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

that he couldn’t eat the flesh of an animal he had butchered. Another toldme that he wouldn’t be capable of sacrificing a cow if he’d known it before, much less if he’d drunk its milk. I reminded them that the Vicario brothers sacrificed the same hogs they raised, and that they were so familiar to them that they called them by their names. “That’s true,” one of them replied, “but remember that they didn’t give them people’s namesbut the names of flowers.” FaustinoSantos was the only one who perceived a glimmer of truth in Pablo Vicario’s threat, and he asked him jokingly why they had to kill Santiago Nasar since there were so many other rich people who deserved dying first.
    “Santiago Nasar knows why,” Pedro Vicario answered him.
    Faustino Santos told me that he’d been doubtful still, and that he reported it to a policeman who came by a little later tobuy a pound of liver for the mayor’s breakfast. The policeman, according to the brief, was named Leandro Pornoy, and he died the following year, gored in the jugular vein by a bull during the national holidays. So I was never able to talk to him, but Clotilde Armenta confirmed for me that he was the first person in her store when the Vicario twins were already sitting and waiting.
    Clotilde Armentahad just replaced her husband behind the counter. It was their usual system. The shop sold milk at dawn and provisions during the day and became a bar after six o’clock in the evening. Clotilde Armenta would open at three-thirty in the morning. Her husband, the good Don Rogelio de la Flor, would take charge of the bar until closing time. But that night there had been so many stray customersfrom the wedding that he went to bed after three o’clock without closing, and Clotilde Armenta was alreadyup earlier than usual because she wanted to finish before the bishop arrived.
    The Vicario brothers came in at four-ten. At that time only things to eat were sold, but Clotilde Armenta sold them a bottle of cane liquor, not only because of the high regard she had for them but also becauseshe was very grateful for the piece of wedding cake they had sent her. They drank down the whole bottle in two long swigs, but they remained stolid. “They were stunned,” Clotilde Armenta told me, “and they couldn’t have got their blood pressure up even with lamp oil.” Then they took off their cloth jackets, hung them carefully on the chair backs, and asked her for another bottle. Their shirts weredirty with dried sweat and a one-day beard gave them a backwoods look. They drank the second bottle more slowly, sitting down, looking insistently toward Plácida Linero’s house on the sidewalk across the way, where the windows were dark. The largest one, on the balcony, belonged to Santiago Nasar’s bedroom. Pedro Vicario asked Clotilde Armenta if she had seen any light in that window, and she answeredhim no, but it seemed like a strange interest.
    “Did something happen to him?” she asked.
    “No,” Pedro Vicario replied. “Just that we’re looking for him to kill him.”
    It was such a spontaneous answer that she couldn’tbelieve she’d heard right. But she noticed that the twins were carrying two butcher knives wrapped in kitchen rags.
    “And might a person know why you want to kill him so early inthe morning?” she asked.
    “He knows why,” Pedro Vicario answered.
    Clotilde Armenta examined them seriously: she knew them so well that she could tell them apart, especially ever since Pedro Vicario had come back from the army. “They looked like two children,” she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she’d always felt that only children are capable of everything. So she finished gettingthe jug of milk ready and went to wake her husband to tell him what was going on in the shop. Don Rogelio de la Flor listened to her half-awake.
    “Don’t be silly,” he told her. “Those two aren’t about to kill anybody, much less someone rich.”
    When