Chronicle of a Death Foretold

  Clotilde Armenta hadn't finished dispensing her milk when the Vicario brothers returned with two other knives wrapped up in newspapers. One was for quartering, with a strong, rusty blade twelve inches long and three inches wide, which had been put together by Pedro Vicario with the metal from a marquetry saw at a time when German knives were no longer available because of the war. The other one was shorter, but broad and curved. The investigator had made sketches of them in the brief, perhaps because he had trouble describing them, and all he ventured to say was that it looked like a miniature scimitar. It was with these knives that the crime was committed, and both were rudimentary and had seen a lot of use.

  Faustino Santos couldn't understand what had happened. "They came to sharpen their knives a second time," he told me, "and once more they shouted for people to hear that they were going to cut Santiago Nasar's guts out, so I thought they were kidding around, especially since I didn't pay any attention to the knives and thought they were the same ones." This time, however, Clotilde Armenta noticed from the time she saw them enter that they didn't have the same determination as before.

  Actually, they'd had their first disagreement. Not only were they much more different inside than they looked on the outside, but in difficult emergencies they showed opposite characters. We, their friends, had spotted it ever since grammar school. Pablo Vicario was six minutes older than his brother, and he was the more imaginative and resolute until adolescence. Pedro Vicario always seemed more sentimental to me, and by the same token more authoritarian. They presented themselves together for military service at the age of twenty, and Pablo Vicario was excused in order to stay home and take care of the family. Pedro Vicario served for eleven months on police patrol. The army routine, aggravated by the fear of death, had matured his tendency to command and the habit of deciding for his brother. He also came back with a case of sergeant's blennorrhagia that resisted the most brutal methods of military medicine as well as the arsenic injections and permanganate purges of Dr. Dionisio Iguaran. Only in jail did they manage to cure it. We, his friends, agreed that Pablo Vicario had suddenly developed the strange dependence of a younger brother when Pedro Vicario returned with a barrack-room soul and with the novel trick of lifting his shirt for anyone who wanted to see a bullet wound with seton on his left side. He even began to develop a kind of fervor over the great man's blennorrhagia that his brother wore like a war medal.

  Pedro Vicario, according to his own declaration, was the one who made the decision to kill Santiago Nasar, and at first his brother only followed along. But he was also the one who considered his duty fulfilled when the mayor disarmed them, and then it was Pablo Vicario who assumed command. Neither of the two mentioned that disagreement in their separate statements to the investigator. But Pablo Vicario confirmed several times to me that it hadn't been easy for him to convince his brother about their final resolve. Maybe it was really nothing but a wave of panic, but the fact is that Pablo Vicario went into the pigsty alone to get the other two knives, while his brother agonized, drop by drop, trying to urinate under the tamarind trees. "My brother never knew what it was like," Pedro Vicario told me in our only interview. "It was like pissing ground glass." Pablo Vicario found him hugging the tree when he came back with the knives. "He was in a cold sweat from the pain," he told me, "and he tried to tell me to go on by myself because he was in no condition to kill anybody." He sat down on one of the carpenters' benches they'd set up under the trees for the wedding lunch, and he dropped his pants down to his knees. "He spent about half an hour changing the gauze he had his prick wrapped in," Pablo Vicario told me. Actually, he hadn't delayed more than ten minutes, but it was something so difficult and so puzzling for Pablo Vicario that he interpreted it as some new trick on his brother's part to waste time until dawn. So he put the knife in his hand and dragged him off almost by force in search of their sister's lost honor.

  "There's no way out of this," he told him. "It's as if it had already happened."

  They left by way of the pigpen gate with the knives unwrapped, pursued by the uproar of the dogs in the yards. It was beginning to get light. "It wasn't raining," Pablo Vicario remembered. "Just the opposite," Pedro recalled. "There was a sea wind and you could still count the stars with your finger." The news had been so well spread by then that Hortensia Baute opened her door precisely as they were passing her house, and she was the first to weep for Santiago Nasar. "I thought they'd already killed him," she told me, "because I saw the knives in the light from the street lamp and it looked to me that they were dripping blood." One of the few houses open on that misplaced street was that of Prudencia Cotes, Pablo Vicario's fiancee. Whenever the twins passed by there at that time, and especially on Fridays when they were going to the market, they would go 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 then 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 full adolescent bloom, with 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 one 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 kept 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.

  So Clotilde Armenta had good reason when it seemed to her that the twins weren't as resolute as before, and she served them a bottle of rotgut rum with the hope of getting them dead drunk. "That day," she told me, "I realized just how alone we women are in the world!" Pedro Vicario asked to borrow her husband's shaving implements, and she brought him the brush, the soap, the hanging mirror, and the safety razor with a new blade, but he shaved with his butcher knife. Clotilde Armenta thought that was the height of machismo. "He looked like a killer in the movies," she told me. But as he explained to me later, and it was true, in the army he'd learned to shave with a straight razor and couldn't do it any other way ever since. His brother, for his part, shaved in a more humble way, with Don Rogelio de la Flor's borrowed safety razor. Finally, they drank the bottle in silence, very slowly, gazing with the boobish look of early risers at the dark window in the house across the way, while false customers buying milk they didn't need and asking for food items that didn't exist went in and out with the intention of seeing if it was true that they were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him.

  The Vicario brothers would not see that window light up. Santiago Nasar went into the house at four-twenty, but he didn't have to turn on any light to reach his bedroom because the bulb on the stairway stayed lit through the night. He threw himself onto his bed in the darkness and with his clothes on, since he had only an hour in which to sleep, and that was how Victoria Guzman found him when she came up to wake him so he could receive the bishop. We'd been together at Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' 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 with open doors for those of us still unsated by the wedding bash. Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, about whom we used to say that she would only go to sleep 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, bu
t she was also the most strict. 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 with 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 Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' 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 year on The Divine Face. Ever since then they were still linked by a serious affection, but without the disorder of love, and she had so much respect for him that she never again went to bed with anyone if he was present. During those last vacations she would send us off early with the pretext that she was tired, but she left the door unbarred and with a lamp lighted in the hall so that I could come in secretly.

  Santiago Nasar had an almost magical talent for disguises, and his favorite sport was to confuse the identities of the mulatto girls. He would rifle the wardrobe of some to disguise the others, so that they all ended up feeling different from themselves and like the ones they weren't. On a certain occasion, one of them found herself repeated in another with such exactness that she had a crying attack. "I felt like I'd stepped out of the mirror," she said. But that night Maria Alejandrina Cervantes wouldn't let Santiago Nasar indulge himself for the last time in his tricks as a transformer, and she did it with such flimsy pretexts that the bad taste left by that memory changed his life. So we took the musicians with us for a round of serenades, and we continued the party on our own, while the Vicario twins were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him. It was he who got the idea, almost at four o'clock, to go up the widower Xius's hill and sing for the newlyweds.

  Not only did we sing under the windows, but we set off rockets and fireworks in the gardens, yet we didn't perceive any sign of life inside the farmhouse. It didn't occur to us that there was no one there, especially because the new car was by the door with its top still folded down and with the satin ribbons and bouquets of wax orange blossoms they had hung on it during the festivities. My brother Luis Enrique, who played the guitar like a professional at that time, improvised a song with matrimonial double meanings in honor of the newlyweds. Until then it hadn't rained. On the contrary, the moon was high in the sky and the air was clear, and at the bottom of the precipice you could see the trickle of light from the Saint Elmo's fire in the cemetery. On the other side you could make out the groves of blue banana trees in the moonlight, the sad swamps, and the phosphorescent line of the Caribbean on the horizon. Santiago Nasar pointed to an intermittent light at sea and told us that it was the soul in torment of a slave ship that had sunk with a cargo of blacks from Senegal across from the main harbor mouth at Cartagena de Indias. It wasn't possible to think that his conscience was bothering him, although at that time he didn't know that the ephemeral married life of Angela Vicario had come to an end two hours before. Bayardo San Roman had taken her to her parents' house on foot so that the noise of the motor wouldn't betray his misfortune in advance, and he was back there alone and with the lights out in the widower Xius's happy farmhouse.

  When we went down the hill my brother invited us to have some breakfast of fried fish at one of the lunch stands in the market, but Santiago Nasar was against it because he wanted to get an hour's sleep before the bishop arrived. He went along the riverbank with Cristo Bedoya, passing the poor people's eating places that were beginning to light up by the old harbor, and before turning the corner he waved good-bye. It was the last time we saw him.

  Cristo Bedoya, whom he had agreed to meet later on at the docks, took leave of him at the back door of his house. The dogs barked at him as usual when they heard him come in, but he calmed them down in the half-light with the tinkling of his keys. Victoria Guzman was keeping watch over the coffeepot on the stove when he passed by the kitchen on his way inside the house.

  "Whitey," she called to him, "coffee will be ready soon."

  Santiago Nasar told her that he'd have some later, and he asked her to tell Divina Flor to wake him up at five-thirty and bring him a clean change of clothes, just like the ones he had on. An instant after he'd gone to bed, Victoria Guzman got the message from Clotilde Armenta sent via the milk beggar. At five-thirty she followed his orders to wake him, but she didn't send Divina Flor and went up to the bedroom herself with the suit of pure linen, because she never missed a chance to keep her daughter away from the claws of the seigneur.

  Maria Alejandrina Cervantes had left the door of the house unbarred. I took leave of my brother, crossed the veranda where the mulatto girls' cats were sleeping curled up among the tulips, and opened the bedroom door without knocking. The lights were out, but as soon as I went in I caught the smell of a warm woman and I saw the eyes of an insomniac leopard in the darkness, and then I didn't know anything else about myself until the bells began to ring.

  On his way to our house, my brother went in to buy some cigarettes at Clotilde Armenta's store. He'd drunk so much that his memories of that encounter were always quite confused, but he never forgot the fatal drink that Pedro Vicario offered him. "It was liquid fire," he told me. Pablo Vicario, who had fallen asleep, awoke with a start when he heard him come in, and he showed him the knife.

  "We're going to kill Santiago Nasar," he told him.

  My brother doesn't remember it. "But even if I did remember, I wouldn't have believed it," he told me many times. "Who the fuck would ever think that the twins would kill anyone, much less with a pig knife!" Then they asked him where Santiago Nasar was, because they'd seen the two of them together, and my brother didn't remember his own answer either. But Clotilde Armenta and the Vicario brothers were so startled when they heard it that it was left established in the brief in separate declarations. According to them, my brother said: "Santiago Nasar is dead." Then he delivered an episcopal blessing, stumbled over the threshold, and staggered out. In the middle of the square he crossed paths with Father Amador. He was going to the dock in his vestments, followed by an acolyte who was ringing the bell and several helpers carrying the altar for the bishop's field mass. The Vicario brothers crossed themselves when they saw them pass.

  Clotilde Armenta told me that they'd lost their last hopes when the priest passed by her place. "I thought he hadn't got my message," she said. Nonetheless, Father Amador confessed to me many years later, retired from the world in the gloomy Calafell Rest Home, that he had in fact received Clotilde Armenta's message and others more peremptory while he was getting ready to go the docks. "The truth is I didn't know what to do," he told me. "My first thought was that it wasn't any business of mine but something for the civil authorities, but then I made up my mind to say something in passing to Placida Linero." Yet when he crossed the square, he'd forgotten completely. "You have to understand," he told me, "that the bishop was coming on that unfortunate day." At the moment of the crime he felt such despair and was so disgusted with himself that the only thing he could think of was to ring the fire alarm.

  My brother Luis Enrique went into the house through the kitchen door, which my mother left unlocked so my father wouldn't hear us come in. He went to the bathroom before going to bed, but he fell asleep sitting on the toilet, and when my brother Jaime got up to go to school he found him stretched out face down on the tile floor and singing in his sleep. 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. "It was striking five when I went to the bathroom," she told me. Later, when my sister Margot went in to bathe before going to the docks, she managed with great effort to drag him to his bedroom. From the other side of sleep he heard the first bellows of the bishop's boat without awakening. Then he fell into a dee
p sleep, worn out by carousing, until my sister the nun went into the bedroom, trying to put her habit on as she ran, and she woke him up with her mad cry:

  "They've killed Santiago Nasar!"

  THE DAMAGE from the knives was only a beginning for the inclement autopsy that Father Carmen Amador found himself obliged to do in Dr. Dionisio Iguaran's absence. "It was as if we killed him all over again after he was dead," the aged priest told me in his retirement at Calafell. "But it was an order from the mayor, and orders from that barbarian, stupid as they might have been, had to be obeyed." It wasn't entirely proper. In the confusion of that absurd Monday, Colonel Aponte had had an urgent telegraphic conversation with the governor of the province, and the latter authorized him to take the preliminary steps while he sent an investigating magistrate. The mayor was a former troop commander with no experience in matters of law, and he was too conceited to ask anyone who knew where he should begin. The first thing that bothered him was the autopsy. Cristo Bedoya, who was a medical student, managed to get out of it because of his intimate friendship with Santiago Nasar. The mayor thought that the body could be kept under refrigeration until Dr. Dionisio Iguaran came back, but he couldn't find a human-sized freezer, and the only one that would serve the purpose in the market was out of order. The body had been exposed to public view in the center of the living room, lying on a narrow iron cot while they were building a rich man's coffin for it. They'd brought in fans from the bedrooms and some neighboring houses, but there were so many people anxious to see it that they had to push back the furniture and take down the birdcages and pots of ferns, and even then the heat was unbearable. In addition, the dogs, aroused by the smell of death, increased the uneasiness. They hadn't stopped howling since I went into the house, when Santiago Nasar was still in his death throes in the kitchen and I found Divina Flor weeping with great howls and holding them off with a beam.