Chronicle of a Death Foretold

by Gabriel García Márquez

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.

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.”

Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold.