Chronicle of a Death Foretold Read Online Free Page B

much the better,” he said. “That makes it easier and cheaper besides.”
    She confessed to me that he’d managed to impress her, but for reasons opposite those of love. “I detested conceited men, and I’d never seen one so stuck-up,” she told me, recalling that day. “Besides, I thought he was a Polack.” Her annoyance was greater when she sang out the raffle of the music box, to the anxietyof all, and indeed, it had been won by Bayardo San Román. She couldn’t imagine that he, just to impress her, had bought all the tickets in the raffle.
    That night, when she returned home, Angela Vicario found the music box there, gift-wrapped and tied with an organdy bow. “I never did find out how he knew that it was my birthday,” she told me. It was hard for her to convince her parents that shehadn’t given Bayardo San Román any reason to send her a gift like that, and even worse, in such a visible way that it hadn’t gone unnoticed by anyone. So her older brothers, Pedro and Pablo, took the music box to the hotel to give back to its owner, and they did it with such a flurry that there was no one who saw them come and didn’t see them leave. Since the only thing the family hadn’t countedupon was Bayardo San Román’s irresistible charm, the twins didn’t reappear until dawn of the next day, foggy with drink, bearing once more the music box, and bringing along, besides, Bayardo San Román to continue the revels at home.
    Angela Vicario was the youngest daughter of a family of scant resources. Her father, Poncio Vicario, was a poor man’s goldsmith, and he’d lost his sight from doingso much fine work in gold in order to maintain the honor of the house. Purísima del Carmen, her mother, had been a schoolteacher until she married forever. Her meek and somewhat afflicted look hid the strength of her character quite well. “She looked like a nun,” Mercedes recalls. She devoted herself with such spirit of sacrifice to the care of her husband and the rearing of her children that attimes one forgot she still existed. The two oldest daughters had married very late. In addition to the twins, they had a middle daughter who had died of nighttime fevers, and two years later they were still observing a mourning that was relaxed inside the house but rigorous on the street. The brothers were brought up to be men. The girls had been reared to get married. They knew how to do screenembroidery, sew by machine, weave bone lace, wash and iron, make artificial flowers and fancy candy, and write engagement announcements. Unlike the girls of the time, who had neglected the cult of death, the four were past mistresses in the ancient science of sitting up with the ill, comforting the dying, and enshrouding the dead. The only thing that my mother reproached them for was the custom ofcombing their hair before sleeping. “Girls,” she would tellthem, “don’t comb your hair at night; you’ll slow down seafarers.” Except for that, she thought there were no better-reared daughters. “They’re perfect,” she was frequently heard to say. “Any man will be happy with them because they’ve been raised to suffer.” Yet it was difficult for the ones who married the two eldest to break the circle,because they always went together everywhere, and they organized dances for women only and were predisposed to find hidden intentions in the designs of men.
    Angela Vicario was the prettiest of the four, and my mother said that she had been born like the great queens of history, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. But she had a helpless air and a poverty of spirit that augured anuncertain future for her. I would see her again year after year during my Christmas vacations, and every time she seemed more destitute in the window of her house, where she would sit in the afternoon making cloth flowers and singing single-woman waltzes with her neighbors. “She’s all set to be hooked,” Santiago Nasar would tell me, “your cousin