Chronicle of a Death Foretold: List 2

The night he arrived he gave them to understand at the movies that he was a track engineer, and spoke of the urgency for building a railroad into the interior so that we could keep ahead of the river’s fickle ways.

With the same assurance he talked about frontier illnesses with a military doctor who had come through during those months of conscription.

In those days it wasn’t permitted to receive communion standing and everything was in Latin, but my mother is accustomed to noting that kind of superfluous detail when she wants to get to the heart of the matter.

Nevertheless, after that consecrated verdict she wrote me two letters in which she didn’t say anything about Bayardo San Román, not even when it was known very well that he wanted to marry Angela Vicario.

He seemed attractive, certainly, but far from Magdalena Oliver’s idyllic vision.

He seemed more serious to me than his antics would have led one to believe, and with a hidden tension that was barely concealed by his excessive good manners.

Bayardo San Román came to the bazaar and went straight to the booth run by the languid raffler, who was in mourning, and he asked her the price of the music box inlaid with mother-of-pearl that must have been the major attraction of the fair.

Angela Vicario was the youngest daughter of a family of scant resources.

In addition to the twins, there was a middle daughter who had died of nighttime fevers, and two years later they were still observing a mourning that was relaxed inside the house but rigorous on the street.

The only thing that my mother reproached them for was the custom of combing their hair before sleeping.

Yet it was difficult for the men who married the two eldest to break the circle, because they always went together everywhere, and they organized dances for women only and were predisposed to find hidden intentions in the designs of men.

I would see her again year after year during my Christmas vacations, and every time she seemed more destitute in the window of her house, where she would sit in the afternoon making cloth flowers and singing songs about single women with her neighbors.

But it was a momentary vision: her penury of spirit had been aggravated with the years.

It came to be said that he had wiped out villages and sown terror in Casanare as troop commander, that he had escaped from Devil’s Island, that he’d been seen in Pernambuco trying to make a living with a pair of trained bears, and that he’d salvaged the remains of a Spanish galleon loaded with gold in the Windward Passage.

Bayardo San Román put an end to all those conjectures by a simple recourse: he produced his entire family.

Bayardo San Román put an end to all those conjectures by a simple recourse: he produced his entire family.

He wore the Medal of Valor on his lapel and carried a cane with the national shield carved on the pommel.

The parents’ decisive argument was that a family dignified by modest means had no right to disdain that prize of destiny.

She was so distressed that she had resolved to tell her mother the truth so as to free herself from that martyrdom, when her only two confidantes, who worked with her making cloth flowers, dissuaded her from her good intentions.

She was so distressed that she had resolved to tell her mother the truth so as to free herself from that martyrdom, when her only two confidantes, who worked with her making cloth flowers, dissuaded her from her good intentions.

General Petronio San Román and his family arrived that time on the National Congress’s ceremonial boat, which remained moored to the dock until the end of the festivities, and with them came many illustrious people who, even so, passed unnoticed in the tumult of new faces.

General Petronio San Román and his family arrived that time on the National Congress’s ceremonial boat, which remained moored to the dock until the end of the festivities, and with them came many illustrious people who, even so, passed unnoticed in the tumult of new faces.

So they painted the house its original yellow color, fixed up the doors, repaired the floors, and left it as worthy as was possible for such a clamorous wedding.

Her caution seemed natural, because there was no public misfortune more shameful than for a woman to be jilted in her bridal gown.

It was obvious that Angela took this as an impertinence.

In fact, with the final figures that Cristo Bedoya gave him the next day on the docks, forty-five minutes before he died, he ascertained that Bayardo San Román’s prediction had been exact.

In the course of the investigations for this chronicle I recovered numerous marginal experiences, among them the free recollections of Bayardo San Román’s sisters, whose velvet dresses with great butterfly wings pinned to their backs with gold brooches drew more attention than the plumed hat and row of war medals worn by their father.

In the course of the investigations for this chronicle I recovered numerous marginal experiences, among them the free recollections of Bayardo San Román’s sisters, whose velvet dresses with great butterfly wings pinned to their backs with gold brooches drew more attention than the plumed hat and row of war medals worn by their father.

...he nodded his snow-white head in all directions with the erratic expression of someone too recently blind, answering questions that weren’t directed at him and responding to fleeting waves of the hand that no one was making to him, happy in his circle of oblivion, his shirt cardboard-stiff with starch and holding the lignum vitae cane they had bought him for the party.

...he nodded his snow-white head in all directions with the erratic expression of someone too recently blind, answering questions that weren’t directed at him and responding to fleeting waves of the hand that no one was making to him, happy in his circle of oblivion, his shirt cardboard-stiff with starch and holding the lignum vitae cane they had bought him for the party.