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

Vicario found him hugging the tree when he came back with the knives. “He was in a cold sweat from the pain,” he told me, “and he tried to tell me to go on by myself because he was in no condition to kill anybody.” He sat down on one of the carpenters’ benchesthey’d set up under the trees for the wedding lunch, and he dropped his pants down to his knees. “He spent about half an hour changing the gauze he had his prick wrapped in,” Pablo Vicario told me. Actually, he hadn’t delayed more than ten minutes, but it was something so difficult and so puzzling for Pablo Vicario that he interpreted it as some new trick on hisbrother’s part to waste time untildawn. So he put the knife in his hand and dragged him off almost by force in search of their sister’s lost honor.
    “There’s no way out of this,” he told him. “It’s as if it had already happened.”
    They left by way of the pigpen gate with the knives unwrapped, pursued by the uproar of the dogs in the yards. It was beginning to get light. “It wasn’t raining,” Pablo Vicario remembered. “Just theopposite,” Pedro recalled. “There was a sea wind and you could still count the stars with your finger.” The news had been so well spread by then that Hortensia Baute opened her door precisely as they were passing her house, and she was the first to weep for Santiago Nasar. “I thought they’d already killed him,” she told me, “because I saw the knives in the light from the street lamp and it lookedto me that they were dripping blood.” One of the few houses open on that misplaced street was that of Prudencia Cotes, Pablo Vicario’s fiancée. Whenever the twins passed by there at that time, and especially on Fridays when they were going to the market, they would go in to have their first cup of coffee. They pushed open the door to the courtyard, surrounded by the dogs, who recognized them in thehalf-light of dawn, and they greeted Prudencia Cotes’s mother in the kitchen. Coffee wasn’t ready yet.
    “We’ll leave it for later,” Pablo Vicario said. “We’re in a hurry now.”
    “I can imagine, my sons,” she said. “Honor doesn’t wait.”
    But in any case, they waited, and then it was Pedro Vicario who thought his brother was wasting time on purpose. While they were drinking their coffee PrudenciaCotes came into the kitchen in full adolescent bloom, with a roll of old newspapers to revive the fire in the stove. “I knew what they were up to,” she told me, “and I didn’t only agree, I never would have married him if he hadn’t done what a man should do.” Before leaving the kitchen, Pablo Vicario took two sections of newspaper from her and gave one to his brother to wrap the knives in. PrudenciaCotes stood waiting in the kitchen until she saw them leave by the courtyard door, and she kept on waiting for three years without a moment of discouragement until Pablo Vicario got out of jail and became her husband for life.
    “Take good care of yourselves,” she told them.
    So Clotilde Armenta had good reason when it seemed to her that the twins weren’t as resolute as before, and she served thema bottle of rotgut rum with the hope of getting them dead drunk. “That day,” she told me, “I realized just how alone we women are in the world!” Pedro Vicario asked to borrow her husband’sshaving implements, and she brought him the brush, the soap, the hanging mirror, and the safety razor with a new blade, but he shaved with his butcher knife. Clotilde Armenta thought that was the height of machismo.“He looked like a killer in the movies,” she told me. But as he explained to me later, and it was true, in the army he’d learned to shave with a straight razor and couldn’t do it any other way ever since. His brother, for his part, shaved in a more humble way, with Don Rogelio de la Flor’s borrowed safety razor. Finally, they drank the bottle in silence, very slowly, gazing with the boobishlook of early risers at the