Chronicle of a Death Foretold Read Online Free

high-heeled shoes and the church shawl she only wore for visits of condolence. My father, who had heard everything from his bed, appeared in the dining room in his pajamas and asked in alarm where she was going.
    “To warn my dear friend Plácida,” she answered. “It isn’t right that everybody should know that they’re goingto kill her son and she the only one who doesn’t.”
    “We’ve got the same ties to the Vicarios that we do with her,” my father said.
    “You always have to take the side of the dead,” she said.
    My younger brothers began to come out of the other bedrooms. The smallest, touched by the breath of tragedy, began to weep. My mother paid no attention to them; for once in her life she didn’t even pay anyattention to her husband.
    “Wait a minute and I’ll get dressed,” he told her.
    She was already in the street. My brother Jaime, who wasn’t more than seven at the time, was the only one who was dressed for school.
    “You go with her,” my father ordered.
    Jaime ran after her without knowing what was going on or where they were going, and grabbed her hand. “She was going along talking to herself,”Jaime told me. “Lowlifes,” she was saying under her breath, “shitty animals that can’t do anything that isn’t something awful.” She didn’t even realize that she was holding the child by the hand. “They must have thought I’d gone crazy,” she told me. “The only thing I can remember is that in the distance you could hear the noise of a lot of people, as if the wedding party had started up again, andeverybody was running toward the square.” She quickened her step, with the determination she was capable of when there was a life atstake, until somebody who was running in the opposite direction took pity on her madness.
    “Don’t bother yourself, Luisa Santiaga,” he shouted as he went by. “They’ve already killed him.”

B AYARDO S AN R OMÁN , the man who had given back his bride, had come for the first time in August of the year before: six months before the wedding. He arrived on the weekly boat with some saddlebags decorated with silver that matched the buckle of his belt and the rings on his boots. He was around thirty years old, but they were well concealed, because he had the waist of a novice bullfighter,golden eyes, and a skin slowly roasted by saltpeter. He arrived wearing a short jacket and very tight trousers, both of natural calfskin,and kid gloves of the same color. Magdalena Oliver had come with him on the boat and couldn’t take her eyes off him during the whole trip. “He looked like a fairy,” she told me. “And it was a pity, because I could have buttered him and eaten him alive.” Shewasn’t the only one who thought so, nor was she the last to realize that Bayardo San Román was not a man to be known at first sight.
    My mother wrote me at school toward the end of August and said in a casual note: “A very strange man has come.” In the following letter she told me: “The strange man is called Bayardo San Román, and everybody says he’s enchanting, but I haven’t seen him.” Nobodyknew what he’d come for. Someone who couldn’t resist the temptation of asking him, a little before the wedding, received the answer: “I’ve been going from town to town looking for someone to marry.” It might have been true, but he would have answered anything else in the same way, because he had a way of speaking that served him rather to conceal than to reveal.
    The night he arrived he gave themto understand at the movies that he was a track engineer and spoke of the urgency for building a railroad into the interior so that we could keep ahead of the river’s fickle ways. On the following day he had to send a telegram and he transmitted it on the key himself, and in addition, hetaught the telegrapher a formula of his so that he could keep on using the worn-out batteries. With the sameassurance he talked about frontier illnesses with a military