Chronicle of a Death Foretold Paperback – October 7, 2003

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ'SCHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLDA reading report by Robert CrosmanI remember this short novel appearing in Playboy when I was in graduate school in the `sixties, but I read no more than the opening paragraphs. Garcia-Marquez had recently won the Nobel Prize, but I hadn't yet read anything by him, and there was something antipathetic about the notion of a "death foretold." Not just the implicit violence, but above all the sense of fatality - that from the very title this revenge murder is declared inevitable. The message I got was that in Latin American culture there is a rigid cultural demand that one die for actions I would consider trivial. But for a while we remain ignorant of the reasons or motivations for Santiago's killing. While the story asserts in the first sentence that "they were going to kill him," it is reticent about why he deserves to die.As he arises early and comes down to the kitchen to drink coffee, the condemned man, Santiago Nasar, is oblivious to the fate hanging over him. There the servant, Victoria Guzman, is busy slaughtering rabbits, and feeding their guts to dogs that howl for their portion of the spoils. The vividly described disembowelment prefigures the most grizzly part of Santiago's own death, at the hands of his killers, as the narrator matter-of-factly informs us in the second paragraph: "he was carved up like a pig an hour later." But why? The justice of the situation is unclear, and I instinctively feel badly for the handsome young man, even though he is unkind to the servants.I found it distracting that much of these first paragraphs dwells on Santiago Nasar's recent dreams, which are not bloody but rather of flight in a forest or orchard setting. These dreams seem irrelevant, inasmuch as they do not warn him of immanent violence, and even his mother, Placida Linero, a psychic, sees nothing sinister in them. Perhaps they prefigure the freeing of his soul from earthly bounds, or (to the contrary) reflect his reputation as a raptor preying on innocent "chicks," but if so, these meanings are hidden from him, and from us, as he casually bosses the house servant, and gropes her nubile teenage daughter, Divina Flor, who sees herself destined to be seduced by the handsome cattle rancher, as her mother was by his deceased father, Ibrahim Nasar. The girl views this future with apprehension but also with resignation, while her mother "had so much repressed rage," that she continues disemboweling rabbits to Santiago Naser's evident discomfort. Why, she wonders, is he so squeamish, when as a rancher he is constantly involved in slaughtering cattle?Thus, the violence at the base of all civilized life - the taking of one life to sustain or advance another - is rather brutally acknowledged, and if I read this far as a young man I did not like it. The animals are sacrificed to the appetites of humans, just as the servants must submit to their human masters. This will be a tale not only of violence but of the dominance of the rich over the poor, with no attempt made to gloss over the material facts of life and death, until the resentment of the victimized boils over in a futile act of murder that solves nothing, but that reveals the material consequences of dominance and submission, enforced by violence.As Santiago Naser (characters in this story are almost invariably referred to by their full names) sallies forth into the already hot morning to meet a riverboat bringing the local bishop upriver from Riohacha. In the event the bishop does no more than wave a blessing as his boat passes by. The scene shifts to the twins, Pablo and Pedro Vicario, young men like himself but of a lower class - professional butchers - who plan to stab Santiago to death for seducing their sister. That young woman, Angela Vicario has only just married a rich suitor, Bayardo San Roman, who has discovered on his wedding night that his new wife is not a virgin, and has immediately returned her to the parental house in a volcanic rage. The brothers are none too enthusiastic about the burden of revenge that has been thrust upon them, but see no alternative to killing the man who has ruined their sister and brought dishonor on their whole family, which subsequently leaves town for good.The customs and practices of this Latin American culture - Riohacha is a town in Marquez's native Colombia, though the country is never named in the tale - are regarded by the narrator, no less than by all the actors in his drama, as unquestioned and inevitable. This accounts for a good deal of the fatalistic attitude that he and everyone else takes toward the story of Santiago Naser's killing. The narrative present is long after the events he describes - twenty-seven years - so of course the outcome is in that sense inevitable, but it is also told in a way that shows how everyone believes that death is the only possible outcome. Paradoxically, this inevitability is underlined by a whole series of facts that seem to point in the opposite direction. In the first scene, in the Nasar household, mention is made of an anonymous letter shoved under the front door warning of the revenge plot. The letter is overlooked and ignored by the servant who finds it. Though many townspeople try to avoid the eventual outcome, and none abet it, yet they all seem to see it as inevitable and even proper, given the demands of honor.Nearly everyone in town except the intended victim is aware of the twins' plan of revenge, and one after another try to warn him, but every attempt miscarries in one way or another, as though the would-be warners did not have their hearts in it - one, a priest, simply forgets it. As Santiago walks through the town, changing direction and stopping in unwonted places, those who would warn him keep missing him, while others lose heart, or delegate the job to others who in turn decide it's none of their business. The twins themselves appear to want the young man to flee and avoid his fate. At one point the mayor deprives them of the butcher knives they have honed to razor sharpness, but they nonetheless obtain other, crueler knives, and proceed toward the seemingly inevitable encounter at his front door.That door is usually barred, the back door being the usual portal of ingress and egress. On this morning Santiago has however left home by the front door, leaving it unlocked for his return. But a servant, unaware of the plot, has barred it once again as a matter of routine, again making Santiago's fate seem both fortuitous and inevitable, inasmuch as no amount of human agency expended to prevent his death seems to be adequate to forestall his fate, which, after all, has been foretold. At its heart lies the unpardonable transgression - the defloration of a girl deemed worthy of marriage to a rich and eminent bridegroom, son of a distinguished Conservative general in the country's civil wars, and this despite the fact that her own family of tradesmen is of modest circumstances, a family of butchers. Her husband's rejection of her is a reversal of all their hopes of social elevation, a mark of shame that cannot be expunged but only qualified by being avenged. And yet, at the center of this tragedy of an enactment of a stern cultural code lies an ambiguity, an uncertainty.Angela Vicario goes to her bridal bed knowing that she will not bleed when her husband enters her. She has been provided with the means necessary to fake virginity, including Mercurochrome to redden the sheet that must be displayed on the following morning. And yet, not in love with her new husband, she rebels against the cultural custom and tells him straightforwardly that she is not a virgin. She gives a name - Santiago Nasar - and twenty-seven years later she tells the narrator, who has had doubts, that she spoke truly. He certainly fits the mold: as a teenager, the handsome Santiago had carried on a long and passionate affair with the town's madam, Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, (with whom the narrator himself was in bed on the night before the twins killed Santiago Nasar), and was known as a "sparrow hawk, like his father, going about alone nipping the bud of any wayward virgin who showed up in those woods."(90) But he avoided the girls close by, with whose families there would be inevitable entanglements, and he never had been seen to pay Angela any attention, regarding her as "a booby." Could she have named him as a plausible seducer, and thereby have protected a lover she still cared for, the narrator wonders. Yet the now-middle-aged Angela, an old maid supporting herself in another village by sewing cloth flowers, assures him that she told the truth: "'Don't beat it to death, cousin,' she told me. `He was the one.'"(90) Yet some shadow of doubt remains.Based on her allegation the whole far-fetched tragicomedy of missed opportunities and misunderstandings unfolds with seeming inevitability. The cultural codes demand a blood sacrifice to the God who has ordained that the poor must submit to the rich, and women must serve men, either as degraded sex-objects or as pure vessels of paternal succession of bloodlines from father to son - we must know that our sons are truly ours! Only one marriage in the entire town is described as happy - that of a man, Xius, and his wife, Yolanda. After her death, he lived on in their lovely house full of her presence still, until Bayardo San Roman bullies him into selling it to be the locus of his happy marriage to Angela.On his way home, the hapless Santiago Nasar stops by the home of his fiancée Flora Miguel; theirs was a match arranged by their parents and is loveless on both sides. Having heard of Angela's charges against her fiancé, Flora angrily throws a chest full of his perfunctory love letters back at him, and Santiago is bewildered, until her father explains the facts to him. Confused, he hurries toward home, expecting to find the front door open as he left it. But inside the house there is further confusion: his mother and a friend, Cristobal Bedoya, believe he has already entered, and even his screams as the twins attack him at the front door seem to them to come from his upstairs room, which they run to.Serious accidents often turn out to have been over-determined: foggy conditions, a neglected brake repair, a branch-obscured stop sign, the slight impairment of two beers, all conspire to cause a wreck that in the absence of any one would not have happened. So it is with Santiago's death - the absence of any one of a dozen factors would have made it avoidable. But his killing is brutal, as reconstructed first in an autopsy and then given a gruesome description of the stabs and cuts administered by two frantic butchers, ending in a disembowelment that leaves the mortally wounded young man staggering toward the back door with his own entrails in his hands.Like Shakespeare, Garcia-Marquez tells this story with seeming impartiality. The narrator's careful attempt to reconstruct the story decades later leads to testimony from a large cast of characters who report their own views and feelings, along with their roles in the tale, a representative cross-section of the entire unnamed town, all ages, sexes, social ranks from prostitute and servant to doctor, priest and mayor, rich and poor alike. Neither they nor he condemn the young, privileged victim nor do they defend him, and likewise with his murderers (who are held for a while and then exonerated by the court), and all the others in the story. No one is an angel, no one a demon; the social codes that condemn Santiago Nasar, while their enforcers paradoxically wish to spare him from death, are neither praised nor damned. They are just the way human beings are. A supporter of traditional cultural values might, I suppose, see the "justice" enacted as appropriate, though deploring the explicitness of the brutal descriptions. Yet the story can easily be read as an indictment of honor killing, and in view of the author's left-wing sympathies this seems the more likely interpretation. Yet he leaves it to us to draw the moral.Santiago Nasar's sexual exploitation of vulnerable women is of course indefensible, and though he may have been innocent of the specific seduction for which he dies, he clearly deserves to be punished. Yet that behavior is so conventional in his land that the entire male sex seems to bear his guilt to one degree or another, including the outraged bridegroom, Bayardo San Roman, whose macho outrage at being deprived of an intact hymen contributes much to the tragedy, and even more to the general unhappiness of the aftermath. Both he and Santiago suffer, and yet neither is aware of why they are being punished, and thus nothing is learned, by them or anyone else. In their own eyes they are victims. Garcia-Marquez has a soft spot in his heart for prostitutes, however, whom he sees as loving and warm-hearted, who provide a minimally destructive outlet (as he sees it) for what he sees as men's raging libidos, whether as sex-starved bachelors or as equally frustrated married men. The inequality of wealth and social status are also to blame for the hostility that seethes below the surface of social life, and that lends energy to the deadly cataclysms that regularly occur - most notably in the perpetual civil wars of his homeland (Garcia-Marquez left Columbia at thirty and spent most of his remaining fifty plus years abroad).The status of women is particularly bleak. The narrator quotes his mother as describing Angela Vicario and her sisters as "perfect . . . Any man will be happy with them because they've been raised to suffer,"(31) and this judgment is all the more devastating because it is offered with no apparent animus, as a simple statement of the way things are, with only the occasional exception of a Yolanda Xius, whose husband loved and cherished her until, alas, she died, and he then believed her spirit still visited him.All these injustices and sorrows are matter-of-factly reported by Marquez's narrator, who seems to feel a degree of sympathy for all the principals, and to blame none very much - not even the insufferable Bayardo San Roman, who after all is a product of his upbringing and his culture just as much as are all the others. To alter their behavior they would have to question (and defy) the norms of their society, and this never seems to occur to any of them. Given the code that prescribes both an insatiable male libido and obligatory female asexuality, and given the values that enforce both male promiscuity and a familial demand for honor and vengeance, Santiago Nasar, the Vicario twins, and all the rest are doomed to enact a script that has been written long before they were born, and acted out time and time again. Since before traditional European culture moved to the so-called New World, Santiago's violent, gruesome death has been a death foretold. Garcia-Marquez nonetheless turns his magnifying glass on the whole nexus of traditions, values and attitudes and raises questions in the mind of a reader who rebels against the notion that there is only one way this story can end.

I’ve tried reading him several time over the years. I always walk away thinking, what is the big deal? No doubt he is a good writer. Wish I could read Spanish.

Marquez’s novella is a chronicle of the last hours of Santiago Nasar as told in the first person by a friend. The events all take place in a small coastal village in Latin America. Angela Vicaro is married to Bayardo San Roman. The wedding and celebrations afterwards are lavish and expensive. After the wedding Angela’s husband is returned to her mother when he discovers she is not a virgin. Angela names Santiago as her lover after a beating by her mother. Angela’s two twin brothers Pedro and Pablo then set out to murder Santiago to recover her honour. The two brothers seem a little reluctant to carry out the murder and tell everybody they meet what they are going to do. Everybody in the village seems to know but no significant effort is made to stop the murder. Santiago ends up butchered like a pig. The narrator is part of the story. A journalist he appears to be putting the story together in a dispassionate journalist style but his emotions or involvement become part of the story.Along the way as the murder plot is outlined Marquez captures the absurd aspects of everyday life in the town. Although this story is about a tragic and indelible day in the life of a small community; our attention is frequently drawn to details that may seem unnecessary at first, but crucial later on. Given the length of the story, Marquez has little room to play around with character development, instead he provides small anecdotes and brief but vivid sketches of townspeople.This book belongs to the magical realism genre. Magical realism novels include events that appear are normal in real life, but they are so ridiculously improbable of actually happening that they are "magical." The line between normal, fantasy and reality gets blurred. In this case everybody knows a murder is going to be committed but they don’t stop it. For each person there seems a normal reason for his or her inaction. You then end up with a situation where improbable events become common and the usual becomes rare.The style of the novella is simple but imaginative, elegant and brilliant in the details. Every sentence is carefully crafted.Many strange and ironical things happened that day. The role of Santiago’s mother in barring his escape route is especially so. Earlier Santiago Nasar watched a servant butcher rabbits for lunch, ''surrounded by panting dogs.'' He is soon similarly butchered, and the same dogs arrive at his autopsy, panting, ravenous, eager to be fed his bowels as they were fed the rabbits.There are a lot of unanswered questions in the chronicle.Who exactly was the husband Bayardo San Roman? Why did he come to town in the first place? Was he the Devil or a Homosexual? What did he do before he came to town? He certainly was a strange and interesting character, his answers to questions disguised the truth, why did he marry Angela, why did he give her back and why did he return?Was Santiago Nasar the one responsible for Angela losing her virginity? The investigator could not find any evidence to suggest he was except Angela’s blank statement that he was responsible. There was a lot of evidence to the contrary; such as they were never seen together, they frequented different social groups and so on.What really happened that day? The narrator can’t put the facts together in his mind even though he was there. He relies on the memories of others 27 years later and they can’t remember either. Memories are often tainted by what people would have liked to happen, a story that puts them in a good light especially to themselves. Even the narrator who was involved may not be telling the full truth. The wife Angela also seems a very unreliable witness.Why didn’t someone warn Santiago or even better stop the murder? There were a few half-hearted efforts by the Mayor on others. Many people knew but did not warn the victim.Santiago Nasar is portrayed as something of a Christ like figure. When he found out what was going to happen he seemed surprised but acted as if he accepted his fate.The reader has to fill in the answers himself to these questions. This involvement of the reader is one thing that made the novel very interesting to me. Readers with different beliefs, prejudices or experiences will come to different conclusions. In my case I see a story without an objective reality or set of facts. What happened is what each person saw, believed and remembers. Others will see a strong religious significance in Santiago sacrificing himself like Christ.There are many characters in the book. Everybody in the town seemed to be involved in some way. It reminds me of the small country town I grew up in NSW. The following is a list I compiled to keep track on them roughly in order of their appearance;1. Santiago Nasar the victim who was murdered2. The Bishop who visited the town but only blessed from a distance, did not land because he hated the place3. Cristo Bedoya Santiago’s closest friend, who searched for Santiago in his dying moments.4. Placida Linero, Santiago Nasar’s mother who contributed to his death by barring the door.5. Narrator, friend of Santiago who was with him all the time at the day of the wedding, along with his brother and Cristo Bedoya at the church and at the festival.6. Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, some sort of madam, on whose lap the narrator was recovering on the morning of the murder7. Victoria Guzman, Santiago and his mother’s cook who butchered a rabbit on the day of the murder in a similar way to that Santiago was butchered.8. Divina Flor, Victoria’s daughter who was just coming into bloom and who was grabbed by the pussy by Santiago on the morning of the murder.9. Ibrahim Nasar, Santiago’s father, who had seduced Victoria Guzman.10. Someone, unknown, who pushed a note under the door warning Santiago that his life was in danger.11. Clotilde Armenta, Proprietress of Milk Shop in town square who was the first to see Santiago in the glow of dawn and thought he already “looked like a ghost”12. Pedro and Pablo Vicario, twins who murdered Santiago.13. Margo, Narrator’s sister who described the Bishop’s visit and described Santiago as being in good spirits at the Wharf14. Cristo Bedoya, a member of group of four close friends including Santiago, the narrator and the narrator’s brother . He calculated the cost of the wedding with Santiago.15. Flora Miguel Santiago’s fiancé16. Don Lazaro Aponte, a Colonel and ex town Mayor in retirement, who was told by policeman of twins intentions at 4am Monday17. Father Carmen Amador, town priest18. Narrator and Margo’s mother, Luisa Santiaga, housebound but knew everything that was going on in the town.19. Angela Vicario, bride that was returned to her mother by her husband because she was not a virgin20. Pura Vicario, mother of returned bride21. Narrator’s father22. Narrator’s brother Jaime23. Bayardo San Roman the man who gave back his bride and reminded the narrator’s mother of the devil24. Magdalena Oliver who arrived with Bayardo on the boat 6 months before the wedding but couldn’t take her eyes off him25. Poncio Vicario blind father of the bride26. Bayardo’s family mother father and two provocative sisters27. Alberta Symonds Bayardo’s mother a mulatto from Curacao28. General Petronio San Roman impressive hero of civil wars29. Widower Xuis – previous owner of house Bayardo bought for himself and his bride30. Dr Dionisio Iguaran doctor who played dominos with Xuis.31. Angela’s friends who advised her on how to handle the situation of her not being a virgin.32. Narrator’s sister the nun who danced a merengue in her habit at the wedding.33. Mercedes Barcha, who narrator proposed to in primary school and married 14 years later.34. Faustino Santos, a butcher friend who sharpened the twin’s knives.35. Other butchers who saw the twins early Monday36. Leandro Pornoy, policeman who Faustino Santos told of the twin’s intentions. He passed the message onto Colonel Don Lazaro Aponte.37. Don Rogelio De La Flor husband of Clotilde Armenta Proprietress of milk shop38. Beggar woman who comes each day to ask for milk took a message to Victoria Guzman from Clotilde Armenta.39. Hortensia Baute who saw twins passing by her house with their knives and thought “they had already killed him”40. Prudencia Cotes, Pablo’s fiancée and her mother. Prudencia said that shoe would not have married Pablo if he did not commit the act.41. Fake customers buying milk they didn’t need to see if the murder was really going to happen.42. Susana Abdala Centenary Matriarch of Arab community provided medical help to twins.43. Aura Villeros, midwife who suffered from bladder problems from the day of the murder.44. Investigating Magistrate, new graduate whose report ended up in flood-ridden basement, which was Sir Francis Drake’s headquarters for 2 days. He found no indication that Santiago had been the cause of the wrong.45. Polo Carrillo owner of electric plant who said Santiago thought his wealth made him untouchable. His wife Fausta Lopez commented “Like all Turks”46. Indalecio Pardo, friend of Santiago who lost his nerve rather than warning him.47. Ecolastica Cisneros who saw Santiago and his friend walking calmly in the square discussing the cost of the wedding48. Sara Noriega shoe store owner who Santiago told not to worry about his paleness49. Celeste Dangond who was sitting in his pyjamas in front of his house mocking those who were going to see the Bishop.50. Yamil Shaium who waited at his dry goods store to meet Santiago and warn him.