Chronicle of a Death Foretold

by Gabriel García Márquez

  Nevertheless, what had alarmed him most at the end of his excessive diligence was not having found a single indication, not even the most unlikely one, that Santiago Nasar had been the cause of the wrong. The friends of Angela Vicario who had been her accomplices in the deception kept on saying for a long time that she had shared her secret with them since before the wedding, but that she hadn’t revealed any name to them. 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 lateral 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, the same as for Santiago Nasar’s closest friends, the victim’s very behavior 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 known that the twins’ simple nature was incapable of resisting an insult. No one knew Bayardo San Román 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 that his conscious lack of concern 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 was 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 along the dock and both seemed so unconcerned that they gave rise to false illusions. “They were both going along so contentedly,” Meme Loiza told me, “that I gave thanks to God, because I thought the matter had been cleared up.” Not everybody loved Santiago Nasar too much, of course. Polo 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 López, 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 they were the fantasies of 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 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 it, because they were still interested in the costs of the wedding.

  The people were breaking up and heading toward the square the same way as they. It was a thick crowd, but Escolástica Cisneros thought she noticed that the two friends were walking in the center of it without any difficulty, inside an empty circle, because the people knew that Santiago Nasar was going 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 all this hullabaloo!”

  Celeste Dangond was sitting in his pajamas by the door of his house, mocking those who had gone to greet the bishop, and he invited Santiago Nasar to have some coffee. “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 rumor, 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 counselor of the family. No one had as much authority as he to talk to Santiago Nasar. Nevertheless, he thought that if the rumor was baseless it would alarm him uselessly, 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 time to hear 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 in any 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 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 Guzmán 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 Guzmán 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 Plácida 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: she 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 went 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 Plácida Linero’s bedroom and went from there to 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 went through the room in silence, passed by the bathroom, and went into Santiago Nasar’s bedroom. 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 realize that it was unloaded. Plácida 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,” Plácida Linero said.

  “He 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 realized that Cristo Bedoya didn’t know what to do with his body. “I hope that God has forgiven me,” Plácida Linero told me, “but he seemed so confused that it suddenly occurred to me that he’d come to rob.” She asked him what was wrong. Cristo Bedoya was aware 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 more explanations. “In any case,” he told me, “she was always imagining that she was being robbed.” On 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 door, 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 natural, and yet it wasn’t the only one or the most visible one that he’d put on in the last moments so they would stop him from committing the crime.

  “Cristóbal,” he shouted, “tell Santiago Nasar that we’re waiting for him here to kill him.”

  Cristo Bedoya could have done him the favor 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 said about the devasting power of an armor-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 when he made the decision to wipe his sister’s honor 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 on 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 Lázaro 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.”

  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. Próspera 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 state of health, and promised to come back later for some emergency treatment, but he lost three minutes more helping Próspera 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 recognized 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 fiancée, 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 kept 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 it, perhaps because he had the same utilitarian concept of matrimony as his father. Flora Miguel, for her part, enjoyed a certain floral condition, 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 weddin
g, 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 told 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 honor. 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 fiancée’s house. The investigating magistrate looked for a single person who’d seen him, and he did it 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 parlor, green with rage, wearing one of the dresses with unfortunate ruffles that she was in the habit of putting on for memorable occasions, and she put the chest in his hands.