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

Clotilde Armenta returned to the store, the twins were chatting with Officer Leandro Pornoy, who was coming for the mayor’s milk. She didn’t hear whatthey were talking about, but she supposed that they had told him something about their plans from the way he looked at the knives when he left.
    Colonel Lázaro Aponte had just got up a little before four. He’d finished shaving when Officer Leandro Pornoy revealed the Vicario brothers’ intentions tohim. He’d settled so many fights between friends the night before that he was in no hurry for anotherone. He got dressed calmly, tied his bow tie several times until he had it perfect, and around his neck he hung the scapular of the Congregation of Mary, to receive the bishop. While he breakfasted on fried liver smothered with onion rings, his wife told him with great excitement that Bayardo San Román had brought Angela Vicario back home, but he didn’t take it dramatically.
    “Good Lord!” he mocked.“What will the bishop think!”
    Nevertheless, before finishing breakfast he remembered what the orderly had just told him, put the two bits of news together, and discovered immediately that they fit like two pieces of a puzzle. Then he went to the square, going along the street to the new dock, where the houses were beginning to liven up for the bishop’s arrival. “I can remember with certaintythat it was almost five o’clock and it was beginning to rain,” Colonel Lázaro Aponte told me. Along the way three people stopped him to tell him secretly that the Vicario brothers were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him, but only one could tell him where.
    He found them in Clotilde Armenta’s store. “When I saw them I thought they were nothing but a pair of big bluffers,” he told me with hispersonallogic, “because they weren’t as drunk as I thought.” Nor did he interrogate them concerning their intentions, but took away their knives and sent them off to sleep. He treated them with the same self-assurance with which he had passed off his wife’s alarm.
    “Just imagine!” he told them. “What will the bishop say if he finds you in that state!”
    They left. Clotilde Armenta suffered anotherdisappointment with the mayor’s casual attitude, because she thought he should have arrested the twins until the truth came out. Colonel Aponte showed her the knives as a final argument.
    “Now they haven’t got anything to kill anybody with,” he said.
    “That’s not why,” said Clotilde Armenta. “It’s to spare those poor boys from the horrible duty that’s fallen on them.”
    Because she’d sensed it.She was certain that the Vicario brothers were not as anxious to fulfill the sentence as to find someone who would do them the favor of stopping them. But Colonel Aponte was at peace with his soul.
    “No one is arrested just on suspicion,” he said. “Now it’s a matter of warning Santiago Nasar and happy new year.”
    Clotilde Armenta would always remember that Colonel Aponte’s chubby appearance broughton a certainpity in her, but on the other hand I remembered him as a happy man, although a little bit off because of the solitary spiritualist practices he had learned through the mails. His behavior that Monday was the final proof of his silliness. The truth is that he didn’t think of Santiago Nasar again until he saw him on the docks, and then he congratulated himself for having made the rightdecision.
    The Vicario brothers had told their plans to more than a dozen people who had gone to buy milk, and these had spread them all over before six o’clock. It seemed impossible to Clotilde Armenta that they didn’t know in the house across the way. She didn’t think that Santiago Nasar was there, since she hadn’t seen the bedroom light go on, and she asked everyone she could to warn him whenthey saw him. She even sent word to Father Amador through the novice on duty, who came to buy milk for the nuns. After four o’clock, when she saw the lights on in