Chronicle of a Death Foretold Read online

  It had struck six and the street lights were still on. In the branches of the almond trees and on some balconies the colored wedding decorations were still hanging and one might have thought they’d just been hung up in honor of the bishop. But the square, covered with paving stones up to the front steps of the church, where the bandstand was, looked like 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 who were waiting for Santiago Nasar in order to kill him were. 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 aluminum. “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 virtue 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,” Clotilde Armenta said. The girls from the nuns’ school crossed the square at that moment, trotting in disorder with their orphans’ uniforms.

  Plácida 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 coxcomb soup was his favorite dish. At the loading pier there was so much firewood piled up that the boat would have needed at least two hours to load it. But it didn’t stop. It appeared at the bend in the river, snorting like a dragon, and then the band of musicians began to play the bishop’s anthem, and the cocks began to crow in their baskets and aroused 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 appetizing 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 continue 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 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 realized 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 realized 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 convinced her to go on ahead while he put on his riding 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 Lázaro 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 it had been years since she’d gone out into the street, not even to go to mass. I had become aware of that
quality of hers ever since I began to get up early to go to 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 that was ahead of time which she could only have known through powers of divination. That morning, however, she didn’t feel the throb of the tragedy that had been gestating since three o’clock in the morning. She’d finished sweeping the courtyard, and when my sister Margot went out to receive the bishop she found her grinding manioc for the fritters. “Cocks could be heard,” my mother is accustomed to say, remembering that day. She never associated the distant uproar with the arrival of the bishop, however, but with the last leftovers from the wedding.

  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 reached its scandalous size. 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 cold explain to me how poor Santiago Nasar ended up being involved in such a mixup.” The only thing they knew for sure was that Angela Vicario’s brothers were waiting for him to kill him.

  My sister came back 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 told her. “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 told 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 was 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 heard everything from his bed, appeared in the dining room in his pajamas and asked in alarm where she was going.

  “To warn my dear friend Plácida,” 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 going on 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 realize 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.”

  BAYARDO SAN ROMÁN, the man who had given back his bride, had come for the first time in August of the year before: six months before the wedding. He arrived on the weekly boat with some saddlebags decorated with silver that matched the buckle of his belt and the rings on his boots. He was around thirty years old, but they were well concealed, because he had the waist of a novice bullfighter, golden eyes, and a skin slowly roasted by saltpeter. He arrived wearing a short jacket and very tight trousers, both of natural calfskin, and kid gloves of the same color. Magdalena Oliver had come 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 realize that Bayardo San Román was not a man to be known at first sight.

  My mother wrote me at school toward the end of August and said in a casual note: “A very strange man has come.” In the following letter she told me: “The strange man is called Bayardo San Román, 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 him rather to conceal 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 doing conscription. He liked noisy and long-enduring festivities, but he was a good toper, a mediator of fights, and an enemy of cardsharps. One Sunday after mass he challenged the 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 Román 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 note 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 to me about Bayardo San Román, not even when it was known only too well that he wanted to marry Angela Vicario. Only a long time after the unfortunate wedding did she confess to me that she 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, indeed, 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 like a very sad man to me. At that time he had already formalized 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 Román lived told of how he’d been napping in a rocking chair in the parlor toward the end of September, when Angela Vicario and her mother crossed the square with two baskets of artificial flowers. Bayardo San Román half-awoke, saw the two women dressed in the inclement black worn by the only living 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 Román followed them to the other side of the square with his look.

  “She’s well-named,” he said.