Chronicle of a Death Foretold

  "So much the better," he said. "That makes it easier and cheaper besides."

  She confessed to me that he'd managed to impress her, but for reasons opposite those of love. "I detested conceited men, and I'd never seen one so stuck-up," she told me, recalling that day. "Besides, I thought he was a Polack." Her annoyance was greater when she sang out the raffle of the music box, to the anxiety of all, and indeed, it had been won by Bayardo San Roman. She couldn't imagine that he, just to impress her, had bought all the tickets in the raffle.

  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 Roman 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 flurry that there was no one who saw them come and didn't see them leave. Since the only thing the family hadn't counted upon was Bayardo San Roman'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 Roman to continue the revels at home.

  Angela Vicario was the youngest daughter of a family of scant resources. Her father, Poncio Vicario, was a poor man's goldsmith, and he'd lost his sight from doing so much fine work in gold in order to maintain the honor of the house. Purisima del Carmen, her mother, had been a schoolteacher until she married forever. Her meek and somewhat afflicted look hid the strength of her character quite well. "She looked like a nun," Mercedes recalls. She devoted herself with such spirit of sacrifice to the care of her husband and the rearing of her children that at times one forgot she still existed. The two oldest daughters had married very late. In addition to the twins, they had a middle daughter who had died of nighttime fevers, and two years later they were still observing a mourning that was relaxed inside the house but rigorous on the street. The brothers were brought up to be men. The girls had been reared to get married. They knew how to do screen embroidery, sew by machine, weave bone lace, wash and iron, make artificial flowers and fancy candy, and write engagement announcements. Unlike the girls of the time, who had neglected the cult of death, the four were past mistresses in the ancient science of sitting up with the ill, comforting the dying, and enshrouding the dead. The only thing that my mother reproached them for was the custom of combing their hair before sleeping. "Girls," she would tell them, "don't comb your hair at night; you'll slow down seafarers." 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." Yet it was difficult for the ones who married the two eldest to break the circle, because they always went together everywhere, and they organized dances for women only and were predisposed to find hidden intentions in the designs of men.

  Angela Vicario was the prettiest of the four, and my mother said that she had been born like the great queens of history, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. But she had a helpless air and a poverty of spirit that augured an uncertain future for her. I would see her again year after year during my Christmas vacations, and every time she seemed more destitute in the window of her house, where she would sit in the afternoon making cloth flowers and singing single-woman waltzes with her neighbors. "She's all set to be hooked," Santiago Nasar would tell me, "your cousin the ninny is." Suddenly, a little before the mourning for her sister, I passed her on the street for the first time dressed as a grown woman and with her hair curled, and I could scarcely believe it was the same person. But it was a momentary vision: her penury of spirit had been aggravated with the years. So much so that when it was discovered that Bayardo San Roman wanted to marry her, many people thought it was an outsider's perfidy.

  The family took it not only seriously but with great excitement. Except Pura Vicario, who laid down the condition that Bayardo San Roman should identify himself properly. Up till then nobody knew who he was. His past didn't go beyond that afternoon when he disembarked in his actor's getup, and he was so reserved about his origins that even the most demented invention could have been true. It came to be said that he had wiped out villages and sown terror in Casanare as troop commander, that he had escaped from Devil's Island, that he'd been seen in Pernambuco trying to make a living with a pair of trained bears, and that he'd salvaged the remains of a Spanish galleon loaded with gold in the Windward Channel. Bayardo San Roman put an end to all those conjectures by a simple recourse: he brought his whole family on.

  There were four of them: the father, the mother, and two provocative sisters. They arrived in a Model-T Ford with official plates whose duck-quack horn aroused the streets at eleven o'clock in the morning. His mother, Alberta Simonds, a big mulatto woman from Curacao, who spoke Spanish with a mixture of Papiamento, in her youth had been proclaimed the most beautiful of the two hundred most beautiful women in the Antilles. The sisters, newly come into bloom, were like two restless fillies. But the main attraction was the father: General Petronio San Roman, hero of the civil wars of the past century, and one of the major glories of the Conservative regime for having put Colonel Aureliano Buendia to flight in the disaster of Tucurinca. My mother was the only one who wouldn't go to greet him when she found out who he was. "It seems all right to me that they should get married," she told me. "But that's one thing and it's something altogether different to shake hands with the man who gave the orders for Gerineldo Marquez to be shot in the back." As soon as he appeared in the window of the automobile waving his white hat, everybody recognized him because of the fame of his pictures. He was wearing a wheat-colored linen suit, high-laced cordovan shoes, and gold-rimmed glasses held by a clasp on the bridge of his nose and connected by a chain to a button hole in his vest. He wore the medal of valor on his lapel and carried a cane with the national shield carved on the pommel. He was the first to get out of the automobile, completely covered with the burning dust of our bad roads, and all he had to do was appear on the running board for everyone to realize that Bayardo San Roman was going to marry whomever he chose.

  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 Roman 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."

  Unlike engagements of the time, which were long and supervised, theirs lasted only four months because of Bayardo San Roman's urgings. It wasn't any shorter because Pura Vicario demanded that they wait until the family mourning was over. But the time passed without anxiety because of the irresistible way in which Bayardo San Roman arranged things. "One night he asked me what house I liked best," Angela Vicario told me. "And I answered, without knowing why, that the prettiest house in town was the farmhouse belonging to the widower Xius." I would have said the same. It was on a windswept hill, and from the terrace you could see the limitless paradise of the marshes covered with purple anemones, and on clear summer days you could make out the neat horizon of the Caribbean and the tourist ships from Cartagena de Indias. That very night Bayardo San Roman went to the social club and sat down at the widower Xius's table to play a game of dominoes.

  "Widower," he told him, "I'll buy your house."

  "It's not for sale," the widower said.

/>   "I'll buy it along with everything inside."

  The widower Xius explained to him with the good breeding of olden days that the objects in the house had been bought by his wife over a whole lifetime of sacrifice and that for him they were still a part of her. "He was speaking with his heart in his hand," I was told by Dr. Dionisio Iguaran, who was playing with them. "I was sure he would have died before he'd sell a house where he'd been happy for over thirty years." Bayardo San Roman also understood his reasons.

  "Agreed," he said. "So sell me the house empty."

  But the widower defended himself until the end of the game. Three nights later, better prepared, Bayardo San Roman returned to the domino table.

  "Widower," he began again, "what's the price of the house?"

  "It hasn't got a price."

  "Name any one you want."

  "I'm sorry, Bayardo," the widower said, "but you young people don't understand the motives of the heart."

  Bayardo San Roman didn't pause to think.

  "Let's say five thousand pesos," he said.

  "You don't beat around the bush," the widower answered him, his dignity aroused. "The house isn't worth all that."

  "Ten thousand," said Bayardo San Roman. "Right now and with one bill on top of another."

  The widower looked at him, his eyes full of tears. "He was weeping with rage," I was told by Dr. Dionisio Iguaran, who, in addition to being a physician, was a man of letters. "Just imagine: an amount like that within reach and having to say no because of a simple weakness of the spirit." The widower Xius's voice didn't come out, but without hesitation he said no with his head.

  "Then do me one last favor," said Bayardo San Roman. "Wait for me here for five minutes."

  Five minutes later, indeed, he returned to the social club with his silver-trimmed saddlebags, and on the table he laid ten bundles of thousand-peso notes with the printed bands of the State Bank still on them. The widower Xius died two months later. "He died because of that," Dr. Dionisio Iguaran said. "He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart." But not only had he sold the house with everything it had inside; he asked Bayardo San Roman to pay him little by little because he didn't even have a leftover trunk where he could keep so much consolation money.

  No one would have thought nor did anyone say that Angela Vicario wasn't a virgin. She hadn't known any previous fiance and she'd grown up along with her sisters under the rigor of a mother of iron. Even when it was less than two months before she would be married, Pura Vicario wouldn't let her go out alone with Bayardo San Roman to see the house where they were going to live, but she and the blind father accompanied her to watch over her honor. "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 disturbed that she had resolved to tell her mother the truth so as to free herself from that martyrdom, when her only two confidantes, who helped her make cloth flowers, dissuaded her from her good intentions. "I obeyed them blindly," she told me, "because they made me believe that they were experts in men's tricks." They assured her that almost all women lost their virginity in childhood accidents. They insisted that even the most difficult of husbands resigned themselves to anything as long as nobody knew about it. They convinced her, finally, that most men came to their wedding night so frightened that they were incapable of doing anything without the woman's help, and at the moment of truth they couldn't answer for their own acts. "The only thing they believe is what they see on the sheet," they told her. And they taught her old wives' tricks to feign her lost possession, so that on her first morning as a newlywed she could display open under the sun in the courtyard of her house the linen sheet with the stain of honor.

  She got married with that illusion. Bayardo San Roman, for his part, must have got married with the illusion of buying happiness with the huge weight of his power and fortune, for the more the plans for the festival grew, the more delirious ideas occurred to him to make it even larger. He tried to hold off the wedding for a day when the bishop's visit was announced so he could marry them, but Angela Vicario was against it. "Actually," she told me, "the fact is I didn't want to be blessed by a man who only cut off the combs for soup and threw the rest of the rooster into the garbage." Yet, even without the bishop's blessing, the festival took on a force of its own so difficult to control that it got out of the hands of Bayardo San Roman himself and ended up being a public event.

  General Petronio San Roman and his family arrived that time on the National Congress's ceremonial boat, which remained moored to the dock until the end of the festivities, and with them came many illustrious people who, even so, passed unnoticed in the tumult of new faces. So many gifts were brought that it was necessary to restore the forgotten site of the first electrical power plant in order to display the most admirable among them, and the rest were immediately taken to the former home of the widower Xius, which was already set up to receive the newlyweds. The groom received a convertible with his name engraved in Gothic letters under the manufacturer's seal. The bride was given a chest with table settings in pure gold for twenty-four guests. They also brought in a ballet company and two waltz orchestras that played out of tune with the local bands and all the groups of brass and accordion players who came, animated by the uproar of the revelry.

  The Vicario family lived in a modest house with brick walls and a palm roof, topped by two attics where swallows got in to breed in January. In front it had a terrace almost completely filled with flowerpots, and a large yard with hens running loose and fruit trees. In the rear of the yard the twins had a pigsty, with its sacrificial stone and its disemboweling table, which was a good source of domestic income ever since Poncio Vicario had lost his sight. Pedro Vicario had started the business, but when he went into military service, his twin brother also learned the slaughterer's trade.

  The inside of the house barely had enough room in which to live. Therefore, the older sisters tried to borrow a house when they realized the size of the festival. "Just imagine," Angela Vicario told me, "they'd thought about Placida Linero's house, but luckily my parents stubbornly held to the old song that our daughters would be married in our pigpen or they wouldn't be married at all." So they painted the house its original yellow color, fixed up the doors, repaired the floors, and left it as worthy as was possible for such a clamorous wedding. The twins took the pigs off elsewhere and sanitized the pigsty with quicklime, but even so it was obvious that there wasn't enough room. Finally, through the efforts of Bayardo San Roman, they knocked down the fences in the yard, borrowed the neighboring house for dancing, and set up carpenters' benches to sit and eat on under the leaves of the tamarind trees.

  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 her marked cards until the final consequences. "In those days," she explained to me, "God understood such things." On the other hand, no one yet knew what cards Bayardo San Roman was playing with. From the moment he finally appeared in frock coat and top hat until he fled the dance with the creature of his torment, he was the perfect image of a happy bridegroom.

  Nor was it known what cards Santiago Nasar was playing. I was with him all the time, in the church and at the festival, along with Cristo Bedoya and my brother Luis Enrique, and none of us caught a glimpse of any change in his manner. I'v
e had to repeat this many times, because the four of us had grown up together in school and later on in the same gang at vacation time, and nobody could have believed that we could have a secret without its being shared, all the more so such a big secret.

  Santiago Nasar was a man for parties, and he had his best time on the eve of his death calculating the expense of the wedding. In the church he estimated that they'd set up floral decorations equal in cost to those for fourteen first-class funerals. That precision would haunt me for many years, because Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him and that day he repeated it to me as we went into the church. "I don't want any flowers at my funeral," he told me, not thinking that I would see to it that there weren't any the next day. En route from the church to the Vicarios' house he drew up the figures for the colored wreaths that decorated the streets, calculated the cost of the music and the rockets, and even the hail of raw rice with which they received us at the party. In the drowsiness of noon the newlyweds made their rounds in the yard. Bayardo San Roman had become our very good friend, a friend of a few drinks, as they said in those days, and he seemed very much at ease at our table. Angela Vicario, without her veil and bridal bouquet and in her sweat-stained satin dress, had suddenly taken on the face of a married woman. Santiago Nasar calculated, and told Bayardo San Roman, that up to then the wedding was costing some nine thousand pesos. It was obvious that she took it as an impertinence. "My mother had taught me never to talk about money in front of other people," she told me. Bayardo San Roman, on the other hand, took it very graciously and even with a certain pride.

  "Almost," he said, "but we're only beginning. When it's all over it will be twice that, more or less."

  Santiago Nasar proposed proving it down to the last penny, and his life lasted just long enough. In fact, with the final figures that Cristo Bedoya gave him the next day on the docks, forty-five minutes before he died, he ascertained that Bayardo San Roman's prediction had been exact.