Chronicle of a Death Foretold (9 page)

“Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “You gave me a start!”

Cristo Bedoya was also
startled. He saw her in the full light, wearing a dressing gown with golden larks, her hair loose, and the charm had vanished. He explained, somewhat confused, that he was looking for Santiago Nasar.

“He went to receive the bishop,” Plácida Linero said.

“He went right through,” he said.

“I thought so,” she said. “He’s the son of the worst kind of mother.”

She didn’t go on because at that moment
she realized that Cristo Bedoya didn’t know what to do with his body. “I hope that God has forgiven me,” Plácida Linero told me, “but he seemed so confused that it suddenly occurred to me that he’d come to rob.” She
asked him what was wrong. Cristo Bedoya was aware he was in a suspicious situation, but he didn’t have the courage to reveal the truth.

“It’s just that I haven’t had a minute’s sleep,”
he told her.

He left without any more explanations. “In any case,” he told me, “she was always imagining that she was being robbed.” On the square he ran into Father Amador, who was returning to the church with the vestments for the frustrated mass, but he didn’t think he could do anything for Santiago Nasar except save his soul. He was heading toward the docks again when he heard them calling
him from the door of Clotilde Armenta’s store. Pedro Vicario was in the door, pale and haggard, his shirt open and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and with the naked knife in his hand. His manner was too insolent to be natural, and yet it wasn’t the only one or the most visible one that he’d put on in the last moments so they would stop him from committing the crime.

“Cristóbal,” he shouted,
“tell Santiago Nasar that we’re waiting for him here to kill him.”

Cristo Bedoya could have done him the favor of stopping him. “If I’d known how to shoot a revolver, Santiago Nasar would be alive today,” he told me. But the idea did impress him after all he’d heard said about the devasting power of an armor-plated bullet.

“I warn you. He’s armed with a magnum that can go through an engine block,”
he shouted.

Pedro Vicario knew it wasn’t true. “He never went armed except when he wore riding clothes,” he told me. But in any case, he’d foreseen the possibility that he might be when he made the decision to wipe his sister’s honor clean.

“Dead men can’t shoot,” he shouted.

Then Pablo Vicario appeared in the doorway. He was as pale as his brother and he was wearing his wedding jacket and
carrying his knife wrapped in the newspaper. “If it hadn’t been for that,” Cristo Bedoya told me, “I never would have known which of the two was which.” Clotilde Armenta then appeared behind Pablo Vicario and shouted to Cristo Bedoya to hurry up, because in that faggot town only a man like him could prevent the tragedy.

Everything that happened after that is in the public domain. The people who
were coming back from the docks, alerted by the shouts, began to take up positions on the square to witness the crime. Cristo Bedoya asked several people he knew if they’d seen Santiago Nasar, but no one had. At the door of the social club he ran into Colonel Lázaro Aponte and he told him what had just happened in front of Clotilde Armenta’s store.

“It can’t be,” Colonel Aponte said, “because
I told them to go home to bed.”

“I just saw them with pig-killing knives,” Cristo Bedoya said.

“It can’t be, because I took them away from them before sending them home to bed,” said the mayor. “It must be that you saw them before that.”

“I saw them two minutes ago and they both had pig-killing knives,” Cristo Bedoya said.

“Oh, shit,” the mayor said. “Then they must have come back with two
new ones.”

He promised to take care of it at once, but he went into the social club to check on a date for dominoes that night, and when he came out again the crime had already been committed. Cristo Bedoya then made his only mortal mistake: he thought that Santiago Nasar had decided at the last moment to have breakfast at our house before changing his clothes, and he went to look for him there.
He hurried along the riverbank, asking everyone he passed if they’d seen him go by, but no one said he had. He wasn’t alarmed because there were other ways to get to our house. Próspera Arango, the uplander, begged him to do something for her father, who was in his death throes on the stoop of his house, immune to the bishop’s fleeting blessing. “I’d seen him when I passed,” my sister Margot told
me,
“and he already had the face of a dead man.” Cristo Bedoya delayed four minutes to ascertain the sick man’s state of health, and promised to come back later for some emergency treatment, but he lost three minutes more helping Próspera Arango carry him into the bedroom. When he came out again he heard distant shouts and it seemed to him that rockets were being fired in the direction of the
square. He tried to run but was hindered by the revolver, which was clumsily stuck in his belt. As he turned the last corner he recognized my mother from the rear as she was practically dragging her youngest son along.

“Luisa Santiaga,” he shouted to her, “where’s your godson?”

My mother barely turned, her face bathed in tears.

“Oh, my son,” she answered, “they say he’s been killed!”

That’s
how it was. While Cristo Bedoya had been looking for him, Santiago Nasar had gone into the house of Flora Miguel, his fiancée, just around the corner from where he’d seen him for the last time. “It didn’t occur to me that he could be there,” he told me, “because those people never got up before noon.” The version that went around was that the whole family slept until twelve o’clock on orders from
Nahir Miguel, the wise man of the community. “That’s why Flora Miguel, who wasn’t that young anymore, was
kept like a rose,” Mercedes says. The truth is that they kept the house locked up until very late, like so many others, but they were early-rising and hard-working people. The parents of Santiago Nasar and Flora Miguel had agreed that they should get married. Santiago Nasar accepted the engagement
in the bloom of his adolescence, and he was determined to fulfill it, perhaps because he had the same utilitarian concept of matrimony as his father. Flora Miguel, for her part, enjoyed a certain floral condition, but she lacked wit and judgment and had served as bridesmaid for her whole generation, so the agreement was a providential solution for her. They had an easy engagement, without
formal visits or restless hearts. The wedding, postponed several times, was finally set for the following Christmas.

Flora Miguel awoke that Monday with the first bellows of the bishop’s boat, and shortly thereafter she found out that the Vicario twins were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him. She told my sister the nun, the only one she spoke to after the misfortune, that she didn’t even
remember who’d told her. “I only know that at six o’clock in the morning everybody knew it,” she told her. Nevertheless, it seemed inconceivable to her that they were going to kill Santiago Nasar, but on the other hand, it occurred to her that they would force him to marry Angela Vicario in order to give her back
her honor. She went through a crisis of humiliation. While half the town was waiting
for the bishop, she was in her bedroom weeping with rage, and putting in order the chestful of letters that Santiago Nasar had sent her from school.

Whenever he passed by Flora Miguel’s house, even if nobody was home, Santiago Nasar would scratch his keys across the window screens. That Monday she was waiting with the chest of letters in her lap. Santiago Nasar couldn’t see her from the street,
but she, however, saw him approaching through the screen before he scratched it with his keys.

“Come in,” she told him.

No one, not even a doctor, had entered that house at six forty-five in the morning. Santiago Nasar had just left Cristo Bedoya at Yamil Shaium’s store, and there were so many people hanging on his movements in the square that it was difficult to believe that no one saw him
go into his fiancée’s house. The investigating magistrate looked for a single person who’d seen him, and he did it with as much persistence as I, but it was impossible to find one. In folio 382 of the brief, he wrote another marginal pronouncement in red ink:
Fatality makes us invisible
. The fact is that Santiago Nasar went in through the main door, in full view of everyone, and without doing
anything not to be seen. Flora Miguel was waiting for him in the parlor, green
with rage, wearing one of the dresses with unfortunate ruffles that she was in the habit of putting on for memorable occasions, and she put the chest in his hands.

“Here you are,” she told him. “And I hope they kill you!”

Santiago Nasar was so perplexed that he dropped the chest and his loveless letters poured out
onto the floor. He tried to catch Flora Miguel in the bedroom, but she closed the door and threw the bolt. He knocked several times, and called her in too pressing a voice for the time of day, so the whole family came in, all alarmed. Counting relatives by blood and by marriage, adults and minors, there were more than fourteen of them. The last to come was Nahir Miguel, the father, with his red beard
and the bedouin caftan he had brought from his homeland and which he always wore at home. I saw him many times and he was immense and spare, but what most impressed me was the glow of his authority.

“Flora,” he called in his language. “Open the door.”

He went into his daughter’s bedroom while the family stared at Santiago Nasar. He was kneeling in the parlor, picking up the letters and putting
them into the chest. “It looked like a penance,” they told me. Nahir Miguel came out of the bedroom after a few
minutes, made a signal with his hand, and the whole family disappeared.

He continued talking in Arabic to Santiago Nasar. “From the first moment I understood that he didn’t have the slightest idea of what I was saying,” he told me. Then he asked him outright if he knew that the Vicario
brothers were looking for him to kill him. “He turned pale and lost control in such a way that it was impossible to think that he was pretending,” he told me. He agreed that his manner reflected not so much fear as confusion.

“Only you can know if they’re right or not,” he told him. “But in any case, you’ve only got two paths to follow now: either you hide here, in this house which is yours,
or you go out with my rifle.”

“I don’t understand a Goddamned thing,” Santiago Nasar said.

It was the only thing he managed to say, and he said it in Spanish. “He looked like a little wet bird,” Nahir Miguel told me. He had to take the chest from his hands because he didn’t know where to put it in order to open the door.

“It’ll be two against one,” he told him.

Santiago Nasar left. The people
had stationed themselves on the square the way they did on parade days. They all saw him come out, and they all understood
that now he knew they were going to kill him, and he was so confused he couldn’t find his way home. They say that someone shouted from a balcony: “Not that way, Turk; by the old dock.” Santiago Nasar sought out the voice. Yamil Shaium shouted for him to get into his store
and went to get his hunting gun, but he couldn’t remember where he’d put the cartridges. They began to shout at him from every side, and Santiago Nasar went backward and forward several times, baffled by so many voices at the same time. It was obvious that he was heading toward his house through the kitchen door, but suddenly he must have realized that the main door was open.

“There he comes,”
said Pedro Vicario.

They’d both seen him at the same time. Pablo Vicario took off his jacket, put it on the bench, and unwrapped his knife, holding it like a scimitar. Before leaving the store, without any agreement, they both crossed themselves. Then Clotilde Armenta grabbed Pedro Vicario by the shirt and shouted to Santiago Nasar to run because they were going to kill him. It was such an urgent
shout that it drowned out the others. “At first he was startled,” Clotilde Armenta told me, “because he didn’t know who was shouting at him or from where.” But when he saw her he also saw Pedro Vicario, who threw her to the ground and
caught up with his brother. Santiago Nasar was less than fifty yards from his house and he ran to the main door.

Five minutes before, in the kitchen, Victoria Guzmán
had told Plácida Linero what everybody already knew. Plácida Linero was a woman of steady nerves, so she didn’t let any sign of alarm show through. She asked Victoria Guzmán if she’d said anything to her son, and she lied honestly, since she answered that she still hadn’t known anything when he came down for coffee. In the living room, where she was still scrubbing the floor, Divina Flor at
the same time saw Santiago Nasar come in through the door on the square and go up the open stairs to the bedrooms. “It was a very clear vision,” Divina Flor told me. “He was wearing his white suit and carrying something that I couldn’t make out well in his hand, but it looked like a bouquet of roses.” So when Plácida Linero asked about him, Divina Flor calmed her down.

“He went up to his room
a minute ago,” she told her.

Plácida Linero then saw the paper on the floor, but she didn’t think to pick it up, and she only found out what it said when someone showed it to her later on during the confusion of the tragedy. Through the door she saw the Vicario brothers running toward the house with their knives out. From the place where she was
she could see them but she couldn’t see her son,
who was running toward the door from a different angle. “I thought they wanted to get in to kill him inside the house,” she told me. Then she ran to the door and slammed it shut. She was putting up the bar when she heard Santiago Nasar’s shouts, and she heard the terrified pounding on the door, but she thought he was upstairs, insulting the Vicario brothers from the balcony in his room. She went
up to help him.

Santiago Nasar only lacked a few seconds to get in when the door closed. He managed to pound with his fists several times, and he turned at once to face his enemies with his bare hands. “I was scared when I saw him face on,” Pablo Vicario told me, “because he looked twice as big as he was.” Santiago Nasar raised his hand to stop the first strike from Pedro Vicario, who attacked
him on the right side with his knife straight in.