Chronicle of a Death Foretold (7 page)

For the immense majority of people there was only one victim: Bayardo San Román. 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 Román: “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 Román 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 Iguarán, 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 Román of the episode, down to the last literal phrase, in an alarming telegram. General San Román 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 Román’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 Lázaro Aponte accompanied them to the house on the hill, and then Dr. Dionisio Iguarán went up on the mule he had for emergencies.
When the sun let up, two men from the town government brought Bayardo San Román 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
Lázaro 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 Lázaro Aponte made fun of him. But one night it occurred to him
to hold a spiritualist séance 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.

Of Angela Vicario, on the other hand, I always got periodic news that inspired an idealized image in me. My sister the nun had been going about
the upper Guajira for some time trying to convert the last idolaters, and she was in the habit of stopping and chatting with her in the village baked by Caribbean salt where her mother had tried to bury her alive. “Regards from your cousin,” she would always tell me. My sister Margot, who also visited her during the first
years, told me she had bought a solid house with a large courtyard with
cross ventilation, the only problem being that on nights of high tide the toilets would back up and fish would appear flopping about in the bedrooms at dawn. Everyone who saw her during that time agreed that she was absorbed and skilled at her embroidery machine, and that by her industry she had managed to forget.

Much later, during an uncertain period when I was trying to understand something
of myself by selling encyclopedias and medical books in the towns of Guajira, by chance I got as far as that Indian death village. At the window of a house that faced the sea, embroidering by machine during the hottest hour of the day, was a woman half in mourning, with steel-rimmed glasses and yellowish gray hair, and hanging above her head was a cage with a canary that didn’t stop singing. When
I saw her like that in the idyllic frame of the window, I refused to believe that the woman there was the one I thought, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit that life would end up resembling bad literature so much. But it was she: Angela Vicario, twenty-three years after the drama.

She treated me the same as always, like a distant cousin, and answered my questions with very good judgment
and a sense of humor. She was so mature and witty that it was difficult to believe that she was
the same person. What surprised me most was the way in which she’d ended up understanding her own life. After a few minutes she no longer seemed as aged to me as at first sight, but almost as young as in my memory, and she had nothing in common with the person who’d been obliged to marry without love
at the age of twenty. Her mother, in her grouchy old age, received me like a difficult ghost. She refused to talk about the past, and for this chronicle I had to be satisfied with a few disconnected phrases from her conversations with my mother, and a few others rescued from my memories. She had gone beyond what was possible to make Angela Vicario die in life, but the daughter herself had brought
her plans to naught because she never made any mystery out of her misfortune. On the contrary, she would recount it in all its details to anyone who wanted to hear it, except for one item that would never be cleared up: who was the real cause of her damage and how and why, because no one believed that it had really been Santiago Nasar. They belonged to two completely different worlds. No one had
ever seen them together, much less alone together. Santiago Nasar was too haughty to have noticed her: “Your cousin the booby,” he would say to me when he had to mention her. Besides, as we said at that time, he was a chicken hawk. He went about alone, just like his father, nipping the bud of any wayward virgin that
would begin showing up in those woods, but in town no other relationship ever
came to be known except for the conventional one he maintained with Flora Miguel, and the stormy one with Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, which drove him crazy for fourteen months. The most current version, perhaps because it was the most perverse, was that Angela Vicario was protecting someone who really loved her and she had chosen Santiago Nasar’s name because she thought her brothers would never
dare go up against him. I tried to get that truth out of her myself when I visited her the second time, with all my arguments in order, but she barely lifted her eyes from the embroidery to knock them down. “Don’t beat it to death, cousin,” she told me. “He was the one.”

Everything else she told without reticence, even the disaster of her wedding night. She recounted how her friends had instructed
her to get her husband drunk in bed until he passed out, to feign more embarrassment than she really felt so he’d turn out the light, to give herself a drastic douche of alum water to fake virginity, and to stain the sheet with Mercurochrome so she could display it the following day in her bridal courtyard. Her bawds hadn’t counted on two things: Bayardo San Román’s exceptional resistance as
a drinker, and the pure decency that Angela Vicario carried hidden inside the stolidity her mother had imposed.
“I didn’t do any of what they told me,” she said, “because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was all something dirty that shouldn’t be done to anybody, much less to the poor man who had the bad luck to marry me.” So she let herself get undressed openly in the lighted
bedroom, safe now from all the acquired fears that had ruined her life. “It was very easy,” she told me, “because I’d made up my mind to die.”

The truth is that she spoke about her misfortune without any shame in order to cover up the other misfortune, the real one, that was burning in her insides. No one would even have suspected until she decided to tell me that Bayardo San Román had been in
her life forever from the moment he’d brought her back home. It was a coup de grace. “Suddenly, when Mama began to hit me, I began to remember him,” she told me. The blows hurt less because she knew they were for him. She continued thinking about him with a certain surprise at herself while she was lying on the dining room couch sobbing. “I wasn’t crying because of the blows or anything that had
happened,” she told me. “I was crying because of him.” She kept on thinking about him while her mother put arnica compresses on her face, and even more when she heard the shouting in the street and the fire alarm bells in the belfry, and her mother came in to tell her she could sleep now because the worst was over.

She’d been thinking about him for a long time without any illusions when she had
to go with her mother to get her eyes examined in the hospital at Riohacha. They stopped off on the way at the Hotel del Puerto, whose owner they knew, and Pura Vicario asked for a glass of water at the bar. She was drinking it with her back to her daughter when the latter saw her own thoughts reflected in the mirrors repeated around the room. Angela Vicario turned her head with a last breath and
saw him pass by without seeing her and saw him go out of the hotel. Then she looked at her mother with her heart in shreds. Pura Vicario had finished drinking, dried her lips on her sleeve, and smiled at her from the bar with her new glasses. In that smile, for the first time since her birth, Angela Vicario saw her as she was: a poor woman devoted to the cult of her defects. “Shit,” she said to
herself. She was so upset that she spent the whole trip back home singing aloud, and she threw herself on her bed to weep for three days.

She was reborn. “I went crazy over him,” she told me, “out of my mind.” She only had to close her eyes to see him, she heard him breathing in the sea, the blaze of his body in bed would awaken her at midnight. Toward the end of that week, unable to get a moment’s
rest, she wrote him the first letter. It was a conventional missive, in which she told him that she’d seen him come out of the hotel, and that she would
have liked it if he had seen her. She waited in vain for a reply. At the end of two months, tired of waiting, she sent him another letter in the same oblique style as the previous one, whose only aim seemed to be to reproach him for his lack of
courtesy. Six months later she had written six letters with no reply, but she comforted herself with the proof that he was getting them.

Mistress of her fate for the first time, Angela Vicario then discovered that hate and love are reciprocal passions. The more letters she sent the more the coals of her fever burned, but the happy rancor she felt for her mother also heated up. “Just seeing her
would turn my stomach,” she told me, “but I couldn’t see her without remembering him.” Her life as a rejected wife continued on, simple as that of an old maid, still doing machine embroidery with her friends, just as before she had made cloth tulips and paper birds, but when her mother went to bed she would stay in the room until dawn writing letters with no future. She became lucid, overbearing,
mistress of her own free will, and she became a virgin again just for him, and she recognized no other authority than her own nor any other service than that of her obsession.