Chronicle of a Death Foretold

by Gabriel García Márquez

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 of conscription. He liked noisy and long-lasting festivities, but he was a good drinker, 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.

That night, when she returned home, Angela Vicario found the music box there, gift-wrapped and tied with an organdy bow. “I never did find out how he knew that it was my birthday,” she told me. It was hard for her to convince her parents that she hadn’t given Bayardo San Román any reason to send her a gift like that, and even worse, in such a visible way that it hadn’t gone unnoticed by anyone. So her older brothers, Pedro and Pablo, took the music box to the hotel to give back to its owner, and they did it with such a rush that there was no one to witness them come and then not leave. Since the only thing the family hadn’t counted upon was Bayardo San Román’s irresistible charm, the twins didn’t reappear until dawn of the next day, foggy with drink, bearing once more the music box, and bringing along, besides, Bayardo San Román to continue the revels at home.

It was Angela Vicario who didn’t want to marry him. “He seemed too much of a man for me,” she told me. Besides, Bayardo San Román hadn’t even tried to court her, but had bewitched the family with his charm. Angela Vicario never forgot the horror of the night on which her parents and her older sisters with their husbands, gathered together in the parlor, imposed on her the obligation to marry a man whom she had barely seen. The twins stayed out of it. “It looked to us like woman problems,” Pablo Vicario told me. The parents’ decisive argument was that a family dignified by modest means had no right to disdain that prize of destiny. Angela Vicario only dared hint at the inconvenience of a lack of love, but her mother demolished it with a single phrase: “Love can be learned too.”

The only unforeseen surprise was caused by the groom on the morning of the wedding, for he was two hours late in coming for Angela Vicario and she had refused to get dressed as a bride until she saw him in the house. “Just imagine,” she told me. “I would have been happy even if he hadn’t come, but never if he abandoned me dressed up.” Her caution seemed natural, because there was no public misfortune more shameful than for a woman to be jilted in her bridal gown. On the other hand, the fact that Angela Vicario dared put on the veil and the orange blossoms without being a virgin would be interpreted afterwards as a profanation of the symbols of purity. My mother was the only one who appreciated as an act of courage the fact that she had played out her marked cards to the final consequences. “In those days,” she explained to me, “God understood such things.”

One of the few houses open on that misbegotten street was that of Prudencia Cotes, Pablo Vicario’s fiancée. Whenever the twins passed by there at that time, and especially on Fridays when they were going to the market, they would drop in to have their first cup of coffee. They pushed open the door to the courtyard, surrounded by the dogs, who recognized them in the half light of dawn, and they greeted Prudencia Cotes’s mother in the kitchen. Coffee wasn’t ready yet. “We’ll leave it for later,” Pablo Vicario said. “We’re in a hurry now.” “I can imagine, my sons,” she said. “Honor doesn’t wait.” But in any case, they waited, and this time it was Pedro Vicario who thought his brother was wasting time on purpose. While they were drinking their coffee, Prudencia Cotes came into the kitchen in all her adolescent bloom, carrying a roll of old newspapers to revive the fire in the stove. “I knew what they were up to,” she told me, “and I didn’t only agree, I never would have married him if he hadn’t done what a man should do.” Before leaving the kitchen, Pablo Vicario took two sections of newspaper from her and gave them to his brother to wrap the knives in. Prudencia Cotes stood waiting in the kitchen until she saw them leave by the courtyard door, and she went on waiting for three years without a moment of discouragement until Pablo Vicario got out of jail and became her husband for life. “Take good care of yourselves,” she told them.

We’d been together at María Alejandrina Cervantes’s until after three, when she herself sent the musicians away and turned out the lights in the dancing courtyard so that her pleasurable mulatto girls could go to bed by themselves and get some rest. They’d been working without cease for three days, first taking care of the guests of honor in secret, and then turned loose, the doors wide open for those of us still unsated by the wedding bash. María Alejandrina Cervantes, about whom we used to say that she would go to sleep only once and that would be to die, was the most elegant and the most tender woman I have ever known, and the most serviceable in bed, but she was also the strictest. She’d been born and reared here, and here she lived, in a house with open doors, with several rooms for rent and an enormous courtyard for dancing lit by lantern gourds bought in the Chinese bazaars of Paramaribo. It was she who did away with my generation’s virginity. She taught us much more than we should have learned, but she taught us above all that there’s no place in life sadder than an empty bed. Santiago Nasar lost his senses the first time he saw her. I warned him: “ ‘A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.’ ” But he didn’t listen to me, dazzled by María Alejandrina Cervantes’s illusory calls. She was his mad passion, his mistress of tears at the age of fifteen, until Ibrahim Nasar drove him out of the bed with a whip and shut him up for more than a yea...

My sister the nun, who wasn’t going to wait for the bishop because she had an eighty-proof hangover, couldn’t get him to wake up.

Nevertheless, in the final note he pointed out a hypertrophy of the liver that he attributed to a poorly cured case of hepatitis. “That is to say,” he told me, “he had only a few years of life left to him in any case.” Dr. Dionisio Iguarán, who in fact had treated Santiago Nasar for hepatitis at the age of twelve, recalled that autopsy with indignation. “Only a priest could be so dumb,” he told me. “There was never any way to make him understand that we tropical people have larger livers than greenhorn Galician Spaniards.”

Colonel Aponte, under whose orders it had been built, said that no hotel existed that was more humane. My brother Luis Enrique agreed, because one night they’d locked him up after a fight among musicians, and the mayor allowed him the charity of having one of the mulatto girls stay with him.

Angela Vicario then discovered that hate and love are reciprocal passions.

The magistrate 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 discovered 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 searched many times with the water up to my ankles in that lagoon of lost causes, and after five years rummaging around only chance let me rescue some 322 pages filched from the more than 500 that the brief must have contained. 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 fate had touched him with, that he kept falling into lyrical distractions that ran contrary to the rigor of his profession. Most of all, ...