You are here: home > fiction
Review by
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
The Anatomy of a killing in which an entire village is implicated
When you read the first sentence, indeed, the title of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 120-page book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, you immediately know what the story is about: that this day some time in the past, Santiago Nasar, will meet his untimely death. What’s remarkable about the work is the efficiency of the prose, the motives of a complete village in Columbia near the Caribbean coast is dissected and analyzed leaving the reader with a remarkable insight about the lives and motives of its inhabitance. And the story reveals that they can be considered accessories to the crime.
The story begins with the village getting over a night of revelry celebrating the wedding of a beautiful bride of humble means Angela Vicario to handsome, wealthy out-of-town groom Bayardo San Roman, who apparently arrives in the village a mere year earlier with the express intent of finding a bride. “Bayardo San Roman…had turned up for the first time in August of the year before: six months before the wedding. He arrived on the weekly boat with some saddlebags decorated with silver that matched the buckle of his belt and the rings on his boots. He was around thirty years old, but they were well concealed, because he had the waist of a novice bullfighter, golden eyes, and a skin slowly roasted by saltpeter.”
Angela Vicario was the youngest and prettiest of four children in the Vicario household, “a family of scant resources. Her father, Poncio Vicario, was a poor man’s goldsmith, and he’d lost his sight from doing so much fine work in gold in order to maintain the honor of the house.” The author describes Angela as having “been born like the great queens of history, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. But, she had a helpless air and a poverty of spirit that augured an uncertain future for her.” Though San Ramon becomes infatuated with Angela, she does not feel the same toward him, but consents to go through with the wedding to obey her family’s wishes.
The wedding party is over as the book begins and Santiago Nasar, after a mere hour’s sleep is getting dress to greet the Bishop who was supposed to visit the town the day after the wedding. And the town, struggling to get over the night of celebrating, is waking in anticipation of his arrival just after dawn. But, there is something amiss. Unknown to all except the married couple and the Vicario family, Bayardo has returned his bride in the night to her family after determining that she is not a virgin. This one truth sets in motion the tragedy that will befall Santiago and the entire village.
The Vicario twins demands of Angela the name of man who has taken her virginity and has thus brought dishonor on her. “She looked for it in the shadows, she found it at first sight among the many, many easily confused names from this world and the other, and she nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence as already been written. ‘Santiago Nasar,’ she said.”
The family’s two male twins Pablo and Pedro immediately know their duty. They must kill Santiago Nasar and thus restore their sister’s lost honor. With the premise establish Marquez spends the remainder of the book recounting the tragic circumstances leading up to the murder and its horrible aftermath. We learn that the twins make no secret of their mission. They “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 then took them to the meat market and there sharpened them for their dead and during the course of their labor told everyone who was within earshot of their plans to murder Santiago Nasar.
Some of the towns’ people believe that the two, drunk from a night of heavy drinking, were simply bragging and lacked the nerve to carry out their bloody threat. In the course of the narrative, the author provides insight into the two brothers that suggests that this could be the case. But as one twin appeared to lose heart for the deed, the other’s resolve seem to quicken and vice versa. Then there were the villagers who knew of the plot but chose to take no action or presumed that someone else would shoulder the responsibility thus making it unnecessary for them to do so. In many ways, this is in keeping with modern socialist views that if attacked a victim stands a better chance if only one person is around to witness rather than a crowd. The sole witness will feel far more compelled to act than any one person in the crowd, who will always assume the other guy will “do something.”
Clotilde Armenta owned a milk stand grocery story where the twins lay in wait for Santiago to ambush him. She informs Leandro Pornoy, the police officer and Colonel Lazaro Aponte of the plot and the later confiscates the two knives the twins have sharpened for their deed. He assumes that this has stopped the plot in its tracks. However, the twins only return home and acquire two more knives, which they again sharpen at the meat market and return to Clotilde Armenta’s shop to resume their vigil.
During their return to the shop, en route the twins stop at the home of Prudencia Cotes, the betrothed of Pablo Vicario. Upon hearing of the twins’ mission declares in an interview afterward with the story’s narrator, “I knew what they were up to and I didn’t only agree, I never would have married him if hadn’t done what a man should do.” Indeed, Prudencia echoes the belief among all the townspeople that the dishonor bestowed on Angela Vicario by Santiago Nasar had to be restored and that death was the only means to affect the end.
In Marquez’s story, his characters are compelled to act in the way they do because the circumstance leaves them no choice. In Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon must muster his kings of Greece to besiege Troy and retrieve his brother’s bride Helen, whom Paris has stolen. In the Greek Epic, a caprice of the gods provokes the theft of Helen. In Marquez’s book, the loss of virginity has the same affect. It creates an unresolved tension that must be set aright. It demanded a sacrificial lamb and in this case it was Santiago Nasar, just as the city of Troy had to be sacked to right the dishonor of Paris taking Menaleus wife.
As with most of Marquez’s writing, this piece is rich in symbolism and the supernatural and looks to the Greek tragedy for inspiration. Bayardo, wanting to impress his wife to be, asks her what is the prettiest house in the village. She answered, “that the prettiest house in town was the farmhouse belonging to the widower Xius.” Bayardo makes an offer to the widower that cannot be refused and Xius reluctantly parts with the home, which he was hesitant to leave because “the objects in the house had been bought by his wife over a whole lifetime of sacrifice and that for him they were still a part of her.”
It is to this home that Bayardo bring his new bride and learns of her lost honor. The realization becomes almost too much for Bayardo to bear and in the days following the wedding he locks himself within the home and begins to drink himself into a stupor. Found by the townspeople in a state near death they revive him only to have him chase them from the house and resume his effort at self-destruction. After a second rescue, he leaves for good and the Xius farmhouse slowly “begins to crumble…and finally nothing remained except its weather-rotted carcass.” During this time, “things had been disappearing little by little.” The widower Xius believed it was his dead wife reclaiming her belongings. To put the matter to rest, Colonel Aponte held a séance “to clear up the mystery and the soul of Yolanda Xius confirmed in her own handwriting that it was in fact she who was recovering the knickknacks of her happiness for her house of death.”
Short as it is, Marquez’ work will not disappoint the reader. The characters are remarkably well drawn for such a short work, particularly the Vicario Twins, Bayardo, and Angela. You may think you know the ending to this work but it will still surprise you. It’s that good.
|
i