Chronicle of a Death Foretold (10 page)

“Sons of bitches!” he shouted.

The knife went through the palm of his right hand and then sank into his side up to the hilt. Everybody heard his cry of pain.

“Oh, mother of mine!”

Pedro Vicario pulled out his knife with his slaughterer’s iron wrist and dealt him a second thrust almost in the same place. “The strange thing is that the knife
kept coming out clean,” Pedro Vicario declared to the
investigator. “I’d given it to him at least three times and there wasn’t a drop of blood.” Santiago Nasar twisted after the third stab, his arms crossed over his stomach, let out the moan of a calf, and tried to turn his back to them. Pablo Vicario, who was on his left, then gave him the only stab in the back and a spurt of blood under high
pressure soaked his shirt. “It smelled like him,” he told me. Mortally wounded three times, Santiago Nasar turned frontward again and leaned his back against his mother’s door, without the slightest resistance, as if he only wanted to help them finish killing him by equal shares. “He didn’t cry out again,” Pedro Vicario told the investigator. “Just the opposite: it looked to me as if he was laughing.”
Then they both kept on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other side of fear. They didn’t hear the shouts of the whole town, frightened by its own crime. “I felt the way you do when you’re galloping on horseback,” Pablo Vicario declared. But they both suddenly awakened to reality, because they were exhausted, and
yet they thought that Santiago Nasar would never fall. “Shit, cousin,” Pablo Vicario told me, “you can’t imagine how hard it is to kill a man!” Trying to finish it once and for all, Pedro Vicario sought his heart, but he looked for it almost in the armpit, where pigs have it. Actually, Santiago Nasar
wasn’t falling because they themselves were holding him up with stabs against the door. Desperate,
Pablo Vicario gave him a horizontal slash on the stomach, and all his intestines exploded out. Pedro Vicario was about to do the same, but his wrist twisted with horror and he gave him a wild cut on the thigh. Santiago Nasar was still for an instant, leaning against the door, until he saw his own viscera in the sunlight, clean and blue, and he fell on his knees.

After looking and shouting for
him in the bedroom, hearing other shouts that weren’t hers and not knowing from where, Plácida Linero went to the window facing the square and saw the Vicario twins running toward the church. Hot in pursuit was Yamil Shaium with his jaguar gun and some other unarmed Arabs, and Plácida Linero thought the danger had passed. Then she went out onto the bedroom balcony and saw Santiago Nasar in front
of the door, face down in the dust, trying to rise up out of his own blood. He stood up, leaning to one side, and started to walk in a state of hallucination, holding his hanging intestines in his hands.

He walked more than a hundred yards, completely around the house, and went in through the kitchen door. He still had enough lucidity not to go along the street, it was the longest way, but he
went in by way of the house next door. Poncho Lanao, his wife, and their
five children hadn’t known what had just happened twenty paces from their door. “We heard the shouting,” the wife told me, “but we thought it was part of the bishop’s festival.” They were sitting down to breakfast when they saw Santiago Nasar enter, soaked in blood and carrying the roots of his entrails in his hands. Poncho
Lanao told me: “What I’ll never forget was the terrible smell of shit.” But Argénida Lanao, the oldest daughter, said that Santiago Nasar walked with his usual good bearing, measuring his steps well, and that his Saracen face with its headstrong ringlets was handsomer than ever. As he passed by the table he smiled at them and continued through the bedrooms to the rear door of the house. “We were
paralyzed with fright,” Argénida Lanao told me. My aunt, Wenefrida Márquez, was scaling a shad in her yard on the other side of the river when she saw him go down the steps of the old dock, looking for his way home with a firm step.

“Santiago, my son,” she shouted to him, “what has happened to you?”

“They’ve killed me, Wene child,” he said.

He stumbled on the last step, but he got up at once.
“He even took care to brush off the dirt that was stuck to his guts,” my Aunt Wene told me. Then he went into his house through the back door that had been open since six and fell on his face in the kitchen.

COLLECTED STORIES

IN EVIL HOUR

INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES

LEAF STORM

LIVING TO TELL THE TALE

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES

NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING

NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL

OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS

ONE HUNDRED YEARS
OF SOLITUDE

STRANGE PILGRIMS

THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH

THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH

THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR

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‘The stories are rich and unsettling, confident and eloquent. They are magical’ John Updike

Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel García Márquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities
in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo’s revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Márquez’s stories are a delight.

‘These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is essence of Márquez’
Guardian

‘Of all the
living authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel García Márquez’
Sunday Telegraph

‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do’ Salman Rushdie

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‘A masterly book’
Guardian

‘César Montero was dreaming about elephants. He’d seen them at the movies on Sunday …’

Only moments later, César is led away by police as they clear the crowds away from the man he has just killed.

But César is not the only
man to be riled by the rumours being spread in his Colombian hometown – under the cover of darkness, someone creeps through the streets sticking malicious posters to walls and doors. Each night the respectable townsfolk retire to their beds fearful that they will be the subject of the following morning’s lampoons.

As paranoia seeps through the town and the delicate veil of tranquility begins
to slip, can the perpetrator be uncovered before accusation and violence leave the inhabitants’ sanity in tatters?

‘
In Evil Hour
was the book which was to inspire my own career as a novelist. I owe my writing voice to that one book!’ Jim Crace

‘Belongs to the very best of Márquez’s work … Should on no account be missed’
Financial Times

‘A splendid achievement’
The Times

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