Chronicle of a Death Foretold Read Online Free PDF Page A

the ninny is.” Suddenly, a little before the mourningfor her sister, I passed her on the street for the first time dressed as a grown woman and with her hair curled, and I could scarcely believe it was the same person. But it was a momentary vision: her penury of spirit had been aggravated with the years. Somuch so that when it was discovered that Bayardo San Román wanted to marry her, many people thought it was an outsider’s perfidy.
    The familytook it not only seriously but with great excitement. Except Pura Vicario, who laid down the condition that Bayardo San Román should identify himself properly. Up till then nobody knew who he was. His past didn’t go beyond that afternoon when he disembarked in his actor’s getup, and he was so reserved about his origins that even the most demented invention could have been true. It came to be saidthat he had wiped out villages and sown terror in Casanare as troop commander, that he had escaped from Devil’s Island, that he’d been seen in Pernambuco trying to make a living with a pair of trained bears, and that he’d salvaged the remains of a Spanish galleon loaded with gold in the Windward Channel. Bayardo San Román put an end to all those conjectures by a simple recourse: he brought hiswhole family on.
    There were four of them: the father, the mother, and two provocative sisters. They arrived in a Model-T Ford with official plates whose duck-quack horn aroused the streets at eleven o’clock in the morning. His mother, Alberta Simonds, a big mulatto woman from Curaçao, who spoke Spanish with a mixture of Papiamento, in her youth had been proclaimed the most beautiful of the twohundred most beautifulwomen in the Antilles. The sisters, newly come into bloom, were like two restless fillies. But the main attraction was the father: General Petronio San Román, hero of the civil wars of the past century, and one of the major glories of the Conservative regime for having put Colonel Aureliano Buendía to flight in the disaster of Tucurinca. My mother was the only one who wouldn’tgo to greet him when she found out who he was. “It seems all right to me that they should get married,” she told me. “But that’s one thing and it’s something altogether different to shake hands with the man who gave the orders for Gerineldo Márquez to be shot in the back.” As soon as he appeared in the window of the automobile waving his white hat, everybody recognized him because of the fameof his pictures. He was wearing a wheat-colored linen suit, high-laced cordovan shoes, and gold-rimmed glasses held by a clasp on the bridge of his nose and connected by a chain to a button hole in his vest. He wore the medal of valor on his lapel and carried a cane with the national shield carved on the pommel. He was the first to get out of the automobile, completely covered with the burningdust of our bad roads, and all he had to do was appear on the running board for everyone to realize that Bayardo San Román was going to marry whomever he chose.
    It was Angela Vicario who didn’t want to marryhim. “He seemed too much of a man for me,” she told me. Besides, Bayardo San Román hadn’t even tried to court her, but had bewitched the family with his charm. Angela Vicario never forgotthe horror of the night on which her parents and her older sisters with their husbands, gathered together in the parlor, imposed on her the obligation to marry a man whom she had barely seen. The twins stayed out of it. “It looked to us like woman problems,” Pablo Vicario told me. The parents’ decisive argument was that a family dignified by modest means had no right to disdain that prize of destiny.Angela Vicario only dared hint at the inconvenience of a lack of love, but her mother demolished it with a single phrase:
    “Love can be learned too.”
    Unlike engagements of the time, which were long and supervised, theirs lasted only four months because of Bayardo San Román’s urgings. It wasn’t any