Bayardo San Román, the man
who returned his wife on the very night of his wedding, first arrived here just six months before the wedding. While he was more than a man of
consequence, Angela Vicario was the youngest in a family of modest means, and
the prettiest of the four Vicario girls. The family, were naturally elated when
the wealthy Bayardo San Román wanted to marry the pretty Angela, with the
exception of her brother Pedro, who laid down one condition. Bayardo San Roman must come clean, as to who
he was; a matter over which there was considerable and often wild
speculation. Bayardo San Roman put an
end to all conjecture, in a very simple manner. He brought in his whole family.
The trump card was the father: General Petronio San Román, hero of the civil
wars of the last century. It sufficed for him to appear, for everyone to
understand that Bayardo San Román was going to marry whomever he wished.
At Bayardo San Roman’s insistence the
engagement lasted only four months.’ One evening he asked me what house I would
like most.’ Angela Vicario told me. ‘And I replied, without really knowing why,
that the most beautiful house in the place was the villa of the widower Xious,’
where that good man had enjoyed many an hour of married bliss. Immediately
after, Bayardo San Roman acquired the house.
On the Sunday, they got
married, the official wedding celebrations were over by six in the evening,
when all the guests of honour left. A little later, the young couple appeared
in their open car. After joining the crowd in drinking and dancing, Bayardo San
Roman finally enjoined everybody to continue drinking and dancing to their
hearts’ content, all at his expense, and whisked his terrified bride off
towards the house of his dreams, where the widower Xious had found so much
happiness.
No one would have thought, nor would anyone
have ever said, that Angela Vicario was not a virgin. She had not known any
other fiancé, and she had grown up surrounded by her two elder sisters and
under the uncompromising, hard, steel-like authority of her mother. Her two close confidantes had reassured her,
by convincing her that most men were so scared on their honeymoon, that they
were incapable of doing anything without assistance from their partner. ‘They
believed only what they saw on the sheet’, they said to her. And they had
taught her the tricks of experienced women, so that she could feign the loss of
her innocence, and put out to sun in the patio of her new home, on the first
morning as a newly wed, the linen sheet bearing the stain of honour.
Pura Vicario told my mother
that, on the night of the wedding, she had gone to bed at about 11pm She was dead to the world when there had
been a rapping on the door. ‘Three slow knocks portended evil’ she said . She
opened the door without putting on the light so as not to awaken anyone else
and recognized, in the dim light of the street lamp, Bayardo San Roman in his
silk shirt all unbuttoned and his fancy pants held up by braces. Angela Vicario was standing in the shadows,
although her mother saw her only when Bayardo San Roman grabbed her by the arm
and dragged her into the light. Her satin dress was ripped to shreds and she
was wrapped in a bath towel. Pura Vicario thought that they had plunged off the
road in their car and that they were dead. ‘Holy Mother of God’ she cried out
in terror. ‘Speak to me if you are you still of this world’?
Bayardo San Roman did not
enter, but without uttering a word he gently pushed his wife into the house. He
then kissed Pura Vicario on the cheek, and in a deeply dejected tone of voice
blended with an intense tenderness, said to her, ‘Thank you for everything
mother. You are a saint’. ‘All I
remember’, Angela Vicario said to me, ‘is that mother grabbed me by the hair in
one hand and with the other thrashed me in such a fury, that I believed she was
going to kill me’.
Her brothers returned home a
little before 3am, summoned away urgently from the revelry at Maria Alexandrina
Cervante’s House of Mercy, where along with some others, they had been singing
and drinking with Santiago Nasar and his companions, five hours before killing
him. They found Angela Vicario prostrate on the dining room couch, her face of
a violet hue, all bruised by blows, but with not a tear being shed anymore.
Pedro Vicario the more determined of the
brothers had lifted her up by the waist and sat her up on the dining
table.’ So then?’ he yelled, shaking with rage, ‘Who was it? Tell us!’ She had
hardly hesitated. She dipped into the
dim recesses of her mind searching for the name
and spotted it at first glance from among all the names that she could
confound it with.
‘Santiago Nasar’, she said.
Pedro and Pablo Vicario were
twins. They were twenty-four years old and they resembled each other so much
that it was almost impossible to tell one from the other. After their sister had revealed the name of
the perpetrator of the deed that had dishonoured the family name, the twins had
gone to the pigsty where the butchers’ knives were kept and selected two of the
best. They wrapped them up in some rags and went to the meat market to sharpen
them, as the first stalls were just opening up. Twenty-one people declared that
they had heard every word of the threats uttered by them, and they were all
agreed that the twins had spoken out about their plans, without restraint, with
the sole intention of being heard.
However they enjoyed such a
firm reputation of being good fellows that no one took their threats seriously.
But, Faustino Santos, a fellow butcher, who had seen them come into the meat
market at three-twenty, was puzzled that
they’d come in on a Monday instead of on Friday, as they usually did, and he had expressed his misgivings to a
policeman, now dead, who came by a little later to buy a pound of liver for the
mayor’s breakfast.
The twins came in to
Clotilde Amenta’s store with their sharpened knives at four-ten.
They drank two bottles of cane brandy, the first one standing and in two
long swigs, the second, more slowly and seated down, with their eyes riveted on
Placida Linero’s house, across the pavement opposite, where the windows
remained unlit. The largest window on the balcony was that of Santiago Nasar’s
bedroom. To a question Clotilde Amenta posed to them, ‘Why do you want to kill
Santiago Nasar so early in the morning?’ Pedro Vicario answered, ‘He knows why.
He knows’.
While the twins were waiting
for him to kill him, Santiago Nasar, when we had wound up carousing at Maria Alexandrina Cervante’s
place, suggested at around 4am, that we take the musicians on a round of
serenades and continue the wedding celebrations on our own, climbing up the
hill to the widower Xious’ place. Not only did we serenade under the windows of
the newly weds, but we lit fireworks and shot off rockets in the garden, but
did not notice the slightest sign of life from within the house. It never
occurred to us that the place was deserted, particularly since the car, with
the hood still down, was parked out on the front porch. Bayardo San Roman had left on foot for the dishonoured
bride’s parents’ home, so that the noise of the car engine would not
prematurely announce his misfortune. He was back there alone, with the lights
switched off, in the once happy marital home of the widower Xius.
Clotilde Armenta had left
the store for a while, to express her fears about the twins to her husband, and
when she returned, she found them engaged in a conversation with Leandro
Pornoy, the police officer. She did not hear what was said, but assumed, from
the manner in which he looked at their knives as he left, that they had told
him about their plans.
Colonel Lazaro Aponte
retired colonel of the military academy and mayor of the town over the last
eleven years, had got up a little before 4 o’clock and had finished shaving
when Officer Leandro Pornoy told him about the twins intentions. While he was having his breakfast, his wife
in great excitement, related how Bayardo San Roman had returned his wife to her
parents. ‘Good Lord, what will the bishop think?’: he said mockingly. However,
before finishing his meal, he recalled what his orderly had said, put two and
two together and established immediately the connection between the two pieces
of the riddle. He then set off towards the square along the street leading to
the new docks where the houses were just beginning to get excited over the
arrival of the bishop. ‘I remember distinctly,’ he said to me. ‘It was almost 5
o’clock’
He found the brothers in
Clotilde Armenta’s store. He didn’t even
question them about their plans. He merely confiscated their knives and packed
them off to bed. ‘Just think of it. What
will the bishop say if he were to find you in this state?’ The twins left.
Clotilde Armenta expressed her disappointment
at the Colonel’s casual attitude. Defending his strategy in dealing with the
brothers, he showed her the two knives as a final proof. ‘They have nothing
with which to kill anyone now’, he said.
‘It is not for that’ said Clotilde Armenta. ‘It is to free those poor
boys from the terrible obligation that had fallen upon them’. She had sensed
it. She was quite certain that the brothers Vicario were less anxious to
execute their sentence, than to find someone who would do them the favour of
preventing them from acting. But Colonel Aponte was at peace with his own soul.
After the Mayor had confiscated
their knives, the twins collected replacements from the porcherie and went out
through the pigpen gate, the unwrapped knives in their hands. The twins were in the habit of dropping in at
the house of Prudentia Cotes, Pablo Vicario’s fiancée, for early morning
coffee. That day the coffee was not yet ready. ‘We’ll have the coffee later’
Pablo Vicario said. ‘Just now we have no time to lose.’ ‘I can well imagine, my
children’, Prudencia’s mother said to
them, beaming with pride. ‘ A debt of honour does not wait.
Prudencia Cotes – now in the
full bloom of adolescence- entered the kitchen with a pile of old newspapers to
re-kindle the fire. They wrapped up the knives in some sheets they took off
her. ‘I knew what they were hatching’,
she said to me, ‘and not only was I in full agreement with them, but I would
have refused to marry Pablo if he had shirked his manly duty.’
Faustino Santos, the
butcher, could not understand what was happening, when they came into the meat
marked once again, to sharpen knives, which he thought, they had already
sharpend, and they began, once again, shouting out loud, that they were going
to eviscerate Santiago Nasar.’
When they returned to
Clotilde Armenta’s store, with the second set of knives, sharpened and wrapped
in newspaper it was close upon 5.30. On this second occasion however, Clotilde
Armenta noticed, from the time they came in, that they seemed to be less
determined than before. She thought of cooling of further cooling off their
ardour, and served them a bottle of rum with the hope of knocking them out
completely into a drunken stupor. They drank the bottle slowly and in silence,
contemplating, with the dumb air of early risers, the unlit window of the house
opposite.
The brothers Vicario never
saw that window light up, although Santiago Nasar had returned home at 4.20.
Victoria Guzman was tending the coffeepot on the stove as he passed through the
kitchen towards the interior of the house. ‘Whitey’, she called out, ‘ coffee will be ready soon’. ‘I’ll have some
later. Tell Divina Flor to wake me up at 5.30 and at the same time bring me a
clean change of clothes, like the ones I am now wearing’ Since the light on the
stairs had been on throughout the night, there was no need to switch on any
light for him to reach his room. He threw himself on his bed in the darkness,
fully dressed.
Just after he went to bed,
Victoria Guzman received Clotilde Armenta’s message sent through the beggar
woman. At 5.30, she went up to his bedroom herself, with a linen suit, to wake
him up, without sending Divina Flor, since she never missed an opportunity of
saving her daughter from the clutches of the senor. But she also missed the
opportunity of conveying to him Clotilde
Armenta’s warning message.
When Santiago Nasser left his home it had
already struck six, the street lights were still on, and several people were
running towards the docks, urged on by the bellowing from the bishop’s
boat. Someone, never identified, had
slipped a note within an envelope under the closed door, warning Santiago
Nasser that the twins were waiting to kill him, and revealing, in addition to
the place, the reasons and certain very precise details of the plot. The
message was lying there, on the floor, when Santiago Nasser had left, but he
had not spotted it; nor had Divina Flor, who had opened the door for him.
Victoria Guzman, for her
part, had stated quite categorically that neither she nor her daughter had any
idea, when Santiago Nasar left the house, that the twins were waiting to kill
him. But with the passage of time, she admitted that both of them were not
unaware of what was about to happen, when he entered the kitchen to drink his
coffee, a little after 5.30 that morning. ‘I’d heard about it from a woman who
had come begging for a little milk. I did not warn him because I thought that
these were the boastful words of drunkards,’ she said to me. However, Divina Flor confessed to me, during the
course of a visit I made after her mother’s death, that her mother had not said
a thing to Santiago Nasser because, in her heart of hearts, she wished him
dead.
The only place open on the square, at the time
Santiago Nasar left home, was Clotilde Armenta’s store, where the two men who
had threatened to kill him, after nearly three hours of watching and waiting,
had just dosed off in their chairs, their knives wrapped in newspaper held
against their breasts. Clotilde Armenta held her breath so as not to awaken
them, but the moment Santiago Nasar started crossing the square, they woke up
and watched him intently, more with pity
than with anger.
The brothers Vicario had
made known their plans to more than a dozen people who had come to buy milk at
the store, and these early customers had
spread the news all over the town before 6 o’clock. It seemed impossible to
Clotilde Armenta that nothing was known in the house just opposite. She had
thought that Santiago Nasar was not in the house because she, like the twins,
had not seen his bedroom light; and she told everyone she served to warn him
when they ran into him. She even informed Fr Amador. After 4 o’clock, seeing Placida Linero’s
kitchen lights, she sent a final urgent message through the beggar woman.
Victoria Guzman took that message.
As a result of the repeated,
loud pronouncements of the twins and the word spread by Clotilde Armenta’s
early customers, by and large, those who were on the docks knew that the
brothers were going to kill Santiago Nasser. Don Lazaro Aponte preening himself
on his successful handling of the twins, had greeted Santiago Nasar with a wave
of the hand. ‘I had good reason to believe that he was no longer exposed to
risk’ he said to me. Neither was Fr.Amador worried. ‘When I saw him safe and
sound, I thought that it had all been one of those practical jokes in bad
taste.’ No one had asked themselves whether Santiago Nasser himself had been
alerted, because it seemed impossible to anyone that he hadn’t been.
My sister Margot was one of
the few people who still did not know that the twins were waiting to kill
Santiago Nasar. She had been with him on
the docks and invited him to join us at breakfast at our home, where my mother
was in the process of making manioc fritters that morning. ‘I’ll change and
join you’ he said. It was then he realized that he’d forgotten and left his
watch on his bedside table. ‘What’s the time’? It was a twenty-five minutes
after six. ‘I shall be with you in
fifteen minutes’, he said to my sister. She insisted that he go along with her
at once, since breakfast was already on the table. .Santiago Nasar persuaded her to go along
ahead, while he changed into his riding clothes. He took his leave with a wave
of his hand, and took off towards the
square, arm in arm with Cristo Bedoya, his closest friend and constant
companion. That was the last time she saw him alive.
After the bishop had passed
on, without setting foot on our soil, the other news, suppressed until then,
burst forth in all its scandalous nature. It was only then, after she had
already invited Santiago Nasar for breakfast, and he had waved her goodbye,
that my sister Margot had learned about the marital disaster and its impending
dire consequences. ‘No one,’ she said,
‘could explain how the unfortunate Santiago Nasser had ended up by being
embroiled in such a mishap. He and Angela Vicario had never been seen together,
leave aside being seeing together alone’. There was one certainty though.
Angela Vicario’s brothers were waiting to kill Santiago Nasar.
Clotilde Armenta told me that
she gave up all hope when Fr Amador finally went his way passing her house,
without stopping. ‘I thought he had not received my message’, she said.
However, Fr Amador confessed to me many years later, when he had retired from
the world into the shadows of the Rest Home at Calafell, that he had received
Clotilde Armenta’s message, and others even more insistent, while he was
preparing to go to the docks. ‘Truth is, I just didn’t know how to act’, he
told me. ‘At first, I thought it was no concern of mine and merely a matter for
the civil authorities, but then I resolved to say something to Placida Linero
in passing. However, in crossing the square, it slipped my mind completely. You
must understand’, he said to me: ‘the bishop was coming on that unfortunate
day. God, will understand ’. When the crime occurred, he felt so desperate and
so disgusted with himself that the only thing that occurred to him was to order
the sounding of the fire alarm.
My sister,after receiving
the shocking news, returned home from
the docks, gritting her teeth, to prevent herself from bursting into tears. My
mother was in the dining room laying the table.
She had laid an extra place. ‘That’s for Santiago Nasar. I’d heard that
you had invited him.’ ‘Take it away’, my sister blurted out.
And then she told my mother
what had happened. Even before hearing the end of the story, my mother was
already on the street. She was dragging along my brother Jaimie, then just
seven, who was ordered by my father to go along with her as she raced to inform
Placida Linero of the urgent danger. She sped along, until the moment when
someone running in the opposite direction took pity on her disturbed state.
‘Don’t bother yourself anymore, Luisa Santiaga. They’ve already killed him.’
The Killing
This whole tragedy was,
throughout its unfolding, dominated by the vagaries of time and bedeviled by
the interplay of chance and fatal coincidence. Cristo Bedoya, who went on to
become a surgeon of repute, could never explain why, he, after we had finished carousing
with Santiago Nasar, had given in to the
impulse to wait for two hours with his grandparents, until the bishop arrived,
instead of going to rest at the home of his parents. They had been waiting for
him till dawn to warn him about the danger to Santiago Nasar. But the majority
of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and yet didn’t do
it, consoled themselves with the pretext that, matters of honour are sacred
reservations to which access is permitted only to the protagonists of the
drama. ‘Honour is love’, I heard my mother say.
Placida Linero had locked
the door at the last moment, but with the passage of time, she absolved herself
of blame. ‘I locked it, because Divina Flor had sworn to me that she had seen
my son come in’ she told me, ‘and it wasn’t true’. On the other hand, she never
forgave herself for having confused the magnificent augury of the trees with
the ill omen of the birds, and succumbed to the pernicious habit of her day of
chewing cardamoms.
After Santiago Nasar had
promised my sister that he would be coming for breakfast to our home, Cristo
Bedoya took him by the arm along the dock, and the two of them, heavily
involved in discussing wedding finances, seemed so unconcerned, that this gave
rise to false illusions.
Indalecio Pardo, another
close associate of the Santiago Nasar, was just passing by Clotilde Armenta’s
store, when the twins had told him that they were going to kill Santiago Nasar,
no sooner the bishop left. He thought, as so many others did, that these were
the fantasies of early risers. But Clotilde Armenta convinced him of the
seriousness of the threat, and urged him to reach Santiago Nasar and warn him.
‘Don’t trouble yourself’, Pedro Vicario said to him, ‘Consider him already
dead’.
The twins were aware of the close ties between
Indalecio Pardo and Santiago Nasar and they must have thought that he was a
suitable person to prevent the crime without their losing face. But Indalecio
Pardo encountered Santiago Nasar arm in arm with Cristo Bedoya in the midst of
the groups that were leaving the port, and he dared not warn him then. ‘I just
didn’t have the courage’, he said to me. He patted each on the shoulder and
allowed them to continue on their way. They hardly noticed him, so engrossed
were they in the costing of the wedding.
Yamil Shaium was the only
one who did what he had set out to do. No sooner he heard the rumour, he went
out to the door of his dry goods store and waited for Santiago Nasar to warn
him. No one wielded as much authority
as he did, to talk to Santiago Nasar. Yet, he thought that if the rumour were
ill founded, it would be alarming him unnecessarily and preferred to first
consult Cristo Bedoya who might be better informed. He called out to him as he
was passing along with Santiago Nasar. They were already at the corner of the
square. Cristo Bedoya gave a pat on the back to Santiago Nasar, saying, ‘see
you Saturday’, and went to speak to Yamil Shaium. He took just enough time to
listen to what Yamil Shaium had to say and then ran out of the store to catch
up again with his friend. He had seen him turn the corner. Now, he had lost
him.
It seemed impossible that
Santiago Nasar had reached home in such a short time, but in any case Cristo
Bedoya went in to enquire since he found the front door unbarred and open. He
entered without seeing the paper on the floor. He passed through the shaded
living room, trying not to make a noise, since it was still too early for
visitors. On the corridor he crossed Divina Flor. She assured him that Santiago Nasar had not
returned. He then asked Victoria Guzman who was in the kitchen, if Santiago
Nasar was at home and she answered him with feigned innocence, that he had
still not come in to go to sleep.
Cristo Bedoya returned to
the living room where Divina Flor had just opened the windows. Once again he asked her whether she was quite
certain that Santiago Nasar had not come in through the living room door. That
time she was not as sure as on the first occasion.
He then went up to the
second floor, to make sure that Santiago Nasar had not come in without been
seen. The room door was locked on the inside, because Santiago Nasar had left
through his mother’s bedroom. Not only was Cristo Bedoya as familiar with this house
as he was with his own, but he enjoyed the confidence of this family to such an
extent that he pushed open the door of Placida Linero’s bedroom and passed
through to Santiago Nasar’s room. The
bed remained made, and on a chair was his horseman’s hat and riding clothes and on the floor his riding
boots alongside their spurs. Santiago Nasar’s wristwatch that lay on the
bedside table read 6.58. ‘Suddenly, I thought that he had come back to go out
again armed’, Cristo Bedoya said to me. ‘But the magnum was in the drawer of
the bedside table. I had never fired a gun, but I decided to pick it up and
take it along to him. He tucked it into his belt under his shirt, but it was
only after the crime that he realized that it was not loaded. ‘As I was closing
the drawer. Placida Linero appeared in
the doorway, her cup of coffee in her hand’. ‘Good heavens!’ she exclaimed,
‘What a shock you gave me.’
Cristo Bedoya left without
explanations. On the square he ran into Fr Amador, but he didn’t think he could
do anything for Santiago Nasar apart from saving his soul. Cristo Bedoya was
heading, once again, for the docks, when he heard them calling him from the
door of Clotilda Armenta’s store. Pedro Vicario was at the door, pale and
disheveled, his shirt open with the sleeves rolled up. In his hand he held the
crude knife, which he himself had fashioned from an old saw-blade. His
demeanour was too insolent to be natural, yet it was neither the only pose nor
the most obvious one that he had assumed at the last moment, so that they could
prevent him from committing the crime.
‘Cristobal’, he shouted,
‘tell Santiago Nasar, that we are waiting for him here to kill him.’ ‘I warn
you, he is armed with a magnum that can cut through an engine block,’ Cristo
Bedoya shouted.
‘Dead men do not shoot’, he
shouted back.
Many years later, Pedro
Vicarion said that he knew that Santiago Nasar never went armed, when he was
not in his riding clothes.
Then Pablo Vicario appeared
at the door. He was as pale as his brother. He was wearing his wedding jacket
and was carrying his knife wrapped in the newspaper. Clotilde Armenta then appeared behind Pablo
Vicario and shouted out to Cristo Bedoya
to hurry up, because in this town of homosexuals only a man like him
could prevent this tragedy. From then on, everything that happened is in the
public domain.
The people, returning from
the docks, hearing the shouting, positioned themselves on the square to witness
the crime. Cristo Bedoya asked several people whom he knew about Santiago
Nasar’s whereabouts, but no one had seen him. At the door of the social club,
he ran into Colonel Lázaro Aponte and informed him about what had just occurred
at Clotilde Armenta’s store. ‘That cannot be’, Colonel Aponte said, ‘because I
packed them off to bed’. ‘I just saw them with pig-killing knives,’ Cristo
Bedoya said ‘That just cannot be, because I took them away from them, before
ordering them to go home to bed,’ said the mayor. ‘It must be that you saw them
before that.’ ‘I saw them just two minutes ago and they each had a pig-killing
knife in his hand,’ said Cristo Bedoya. ‘Oh shit!’ exclaimed the mayor. ‘Then
they must have returned with two other knives.’ He promised to attend to the
matter immediately but went into the Social Club to confirm a date for dominoes
that night. When he came out, the crime
had already been consummated.
Cristo Bedoya then made his
one fatal error. He thought that Santiago Nasar had finally decided to
breakfast at our house before changing his clothes and he went there to look for
him. He hurried along the river bank
Turning the last corner, he recognized, from the rear, my mother who was
dragging along almost by force her youngest son.
‘Luisa Santiago’ he shouted,
‘where on earth is your godson?’ My mother barely turned, her face bathed in
tears. Alas, my son’, she answered, ‘they say he’s been killed’.
That’s the way it was. While
Cristo Bedoya was looking for him, Santiago Nasar had gone into the house of
Flora Miguel, his fiancé. The house was just around the corner of the square
where Cristo Bedoya had seen him for the last time, and missed catching up with
him, after speaking to Yamil Shaium. ‘It neveroccured to me that he could be
there so early in the morning ,’ Cristo Bedoya told me.
When Santiago Nasar and
Flora Miguel were quite young, their parents had agreed that the two get married. Santiago Nasar had
accepted the engagement in the fullness of his adolescence and was determined
to honour his commitment, perhaps because he held the same utilitarian views on
matrimony as his father did.
Flora Miguel told my sister,
the nun, ‘I only knew that at 6 o’clock
in the morning, everybody knew about it.’
It occurred to her, that while it was inconceivable that they would kill
Santiago Nasar, they would certainly force him to marry Angela Vicario, in
order to redeem their sister’s honour. Flora Miguel suffered a crisis of
humiliation. Weeping with rage, she waited for him in the parlour with a chest
full of letters on her lap; letters that Santiago Nasar had sent her from school.
When he entered, she dumped the chest of letters in his hands, saying: ‘Here,
keep this! And would to God, they kill you!’ Santiago Nasar was so perplexed
that the chest fell from his hands and his loveless letters were strewn all
over the floor. Nahir Miguel, the
father, then came on the scene and spoke
to Santiago Nasar in Arabic. ‘I asked him point blank, whether he knew that the
Vicario brothers were waiting to kill him. He turned pale, and lost control in
such a manner, that it was impossible to believe that he was putting on an
act.’ Nahir Miguel said to me. ‘You know, if they are right or not’ he said to
Santiago Nasar. ‘But in any case, now only two courses of action are left for
you. Either you hide here, which is your house, or you go out with my rifle. It
will be two against one’.
‘I don’t understand a damned
thing’, said Santiago Nasar. 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.
‘I had to take the chest out of his hands, because he didn’t know where to put
it, so that he could open the door’. Santiago Nasar left.
The people had stationed
themselves on the square, as they did on parade days. They all saw him come
out, and they all realized that he was aware that they were going to kill him,
and he was so flustered that he couldn’t find the way to his home. Someone
shouted from a balcony. ‘Not that way, Turk, but by the old dock.’ Yamil Shaium shouted to him to get into his
store, and he went in to get his hunting gun, but he could not remember where
he had stored away the cartridges. The onlookers all began to shout at Santiago
Nasar from all sides, and he, confused by hearing so many voices at the same
time, turned now this way, now that. . He was obviously heading for the kitchen
door of his house, but suddenly it must have occurred to him that the front
door was open.
‘There he comes’, shouted
Pedro Vicario.
They had both seen him at
the same time. Pablo Vicario took off his jacket, folded it, placed it on the bench and unwrapped his
knife which was like a scimitar. Before leaving the store, without mutual
agreement, they both made the sign of the cross. Then Clotilde Armenta grabbed
Pedro Vicario by the shirt and yelled out to Santiago Nasar to run because they
were going to kill him. It was such an urgent shout that it drowned all the
others. ‘At first he was startled,’ Clotilde Armenta said, ‘because he did not
know who was shouting at him and from where.’ But he then saw her, and also saw
Pedro Vicario, who threw her to the ground with a push and caught up with his
brother. Santiago Nasar was less than 50 metres from his house and he ran
towards the main door.
Five minutes before that, in
the kitchen, Victoria Guzmán had told Placida Linero what everyone knew. Calm
by nature, she did not panic. She asked Victoria Guzmán whether she had said
anything to her son. No, she said. In the living room, Divina Flor, at the same
time, said that she had a vision of him enter through the door leading from the
square and go up to the bedrooms, just a minute before.
Placida Linero then saw the paper on the
ground but did not think of picking it up. Through the open door she saw the
Vicario brothers coming running towards the house with their knives bared. From
where she was she could see them clearly, but did not manage to see her son who
was running towards the door from a different angle. ‘I thought that they
wanted to get in to kill him inside the house,’ she said to me. ‘I ran towards the door and slammed it shut.’
She was just putting up the bar when she heard Santiago Nasar’s terrified
shouts, and she also heard the frantic pounding on the door, but she thought that
he was upstairs, hurling insults at the Vicario brothers from the balcony of
his bedroom, and that it was they who were pounding on the door. She ran up to
help her son. Santiago Nasar needed just a few seconds to get in when the door
slammed shut in his face. He pounded on the door several times with his fists
and then turned to face his enemies with his bare hands.
‘I was scared when I saw him
face to face’, Pedro Vicario told me. ‘Because he appeared to be twice his
size’. Santiago Nasar raised his hand to parry the first blow from Pedro
Vicario, who attacked him on the right flank with his knife driven straight in.
‘Sons of a whore’, he
shouted. The knife went through the palm of his right hand and then sank up to
the hilt into his side. Everyone heard his yell of pain.
Oh! My mother!’
Pedro Vicario withdrew his
knife with his fierce butcher’s wrist and plunged it in a second time almost in
the same place. ‘The strange thing is that the knife kept returning clean’
Pedro Vicario told the enquirer. ‘I’d struck him at least three times and there
was not a drop of blood.’ After the third knife thrust, Santiago Nasar twisted,
his arms crossed over his stomach. He let out the moan of a calf and tried to
turn his back to them. Pablo Vicario, who was on his left flank, then gave him
with the curved knife, the only stab in the back, and a gush of blood spurted
out at high pressure, drenching his shirt. ‘It smelled like him’, he said.
Mortally wounded three
times, Santiago Nasar once again turned to face them, and leaned his back
against his mother’s door, without offering the slightest resistance, as if his
sole wish was to help them to finish him off,
sharing the honours equally between the two of them.
‘He didn’t cry out again’,
Pedro Vicario told the investigator. ‘On the contrary, he seemed to be
smiling’. Then they both kept on knifing him against the door, with alternate
and easy thrusts, floating in the dazzling backwater they had encountered on
the other side of fear. So mesmerized were they by the rhythmic cadence of the
sweep of their knives, that they did not hear the shouts of a whole town
terrified by its own crime. ‘I felt the way you do when galloping on
horseback’, declared Pablo Vicario. Yet,
it seemed to them that Santiago Nasar would never collapse. ‘Shit, cousin’
Pablo Vicario said to me. ‘You will never imagine how difficult it is to kill a
man’
Trying to finish it off once
and for all, Pedro Vicario went for his heart, but he looked for it almost in
the armpit, where it is in pigs. In fact Santiago Nasar was not falling because
they themselves were holding him up against the door with their repeated knife
thrusts. In desperation, Pablo Vicario gave him a horizontal slash across the
abdomen and his guts spilled forth explosively. Santiago Nasar, for an instant,
remained still, leaning against his mother’s door, until he saw his own guts,
glinting clean and blue in the sunlight. He then sank to his knees.
Meanwhile, after looking and
shouting for him in the bedrooms, hearing, without knowing where they came
from, other shouts that were not her own, Santiago Nasars’s mother went to the
window facing the square and saw the Vicario twins running towards the church.
They were pursued closely by Yamil Shaium with his tiger hunting gun and some
other unarmed Arabs. Placida Linero assumed that the danger had passed.
Then she went out on to the
bedroom balcony and looking out saw, to her horror, her son, in front of the
door, face downwards in the dust, trying to raise himself out of a pool of his
own blood. He stood up, leaning to a side, and began to walk in a state of
hallucination, holding his hanging intestines in his hands. He walked more than
a hundred metres, completely around the house and entered through the kitchen
door. He still had enough lucidity not to go by the street, which was the
longest way. Instead he went in by the neighbouring house.
Poncho Lanao, his wife and
their five children had not known what had just occurred twenty paces from
their door. ‘We heard the shouting’, the wife told me, ‘but we thought it was
the festivity for the bishop’. They were just sitting down to breakfast, when
they saw Santiago Nasar enter, soaked in blood and carrying his guts by the
roots in his hands.. ‘What I can never forget’ Pancho Lanao said to me, ‘is the
terrible smell of shit’.
But Argénida Lanao the
eldest daughter, said that Santiago Nasar walked with his usual upright bearing
and well measured tread, and that his Saracen face with its impetuous curls
stayed 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
paralysed with fear’, Argenida Lanao told me.
My aunt Winifreda Marquez
was scaling a shard in the yard of her house on the other side of the river,
when she saw him going down the steps of the old dock with a firm step, looking
for his home. Santiago, my son’ she shouted to him, ‘what has happened to you?’
Santiago Nasar recognized her.
‘They have killed me, Winnie
child’, he said.
He stumbled on the last
step, but got up at once. ‘He even took care to brush off with his hand the
dirt that had stuck to his guts’, my aunt Winnie told me. He then went into his
house through the back door that had been open since six and fell headlong on
the kitchen floor.
Conclusion.
So, amigos I have presented
to you the final act of that tragedy which most of us witnessed over two decades ago, on this very
stage. For the sake of completeness,
there are some details yet, that need mentioning. Several years later, when I visited Angela
Vicario, she spared no detail, when describing what happened on that fateful
wedding night. She explained how she had been well coached, in the art of
deceiving her husband into believing that she was a virgin, but at the moment
of truth, she didn’t have the heart, and besides, felt she was cheating, to go
ahead with the planned subterfuge. She undressed before her husband, in a fully
lit room, overlooking the expedient of the vaginal douche and the
mercurochrome, with the predictable outcome we are all aware of.
The fact is that she spoke about her
misfortune without any shame, so as to cover up the other shame, the real one
that was burning up her guts. No one would have had the slightest suspicion,
until she decided to tell me, that from the moment Bayardo San Román had
brought her back home, he had been, for all time, in her life. ‘I went crazy
over him’ she said to me, ‘I lost my head completely’ Over half a lifetime she
wrote one letter per week to him. One
day he walked in while she was at her embroidery machine with her companions He
was carrying a suitcase of clothes for his stay in one hand, and another
similar one with almost two thousand letters she had written to him, in the
other. They were arranged in bundles according to date, tied up with coloured
ribbons, and all unopened.
One matter she refused to discuss. Hardly
anyone, including the investigating magistrate believed that Santiago Nasar was
responsible for the loss of her virginity.
But to my repeated questioning ,she had one simple answer; ‘ Don’t
labour the point, cousin. He was my perpetrator.’ The generally accepted view
was that Angela Vicario was protecting someone else, whom she still cared for,
and she mentioned Santiago Nasar, because she never believed that her brothers
would go against so powerful a man.
The Vicario twins were
acquitted on the grounds that it was a case of justifiable homicide, the settlement
of a debt of honor.
So, it appears mi amigos,
that the matter is closed for all time. But is it? I’d thought that once I had
completed this chronicle, my heart and mind would be at peace, and that I need
no longer keep tossing in my bed at night. But, just as the young,
enthusiastic, investigating magistrate, in spite of a most genuine and
conscientious attempt, concluded his dossier in a state of perturbation, so do
I, after years of committed, hard, unremitting toil, remain perturbed, deeply perturbed.
My perturbation stems from a question that nags, and will continue forever
nagging me. That question is::
Who, who really killed
Santiago Nasar.?
