Colonel Lázaro Aponte accompanied them to the house on the hill, and then Dr. Dionisio Iguarán went up on the mule he had for emergencies. When the sun let up, two men from the town government brought Bayardo San Román down on 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 deu!” 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 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 found inside seemed to be a woman’s natural items for hygiene and beauty, and I only found out 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 in spite of Colonel Lázaro Aponte’s determined vigilance, even the full-length closet with six mirrors that the mastercraftsmen of Mompox had had to assemble inside the house because it wouldn’t fit through the door. At first the widower Xius was overjoyed, thinking that they were the posthumous recourses of his wife to carry off what was hers. Colonel Lázaro Aponte made fun of him. But one night it occurred to him to hold a spiritualist séance 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 knickknacks of 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 weather-rotted 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 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 always got periodic news that inspired an idealized 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 her 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 encyclopedias 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 gray 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 the one I thought, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit that life would 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 humor. 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 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 chicken hawk. He went about alone, just like his father, nipping the bud of any wayward virgin that would begin 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 Román’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 realized that it was all something dirty that shouldn’t be done to 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 Román 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
continued 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 saw 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 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 proof 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 rancor 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 recognized 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 fiancée’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 postmistresses were changed and six times she got 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.
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 writing 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 Román 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 colored ribbons, and all unopened.
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 still didn’t do it consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are sacred monopolies with access only for those who are part of the drama. “Honor 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 take it any longer, she ran out naked into the street. Flora Miguel, Santiago Nasar’s fiancée, 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 eighty-six, 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. Plácida 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.
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 s
ummoned, anxious to show off their own important parts in the drama. He 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 learned 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 myself did my searching many times with the water up to my ankles in that lagoon of lost causes, and only chance after five years of searching let me rescue some 322 pages filched from the more than 500 that the brief must have had.
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 color of the ink, seemed to be written in blood. He was so perplexed by the enigma that chance had touched him with, that many times he fell into lyrical distractions that ran contrary to the rigor 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 untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold Page 7
