Chronicle of a Death Foretold

  "Help me," she shouted to me. "What they want is to eat his guts."

  We locked them up in the stable. Placida Linero later ordered them taken to some place far off until after the funeral. But toward noon, no one knew how, they escaped from where they were and burst madly into the house. Placida Linero, just once, lost her grip.

  "Those shitty dogs!" she shouted. "Kill them!"

  The order was carried out immediately and the house was silent again. Until then there hadn't been any concern at all for the state of the body. The face had remained intact, with the same expression it had had when he was singing, and Cristo Bedoya had put the intestines back in place and wrapped the body with a linen strip. Nevertheless, in the afternoon a syrup-colored liquid began to flow from the wounds, drawing flies, and a purple blotch appeared on his upper lip and spread out very slowly, like the shadow of a cloud on water, up to his hairline. His face, which had always been easy-going, took on a hostile expression, and his mother covered it with a handkerchief. Colonel Aponte understood then that they couldn't wait any longer and he ordered Father Amador to do the autopsy. "It would be worse digging him up a week later," he said. The priest had studied medicine and surgery at Salamanca, but had entered the seminary before he was graduated, and even the mayor knew that his autopsy would have no legal standing. Nevertheless, he made him carry out the order.

  It was a massacre, performed at the public school with the help of the druggist, who took notes, and a first-year medical student who was here on vacation. They only had a few instruments for minor surgery available and the rest were craftsmen's tools. But despite the havoc wrought on the body, Father Amador's report seemed in order and the investigator incorporated it in the brief as a useful piece of evidence.

  Seven of the several wounds were fatal. The liver was almost sliced in pieces by two deep cuts on the anterior side. He had four incisions in the stomach, one of them so deep that it went completely through and destroyed the pancreas. He had six other lesser perforations in the transverse colon and multiple wounds in the small intestine. The only one he had in the back, at the level of the third lumbar vertebra, had perforated the right kidney. The abdominal cavity was filled with large clots of blood, and in the midst of the morass of gastric contents appeared a medal of the Virgin of Carmel that Santiago Nasar had swallowed at the age of four. The thoracic cavity showed two perforations: one in the second right intercostal space that affected the lung and another quite close to the left armpit. He also had six minor wounds on his arms and hands, and two horizontal cuts: one on the right thigh and the other in the abdominal muscles. He had a deep stab in the right hand. The report says: "It looked like a stigma of the crucified Christ." The encephalic mass weighed sixty grams more than that of a normal Englishman, and Father Amador noted in the report that Santiago Nasar had a superior intelligence and a brilliant future. 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 Iguaran, 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." The report concluded that the cause of death had been a massive hemorrhage brought on by any one of the seven major wounds.

  They gave us back a completely different body. Half of the cranium had been destroyed by the trepanation and the ladykiller face that death had preserved ended up losing its identity. Furthermore, the priest had pulled out the sliced-up intestines by the roots, but in the end he didn't know what to do with them, and he gave them an angry blessing and threw them into the garbage pail. The last onlookers ranged about the schoolhouse windows lost their curiosity, the helper fainted, and Colonel Lazaro Aponte, who had seen and caused so many repressive massacres, ended up being a vegetarian as well as a spiritualist. The empty shell, stuffed with rags and quicklime and sewed up crudely with coarse twine and baling needles, was on the point of falling apart when we put it into the new coffin with silk quilt lining. "I thought it would last longer that way," Father Amador told me. Just the opposite happened and we had to bury him hurriedly at dawn because he was in such bad shape that it was already unbearable in the house.

  A cloudy Tuesday was breaking through. I didn't have the courage to sleep at the end of that oppressive time, and I pushed on the door of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' house in case she hadn't put up the bar. The gourd lamps were burning where they hung from the trees and in the courtyard for dancing there were several wood fires with huge steaming pots where the mulatto girls were putting mourning dye onto their party clothes. I found Maria Alejandrina Cervantes awake as always at dawn, and completely naked as always when there weren't any strangers in the house. She was squatting like a Turkish houri on her queenly bed across from a Babylonic platter of things to eat: veal cutlets, a boiled chicken, a pork loin, and a garnishing of plantains and vegetables that would have served five people. Disproportionate eating was always the only way she could mourn and I'd never seen her do it with such grief. I lay down by her side with my clothes on, barely speaking, and mourning too in my way. I was thinking about the ferocity of Santiago Nasar's fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination. I dreamed that a woman was coming into the room with a little girl in her arms, and that the child was chewing without stopping to take a breath and the half-chewed kernels of corn were falling into the woman's brassiere. The woman said to me: "She crunches like a nutty nuthatch, kind of sloppy, kind of slurpy." Suddenly I felt the anxious fingers that were undoing the buttons of my shirt, and I caught the dangerous smell of the beast of love lying by my back, and I felt myself sinking into the delights of the quicksand of her tenderness. But suddenly she stopped, coughed from far off, and slipped out of my life.

  "I can't," she said. "You smell of him."

  Not just I. Everything continued smelling of Santiago Nasar that day. The Vicario brothers could smell him in the jail cell where the mayor had locked them up until he could think of something to do with them. "No matter how much I scrubbed with soap and rags I couldn't get rid of the smell," Pedro Vicario told me. They'd gone three nights without sleep, but they couldn't rest because as soon as they began to fall asleep they would commit the crime all over again. Now, almost an old man, trying to explain to me his state on that endless day, Pablo Vicario told me without any effort: "It was like being awake twice over." That phrase made me think that what must have been most unbearable for them in jail was their lucidity.

  The room was ten feet square, and had a very high skylight with iron bars, a portable latrine, a washstand with its pitcher and basin, and two makeshift beds with straw mats. Colonel Aponte, under whose orders it had been built, said that there was no hotel 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. Perhaps the Vicario brothers could have thought the same thing at eight o'clock in the morning, when they felt themselves safe from the Arabs. At that moment they were comforted by the honor of having done their duty, and the only thing that worried them was the persistence of the smell. They asked for lots of water, laundry soap, and rags, and they washed the blood from their arms and faces, and they also washed their shirts, but they couldn't get any rest. Pedro Vicario also asked for his laxatives and diuretics and a roll of sterile gauze so he could change his bandage, and he succeeded in having two micturitions during the morning. Nevertheless, life was becoming so difficult for him as the day advanced that the smell took second place. At two in the afternoon, when the heaviness of the heat should have melted them, Pedro Vicario couldn't stay there lying on the bed, but the same we
ariness prevented him from standing. The pain in his groin had reached his throat, his urine was shut off, and he suffered the frightful certainty that he wouldn't sleep ever again for the rest of his life. "I was awake for eleven months," he told me, and I knew him well enough to know that it was true. He couldn't eat any lunch. Pablo Vicario, for his part, ate a little bit of everything they brought him, and fifteen minutes later unloosed a pestilential cholerine. At six in the afternoon, while they were performing the autopsy on Santiago Nasar's corpse, the mayor was summoned urgently because Pedro Vicario was convinced that his brother had been poisoned. "He was turning into water right in front of me," Pedro Vicario told me, "and we couldn't get rid of the idea that it was some trick of the Turks." Up till then he'd overflowed the portable latrine twice and the guard on watch had taken him to the town hall washroom another six times. There Colonel Aponte found him, in the doorless toilet boxed in by the guard, and pouring out water so fluently that it wasn't too absurd to think about poison. But they put the idea aside immediately when it was established that he had only drunk the water and eaten the food sent by Pura Vicario. Nonetheless, the mayor was so impressed that he had the prisoners taken to his house under a special guard until the investigating judge came and transferred them to the panoptic prison in Riohacha.

  The twins' fear was in response to the mood in the streets. Revenge by the Arabs wasn't dismissed, but no one, except the Vicario brothers, had thought of poison. It was supposed, rather, that they would wait for nightfall in order to pour gasoline through the skylight and burn up the prisoners in their cell. But even that was too easy a supposition. The Arabs comprised a community of peaceful immigrants who had settled at the beginning of the century in Caribbean towns, even in the poorest and most remote, and there they remained, selling colored cloth and bazaar trinkets. They were clannish, hard-working, and Catholic. They married among themselves, imported their wheat, raised lambs in their yards, and grew oregano and eggplants, and playing cards was their only driving passion. The older ones continued speaking the rustic Arabic they had brought from their homeland, and they maintained it intact in the family down to the second generation, but those of the third, with the exception of Santiago Nasar, listened to their parents in Arabic and answered them in Spanish. So it was inconceivable that they would suddenly change their pastoral spirit to avenge a death for which we all could have been to blame. On the other hand, no one thought about reprisals from Placida Linero's family, who had been powerful and fighting people until their fortune ran out, and had bred more than two barroom killers who had been preserved by the salt of their name.

  Colonel Aponte, worried by the rumors, visited the Arabs family by family and that time, at least, drew a correct conclusion. He found them perplexed and sad, with signs of mourning on their altars, and some of them sitting on the ground and wailing, but none harbored ideas of vengeance. The reaction that morning had grown out of the heat of the crime, and the very leaders admitted that in no case would it have gone beyond a beating. Furthermore, it was Susana Abdala, the centenary matriarch, who recommended the prodigious infusion of passion flowers and great absinthe that dried up Pablo Vicario's cholerine and unleashed at the same time his brother's florid flow. Pedro Vicario then fell into an insomniac drowsiness and his recovered brother earned his first sleep without remorse. That was how Purisima Vicario found them at three o'clock in the morning on Tuesday when the mayor brought her to say good-bye to them.

  The whole family left, even the older sisters with their husbands, on Colonel Aponte's initiative. They left without anyone's noticing, sheltered by public exhaustion, while the only survivors of that irreparable day among us who were awake were burying Santiago Nasar. They were leaving until spirits cooled off, according to the mayor's decision, but they never came back. Pura Vicario wrapped the face of the rejected daughter in a cloth so that no one would see the bruises, and she dressed her in bright red so nobody might think she was mourning her secret lover. Before leaving she asked Father Amador to confess her sons in jail, but Pedro Vicario refused and convinced his brother that they had nothing to repent. They remained alone, and on the day of their transfer to Riohacha they had recovered so much and were so convinced that they were right that they didn't want to be taken out by night, as had been done with the family, but in broad daylight and with their faces showing. Poncio Vicario, the father, died a short time later. "His moral pain carried him off," Angela Vicario told me. When the twins were absolved they remained in Riohacha, only a day's trip from Manaure, where the family was living. Prudencia Cotes went there to marry Pablo Vicario, who learned to work with precious metals in his father's shop and came to be an elegant goldsmith. Pedro Vicario, without love or a job, reenlisted in the armed forces three years later, earned his first sergeant's stripes, and one fine morning his patrol went into guerrilla territory singing whorehouse songs and was never heard of again.

  For the immense majority of people there was only one victim: Bayardo San Roman. They took it for granted that the other protagonists of the tragedy had been fulfilling with dignity, and even with a certain grandeur, their part of the fortune that life had assigned them. Santiago Nasar had expiated the insult, the brothers Vicario had proved their status as men, and the seduced sister was in possession of her honor once more. The only one who had lost everything was Bayardo San Roman: "poor Bayardo," as he was remembered over the years. Still, no one had thought of him until after the eclipse of the moon the following Saturday, when the widower Xius told the mayor that he'd seen a phosphorescent bird fluttering over his former home, and he thought it was the soul of his wife, who was going about demanding what was hers. The mayor slapped his brow, but it had nothing to do with the widower's vision.

  "Shit!" he shouted. "I'd completely forgotten about that poor man!"

  He went up the hill with a patrol and found the car with its top down in front of the farmhouse, and he saw a solitary light in the bedroom, but no one answered his knocks. So they broke down a side door and searched the rooms, which were lighted by the embers of the eclipse. "Things looked like they were under water," the mayor told me. Bayardo San Roman was unconscious on the bed, still the way Pura Vicario had seen him early Tuesday morning, wearing his dress pants and silk shirt, but with his shoes off. There were empty bottles on the floor and many more unopened beside the bed, but not a trace of food. "He was in the last stages of ethylic intoxication," I was told by Dr. Dionisio Iguaran, who had given him emergency treatment. But he recovered in a few hours, and as soon as his mind had cleared, he threw them out of the house with the best manners he was capable of.

  "Nobody fucks with me," he said. "Not even my father with his war veteran's balls."

  The mayor informed General Petronio San Roman of the episode, down to the last literal phrase, in an alarming telegram. General San Roman must have followed his son's wishes to the letter, because he didn't come for him, but sent his wife with their daughters and two other older women who seemed to be her sisters. They came on a cargo boat, locked in mourning up to their necks because of Bayardo San Roman's misfortunes, and with their hair hanging loose in grief. Before stepping onto land, they took off their shoes and went barefoot through the streets up to the hilltop in the burning dust of noon, pulling out strands of hair by the roots and wailing loudly with such high-pitched shrieks that they seemed to be from joy. I watched them pass from Magdalena Oliver's balcony and I remember thinking that distress like that could only be put on in order to hide other, greater shames.

  Colonel Lazaro Aponte accompanied them to the house on the hill, and then Dr. Dionisio Iguaran went up on the mule he had for emergencies. When the sun let up, two men from the town government brought Bayardo San Roman down on a hammock hanging from a pole, wrapped up to his neck in a blanket and with a retinue of wailing women. Magdalena Oliver thought he was dead.

  "Collons de deu!" she exclaimed. "What a waste!"

  He was laid out by alcohol again, but it was hard to believe they were
carrying a living person, because his right arm was dragging on the ground, and as soon as his mother put it back inside the hammock it would fall out again, so that he left a trail on the ground from the edge of the precipice to the deck of the boat. That was all that we had left of him: the memory of a victim.

  They left the farmhouse the way it was. My brothers and I would go up to explore it on carousing nights when we were home on vacation, and each time we found fewer things of value in the abandoned rooms. Once we rescued the small valise that Angela Vicario had asked her mother for on her wedding night, but we didn't pay any great attention to it. What we found inside seemed to be a woman's natural items for hygiene and beauty, and I only found out their real use when Angela Vicario told me many years later which things were the old wives' artifices she had been instructed in so as to deceive her husband. It was the only trace she'd left in what had been her home as a married woman for five hours.

  Years later when I came back to search out the last pieces of testimony for this chronicle, not even the embers of Yolanda Xius's happiness remained. Things had been disappearing little by little in spite of Colonel Lazaro Aponte's determined vigilance, even the full-length closet with six mirrors that the mastercraftsmen of Mompox had had to assemble inside the house because it wouldn't fit through the door. At first the widower Xius was overjoyed, thinking that they were the posthumous recourses of his wife to carry off what was hers. Colonel Lazaro Aponte made fun of him. But one night it occurred to him to hold a spiritualist seance in order to clear up the mystery, and the soul of Yolanda Xius confirmed in her own handwriting that it was in fact she who was recovering the knickknacks of happiness for her house of death. The house began to crumble. The wedding car was falling apart by the door, and finally nothing remained except its weather-rotted carcass. For many years nothing was heard again of its owner. There is a declaration by him in the brief, but it is so short and conventional that it seems to have been put together at the last minute in order to comply with an unavoidable requirement. The only time I tried to talk to him, twenty-three years later, he received me with a certain aggressiveness and refused to supply even the most insignificant fact that might clarify a little his participation in the drama. In any case, not even his family knew much more about him than we did, nor did they have the slightest idea of what he had come to do in a mislaid town, with no other apparent aim than to marry a woman he had never seen.