Chronicle of a Death Foretold (3 page)

“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 Iguarán, 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 Román 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 Román 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 Román 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 Román. “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 Iguarán, 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 Román. “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 Iguarán
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 Román 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 fiancé 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 Román 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 Román, 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 Román himself and ended up being a public event.

General Petronio
San Román 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 Plácida 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 Román, 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 Román 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’ve 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 Román 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 Román, 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 Román, 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 Román’s prediction had been exact.

I had a very confused memory of the festival before I decided to rescue it piece by piece from the memory of others. For years they continued talking in my house about the fact that my father had gone back to playing his boyhood violin in honor of the newlyweds, that my sister the nun had danced a merengue in her doorkeeper’s habit, and that Dr.
Dionisio Iguarán, who was my mother’s cousin, had arranged for them to take him off on the official boat so he wouldn’t be here the next day when the bishop arrived. In the course of the investigations for this chronicle I recovered numerous marginal experiences, among them the free recollections of Bayardo San Román’s sisters, whose velvet dresses with great butterfly wings pinned to their backs
with gold brooches drew more attention than the plumed hat and row of war medals worn by their father. Many knew that in the confusion of the bash I had proposed marriage to Mercedes Barcha as
soon as she finished primary school, just as she herself would remind me fourteen years later when we got married. Really, the most intense image that I have always held of that undesirable Sunday was that
of old Poncio Vicario sitting alone on a stool in the center of the yard. They had placed him there thinking perhaps that it was the seat of honor, and the guests stumbled over him, confused him with someone else, moved him so he wouldn’t be in the way, and he nodded his snow-white head in all directions with the erratic expression of someone too recently blind, answering questions that weren’t
directed at him and answering fleeting waves of the hand that no one was making to him, happy in his circle of oblivion, his shirt cardboard-stiff with starch and holding the lignum vitae cane they had bought him for the party.

The formal activities ended at six in the afternoon, when the guests of honor took their leave. The boat left with all its lights burning and with a wake of waltzes from
the player piano, and for an instant we were cast adrift over an abyss of uncertainty, until we recognized each other again and plunged into the man-grove of the bash. The newlyweds appeared a short time later in the open car, making their way with difficulty through the tumult. Bayardo San Román shot off rockets, drank cane liquor from the bottles the crowd held out to him, and got out of the
car with
Angela Vicario to join the whirl of the
cumbiamba
dance. Finally, he ordered us to keep on dancing at his expense for as long as our lives would reach, and he carried his terrified wife off to his dream house, where the widower Xius had been happy.

The public spree broke up into fragments around midnight, and all that remained was Clotilde Armenta’s establishment on one side of the square.
Santiago Nasar and I, with my brother Luis Enrique and Cristo Bedoya, went to María Alejandrina Cervantes’ house of mercies. Among so many others, the Vicario brothers went there and they were drinking with us and singing with Santiago Nasar five hours before killing him. A few scattered embers from the original party must have still remained, because from all sides waves of music and distant
fights reached us, sadder and sadder, until a short while before the bishop’s boat bellowed.

Pura Vicario told my mother that she had gone to bed at eleven o’clock at night after her older daughters had helped her clean up a bit from the devastation of the wedding. Around ten o’clock, when there were still a few drunkards singing in the square, Angela Vicario had sent for a little suitcase of
personal things that were in the dresser in her bedroom, and she asked them also to send a suitcase with everyday clothes, but the messenger was in a hurry. She’d fallen into a deep
sleep, when there was knocking on the door. “They were three very slow knocks,” she told my mother, “but they had that strange touch of bad news about them.” She told her that she’d opened the door without turning
on the light so as not to awaken anybody and saw Bayardo San Román in the glow of the street light, his silk shirt unbuttoned and his fancy pants held up by elastic suspenders. “He had that green color of dreams,” Pura Vicario told my mother. Angela Vicario was in the shadows, so she only saw her when Bayardo San Román grabbed her by the arm and brought her into the light. Her satin dress was in shreds
and she was wrapped in a towel up to the waist. Pura Vicario thought they’d gone off the road in the car and were lying dead at the bottom of the ravine.