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

dark window in the house across the way, while false customers buying milk they didn’t need and asking for food items that didn’t exist went in and out with the intention of seeing if it was true that they were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him.
    The Vicario brothers would not see that window light up. Santiago Nasar went into the house at four-twenty, but he didn’thave to turn on any light to reach his bedroom because the bulb on the stairway stayed lit through the night. He threw himself onto his bed in the darkness and with his clothes on, since he had only an hour in which to sleep, and that was how Victoria Guzmán found him when she came up to wake him so he could receive the bishop. We’d been together at María Alejandrina Cervantes’ until after three,whenshe herself sent the musicians away and turned out the lights in the dancing courtyard so that her pleasurable mulatto girls could go to bed by themselves and get some rest. They’d been working without cease for three days, first taking care of the guests of honor in secret, and then turned loose with open doors for those of us still unsated by the wedding bash. María Alejandrina Cervantes,about whom we used to say that she would only go to sleep once and that would be to die, was the most elegant and the most tender woman I have ever known, and the most serviceable in bed, but she was also the most strict. She’d been born and reared here, and here she lived, in a house with open doors with several rooms for rent and an enormous courtyard for dancing with lantern gourds bought inthe Chinese bazaars of Paramaribo. It was she who did away with my generation’s virginity. She taught us much more than we should have learned, but she taught us above all that there’s no place in life sadder than an empty bed. Santiago Nasar lost his senses the first time he saw her. I warned him: “ ‘
A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain
.’” But he didn’t listento me, dazzled by María Alejandrina Cervantes’ illusory calls. She was his mad passion, his mistress of tears at the age of fifteen, until Ibrahim Nasar drove him out of the bed with a whip and shut him up for more than a year on The DivineFace. Ever since then they were still linked by a serious affection, but without the disorder of love, and she had so much respect for him that she never againwent to bed with anyone if he was present. During those last vacations she would send us off early with the pretext that she was tired, but she left the door unbarred and with a lamp lighted in the hall so that I could come in secretly.
    Santiago Nasar had an almost magical talent for disguises, and his favorite sport was to confuse the identities of the mulatto girls. He would rifle the wardrobeof some to disguise the others, so that they all ended up feeling different from themselves and like the ones they weren’t. On a certain occasion, one of them found herself repeated in another with such exactness that she had a crying attack. “I felt like I’d stepped out of the mirror,” she said. But that night María Alejandrina Cervantes wouldn’t let Santiago Nasar indulge himself for the lasttime in his tricks as a transformer, and she did it with such flimsy pretexts that the bad taste left by that memory changed his life. So we took the musicians with us for a round of serenades, and we continued the party on our own, while the Vicario twins were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him. It was he who got the idea, almost at four o’clock, to go up the widower Xius’s hill and sing forthe newlyweds.
    Not only did we sing under the windows, but we set off rockets and fireworks in the gardens, yet we didn’t perceive any sign of life inside the farmhouse. It didn’t occur to us that there was no one there, especially because the new car was by the door with its top still folded down and with the satin ribbons and bouquets of wax orange blossoms they had hung on it during