Chronicle of a Death Foretold

by Gabriel García Márquez

She had watched him from the same hammock and in the same position in which I found her prostrated by the last lights of old age when I returned to this forgotten village, trying to put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards.

he had a way of speaking that served to conceal rather than to reveal.

I had a very confused memory of the festival before I decided to rescue it piece by piece from the memory of others.

Faustino Santos was the only one who perceived a glimmer of truth in Pablo Vicario’s threat, and he asked him jokingly why they had to kill Santiago Nasar since there were so many other rich people who deserved dying first.

Faustino Santos told me that he’d still been doubtful, and that he reported it to a policeman who came by a little later to buy a pound of liver for the mayor’s breakfast.

Pablo Vicario, for his part, ate a little bit of everything they brought him, and fifteen minutes later unloosed a pestilential diarrhea.

Much later, during an uncertain period when I was trying to understand something of myself by selling encyclopedias and medical books in the towns of Guajira, by chance I got as far as that Indian death village. At the window of a house that faced the sea, embroidering by machine during the hottest hour of the day, was a woman half in mourning, with steel-rimmed glasses and yellowish gray hair, and hanging above her head was a cage with a canary that didn’t stop singing. When I saw her like that in the idyllic frame of the window, I refused to believe that the woman there was who I thought it was, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit that life might end up resembling bad literature so much. But it was she: Angela Vicario, twenty-three years after the drama.

“Well,” he said, “here I am.” He was carrying a suitcase with clothing in order to stay and another just like it with almost two thousand letters that she had written him. They were arranged by date in bundles tied with colored ribbons, and they were all unopened.

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.

He was aware of the prudish disposition of his world, and he must have understood 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.