Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Page 9
“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.
“Sons of bitches!” he shouted.
The knife went through the palm of his right hand and then sank into his side up to the hilt. Everybody heard his cry of pain.
“Oh, mother of mine!”
Pedro Vicario pulled out his knife with his slaughterer’s iron wrist and dealt him a second thrust almost in the same place. “The strange thing is that the knife kept coming out clean,” Pedro Vicario declared to the investigator. “I’d given it to him at least three times and there wasn’t a drop of blood.” Santiago Nasar twisted after the third stab, his arms crossed over his stomach, let out the moan of a calf, and tried to turn his back to them. Pablo Vicario, who was on his left, then gave him the only stab in the back and a spurt of blood under high pressure soaked his shirt. “It smelled like him,” he told me. Mortally wounded three times, Santiago Nasar turned frontward again and leaned his back against his mother’s door, without the slightest resistance, as if he only wanted to help them finish killing him by equal shares. “He didn’t cry out again,” Pedro Vicario told the investigator. “Just the opposite: it looked to me as if he was laughing.” Then they both kept on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other side of fear. They didn’t hear the shouts of the whole town, frightened by its own crime. “I felt the way you do when you’re galloping on horseback,” Pablo Vicario declared. But they both suddenly awakened to reality, because they were exhausted, and yet they thought that Santiago Nasar would never fall. “Shit, cousin,” Pablo Vicario told me, “you can’t imagine how hard it is to kill a man!” Trying to finish it once and for all, Pedro Vicario sought his heart, but he looked for it almost in the armpit, where pigs have it. Actually, Santiago Nasar wasn’t falling because they themselves were holding him up with stabs against the door. Desperate, Pablo Vicario gave him a horizontal slash on the stomach, and all his intestines exploded out. Pedro Vicario was about to do the same, but his wrist twisted with horror and he gave him a wild cut on the thigh. Santiago Nasar was still for an instant, leaning against the door, until he saw his own viscera in the sunlight, clean and blue, and he fell on his knees.
After looking and shouting for him in the bedroom, hearing other shouts that weren’t hers and not knowing from where, Plácida Linero went to the window facing the square and saw the Vicario twins running toward the church. Hot in pursuit was Yamil Shaium with his jaguar gun and some other unarmed Arabs, and Plácida Linero thoug
ht the danger had passed. Then she went out onto the bedroom balcony and saw Santiago Nasar in front of the door, face down in the dust, trying to rise up out of his own blood. He stood up, leaning to one side, and started to walk in a state of hallucination, holding his hanging intestines in his hands.
He walked more than a hundred yards, completely around the house, and went in through the kitchen door. He still had enough lucidity not to go along the street, it was the longest way, but he went in by way of the house next door. Poncho Lanao, his wife, and their five children hadn’t known what had just happened twenty paces from their door. “We heard the shouting,” the wife told me, “but we thought it was part of the bishop’s festival.” They were sitting down to breakfast when they saw Santiago Nasar enter, soaked in blood and carrying the roots of his entrails in his hands. Poncho Lanao told me: “What I’ll never forget was the terrible smell of shit.” But Argénida Lanao, the oldest daughter, said that Santiago Nasar walked with his usual good bearing, measuring his steps well, and that his Saracen face with its headstrong ringlets was 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 paralyzed with fright,” Argénida Lanao told me. My aunt, Wenefrida Márquez, was scaling a shad in her yard on the other side of the river when she saw him go down the steps of the old dock, looking for his way home with a firm step.
“Santiago, my son,” she shouted to him, “what has happened to you?”
“They’ve killed me, Wene child,” he said.
He stumbled on the last step, but he got up at once. “He even took care to brush off the dirt that was stuck to his guts,” my Aunt Wene told me. Then he went into his house through the back door that had been open since six and fell on his face in the kitchen.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
COLLECTED STORIES
IN EVIL HOUR
INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES
LEAF STORM
LIVING TO TELL THE TALE
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES
NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING
NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL
OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
STRANGE PILGRIMS
THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
COLLECTED STORIES
‘The stories are rich and unsettling, confident and eloquent. They are magical’ John Updike
Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel García Márquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo’s revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Márquez’s stories are a delight.
‘These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is essence of Márquez’ Guardian
‘Of all the living authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel García Márquez’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do’ Salman Rushdie
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
IN EVIL HOUR
‘A masterly book’ Guardian
‘César Montero was dreaming about elephants. He’d seen them at the movies on Sunday …’
Only moments later, César is led away by police as they clear the crowds away from the man he has just killed.
But César is not the only man to be riled by the rumours being spread in his Colombian hometown – under the cover of darkness, someone creeps through the streets sticking malicious posters to walls and doors. Each night the respectable townsfolk retire to their beds fearful that they will be the subject of the following morning’s lampoons.
As paranoia seeps through the town and the delicate veil of tranquility begins to slip, can the perpetrator be uncovered before accusation and violence leave the inhabitants’ sanity in tatters?
‘In Evil Hour was the book which was to inspire my own career as a novelist. I owe my writing voice to that one book!’ Jim Crace
‘Belongs to the very best of Márquez’s work … Should on no account be missed’ Financial Times
‘A splendid achievement’ The Times
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
INNOCENT ERÉNDIRA AND OTHER STORIES
‘These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is the essence of Márquez’ Guardian
‘Eréndira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of misfortune began to blow …’
Whilst her grotesque and demanding grandmother retires to bed, Eréndira still has floors to wash, sheets to iron, and a peacock to feed. The never-ending chores leave the young girl so exhausted that she collapses into bed with the candle still glowing on a nearby table – and is fast asleep when it topples over …
Eight hundred and seventy-two thousand, three hundred and fifteen pesos, her grandmother calculates, is the amount that Eréndira must repay her for the loss of the house. As she is dragged by her grandmother from town to town and hawked to soldiers, smugglers and traders, Eréndira feels herself dying. Can the love of a virgin save the young whore from her hell?
‘It becomes more and more fun to read. It shows what “fabulous” really means’ Time Out
‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie
‘One of this century’s most evocative writers’ Anne Tyler
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
LEAF STORM
‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie
‘Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the centre of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm’
As a blizzard of warehouses and amusement parlours and slums descends on the small town of Macondo, the inhabitants reel at the accompanying stench of rubbish that makes their home unrecognizable. When the banana company leaves town as fast as it arrived, all they are left with is a void of decay.
Living in this devastated and soulless wasteland is one last honourable man, the Colonel, who is determined to fulfil a longstanding promise, no matter how unpalatable it may be. With the death of the detested Doctor, he must provide an honourable burial – and incur the wrath of the rest of Macondo, who would rather see the Doctor rot, forgotten and unattended.
‘The most important writer of fiction in any language’ Bill Clinton
‘Márquez is a retailer of wonders’ Sunday Times
‘An exquisite writer, wise, compassionate, and extremely funny’ Sunday Telegraph
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
LIVING TO TELL THE TALE
‘A treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we knew existed but couldn’t find. A thrilling miracle of a book’ The Times
Living to Tell the Tale spans Gabriel García Márquez’s life from his birth in Colombia in 1927, through his emerging career as a writer, up to the 1950s and his proposal to the woman who would become his wife. Insightful, daring and beguiling in equal measure, it charts how García Márquez’s astonishing early life influenced the man who, more than any other, has been hailed as the twentieth century’s greatest and most-beloved writer.
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
‘An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women’ The Times
‘It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love …’
; Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza’s impassioned advances and married Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half century, Florentino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has loved none but Fermina. Having sworn his eternal love to her, he lives for the day when he can court her again.
When Fermina’s husband is killed trying to retrieve his pet parrot from a mango tree, Florentino seizes his chance to declare his enduring love. But can young love find new life in the twilight of their lives?
‘A love story of astonishing power and delicious comedy’ Newsweek
‘A delight’ Melvyn Bragg
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES
‘A velvety pleasure to read. Márquez has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humour, a love letter to the dying light’ John Updike
‘The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself a gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin …’