Chronicle

Chronicle of a Death Foretold IT WAS THE FATHER? OR WAS IT? Only Pura Vicario knew what she did during the next two hours, and she went to her grave with her secret. “The only thing I can remember is that she was holding me by the hair with one hand and beating me with the other with such rage that I thought she was going to kill me,” Angela Vicario told me. But even that she did with such stealth that her husband and her older daughters, asleep in the other rooms, didn’t find out about anything until dawn, when the disaster had already been consummated. The twins returned home a short time before three, urgently summoned by their mother. They found Angela Vicario lying face down on the dining room couch, her face all bruised, but she’d stopped crying. “I was no longer frightened,” she told me. “On the contrary: I felt as if the drowsiness of death had finally been lifted from me, and the only thing I wanted was for it all to be over quickly so I could flop down and go to sleep.” Pedro Vicario, the more forceful of the brothers, picked her up by the waist and sat her on the dining room table. “All right, girl,” he said to her, trembling with rage, “tell us who it was.” She only took the time necessary to say the name. 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 sentences has always been written. “Santiago Nasar,” she said.