Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa Read Free Book Online

right in line with killing SantiagoNasar right off and without any public spectacle, but had done much more than could be imagined for someone to stop them from killing him, and they failed.
    According to what they told me years later, they had begun by looking for him at María AlejandrinaCervantes’ place, where they had been with him until two o’clock. That fact, like many others, was not reported in the brief. Actually, SantiagoNasar was no longer there at the time the twins said they went looking for him, because we’d left to do a round of serenades, but in any case, it wasn’t certain that they’d gone. “They never would have left here,” María Alejandrina Cervantes told me, and knowing her so well, I never doubted it. On the other hand, they went to wait for him at Clotilde Armenta’s place, where they knew that almosteverybody would stop except Santiago Nasar. “It was the only place open,” they declared to the investigator. “Sooner or later he would have to come out,” they told me, after they had been absolved. Still, everybody knew that the main door of Plácida Linero’s house was always barred on the inside, even during the daytime, and that Santiago Nasar always carried the keys to the back door with him.That was where he went in when he got home, in fact, while the Vicario twins had been waiting for him for more than an hour on the other side, and if he later left by the door on the square when he went to receive the bishop, it was for such an unforeseen reason that the investigator who drew up the brief never did understand it.
    There had never been a death more foretold. After their sisterrevealed the name to them, the Vicariotwins went to the bin in the pigsty where they kept their sacrificial tools and picked out the two best knives: one for quartering, ten inches long by two and a half inches wide, and the other for trimming, seven inches long by one and a half inches wide. They wrapped them in a rag and went to sharpen them at the meat market, where only a few stalls had begunto open. There weren’t very many customers that early, but twenty-two people declared they had heard everything said, and they all coincided in the impression that the only reason they had said it was for someone to hear them. Faustino Santos, a butcher friend, saw them come in at three-twenty, when he had just opened up his innards table, and he couldn’t understand why they were coming on aMonday and so early, and still in their dark wedding suits. He was accustomed to seeing them come on Fridays, but a little later, and wearing the leather aprons they put on for slaughtering. “I thought they were so drunk,” Faustino Santos told me, “that not only had they forgotten what time it was but what day it was too.” He reminded them that it was Monday.
    “Everybody knows that, you dope,”Pablo Vicario answered him good-naturedly. “We just came to sharpen our knives.”
    They sharpened them on the grindstone, and the way they always did: Pedro holding the knives andturning them over on the stone, and Pablo working the crank. At the same time, they talked about the splendor of the wedding with the other butchers. Some of them complained about not having gotten their share of cake,in spite of their being working companions, and they promised them to have some sent over later. Finally, they made the knives sing on the stone, and Pablo laid his beside the lamp so that the steel sparkled.
    “We’re going to kill Santiago Nasar,” he said.
    Their reputation as good people was so well founded that no one paid any attention to them. “We thought it was drunkards’ baloney,” severalbutchers declared, the same as Victoria Guzmán and so many others who saw them later. I was to ask the butchers sometime later whether or not the trade of slaughterer didn’t reveal a soul predisposed to killing a human being. They protested: “When you sacrifice a steer you don’t dare look into its eyes.” One of them told me