Chronicle of a Death Foretold Read Online Free PDF Page B

so disturbed that she had resolved to tell her mother the truth so as to free herself from that martyrdom, when her only two confidantes, who helped her make cloth flowers, dissuaded her from her good intentions. “I obeyed them blindly,” she told me,“because they made me believe that they were experts in men’s tricks.” They assured her that almost all women lost their virginity in childhood accidents. They insisted that even the most difficult of husbands resigned themselves to anything as long as nobody knew about it.They convinced her, finally, that most men came to their wedding night so frightened that they were incapable of doing anythingwithout the woman’s help, and at the moment of truth they couldn’t answer for their own acts. “The only thing they believe is what they see on the sheet,” they told her. And they taught her old wives’ tricks to feign her lost possession, so that on her first morning as a newlywed she could display open under the sun in the courtyard of her house the linen sheet with the stain of honor.
    She gotmarried with that illusion. Bayardo San Román, for his part, must have got married with the illusion of buying happiness with the huge weight of his power and fortune, for the more the plans for the festival grew, the more delirious ideas occurred to him to make it even larger. He tried to hold off the wedding for a day when the bishop’s visit was announced so he could marry them, but Angela Vicariowas against it. “Actually,” she told me, “the fact is I didn’t want to be blessed by a man who only cut off the combs for soup and threw the rest of the rooster into the garbage.” Yet, even without the bishop’s blessing, the festival took on a force of its own so difficult to control that it got out of the hands of Bayardo San Román himself and ended up being a public event.
    General PetronioSan Román and his family arrived that time on the National Congress’s ceremonialboat, which remained moored to the dock until the end of the festivities, and with them came many illustrious people who, even so, passed unnoticed in the tumult of new faces. So many gifts were brought that it was necessary to restore the forgotten site of the first electrical power plant in order to display themost admirable among them, and the rest were immediately taken to the former home of the widower Xius, which was already set up to receive the newlyweds. The groom received a convertible with his name engraved in Gothic letters under the manufacturer’s seal. The bride was given a chest with table settings in pure gold for twenty-four guests. They also brought in a ballet company and two waltz orchestrasthat played out of tune with the local bands and all the groups of brass and accordion players who came, animated by the uproar of the revelry.
    The Vicario family lived in a modest house with brick walls and a palm roof, topped by two attics where swallows got in to breed in January. In front it had a terrace almost completely filled with flowerpots, and a large yard with hens running loose andfruit trees. In the rear of the yard the twins had a pigsty, with its sacrificial stone and its disemboweling table, which was a good source of domestic income ever since Poncio Vicario had lost his sight. Pedro Vicario had started the business, but when he went into militaryservice, his twin brother also learned the slaughterer’s trade.
    The inside of the house barely had enough room in whichto live. Therefore, the older sisters tried to borrow a house when they realized the size of the festival. “Just imagine,” Angela Vicario told me, “they’d thought about Plácida Linero’s house, but luckily my parents stubbornly held to the old song that our daughters would be married in our pigpen or they wouldn’t be married at all.” So they painted the house its original yellow color, fixed up thedoors, repaired the floors, and left it as worthy as was possible for such a clamorous wedding. The