Chronicle of a Death Foretold (8 page)

She wrote a weekly letter for over half a lifetime. “Sometimes I couldn’t think of what to say,” she told me, dying with laughter, “but it was enough for me to know that he was getting them.” At first they were a
fiancée’s
notes, then they were little messages from a secret lover, perfumed cards from a furtive sweetheart, business papers, love documents, and lastly they were the indignant letters of an abandoned wife who invented cruel illnesses to make him return. One night, in a good mood, she spilled the inkwell over the finished letter and instead of tearing it up she added a postscript: “As proof of my love
I send you my tears.” On occasion, tired of weeping, she would make fun of her own madness. Six times the postmistresses were changed and six times she got their complicity. The only thing that didn’t occur to her was to give up. Nevertheless, he seemed insensible to her delirium; it was like writing to nobody.

Early one windy morning in the tenth year, she was awakened by the certainty that
he was naked in her bed. Then she wrote him a feverish letter, twenty pages long, in which without shame she let out the bitter truths that she had carried rotting in her heart ever since that ill-fated night. She spoke to him of the eternal scars he had left on her body, the salt of his tongue, the fiery furrow of his African tool. On Friday she gave it to the postmistress who came Friday afternoons
to embroider with her and pick up the letters, and she was convinced that that final alleviation would be the end of her agony. But there was no reply. From then on she was no longer conscious of what she wrote
nor to whom she was really writing, but she kept on writing without quarter for seventeen years.

Halfway through one August day, while she was embroidering with her friends, she heard
someone coming to the door. She didn’t have to look to see who it was. “He was fat and was beginning to lose his hair, and he already needed glasses to see things close by,” she told me. “But it was him, God damn it, it was him!” She was frightened because she knew he was seeing her just as diminished as she saw him, and she didn’t think he had as much love inside as she to bear up under it. His shirt
was soaked in sweat, as she had seen him the first time at the fair, and he was wearing the same belt, and carrying the same unstitched leather saddlebags with silver decorations. Bayardo San Román took a step forward, unconcerned about the other astonished embroiderers, and laid his saddlebags on the sewing machine.

“Well,” he said, “here I am.”

He was carrying a suitcase with clothing in order
to stay and another just like it with almost two thousand letters that she had written him. They were arranged by date in bundles tied with colored ribbons, and all unopened.

F
OR YEARS
we couldn’t talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us
could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.

Many never got to know. Cristo Bedoya, who went on to become a surgeon of renown, never managed to explain to himself why he gave in to the impulse to spend two hours at his grandparents’ house until the bishop came instead of going to rest at his parents’, who had been waiting for him since dawn
to warn him. But most of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and still didn’t do it consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are sacred monopolies with access only for those who are part of the drama. “Honor is love,” I heard my mother say. Hortensia Baute, whose only participation was having seen two bloody knives that weren’t bloody yet, felt so affected
by the hallucination that she fell into a penitential crisis and one day, unable to take it any longer, she ran out naked into the street. Flora Miguel, Santiago Nasar’s fiancée, ran away out of spite with a lieutenant of the border patrol, who prostituted her among the rubber workers on the Vichada. Aura Villeros, the midwife who had helped bring three generations into the world, suffered a spasm
of the bladder when she heard the news and to the day of her death had to use a catheter in order to urinate. Don Rogelio de la Flor, Clotilde Armenta’s good husband, who was a marvel of vitality at the age of eighty-six, got up for the last time to see how they had hewn Santiago Nasar to bits against the locked door of his
own house, and he didn’t survive the shock. Plácida Linero had locked
that door at the last moment, but with the passage of time she freed herself from blame. “I locked it because Divina Flor had sworn to me that she’d seen my son come in,” she told me, “and it wasn’t true.” On the other hand, she never forgave herself for having mixed up the magnificent augury of trees with the unlucky one of birds, and she succumbed to the pernicious habit of her time of chewing pepper
cress seeds.

Twelve days after the crime, the investigating magistrate came upon a town that was an open wound. In the squalid wooden office in the town hall, drinking pot coffee laced with cane liquor against the mirages of the heat, he had to ask for troop reinforcements to control the crowd that was pouring in to testify without having been summoned, anxious to show off their own important
parts in the drama. He was newly graduated and still wore his black linen law school suit and the gold ring with the emblem of his degree, and he had the airs and the lyricism of a happy new parent. But I never learned his name. Everything we know about his character has been learned from the brief, which several people helped me look for twenty years later in the Palace of Justice in Riohacha. There
was no classification of files whatever and more than a century of cases were piled up on the floor of the decrepit
colonial building that had been Sir Francis Drake’s headquarters for two days. The ground floor would be flooded by high tides and the unbound volumes floated about the deserted offices. I myself did my searching many times with the water up to my ankles in that lagoon of lost causes,
and only chance after five years of searching let me rescue some 322 pages filched from the more than 500 that the brief must have had.

The judge’s name didn’t appear on any of them, but it was obvious that he was a man burning with the fever of literature. He had doubtless read the Spanish classics and a few Latin ones, and he was quite familiar with Nietzsche, who was the fashionable author
among magistrates of his time. The marginal notes, and not just because of the color of the ink, seemed to be written in blood. He was so perplexed by the enigma that chance had touched him with, that many times he fell into lyrical distractions that ran contrary to the rigor of his profession. Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden
literature, so that there should be the untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold.

Nevertheless, what had alarmed him most at the end of his excessive diligence was not having found a single indication, not even the most unlikely one, that Santiago Nasar had been the cause of the wrong. The friends of Angela Vicario who had been her accomplices
in the deception kept on saying for
a long time that she had shared her secret with them since before the wedding, but that she hadn’t revealed any name to them. In the brief they declared: “She told us about the miracle but not the saint.” Angela Vicario, for her part, wouldn’t budge. When the investigating magistrate asked her with his lateral style if she knew who the decedent Santiago Nasar was, she answered him impassively:

“He was my perpetrator.”

That’s the way she swears in the brief, but with no further precision of either how or where. During the trial, which lasted only three days, the representative of the people put his greatest effort into the weakness of that charge. Such was the perplexity of the investigating magistrate over the lack of proof against Santiago Nasar that his good work at times seemed ruined
by disillusionment. On folio 416, in his own handwriting and with the druggist’s red ink, he wrote a marginal note:
Give me a prejudice and I will move the world
. Under that paraphrase of discouragement, in a merry sketch with the same blood ink, he drew a heart pierced by an arrow. For him, the same as for Santiago Nasar’s closest friends, the victim’s very behavior during his last hours was
overwhelming proof of his innocence.

On the morning of his death, in fact, Santiago Nasar
hadn’t had a moment of doubt, in spite of the fact that he knew very well what the price of the insult imputed to him was. He was aware of the prudish disposition of his world, and he must have known that the twins’ simple nature was incapable of resisting an insult. No one knew Bayardo San Román very well,
but Santiago Nasar knew him well enough to know that underneath his worldly airs he was as subject as anyone else to his native prejudices. So that his conscious lack of concern could have been suicide. Besides, when he finally learned at the last moment that the Vicario brothers were waiting for him to kill him, his reaction was not one of panic, as has so often been said, but was rather the
bewilderment of innocence.

My personal impression is that he died without understanding his death. After he’d promised my sister Margot that he would come and have breakfast at our house, Cristo Bedoya took him by the arm along the dock and both seemed so unconcerned that they gave rise to false illusions. “They were both going along so contentedly,” Meme Loiza told me, “that I gave thanks to
God, because I thought the matter had been cleared up.” Not everybody loved Santiago Nasar too much, of course. Polo Carrillo, the owner of the electric plant, thought that his serenity wasn’t innocence but cynicism. “He thought that his money made him untouchable,” he told me. Fausta López, his wife,
commented: “Just like all Turks.” Indalecio Pardo had just passed by Clotilde Armenta’s store
and the twins had told him that as soon as the bishop left they were going to kill Santiago Nasar. Like so many others, he thought they were the fantasies of early risers, but Clotilde Armenta made him see that it was true, and she asked him to get to Santiago Nasar and warn him.

“Don’t bother,” Pedro Vicario told him. “No matter what, he’s as good as dead already.”

It was too obvious a challenge:
the twins knew the bonds between Indalecio Pardo and Santiago Nasar, and they must have thought that he was just the right person to stop the crime without bringing any shame on them. But Indalecio found Santiago Nasar led by the arm by Cristo Bedoya among the groups that were leaving the docks, and he didn’t dare warn him. “I lost my nerve,” he told me. He gave each one a pat on the back and
let them go their way. They scarcely noticed it, because they were still interested in the costs of the wedding.

The people were breaking up and heading toward the square the same way as they. It was a thick crowd, but Escolástica Cisneros thought she noticed that the two friends were walking in the center of it without any difficulty, inside an empty circle, because the people knew that Santiago
Nasar was going to die and
they didn’t dare touch him. Cristo Bedoya also remembered a strange attitude toward them. “They were looking at us as if we had our faces painted,” he told me. Also, Sara Noriega was opening her shoe store at the moment they passed and she was frightened at Santiago Nasar’s paleness. But he calmed her down.

“You can imagine, Missy Sara,” he told her without stopping,
“with all this hullabaloo!”

Celeste Dangond was sitting in his pajamas by the door of his house, mocking those who had gone to greet the bishop, and he invited Santiago Nasar to have some coffee. “It was in order to gain some time to think,” he told me. But Santiago Nasar answered that he was in a hurry to change clothes to have breakfast with my sister. “I got all mixed up,” Celeste Dangond
told me, “because it suddenly seemed to me that they couldn’t be killing him if he was so sure of what he was going to do.” Yamil Shaium was the only one who did what he had proposed doing. As soon as he heard the rumor, he went out to the door of his dry goods store and waited for Santiago Nasar so he could warn him. He was one of the last Arabs who had come with Ibrahim Nasar, had been his partner
in cards until his death, and was still the hereditary counselor of the family. No one had as much authority as he to talk to Santiago Nasar. Nevertheless, he thought that if the rumor was baseless it would alarm him uselessly, and
he preferred to consult first with Cristo Bedoya in case the latter was better informed. He called to him as he went by. Cristo Bedoya gave a pat on the back to Santiago
Nasar, who was already at the corner of the square, and answered Yamil Shaium’s call. “See you Saturday,” he told him.

Santiago Nasar didn’t reply, but said something in Arabic to Yamil Shaium, and the latter answered him, also in Arabic, twisting with laughter. “It was a play on words we always had fun with,” Yamil Shaium told me. Without stopping, Santiago Nasar waved good-bye to both of them
and turned the corner of the square. It was the last time they saw him.

Cristo Bedoya only took time to hear Yamil Shaium’s information before he ran out of the store to catch Santiago Nasar. He’d seen him turn the corner, but he couldn’t find him among the groups that were beginning to break up on the square. Several people he asked gave him the same answer.

“I just saw him with you.”

It seemed
impossible that he could have reached home in such a short time, but in any case, he went in to ask about him since he found the front door unbarred and ajar. He went in without seeing the paper on the floor. He passed through the shadowy living room, trying not to make any noise, because it was still too early for visitors, but the dogs became aroused at
the back of the house and came out to
meet him. He calmed them down with his keys as he’d learned from their master, and went on toward the kitchen, with them following. On the veranda he came upon Divina Flor, who was carrying a pail of water and a rag to clean the floor in the living room. She assured him that Santiago Nasar hadn’t returned. Victoria Guzmán had just put the rabbit stew on the stove when he entered the kitchen. She understood
immediately. “His heart was in his mouth,” she told me. Cristo Bedoya asked her if Santiago Nasar was home and she answered him with feigned innocence that he still hadn’t come in to go to sleep.

“It’s serious,” Cristo Bedoya told her. “They’re looking for him to kill him.”

Victoria Guzmán forgot her innocence.

“Those poor boys won’t kill anybody,” she said.

“They’ve been drinking since Saturday,”
Cristo Bedoya said.

“That’s just it,” she replied. “There’s no drunk in the world who’ll eat his own crap.”

Cristo Bedoya went back to the living room, where Divina Flor had just opened the windows. “Of course it wasn’t raining,” Cristo Bedoya told me. “It was just going on seven and a golden sun was already coming through the windows.” He asked Divina Flor again if she was sure that Santiago
Nasar hadn’t come in
through the living room door. She wasn’t as sure then as the first time. He asked her about Plácida Linero, and she answered that just a moment before she’d put her coffee on the night table, but she hadn’t awakened her. That’s the way it always was: she would wake up at seven, have her coffee, and come down to give instructions for lunch. Cristo Bedoya looked at the clock:
it was six fifty-six. Then he went up to the second floor to make sure that Santiago Nasar hadn’t come in.

The bedroom was locked from the inside, because Santiago Nasar had gone out through his mother’s bedroom. Cristo Bedoya not only knew the house as well as his own, but was so much at home with the family that he pushed open the door to Plácida Linero’s bedroom and went from there to the
adjoining one. A beam of dusty light was coming in through the skylight, and the beautiful woman asleep on her side in the hammock, her bride’s hand on her cheek, had an unreal look. “It was like an apparition,” Cristo Bedoya told me. He looked at her for an instant, fascinated by her beauty, and then he went through the room in silence, passed by the bathroom, and went into Santiago Nasar’s bedroom.
The bed was still made, and on the chair, well-pressed, were his riding clothes, and on top of the clothes his horseman’s hat, and on the floor his boots beside their spurs. On the night table,
Santiago Nasar’s wristwatch said six fifty-eight. “Suddenly I thought that he’d come back so that he could go out armed,” Cristo Bedoya told me. But he found the magnum in the drawer of the night table.
“I’d never shot a gun,” Cristo Bedoya told me, “but I decided to take the revolver and bring it to Santiago Nasar.” He stuck it in his belt, under his shirt, and only after the crime did he realize that it was unloaded. Plácida Linero appeared in the doorway with her mug of coffee just as he was closing the drawer.