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

the kitchen of Plácida Linero’s house, she sent the last urgent message to Victoria Guzmán by the beggar woman who came by every day to ask for a little milk in the name of charity. When the bishop’s boat bellowed almost everybody wasup to receive him and there were very few of us who didn’t know that the Vicario twins were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him, and besides, the reasons were known down to the smallest detail.
    Clotilde Armenta hadn’t finished dispensing her milk when the Vicario brothers returned with two other knives wrapped up in newspapers. One was for quartering, with a strong, rusty blade twelve incheslong and three inches wide, which had been put together by Pedro Vicario with the metal from a marquetry saw at a time when German knives were no longer available because of the war. The other one was shorter, but broad and curved. The investigator had made sketches of them in the brief, perhaps because he had trouble describing them, and all he ventured to say was that it looked like a miniaturescimitar. It was with these knives that the crime was committed, and both were rudimentary and had seen a lot of use.
    Faustino Santos couldn’t understand what had happened. “They came to sharpen their knives a second time,” he told me, “and once more they shouted for people to hear that they were going to cut Santiago Nasar’s guts out, so I thought they were kidding around, especially since Ididn’t pay any attention to the knives and thought they were the same ones.” This time, however, Clotilde Armenta noticed from the time she saw them enter that they didn’t have the same determination as before.
    Actually, they’d had their first disagreement. Not only were they much more different inside than they looked on the outside, but in difficult emergencies theyshowed opposite characters.We, their friends, had spotted it ever since grammar school. Pablo Vicario was six minutes older than his brother, and he was the more imaginative and resolute until adolescence. Pedro Vicario always seemed more sentimental to me, and by the same token more authoritarian. They presented themselves together for military service at the age of twenty, and Pablo Vicario was excused in order to stayhome and take care of the family. Pedro Vicario served for eleven months on police patrol. The army routine, aggravated by the fear of death, had matured his tendency to command and the habit of deciding for his brother. He also came back with a case of sergeant’s blennorrhagia that resisted the most brutal methods of military medicine as well as the arsenic injections and permanganate purges ofDr. Dionisio Iguarán. Only in jail did they manage to cure it. We, his friends, agreed that Pablo Vicario had suddenly developed the strange dependence of a younger brother when Pedro Vicario returned with a barrack-room soul and with the novel trick of lifting his shirt for anyone who wanted to see a bullet wound with seton on his left side. He even began to develop a kind of fervor over the greatman’s blennorrhagia that his brother wore like a war medal.
    Pedro Vicario, according to his own declaration, was the one who made the decision to kill SantiagoNasar, and at first his brother only followed along. But he was also the one who considered his duty fulfilled when the mayor disarmed them, and then it was Pablo Vicario who assumed command. Neither of the two mentioned that disagreementin their separate statements to the investigator. But Pablo Vicario confirmed several times to me that it hadn’t been easy for him to convince his brother about their final resolve. Maybe it was really nothing but a wave of panic, but the fact is that Pablo Vicario went into the pigsty alone to get the other two knives, while his brother agonized, drop by drop, trying to urinate under the tamarindtrees. “My brother never knew what it was like,” Pedro Vicario told me in our only interview. “It was like pissing ground glass.” Pablo