Chronicle of a Death Foretold

by Gabriel García Márquez

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.

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.”

they were still linked by a serious affection, but without the disorder of love,

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.

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.”