Chronicle of a Death Foretold

by Gabriel García Márquez

  “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 Román’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 continued talking in my house about the fact that my father had gone back to playing his boyhood violin in honor of the newlyweds, that my sister the nun had danced a merengue in her doorkeeper’s habit, and that Dr. Dionisio Iguarán, 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 Román’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 undesirable Sunday was that of old Poncio Vicario sitting alone on a stool in the center of the yard. They had placed him there thinking perhaps that it was the seat of honor, 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 answering fleeting waves of the hand that no one was making to him, happy in his circle of oblivion, his shirt cardboard-stiff with starch and holding the lignum vitae cane they had bought him for the party.

  The formal activities ended at six in the afternoon, when the guests of honor took their leave. The boat left with all its lights burning and with a wake of waltzes from the player piano, and for an instant we were cast adrift over an abyss of uncertainty, until we recognized each other again and plunged into the man-grove of the bash. The newlyweds appeared a short time later in the open car, making their way with difficulty through the tumult. Bayardo San Román 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 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 María Alejandrina Cervantes’ house of mercies. Among so many others, the Vicario brothers went 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 have still 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, but the messenger was in a hurry. She’d 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 Román in the glow of the street light, his silk shirt unbuttoned and his fancy pants held up by elastic suspenders. “He had that green color of dreams,” Pura Vicario told my mother. Angela Vicario was in the shadows, so she only saw her when Bayardo San Román grabbed her by the arm and 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 Román didn’t go in, but softly pushed his wife into the house without saying 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 a 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 off 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 into the air by the waist and sat her on the dining room table.

  “All right, girl,” he told 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.

  THE LAWYER STOOD by the thesis of homicide in legitimate defense of honor, which was upheld by the court of 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 defense 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 honor.”

  Furthermore, with the reconstruction of the facts, they had feigned a much more inclement bloodthirstiness than really was true, to such an extreme that it was necessary to use public funds to repair the main door of Plácida 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, the reality seemed to be that the Vicario brothers had done nothing right in line with killing Santiago Nasar right off and without any public spectacle, but had done much more than could be imagined for someone to stop them from killing him, and they failed.

  According to what they told
me years later, they had begun by looking for him at María Alejandrina Cervantes’ 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 to do a round of serenades, but in any case, it wasn’t certain that they’d gone. “They never would have left here,” María Alejandrina Cervantes told me, and knowing her so well, I never doubted it. On the other hand, they went to wait for him at Clotilde Armenta’s place, where they knew that almost everybody would stop 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 Plácida 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 they had said it was for someone to hear them. Faustino Santos, a butcher friend, saw them come in 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 come 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.”

  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 about the splendor of the wedding with the other butchers. 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, the same as Victoria Guzmán and so many others 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 told me 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, and that they 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 been doubtful still, 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 already sitting and waiting.

  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 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 Plácida 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 interest.

  “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 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 told 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 Lázaro 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 Román h
ad 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 two 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 Lázaro Aponte told me. Along the way three people stopped him to tell him secretly that the Vicario brothers were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him, but only one 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 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.