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

paper on the floor. He passed through the shadowy living room, trying not to make any noise, because it was still too early for visitors, but the dogs became aroused atthe back of the house and came out tomeet him. He calmed them down with his keys as he’d learned from their master, and went on toward the kitchen, with them following. On the veranda he came upon Divina Flor, who was carrying a pail of water and a rag to clean the floor in the living room. She assured him that Santiago Nasar hadn’t returned. Victoria Guzmán had just put the rabbit stew on the stove when he entered the kitchen. She understoodimmediately. “His heart was in his mouth,” she told me. Cristo Bedoya asked her if Santiago Nasar was home and she answered him with feigned innocence that he still hadn’t come in to go to sleep.
    “It’s serious,” Cristo Bedoya told her. “They’re looking for him to kill him.”
    Victoria Guzmán forgot her innocence.
    “Those poor boys won’t kill anybody,” she said.
    “They’ve been drinking since Saturday,”Cristo Bedoya said.
    “That’s just it,” she replied. “There’s no drunk in the world who’ll eat his own crap.”
    Cristo Bedoya went back to the living room, where Divina Flor had just opened the windows. “Of course it wasn’t raining,” Cristo Bedoya told me. “It was just going on seven and a golden sun was already coming through the windows.” He asked Divina Flor again if she was sure that SantiagoNasar hadn’t come inthrough the living room door. She wasn’t as sure then as the first time. He asked her about Plácida Linero, and she answered that just a moment before she’d put her coffee on the night table, but she hadn’t awakened her. That’s the way it always was: she would wake up at seven, have her coffee, and come down to give instructions for lunch. Cristo Bedoya looked at the clock:it was six fifty-six. Then he went up to the second floor to make sure that Santiago Nasar hadn’t come in.
    The bedroom was locked from the inside, because Santiago Nasar had gone out through his mother’s bedroom. Cristo Bedoya not only knew the house as well as his own, but was so much at home with the family that he pushed open the door to Plácida Linero’s bedroom and went from there to theadjoining one. A beam of dusty light was coming in through the skylight, and the beautiful woman asleep on her side in the hammock, her bride’s hand on her cheek, had an unreal look. “It was like an apparition,” Cristo Bedoya told me. He looked at her for an instant, fascinated by her beauty, and then he went through the room in silence, passed by the bathroom, and went into Santiago Nasar’s bedroom.The bed was still made, and on the chair, well-pressed, were his riding clothes, and on top of the clothes his horseman’s hat, and on the floor his boots beside their spurs. On the night table,Santiago Nasar’s wristwatch said six fifty-eight. “Suddenly I thought that he’d come back so that he could go out armed,” Cristo Bedoya told me. But he found the magnum in the drawer of the night table.“I’d never shot a gun,” Cristo Bedoya told me, “but I decided to take the revolver and bring it to Santiago Nasar.” He stuck it in his belt, under his shirt, and only after the crime did he realize that it was unloaded. Plácida Linero appeared in the doorway with her mug of coffee just as he was closing the drawer.
    “Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “You gave me a start!”
    Cristo Bedoya was alsostartled. He saw her in the full light, wearing a dressing gown with golden larks, her hair loose, and the charm had vanished. He explained, somewhat confused, that he was looking for Santiago Nasar.
    “He went to receive the bishop,” Plácida Linero said.
    “He went right through,” he said.
    “I thought so,” she said. “He’s the son of the worst kind of mother.”
    She didn’t go on because at that momentshe realized that Cristo Bedoya didn’t know what to do with