Chronicle of a Death Foretold

by Gabriel García Márquez

Divina Flor confessed to me on a later visit, after her mother had died, that the latter hadn’t said anything to Santiago Nasar because in the depths of her heart she wanted them to kill him.

Someone who was never identified had shoved an envelope under the door with a piece of paper warning Santiago Nasar that they were waiting for him to kill him, and, in addition, the note revealed the place, the motive, and other quite precise details of the plot. The message was on the floor when Santiago Nasar left home, but he didn’t see it, nor did Divina Flor or anyone else until long after the crime had been consummated.

“It was Christmas weather,” my sister Margot said.

“He didn’t seem to be chilly and was only thinking about what the wedding must have cost,” she told me. Cristo

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.

It was Angela Vicario who didn’t want to marry him. “He seemed too much of a man for me,” she told me.

“Love can be learned too.”

“The only thing I prayed to God for was to give me the courage to kill myself,” Angela Vicario told me. “But he didn’t give it to me.” She was so distressed that she had resolved to tell her mother the truth so as to free herself from that martyrdom, when her only two confidantes, who worked with her making cloth flowers, dissuaded her from her good intentions.

“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.”

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 the brothers had said it was so that someone would come over to hear them.

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 had brought Angela Vicario back home, but he didn’t take it dramatically.

So it was inconceivable that they would suddenly abandon their pastoral spirit to avenge a death for which we all could have been to blame.

The whole family left, even the older sisters with their husbands, on Colonel Aponte’s initiative. They left without anyone’s noticing, sheltered by public exhaustion, while the only survivors of that irreparable day among us who were awake were burying Santiago Nasar.

Pedro Vicario, without love or a job, reenlisted in the armed forces three years later, earned his first sergeant’s stripes, and one fine morning his patrol went into guerrilla territory singing whorehouse songs and was never heard of again.

For the immense majority of people there was only one victim: Bayardo San Román. They took it for granted that the other actors in the tragedy had been fulfilling with dignity, and even with a certain grandeur, their part of the destiny that life had assigned them. Santiago Nasar had expiated the insult, the brothers Vicario had proved their status as men, and the seduced sister was in possession of her honor once more.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

But most of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and did not consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are sacred monopolies, giving access only to those who are part of the drama. “Honor is love,” I heard my mother say. Hortensia

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 summoned, everyone eager to show off his own important role in the drama.

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.

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.

“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.

In folio 382 of the brief, he wrote another marginal pronouncement in red ink: Fatality makes us invisible.

The knife went through the palm of his right hand and then sank into his side up to the hilt. Everybody heard his cry of pain.

“The strange thing is that the knife kept coming out clean,” Pedro Vicario declared to the investigator. “I’d given it to him at least three times and there wasn’t a drop of blood.” Santiago