Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa

untouchable,” he told me. Fausta López, his wife,commented: “Just like all Turks.” Indalecio Pardo had just passed by Clotilde Armenta’s storeand the twins had told him that as soon as the bishop left they were going to kill Santiago Nasar. Like so many others, he thought they were the fantasies of early risers, but Clotilde Armenta made him see that it was true, and she asked him to get to Santiago Nasar and warn him.
    “Don’t bother,” Pedro Vicario told him. “No matter what, he’s as good as dead already.”
    It was too obvious a challenge:the twins knew the bonds between Indalecio Pardo and Santiago Nasar, and they must have thought that he was just the right person to stop the crime without bringing any shame on them. But Indalecio found Santiago Nasar led by the arm by Cristo Bedoya among the groups that were leaving the docks, and he didn’t dare warn him. “I lost my nerve,” he told me. He gave each one a pat on the back andlet them go their way. They scarcely noticed it, because they were still interested in the costs of the wedding.
    The people were breaking up and heading toward the square the same way as they. It was a thick crowd, but Escolástica Cisneros thought she noticed that the two friends were walking in the center of it without any difficulty, inside an empty circle, because the people knew that SantiagoNasar was going to die andthey didn’t dare touch him. Cristo Bedoya also remembered a strange attitude toward them. “They were looking at us as if we had our faces painted,” he told me. Also, Sara Noriega was opening her shoe store at the moment they passed and she was frightened at Santiago Nasar’s paleness. But he calmed her down.
    “You can imagine, Missy Sara,” he told her without stopping,“with all this hullabaloo!”
    Celeste Dangond was sitting in his pajamas by the door of his house, mocking those who had gone to greet the bishop, and he invited Santiago Nasar to have some coffee. “It was in order to gain some time to think,” he told me. But Santiago Nasar answered that he was in a hurry to change clothes to have breakfast with my sister. “I got all mixed up,” Celeste Dangondtold me, “because it suddenly seemed to me that they couldn’t be killing him if he was so sure of what he was going to do.” Yamil Shaium was the only one who did what he had proposed doing. As soon as he heard the rumor, he went out to the door of his dry goods store and waited for Santiago Nasar so he could warn him. He was one of the last Arabs who had come with Ibrahim Nasar, had been his partnerin cards until his death, and was still the hereditary counselor of the family. No one had as much authority as he to talk to Santiago Nasar. Nevertheless, he thought that if the rumor was baseless it would alarm him uselessly, andhe preferred to consult first with Cristo Bedoya in case the latter was better informed. He called to him as he went by. Cristo Bedoya gave a pat on the back to SantiagoNasar, who was already at the corner of the square, and answered Yamil Shaium’s call. “See you Saturday,” he told him.
    Santiago Nasar didn’t reply, but said something in Arabic to Yamil Shaium, and the latter answered him, also in Arabic, twisting with laughter. “It was a play on words we always had fun with,” Yamil Shaium told me. Without stopping, Santiago Nasar waved good-bye to both of themand turned the corner of the square. It was the last time they saw him.
    Cristo Bedoya only took time to hear Yamil Shaium’s information before he ran out of the store to catch Santiago Nasar. He’d seen him turn the corner, but he couldn’t find him among the groups that were beginning to break up on the square. Several people he asked gave him the same answer.
    “I just saw him with you.”
    It seemedimpossible that he could have reached home in such a short time, but in any case, he went in to ask about him since he found the front door unbarred and ajar. He went in without seeing the