Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Latin American (Columbian) novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, who writes in Spanish language.
Some of his best known works:
One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Love in the Time of Cholera
Title
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Novella, originally written in Spanish, in 1981.
English Translation
Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman
The story in a nut-shell
The story surrounds the events related to the murder of Santiago Nasar. Santiago is, a young man who is alleged to have taken the virginity of Angela Vicario. On her wedding night, after discovering that she was not a virgin, Angela's husband, Bayardo San Roman, returns her to her house. Angela's twin brothers, Pedro Vicario and Pablo Vicario, ask her who took her virginity, and she tells them that Santiago Nasar did. The brothers find Santiago and kill him.
Characters
In order to understand the characters better, they can be grouped into six: (i) Santiago and those connected to him (6); (ii) The Vicarios and those connected to them (6); (iii) Bayardo and those connected to him (4); (iv) The narrator and those connected to him (6); (v) people of religion and administration (6); and (vi) the general public involved (4)
I. Santiago and those connected to him (6)
1. Santiago Nasar
2. Ibrahim Nasar (Santiago’s father; an Arab)
3. Placida Linero (mother of Santiago)
4. Victoria Guzman (cook for Santiago’s house)
5. Divina Flor (daughter of Victoria)
6. Flora Miguel (Santiago’s fiancée)
II. The Vicarios and those connected to them (6)
7. Poncio Vicario (father of the Vicario family; a goldsmith)
8. Purisima del Carmen/ Pura Vicario (mother of the Vicario family)
9. Pedro Vicario (one of the twins)
10. Pablo Vicario (the second twin)
11. Angela Vicario (Sister of Pedro and Pablo)
12. Prudencia Cotes (Pablo’s fiancée)
III. Bayardo and those connected to him (4)
13. Bayardo San Roman, who marries, and then rejects, Angela
14. General Petronio San Roman (Bayardo’s father)
15. Alberta Simonds (Bayardo’s mother)
16. Xius (a widower whose house Bayardo buys for Angela)
IV. The narrator and those connected to him (6)
17. Narrator
18. Margot (narrator’s sister)
19. Luis Enrique (narrator’s brother)
20. Mercedes Barcha (the girl to whom the narrator had proposed) – this name is taken from the author’s wife
21. Luisa Santiaga (mother of the narrator and Margot) - – this name is taken from the author’s mother
22. Cristo Bedoya (Narrator’s friend)
V. People of religion and administration (6)
23. The Bishop
24. Father Carmen Amador, a local priest
25. Colonel Lazaro Aponte
26. Mayor
27. Police Officer
28. Dr. Dionisio Iguaran
VI. The general public involved (4)
29. Maria Alejandrina Cervantes (keeper of a whorehouse)
30. Faustino Santos (a butcher)
31. Clothilde Arementa (proprietor of the milk shop)
32. Don Rogelio de la Flor (husband of Clothilde)
Structure:
The story is brought to the reader through an unnamed narrator, who is vitally present in the time and place of action. The narration follows a non-linear pattern, with the description of the murder coming only in the end. The narration falls into five chapters. Narrated 27 years after the incident; hence the narrator assumes a near-omniscient status.
Summary: (resource: Sparknotes online)
Chapter 1
On the day he is eventually killed, Santiago Nasar wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to wait for the boat which is bringing the bishop. The night before, he had dreamt about trees. He woke up with a headache. Some people remember that the weather was cloudy that morning, others that it was fine, but all recall that Santiago was in a very good mood. The narrator, lying in the lap of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, was wakened by the clamor of alarm bells.
Santiago is wearing a shirt and pants of white linen exactly like the ones he had worn to the wedding the day before. Santiago goes to the house of his mother, Placida Linero, to get an aspirin for his headache.
Santiago is slim and pale, with Arab eyes and curly hair. He is the only child of a marriage of convenience. He inherited his sixth sense from his mother. From his father, Ibrahim Nasar, he learned his love of firearms, horses, and falconry, as well as the qualities of valor and prudence. He and his father spoke Arabic with each other. After his father died, Santiago abandoned his studies at the end of secondary school in order to take over the family ranch.
Victoria Guzman is sure that it did not rain on the day of Santiago's death. She recalls that she had been in the kitchen, quartering rabbits for lunch, when Santiago came in. Divina Flor, her daughter, had served Santiago a mug of coffee with a shot of cane liquor, as she did every Monday. When she came again to take the mug away, he grabbed her arm and said, "The time has come for you to be tamed." Victoria Guzman says that she will never be tamed while she is alive. She was seduced by Ibrahim Nasar, Santiago's father, when she was an adolescent. Both women had heard that Santiago was going to be killed, but neither was certain whether or not the rumor was true.
The whole house is awakened by the bellow of the bishop's steamboat. Divina Flor leads Santiago to the front door. Even though the front door is usually closed and barred, Santiago always uses that door when he is dressed up. Divina remembers that when he went out the door, the boat stopped tooting and the cocks began to crow. There is an envelope under the door warning Santiago that someone is waiting for him to kill him, but it isn't found until long after Santiago's death.
As everyone makes their way toward the bishop's boat, the two men who are waiting to kill Santiago, Pedro Vicario and Pablo Vicario are waiting at the local milk shop, the only place that is open at that hour. They are still wearing their dark wedding suits, and holding knives wrapped in newspaper.
Though everyone has amassed roosters and firewood to give to the bishop, he never gets off the boat-he just stands on the upper deck and crosses himself until the boat disappears. The narrator's sister, Margot, invites Santiago over for breakfast. She finds Santiago attractive, and imagines the good fortune of his betrothed, Flora Miguel. He accepts her invitation, but says he must go home first to change into his riding clothes.
Many people on the docks know that Santiago is going to be killed, but many also think that he isn't in danger anymore. Everyone thinks Santiago has been warned that he is going to die. Margot learns that Angela Vicario, the bride of the day before, has been returned to her parents' house because her husband has discovered that she isn't a virgin. Margot is unsure how Santiago Nasar is involved in the mix-up. When she comes home, she tells her mother what she has heard, and her mother, Luisa Santiaga, goes to warn Placida that people are going to kill Santiago. However, someone running by tells Luisa not to bother, because he has already been killed.
Chapter 2
The narrator tells the story of Bayardo San Roman, the bridegroom of Angela Vicario. Bayardo arrives in August, six months before his eventual marriage. He is about thirty years old, but seems younger because he has a slim waist and golden eyes. He says he has come to find someone to marry.
He first sees Angela when she is crossing the town square with her mother, dressed in clothes of mourning; the two of them are carrying baskets of artificial flowers. The next time Bayardo sees her, she is singing out the numbers to a raffle at a town event. He buys all of the raffle tickets and wins a music box inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which he then has delivered to her house as a gift. She never discovers how he found out it was her birthday.
The Vicarios are a family "of scant resources." Poncio Vicario is a goldsmith, but has lost his sight from doing so much fine work. Purisima del Carmen (Pura Vicario), Angela's mother, had been a schoolteacher until she married. Angela is the youngest and the prettiest of the family. Pura Vicario wants Bayardo San Roman to identify himself properly; to gain her approval, he introduces his whole family. The family drives to the village in a Model T Ford. Bayardo's mother, Alberta Simonds, is a mulatto woman from Curacao, who in her youth had been proclaimed the most beautiful woman in the Antilles. He has two young sisters, and his father is famous: General Petronio San Roman, hero of the civil wars of the past century.
Angela does not want to marry Bayardo. Their engagement only lasts four months. Bayardo asks Angela what house she likes best, and she replies that she liked the farmhouse belonging to the widower Xius, which is on a windswept hill and overlooks the purple anemones of the marshes. The widower insists that the house wasn't for sale, but Bayardo keeps offering more and more money until Xius gives in.
Nobody knows that Angela isn't a virgin. They have a huge wedding, with extravagant gifts and days and nights of dancing and revelry. The narrator says that he and his brother, Luis Enrique, along with Cristo Bedoya, were with Santiago Nasar all the time, at the church and after at the festival. The four of them had grown up together, and it was hard to believe that one of them could have had such a big secret.
The narrator has a confused memory of the festival—he remembers proposing to marry Mercedes Barcha as soon as she finished primary school. At six in the afternoon, the bride and groom take their leave and drive to their new house. The narrator, Luis, Cristo and Santiago all went to Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' house, where the Vicario brothers also went and were singing and drinking.
Pura Vicario goes to bed at eleven o'clock and has fallen into a deep sleep when there is a knocking at the door. She opens the door and sees Bayardo and Angela standing there. Bayardo pushes his wife into the house and kisses Pura on the cheek, thanking her for everything. After he leaves, Pura holds Angela's hair with one hand and beats her with the other. She does this so stealthily that she does not wake her husband and other daughters. The twins return home, and Pedro asks Angela who has taken her virginity. She says that it was Santiago Nasar.
Chapter 3
The Vicario twins later tell the narrator that they began looking for Santiago Nasar at Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' place, where they had been with him until two o'clock. Since he wasn't there, they went to Clothilde Armenta's milk shop, which was near Santiago's house, to wait for him to come out.
After Angela Vicario reveals Santiago's name to her brothers, they immediately go to the pigsty. They pick out the two best knives, wrap them in rags, and have them sharpened at the meat market. Faustino Santos, a butcher, wonders why they are coming—he thought they were so drunk that they didn't know what time or what day it was. They talk about the wedding, and Pablo declares that they are going to kill Santiago Nasar. Because the twins are known to be good people, nobody pays any attention to them. After they leave, Faustino reports the conversation to a police officer who comes by.
At Clothilde Armenta's milk shop, the twins drink two bottles of cane liquor. They tell her that they are looking for Santiago to kill him. Clothilde tells her husband, Don Rogelio de la Flor, but he responds that she is being silly.
Meanwhile, the police officer informs Colonel Lazaro Aponte about the Vicario brothers' plan. The Colonel has settled so many fights the night before that he is in no hurry to settle another. The Colonel hears that Angela Vicario had been brought home on her wedding night, and realizes the connection between that event and the impending murder. The Colonel goes to Clothilde Armenta's shop, takes the knives away from the boys, and tells them to go home. He explains later that he thought the twins were bluffing.
The Vicario brothers go home, get two different knives, and go to have them sharpened. Faustino is confused, believing that the boys have brought the same knives. Although Pedro makes the decision to kill Santiago, Pablo insists on following through with the plan. Pablo Vicario's fiancée, Prudencia Cotes, says she never would have married him if he hadn't upheld his sister's honor by killing Santiago. She waits the three years he is in jail, and when he gets out he becomes her husband for life.
The twins go back to the milk shop, their knives wrapped in newspaper from Prudencia's house. Clothilde Armenta gives them rum, hoping to make them so drunk they can't do anything.
The narrator then describes Maria Alejandrina Cervantes' house, where there are musicians, a dancing courtyard, and "pleasurable mulatto girls." The girls have all been working without rest for three days, taking care of all who were "unsated" by the wedding bash. The narrator says it was Maria who did away with his generation's virginity.
But on the night before the murder, Maria wouldn't let Santiago dress up her mulatto girls as he usually did, so Santiago and Cristo Bedoya and Luis Enrique and the narrator set off with the musicians on a round of serenades. The first house they stop at is the newlyweds', though they don't know that only Bayardo San Roman is there at that point. They all go to get breakfast, but Santiago says he wants to get an hour of sleep before the bishop comes.
Clothilde Armenta has told Father Carmen Amador about the Vicarios' plan, but because of the Bishop's arrival, the Father forgets, and, on his way to meet the bishop's boat, walks right by the milk shop where the murderers are waiting.
Chapter 4
Because Doctor Dionisio Iguaran is absent, the mayor orders Father Carmen Amador to perform the autopsy on Santiago Nasar. They perform it at the public school with the help of a druggist and a first-year medical student. The report concludes that the death has been brought on by a massive hemorrhage caused by any one of the seven fatal wounds. After the poorly executed autopsy, they quickly bury the body.
The narrator goes to see Maria Alejandrina Cervantes after the autopsy, but she won't sleep with him because she says he smells like Santiago. The Vicario brothers also complain that they can't get his smell off of their bodies, nor can they sleep. They are placed in the local prison, and Pablo Vicario gets a serious case of the runs.
The whole Vicario family leaves town. Angela Vicario's face is wrapped so that no one would see the bruises from the beating her mother gave her, and she was dressed in bright red so that nobody would think that she was mourning for her secret lover. Poncio Vicario died shortly thereafter. The twins were transferred to a prison in Riohacha, a day's trip from Manaure, the town that the Vicario family moved to. Prudencia Cotes moves to Manaure three years later to marry Pablo Vicario after he gets out of jail. Pablo learns to work with precious metals and becomes a goldsmith. Pedro Vicario goes back into the armed forces, and is never heard from again.
The mayor goes to check on Bayardo San Roman a week after the murder and finds him lying in his bed, almost dead with alcohol poisoning. Dr. Iguaran treats him, but as soon as he recovers he throws the mayor and the doctor out of his house. The mayor informed General Petronio San Roman of the situation, and he sends his wife and daughters to get Bayardo. They arrive in mourning with their hair loose, and wail as they walk barefoot to the house. They carry Bayardo out on a cot, put him on the boat and take him away.
Angela Vicario ends up in a town called Guarija, making her living as an embroiderer. When the narrator finally goes to see her, he finds her with glasses and with yellowish gray hair. He says she is so mature and witty that it is hard to believe she is the same person. The narrator asks Angela if it was really Santiago Nasar who took her virginity, and she calmly says it was, even though, as the narrator says, Angela and Santiago were never seen together.
The narrator says that the true misfortune for Angela is that as soon as Bayardo brings her home, he is in her life forever. She begins to think about him constantly. She says that when her mother beat her, she wasn't crying because of anything that had happened—she was crying because of him.
Angela begins to write him letters. She writes a weekly letter to him for seventeen years. Then, halfway through a day in August, he comes into her workplace. He has gained weight and is balding. He takes a step forward and lays his saddlebags on the sewing machine, saying, "'Well, here I am." He is carrying one suitcase filled with clothing, and another suitcase filled with the letters she has sent him, arranged by date and tied with colored ribbons. They are all unopened.
Chapter 5
The narrator says that for years, nobody could talk about anything but the murder of Santiago Nasar. Most people felt at the time that they couldn't intervene too much because it was a matter of honor. Placida Linero never forgave herself for mixing up the bad omen of birds with the good omen of trees in her son's dream, and telling her son, before his death, that his dream boded good health.
Twelve days after the crime, the investigating magistrate arrives. Everything the narrator knows about his character has been derived from the margins of the pages of the brief that the narrator salvaged twenty years later in the Palace of Justice.
What alarms the magistrate most is that there is not a clue that Santiago Nasar has taken Angela Vicario's virginity. Angela herself never specified how or where, but insisted that he was the perpetrator. The narrator's personal viewpoint is that Santiago Nasar died without understanding his death.
Cristo recalls that as Santiago and Cristo Bedoya walked through town on that fateful day, people were staring at them. A man named Yamil Shaium, stood in the door of his shop so that when Santiago passed by, he could warn him of the planned murder. Yamil called Cristo Bedoya to see if Santiago had already been warned. Cristo left Santiago to go talk to Yamil, and Santiago continued on his way home to change clothes in order to have breakfast with the narrator's sister.
As soon as Yamil related the Vicarios' plan to Cristo, Cristo ran to try and find Santiago. Frantic, he checked Santiago's house on the off chance that he was already home. Santiago wasn't there, and Cristo took the gun out of Santiago's night table and stuck it in his belt, not realizing it wasn't loaded.
The people coming back from the docks began to take up positions around the square to witness the crime. Cristo Bedoya went into the social club and ran into Colonel Lazaro Aponte, and he told the Colonel what was going on. The Colonel did not believe him at first because he had taken away the knives, but then realized they had gotten other knives. But because he was slow in leaving the club, the crime had been committed by the time he arrived. Cristo ran to his own house, thinking that maybe Santiago went to breakfast without changing his clothes.
Meanwhile, Santiago Nasar was in the house of Flora Miguel, his fiancée. She had heard about the planned killing, and thought that even if they didn't kill him, he would be forced to marry Angela Vicario in order to give her back her honor. She was upset and humiliated, and when Santiago came in she was furious. She handed him a box with all of the letters he had ever sent her. She told him that she hoped they did kill him, and she went into her room and locked the door.
Santiago's frantic knocking on her door woke everyone else up. Nahir Miguel, her father, told Santiago that the Vicarios wanted to kill him. Santiago said, "I don't understand a god-damned thing." He left the house, and started to head home. Clothilde Armenta yelled at Santiago to run, and he ran the fifty yards to his front door. Placida Linero, Santiago's own mother, had just closed the front door because Divina Flor lied to her and said that he was already home and had gone up to his room.
The Vicario twins caught up with him and began stabbing him. After his entrails had fallen out of his body, he fell to his knees, then managed to stand. He walked more than a hundred yards, completely around the house, and went in through the kitchen door, and fell flat on his face in his kitchen.
The Background of the Story:
The novella was based on real-life events known to Márquez, which happened in the city of Sucre, in Colombia. It is about a young couple that got married and, on the day following their wedding, the groom rejected the bride due to her lack of virginity. The bride was determined to have had relations with her former boyfriend, who was consequently pursued and murdered by the bride's two brothers in order to avenge the family's honour.
Further Topics for Discussion:
Further Topics for Discussion:
Title
The title offers multiple interpretations. The reader will find it difficult to group the words grammatically: is it a ‘chronicle’ that ‘foretells a death’, or is it the ‘foretelling of the chronicle of a death’?
The word ‘chronicle’ is ironic: the narrative is far removed from the definition of a chronicle, which implies a systematic, objective and generally linear account of events. Instead, here we have multiple voices, points of view, and a non-linear approach.
The narrator's inclusion of personal judgments, as well as the events occurring many years after the drama unfolds, seems to breach the definition of a chronicle.
Irony
As mentioned above, the note of irony starts with the title itself. Many elements of irony can be read into the novella. The treatment of religion, which appears ritualistic and meaningless, becomes the backdrop of the murder. The element of dramatic irony where only Santiago is unaware of his impending death. The greatest irony is the unanswered question as to who took Angela Vicario's virginity, for the narrator is unsure why she named Santiago Nasar as the one who committed the crime, although it is suggested by gossip that she did it to protect the man whom she loved.
Magic Realism
Many aspects of the novel is written in the magic realist style. The novel makes oblique references to God and religious practices. The timeline that spreads across five chapters employs magic realism: the main plot plays out five times--once in each of the five chapters--and each time information is given from a different individual in the community. This allows for the storyline to portray the idea of fragmentation, thus bringing in this idea of reality and fantasy. The kaleidoscopic imagery found in the novel, combined with the contorted chronological structure and the townspeople's anticipation of Santiago Nasar's murder, erodes the plausibility of mere irresponsibility as an explanation for the tragedy. This incongruity fits with the magic realism style; it may be put down to fate. The subtle intersection of human values and the supernatural with the physical world is a hallmark of magical realism.
Marquez and Kafka
It's possible to read the book as a Kafkaesque love and crime story: the beginning of the book is itself a variation of the start of The Trial and The Metamorphosis, both by Franz Kafka. García Márquez himself acknowledges this influence, saying that it was the reading of The Metamorphosis that showed him "that it was possible to write in a different way.
Themes: honour, deception, ritual, revenge
Religion
Narration and Point of View
Dreams
Prepared by
Jacob Eapen Kunnath
Dept of English
jekunnath@cmscollege.ac.in
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