Chronicle of a Death Foretold Read Online Free Page A

doctor who had come through during those months doing conscription. He liked noisy and long-enduring festivities, but he was a good toper, a mediator of fights, and an enemy of cardsharps. One Sunday after mass he challenged the most skillful swimmers, who were many, and left the best behind by twenty strokes in crossing the river andback. My mother told me about it in a letter, and at the end she made a comment that was very much like her: “It also seems that he’s swimming in gold.” That was in reply to the premature legend that Bayardo San Román not only was capable of doing everything, and doing it quite well, but also had access to endless resources.
    My mother gave him the final blessing in a letter in October: “Peoplelike him a lot,” she told me, “because he’s honest and has a good heart, and last Sunday he received communion on his knees and helped with the mass in Latin.” In those days it wasn’t permitted to receive communion standing and everything was in Latin, but my mother is accustomed to note that kind of superfluous detail when she wants to get to the heart of the matter. Nevertheless, after that consecratedverdict she wrote me two letters in which she didn’t say anything to me about Bayardo San Román,not even when it was known only too well that he wanted to marry Angela Vicario. Only a long time after the unfortunate wedding did she confess to me that she knew him when it was already too late to correct the October letter, and that his golden eyes had caused the shudder of a fear in her.
    “Hereminded me of the devil,” she told me, “but you yourself had told me that things like that shouldn’t be put into writing.”
    I met him a short while after she did, when I came home for Christmas vacation, and I found him just as strange as they had said. He seemed attractive, indeed, but far from Magdalena Oliver’s idyllic vision. He seemed more serious to me than his antics would have led oneto believe, and with a hidden tension that was barely concealed by his excessive good manners. But above all, he seemed like a very sad man to me. At that time he had already formalized his contract of love with Angela Vicario.
    It had never been too well established how they had met. The landlady of the bachelors’ boardinghouse where Bayardo San Román lived told of how he’d been napping in arocking chair in the parlor toward the end of September, when Angela Vicario and her mother crossed the square with two baskets of artificial flowers. Bayardo San Román half-awoke, saw the two women dressed in the inclement black worn by theonly living creatures in the morass of two o’clock in the afternoon, and asked who the young one was. The landlady answered him that she was the youngestdaughter of the woman with her and that her name was Angela Vicario. Bayardo San Román followed them to the other side of the square with his look.
    “She’s well-named,” he said.
    Then he rested his head on the back of the rocker and closed his eyes again.
    “When I wake up,” he said, “remind me that I’m going to marry her.”
    Angela Vicario told me that the landlady of the boardinghouse had spokento her about that episode before Bayardo San Román began courting her. “I was quite startled,” she told me. Three people who had been in the boardinghouse confirmed that the episode had taken place, but four others weren’t sure. On the other hand, all the versions coincided in the fact that Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Román had seen each other for the first time on the national holiday in Octoberduring a charity bazaar at which she was in charge of singing out the raffles. Bayardo San Román came to the bazaar and went straight to the booth run by the lanquid raffler locked in mourning up to the hilt, and he asked her the price of the music box inlaid with mother-of-pearl that must have been the major attraction of the fair. She answered him that it was not for sale but was to be raffledoff.
    “So