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

his body. “I hope that God has forgiven me,” Plácida Linero told me, “but he seemed so confused that it suddenly occurred to me that he’d come to rob.” Sheasked him what was wrong. Cristo Bedoya was aware he was in a suspicious situation, but he didn’t have the courage to reveal the truth.
    “It’s just that I haven’t had a minute’s sleep,”he told her.
    He left without any more explanations. “In any case,” he told me, “she was always imagining that she was being robbed.” On the square he ran into Father Amador, who was returning to the church with the vestments for the frustrated mass, but he didn’t think he could do anything for Santiago Nasar except save his soul. He was heading toward the docks again when he heard them callinghim from the door of Clotilde Armenta’s store. Pedro Vicario was in the door, pale and haggard, his shirt open and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and with the naked knife in his hand. His manner was too insolent to be natural, and yet it wasn’t the only one or the most visible one that he’d put on in the last moments so they would stop him from committing the crime.
    “Cristóbal,” he shouted,“tell Santiago Nasar that we’re waiting for him here to kill him.”
    Cristo Bedoya could have done him the favor of stopping him. “If I’d known how to shoot a revolver, Santiago Nasar would be alive today,” he told me. But the idea did impress him after all he’d heard said about the devasting power of an armor-plated bullet.
    “I warn you. He’s armed with a magnum that can go through an engine block,”he shouted.
    Pedro Vicario knew it wasn’t true. “He never went armed except when he wore riding clothes,” he told me. But in any case, he’d foreseen the possibility that he might be when he made the decision to wipe his sister’s honor clean.
    “Dead men can’t shoot,” he shouted.
    Then Pablo Vicario appeared in the doorway. He was as pale as his brother and he was wearing his wedding jacket andcarrying his knife wrapped in the newspaper. “If it hadn’t been for that,” Cristo Bedoya told me, “I never would have known which of the two was which.” Clotilde Armenta then appeared behind Pablo Vicario and shouted to Cristo Bedoya to hurry up, because in that faggot town only a man like him could prevent the tragedy.
    Everything that happened after that is in the public domain. The people whowere coming back from the docks, alerted by the shouts, began to take up positions on the square to witness the crime. Cristo Bedoya asked several people he knew if they’d seen Santiago Nasar, but no one had. At the door of the social club he ran into Colonel Lázaro Aponte and he told him what had just happened in front of Clotilde Armenta’s store.
    “It can’t be,” Colonel Aponte said, “becauseI told them to go home to bed.”
    “I just saw them with pig-killing knives,” Cristo Bedoya said.
    “It can’t be, because I took them away from them before sending them home to bed,” said the mayor. “It must be that you saw them before that.”
    “I saw them two minutes ago and they both had pig-killing knives,” Cristo Bedoya said.
    “Oh, shit,” the mayor said. “Then they must have come back with twonew ones.”
    He promised to take care of it at once, but he went into the social club to check on a date for dominoes that night, and when he came out again the crime had already been committed. Cristo Bedoya then made his only mortal mistake: he thought that Santiago Nasar had decided at the last moment to have breakfast at our house before changing his clothes, and he went to look for him there.He hurried along the riverbank, asking everyone he passed if they’d seen him go by, but no one said he had. He wasn’t alarmed because there were other ways to get to our house. Próspera Arango, the uplander, begged him to do something for her father, who was in his death throes on the stoop of his house, immune to the bishop’s fleeting