."
- It was too obvious a challenge: the twins knew the bonds between Indalecio Pardo
- and Santiago Nasar, and they must have thought that he was just the right person to stop the
- crime without bringing any shame on them. But Indalecio found Santiago Nasar being led
- by the arm by Cristo Bedoya among the groups that were leaving the docks, and he didn't
- dare warn him. "I lost my nerve," he told me. He gave each one a pat on the back and let
- them go their way. They scarcely noticed, because they were still taken up with the costs of
- the wedding.
- The people were breaking up and heading toward the square the same way they
- were. It was a thick crowd, but Scoldastica Cisneros thought she noticed that the two
- friends were walking in the centre of it without any difficulty, inside an empty circle,
- because everyone knew that Santiago Nasar was about to die and they didn't dare touch
- him. Cristo Bedoya also remembered a strange attitude toward them. "They were looking at
- us as if we had our faces painted," he told me. Also, Sara Noriega was opening her shoe
- store at the moment they passed and she was frightened at Santiago Nasar's paleness. But he
- calmed her down.
- "You can imagine, Missy Sara," he told her without stopping, "with this
- hangover!"
- Celeste Dangond was sitting in his pyjamas by the door of his house, mocking
- those who had gone to greet the bishop, and he invited Santiago Nasar to have some coffee.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 61 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- "It was in order to gain some time to think," he told me. But Santiago Nasar answered that
- he was in a hurry to change clothes to have breakfast with my sister. "I got all mixed up,"
- Celeste Dangond told me, "because it suddenly seemed to me that they couldn't be killing
- him if he was so sure of what he was going to do." Yamil Shaium was the only one who did
- what he had proposed doing. As soon as he heard the rumour, he went out to the door of his
- dry goods store and waited for Santiago Nasar so he could warn him. He was one of the last
- Arabs who had come with Ibrahim Nasar, had been his partner in cards until his death, and
- was still the hereditary counsellor of the family. No one had as much authority as he to talk
- to Santiago Nasar. Nevertheless, he thought that if the rumour was baseless it would alarm
- him unnecessarily, and he preferred to consult first with Cristo Bedoya in case the latter
- was better informed. He called to him as he went by. Cristo Bedoya gave a pat on the back
- to Santiago Nasar, who was already at the corner of the square, and answered Yamil
- Shaium's call. "See you Saturday," he told him.
- Santiago Nasar didn't reply, but said something in Arabic to Yamil Shaium, and
- the latter answered him, also in Arabic, twisting with laughter. "It was a play on words we
- always had fun with," Yamil Shaium told me. Without stopping, Santiago Nasar waved
- good-bye to both of them and turned the corner of the square. It was the last time they saw
- him.
- Cristo Bedoya only took the time to grasp Yamil Shaium's information before he
- ran out of the store to catch Santiago Nasar. He'd seen him turn the corner, but he couldn't
- find him - among the groups that were beginning to break up on the square. Several people
- he asked gave him the same answer.
- "I just saw him with you."
- It seemed impossible that he could have reached home in such a short time, but
- just in case, he went in to ask about him since he found the front door unbarred and ajar. He
- went in without seeing the paper on the floor. He passed through the shadowy living room,
- trying not to make any noise, because it was still too early for visitors, but the dogs became
- aroused at the back of the house and came out to meet him. He calmed them down with his
- keys as he'd learned from their master, and went on toward the kitchen, with them
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 62 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- following. On the veranda he came upon Divina Flor, who was carrying a pail of water and
- a rag to clean the floor in the living room. She assured him that Santiago Nasar hadn't
- returned. Victoria Guzman had just put the rabbit stew on the stove when he entered the
- kitchen. She understood immediately. "His heart was in his mouth," she told me. Cristo
- Bedoya asked her if Santiago Nasar was home, and she answered him with feigned
- innocence that he still hadn't come in to go to sleep, "It's serious," Cristo Bedoya told her.
- "They're looking for him to kill him."
- Victoria Guzman forgot her innocence.
- "Those poor boys won't kill anybody," she said.
- "They've been drinking since Saturday," Cristo Bedoya said.
- "That's just it," she replied. "There's no drunk in the world who'll eat his own crap."
- Cristo Bedoya went back to the living room, where Divina Flor had just opened
- the windows. "Of course it wasn't raining," Cristo Bedoya told me. "It was just going on
- seven and a golden sun was already coming through the windows." He asked Divina Flor
- again if she was sure that Santiago Nasar hadn't come in through the living room door. She
- wasn't as sure then as the first time. He asked her about Plلcida Linero, and she answered
- that just a moment before she'd put her coffee on the night table, but she hadn't awakened
- her. That's the way it always was: Plلcida Linero would wake up at seven, have her coffee,
- and come down to give instructions for lunch. Cristo Bedoya looked at the clock: it was six
- fifty-six. Then he climbed up to the second floor to make sure that Santiago Nasar hadn't
- come in.
- The bedroom was locked from the inside, because Santiago Nasar had gone out
- through his mother's bedroom. Cristo Bedoya not only knew the house as well as his own,
- but was so much at home with the family that he pushed open the door to Plلcida Linero's
- bedroom and went from there into the adjoining one. A beam of dusty light was coming in
- through the skylight, and the beautiful woman asleep on her side in the hammock, her
- bride's hand on her cheek, had an unreal look. "It was like an apparition," Cristo Bedoya
- told me. He looked at her for an instant, fascinated by her beauty, and then he crossed the
- room in silence, passed by the bathroom, and proceeded into Santiago Nasar's bedroom.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 63 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- The bed was still made, and on the chair, well-pressed, were his riding clothes, and on top
- of the clothes his horseman's hat, and on the floor his boots beside their spurs. On the night
- table, Santiago Nasar's wristwatch said six fifty-eight. "Suddenly I thought that he'd come
- back so that he could go out armed," Cristo Bedoya told me. But he found the Magnum in
- the drawer of the night table. "I'd never shot a gun," Cristo Bedoya told me, "but I decided
- to take the revolver and bring it to Santiago Nasar." He stuck it in his belt, under his shirt,
- and only after the crime did he realise that it was unloaded. Plلcida Linero appeared in the
- doorway with her mug of coffee just as he was closing the drawer.
- "Good heavens!" she exclaimed. "You gave me a start!"
- Cristo Bedoya was also startled. He saw her in the full light, wearing a dressing
- gown with golden larks, her hair loose, and the charm had vanished. He explained,
- somewhat confused, that he was looking for Santiago Nasar.
- "He went to receive the bishop," Plلcida Linero said.
- "The bishop went right through," he said.
- "I thought so," she said. "He's the son of the worst kind of mother."
- She didn't go on because at that moment she realised that Cristo Bedoya didn't
- know what to do with his body. "I hope that God has forgiven me," Plلcida Linero told me,
- "but he seemed so confused that it suddenly occurred to me that he'd come to rob us." She
- asked him what was wrong. Cristo Bedoya was aware that he was in a suspicious situation,
- but he didn't have the courage to reveal the truth.
- "It's just that I haven't had a minute's sleep," he told her.
- He left without any further explanations. "In any case," he told me, "she was
- always imagining that she was being robbed." In the square he ran into Father Amador, who
- was returning to the church with the vestments for the frustrated mass, but he didn't think he
- could do anything for Santiago Nasar except save his soul. He was heading toward the
- docks again when he heard them calling him from the door of Clotilde Armenta's store.
- Pedro Vicario was in the doorway, pale and haggard, his shirt open and his sleeves rolled
- up to the elbows, and with the naked knife in his hand. His manner was too insolent to be
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 64 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
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- natural, and yet it wasn't the only final or the most visible pose that he'd assumed in the last
- moments so they would stop him from committing the crime.
- "Cristobal," he shouted, "tell Santiago Nasar that we're waiting for him here to kill him."
- Cristo Bedoya could have done him the favour of stopping him. "If I'd known how
- to shoot a revolver, Santiago Nasar would be alive today," he told me. But the idea did
- impress him, after all he'd heard about the devastating power of an armour plated bullet.
- "I warn you. He's armed with a Magnum that can go through an engine block," he shouted.
- Pedro Vicario knew it wasn't true. "He never went armed except when he wore
- riding clothes," he told me. But in any case, he'd foreseen the possibility that he might be
- armed when he made the decision to wipe his sister's honour clean.
- "Dead men can't shoot," he shouted.
- Then Pablo Vicario appeared in the doorway. He was as pale as his brother and he
- was wearing his wedding jacket and carrying his knife wrapped in the newspaper. "If it
- hadn't been for that," Cristo Bedoya told me, "I never would have known which of the two
- was which." Clotilde Armenta then appeared behind Pablo Vicario and shouted to Cristo
- Bedoya to hurry up, because in that faggot town only a man like him could prevent the
- tragedy.
- Everything that happened after that is in the public domain. The people who were
- coming back from the docks, alerted by the shouts, began to take up positions around the
- square to witness the crime. Cristo Bedoya asked several people he knew if they'd seen
- Santiago Nasar, but no one had. At the door of the social club he ran into Colonel Lلzaro
- Aponte and he told him what had just happened in front of Clotilde Armenta's store.
- "It can't be," Colonel Aponte said, "because I told them to go home to bed."
- "I just saw them with pig-killing knives," Cristo Bedoya said.
- "It can't be, because I took them away from them before sending them home to
- bed," said the mayor. "It must be that you saw them before that."
- "I saw them two minutes ago and they both had pig-killing knives," Cristo Bedoya said.
- "Oh, shit," the mayor said. "Then they must have come back with two new ones."
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 65 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- He promised to take care of it at once, but he went into the social club to check on
- a date for dominoes that night, and when he came out again the crime had already been
- committed. Cristo Bedoya then made his only mortal mistake: he thought that Santiago
- Nasar had decided at the last moment to have breakfast at our house before changing his
- clothes, and he went to look for him there. He hurried along the riverbank, asking everyone
- he passed if they'd seen him go by, but no one said he had. He wasn't alarmed, because
- there were other ways to get to our house. Prَspera Arango, the uplander, begged him to do
- something for her father, who was in his death throes on the stoop of his house, immune to
- the bishop's fleeting blessing. "I'd seen him when I passed," my sister Margot told me, "and
- he already had the face of a dead man." Cristo Bedoya delayed four minutes to ascertain the
- sick man's condition, and promised to come back later for some emergency treatment, but
- he lost three minutes more helping Prَspera Arango carry him into the bedroom. When he
- came out again he heard distant shouts and it seemed to him that rockets were being fired in
- the direction of the square. He tried to run but was hindered by the revolver, which was
- clumsily stuck in his belt. As he turned the last corner he recognised my mother from the
- rear as she was practically dragging her youngest son along.
- "Luisa Santiaga," he shouted to her, "where's your godson?"
- My mother barely turned, her face bathed in tears.
- "Oh, my son," she answered, "they say he's been killed!"
- That's how it was. While Cristo Bedoya had been looking for him, Santiago Nasar
- had gone into the house of Flora Miguel, his fiancee, just around the corner from where he'd
- seen him for the last time. "It didn't occur to me that he could be there," he told me,
- "because those people never got up before noon." The version that went around was that the
- whole family slept until twelve o'clock on orders from Nahir Miguel, the wise man of the
- community. "That's why Flora Miguel, who wasn't that young anymore, was preserved like
- a rose," Mercedes says. The truth is that they kept the house locked up until very late, like
- so many others, but they were early-rising and hard-working people. The parents of
- Santiago Nasar and Flora Miguel had agreed that they should get married. Santiago Nasar
- accepted the engagement in the bloom of his adolescence, and he was determined to fulfill
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 66 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- it, perhaps because he had the same utilitarian concept of matrimony as his father. Flora
- Miguel, for her part, enjoyed a certain floral quality, but she lacked wit and judgment and
- had served as bridesmaid for her whole generation, so the agreement was a providential
- solution for her. They had an easy engagement, without formal visits or restless hearts. The
- wedding, postponed several times, was finally set for the following Christmas.
- Flora Miguel awoke that Monday with the first bellows of the bishop's boat, and
- shortly thereafter she found out that the Vicario twins were waiting for Santiago Nasar to
- kill him. She informed my sister the nun, the only one she spoke to after the misfortune,
- that she didn't even remember who'd told her. "I only know that at six o'clock in the
- morning everybody knew it," she told her. Nevertheless, it seemed inconceivable to her that
- they were going to kill Santiago Nasar, but on the other hand, it occurred to her that they
- would force him to marry Angela Vicario in order to give her back her honour. She went
- through a crisis of humiliation. While half the town was waiting for the bishop, she was in
- her bedroom weeping with rage, and putting in order the chestful of letters that Santiago
- Nasar had sent her from school.
- Whenever he passed by Flora Miguel's house, even if nobody was home, Santiago
- Nasar would scratch his keys across the window screens. That Monday she was waiting
- with the chest of letters in her lap. Santiago Nasar couldn't see her from the street, but she,
- however, saw him approaching through the screen before he scratched it with his keys.
- "Come in," she told him.
- No one, not even a doctor, had entered that house at six forty-five in the morning.
- Santiago Nasar had just left Cristo Bedoya at Yamil Shaium's store, and there were so many
- people hanging on his movements in the square that it was difficult to believe that no one
- saw him go into his fiancee's house. The investigating magistrate looked for a single person
- who'd seen him, and he did so with as much persistence as I, but it was impossible to find
- one. In folio 382 of the brief, he wrote another marginal pronouncement in red ink: Fatality
- makes us invisible. The fact is that Santiago Nasar went in through the main door, in full
- view of everyone, and without doing anything not to be seen. Flora Miguel was waiting for
- him in the parlour, green with rage, wearing one of the dresses with unfortunate ruffles that
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 67 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- she was in the habit of putting on for memorable occasions, and she placed the chest in his
- hands.
- "Here you are," she told him. "And I hope they kill you!"
- Santiago Nasar was so perplexed that he dropped the chest and his loveless letters
- poured out onto the floor. He tried to catch Flora Miguel in the bedroom, but she closed the
- door and threw the bolt. He knocked several times, and called her in too pressing a voice
- for the time of day, so the whole family came in, all alarmed. Counting relatives by blood
- and by marriage, adults and minors, there were more than fourteen of them. The last to
- come was Nahir Miguel, the father, with his red beard and the Bedouin caftan he had
- brought from his homeland and which he always wore at home. I saw him many times and
- he was immense and spare, but what most impressed me was the glow of his authority.
- "Flora," he called in his language. "Open the door."
- He went into his daughter's bedroom while the family stared at Santiago Nasar. He
- was kneeling in the parlour, picking up the letters and putting them into the chest. "It looked
- like a penance, " they told me. Nahir Miguel came out of the bedroom after a few minutes,
- made a signal with his hand, and the whole family disappeared.
- He continued talking in Arabic to Santiago Nasar. "From the first moment I
- understood that he didn't have the slightest idea of what I was saying," he told me. Then he
- asked him outright if he knew that the Vicario brothers were looking for him to kill him.
- "He turned pale and lost control in such a way that it was impossible to think that he was
- pretending," he told me. He agreed that his manner reflected not so much fear as confusion.
- "Only you can know if they're right or not," he told him. "But in any case, you've
- only got two paths to follow now: either you hide here, in this house which is yours, or you
- go out with my rifle."
- "I don't understand a God-damned thing," Santiago Nasar said.
- It was the only thing he managed to say, and he said it in Spanish. "He looked like
- a little wet bird," Nahir Miguel told me. He had to take the chest from his hands because he
- didn't know where to put it in order to open the door.
- "It'll be two against one," he told him.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 68 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- Santiago Nasar left. The people had stationed themselves on the square the way
- they did on parade days. They all saw him come out, and they all understood that now he
- knew they were going to kill him, and that he was so confused he couldn't find his way
- home. They say that someone shouted from a balcony: "Not that way, Turk; by the old
- dock." Santiago Nasar sought out the voice. Yamil Shaium shouted for him to get into his
- store and went to get his hunting gun, but he couldn't remember where he'd put the
- cartridges. They began to shout at him from every side, and Santiago Nasar went backward
- and forward several times, baffled by hearing so many voices at the same time. It was
- obvious that he was heading toward his house as if to enter through the kitchen door, but
- suddenly he must have realised that the main door was open.
- "There he comes," said Pedro Vicario.
- They'd both seen him at the same time. Pablo Vicario took off his jacket, put it on
- the bench, and unwrapped his knife, holding it like a scimitar. Before leaving the store,
- without any agreement, they both crossed themselves. Then Clotilde Armenta grabbed
- Pedro Vicario by the shirt and shouted to Santiago Nasar to run because they were going to
- kill him. It was such an urgent shout that it drowned out all the others. "At first he was
- startled," Clotilde Armenta told me, "because he didn't know who was shouting at him or
- from where." But when he saw her, he also saw Pedro Vicario, who threw her to the ground
- and caught up with his brother. Santiago Nasar was less than fifty yards from his house and
- he ran to the main door.
- Five minutes before, in the kitchen, Victoria Guzman had told Plلcida Linero what
- everybody already knew. Plلcida Linero was a woman of steady nerves, so she didn't let
- any sign of alarm show through. She asked Victoria Guzman if she'd said anything to her
- son, and she lied honestly, since she answered that she still hadn't known anything when he
- came down for coffee. In the living room, where she was still scrubbing the floor, Divina
- Flor at the same time saw Santiago Nasar come in through the door on the square and go up
- the open stairs to the bedrooms. "It was a very clear vision," Divina Flor told me. "He was
- wearing his white suit and carrying something that I couldn't make out well in his hand, but
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 69 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- it looked like a bouquet of roses." So when Plلcida Linero asked about him, Divina Flor
- calmed her down.
- "He went up to his room a minute ago," she told her.
- Plلcida Linero then saw the paper on the floor, but she didn't think to pick it up,
- and she only found out what it said when someone showed it to her later on during the
- confusion of the tragedy. Through the door she saw the Vicario brothers running toward the
- house with their knives out. From the place where she was standing she could see them but
- she couldn't see her son, who was running toward the door from a different angle. "I
- thought they wanted to get in to kill him inside the house," she told me. Then she ran to the
- door and slammed it shut. She was putting up the bar when she heard Santiago Nasar's
- shouts, and she heard the terrified pounding on the door, but she thought he was upstairs,
- insulting the Vicario brothers from the balcony in his room. She went up to help him.
- Santiago Nasar only needed a few seconds to get in when the door closed. He managed
- to pound with his fists several times, and he turned at once to face his enemies with his bare
- hands. "I was scared when I saw him face on," Pablo Vicario told me, "because he looked
- twice as big as he was." Santiago Nasar raised his hand to stop the first strike from Pedro
- Vicario, who attacked him on the right side with his knife pointed straight in.
- "Sons of bitches!" he shouted.
- The knife went through the palm of his right hand and then sank into his side up to
- the hilt. Everybody heard his cry of pain.
- "Oh, mother of mine!"
- Pedro Vicario pulled out his knife with his slaughterer's iron wrist and dealt him a
- second thrust almost in the same place. "The strange thing is that the knife kept coming out
- clean," Pedro Vicario declared to the investigator. "I'd given it to him at least three times
- and there wasn't a drop of blood." Santiago Nasar twisted after the third stab, his arms
- crossed over his stomach, let out the moan of a calf, and tried to turn his back to them.
- Pablo Vicario, who was on his left, then gave him the only stab in the back and a spurt of
- blood under high pressure soaked his shirt. "It smelled like him," he told me. Mortally
- wounded three times, Santiago Nasar turned frontward again and leaned his back against
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 70 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- his mother's door, without the slightest resistance, as if he only wanted to help them finish
- killing him by his own contribution. "He didn't cry out again," Pedro Vicario told the
- investigator. "Just the opposite: it looked to me as if he was laughing." Then they both kept
- on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling
- backwater they had found on the other side of fear. They didn't hear the shouts of the whole
- town, frightened by its own crime. "I felt the way you do when you're galloping on
- horseback," Pablo Vicario declared. But they both suddenly woke up to reality, because
- they were exhausted, and yet they thought that Santiago Nasar would never fall. "Shit,
- cousin," Pablo Vicario told me, "you can't imagine how hard it is to kill a man!" Trying to
- finish it once and for all, Pedro Vicario sought his heart, but he looked for it almost in the
- armpit, where pigs have it. Actually, Santiago Nasar wasn't falling because they themselves
- were holding him up with stabs against the door. Desperate, Pablo Vicario gave him a
- horizontal slash on the stomach, and all his intestines exploded out. Pedro Vicario was
- about to do the same, but his wrist twisted with horror and he gave him a wild cut on the
- thigh. Santiago Nasar was still for an instant, leaning against the door, until he saw his own
- viscera in the sunlight, clean and blue, and he fell on his knees.
- After looking and shouting for him in the bedroom, hearing other shouts that
- weren't hers and not knowing where they were coming from, Plلcida Linero went to the
- window facing the square and saw the Vicario twins running toward the church. Hot in
- pursuit was Yamil Shaium with his jaguar gun and some other unarmed Arabs, and Plلcida
- Linero thought the danger had passed. Then she went out onto the bedroom balcony and
- saw Santiago Nasar in front of the door, face down in the dust, trying to rise up out of his
- own blood. He stood up, leaning to one side, and started to walk in a state of hallucination,
- holding his hanging intestines in his hands.
- He walked more than a hundred yards, completely around the house, and went in
- through the kitchen door. He still had enough lucidity not to go along the street, it was the
- longest way, but by way of the house next door. Poncho Lanao, his wife, and their five
- children hadn't known what had just happened twenty paces from their door. "We heard the
- shouting," the wife told me, "but we thought it was part of the bishop's festival." They were
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold 71 Grabriel Garcia Marquez
- Dear Friends, this is a backup copy of the original works in my personal library. I had a bad luck in getting back the books
- I lend to my friends. I am trying to make the text in digital form to ensure that I am not going to loose any of them. As I
- have an original printed edition, its sure that the writer/publisher already got their share. As on my knowledge there is no
- legal issues in giving my library collections to my friends, those who loves to read. Kindly delete this file after reading and
- it would be taken as I got the book back.
- With Thanks and regards your friend Antony. mail me to antonyboban@gmail.com
- sitting down to breakfast when they saw Santiago Nasar enter, soaked in blood and carrying
- the roots of his entrails in his hands. Poncho Lanao told me: "What I'll never forget was the
- terrible smell of shit." But Argénida Lanao, the oldest daughter, said that Santiago Nasar
- walked with his usual good bearing, measuring his steps well, and that his Saracen face
- with its dashing ringlets was handsomer than ever. As he passed by the table he smiled at
- them and continued through the bedrooms to the rear door of the house. "We were
- paralysed with fright," Argénida Lanao told me. My aunt, Wenefrida Mلrquez, was scaling
- a shad in her yard on the other side of the river when she saw him go down the steps of the
- old dock, looking for his way home with a firm step.
- "Santiago, my son," she shouted to him, "what has happened to you?"
- "They've killed me, Wene child," he said.
- He stumbled on the last step, but he got up at once. "He even took care to brush off
- the dirt that was stuck to his guts," my Aunt Wene told me. Then he went into his house
- through the back door that had been open since six and fell on his face in the kitchen.
- The End
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