Summary

Chronicle of a Death Foretold begins with Santiago Nasar's final morning, clearly stating he is going to be killed. He awakes from uneasy dreams-after which he feels "splattered by bird shit"-to greet a bishop who is supposed to be landing in their town. He mentions the bad dreams to his mother, Placida Linero, who is known to interpret the dreams of others, though even she fails to foresee her son's ensuing death. We are also introduced to the narrator, a good friend of Santiago's, who is telling the story twenty-seven years after the fact.

As he walks to see the bishop, Santiago meets many people who later report that he was in a good mood. He wears unstarched white linen, his suit for special occasions. The narrator states that he was "recovering from the wedding revels [Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Roman had been married the previous evening] in the apostolic lap of Maria Alejandrina Cervantes," the respected local prostitute, on the morning in question. He mentions that Santiago was unarmed, as was his custom, though he owned several guns.

Santiago's mother remembers him on the morning of his death as twenty-one years old, "slim and pale" with "his father's Arab eyelids and curly hair." The Nasar family's two servants, Victoria Guzman and Divina Flor, also see him go to greet the bishop. Victoria had been seduced by Ibrahim Nasar, Santiago's father, years before, and is determined that her daughter not meet the same fate as she; when Santiago makes a pass at Divina, Victoria quietly threatens him with a bloody knife, which startles him. Victoria and Divina both know about the murder plot, though neither mentions it: Victoria because she "thought it was drunkards' talk" and Divina because "in the depths of her heart she wanted them to kill him." As he leaves the house, he grabs Divina's "whole pussy."

Several coincidences immediately arise that make Santiago's death possible: first, he fails to notice a note that had been pushed under the door, warning him in detail of the murder; second, the narrator notes that he generally used the back door of the house, which he failed to do on the day of his death, but which, if he had used it, would have saved his life. On his way to greet the bishop, Santiago passes the milk shop where the twins Pedro and Pablo Vicario are waiting to kill him. However, Clotilde Armenta, the proprietress of the milk shop, convinces them to let Santiago Nasar see the bishop first.

The bishop does not even come ashore, which disappoints many, though Santiago remains in a good mood, reflecting on the magnificent wedding the night before and saying that his own wedding to his fiancée, Flora Miguel, will be just like it. The narrator then turns to Margot; she invites Santiago to breakfast on the day of his murder and he goes home to change first. She then finds out about the plot to kill him-something about how Angela Vicario was returned to her family in shame-and tells her mother, Luisa Santiaga. Luisa, though she has ties to both sides of the conflict, decides to warn Santiago and his mother. On her way to do so, however, someone says, "Don't bother yourself, Luisa Santiaga. They've already killed him."

Analysis

The first paragraph of Chronicle of a Death Foretold "foretells" many of the concerns that Garcia Marquez develops throughout the novel. For instance, he focuses on time-mentioning that Santiago woke at 5:30 a.m., that he was killed on a Monday and that the narrator is speaking from twenty-seven years in the future. Specific mentions of time continue throughout the story. Garcia Marquez complements this concern with an unusual structure: instead of unfolding chronologically, the novel is a kind of spiral. Each chapter has its own system of time, tending to circle back on itself. This obsession with time, coupled with Garcia Marquez' unusual structure, suggests the paradox that however journalistically the events of Santiago's death may be recorded, our knowledge can never be certain. Garcia Marquez's descriptions of events almost always include specific times, but they often contradict one another, suggesting that each account "believes" in its own accuracy-though none is wholly accurate.

Also, within the first paragraph, Garcia Marquez introduces the importance of his culture to the ensuing events-especially the role of extrasensory knowledge. Placida Linero is plainly announced to be an "interpreter" of dreams; such occult abilities are treated as commonplace throughout the narrative. Characters consistently respond in an intuitive way to the coming murder. For instance, Santiago's recoil at the sight of the butchered rabbits (a sight that he, a hunter, is well accustomed to and doesn't usually mind) anticipates his own evisceration at the novels end. This tendency to foretell the future also reinforces the treatment of time in the novel: time is not a linear thing, but rather cyclical-hence the spiraling structure of each chapters. Santiago's death is present before it happens and many signs point to it; the characters simply fail to read these signs before it is too late.

Part of this failure stems from the uniqueness of individual perspectives on daily events. Not only does each character fail, in his or her own way, to prevent the murder; the characters in the novel can't even agree upon what the weather was like on the day in question. The inconsistency of memories, thus, is one of the central themes of the work. Throughout, Garcia Marquez replays the same events from different characters' points of views; these differing accounts are clear in themselves, but when compared they reveal, in Garcia Marquez' own words, "a broken mirror of memory [put] back together from so many scattered shards."

This fragmentation of memory corresponds, in turn, to a fragmentation of social responsibility. From the outset, it is apparent that Pedro and Pablo don't really want to kill Santiago-they simply see it as their duty in defending their family honor to attempt the murder. They do all that they can, it seems, to inspire the townsfolk to prevent their success, announcing their intention publicly, even to Santiago's friends. Each member of the society, however, leaves it to the rest to prevent the murder, a collective shirking of conscience that ultimately fails. To some degree, an astonishing number of coincidences occurred to prevent even those who wanted to warn Santiago from doing so; even so, the failure to prevent Santiago's death is a failure of every individual within the society. Even the moral beacons of the town, such as the priest and the mayor, are too self-absorbed to stop a stupid, unjust, easily preventable killing.

Summary

The second chapter begins with a description of Bayardo San Roman, the groom from the wedding. He is largely a mystery: an extremely wealthy man from a distinguished military family who arrived in town for the first time only sixth months before his wedding. At thirty years old, Bayardo had "the waist of a novice bullfighter, gold eyes, and a skin slowly roasted by saltpeter"; he is accomplished and well liked. Only the narrator's mother, Luisa Santiaga, admits to forebodings about him, but she does so years after the wedding.

Bayardo's ostensible reason for coming to town is simple; he says, "I've been going from town to town looking for someone to marry." When he first sees Angela he calmly realizes that he is going to marry her. He wins her a mother-of-pearl music box at a charity bazaar by buying all of the raffle tickets. She rejects his offer initially, considering him conceited, but Bayardo is a charmer (and much wealthier than the Vicarios) so it doesn't take him long to convince the Vicarios to give him their daughter; they had "scant resources." Pura Vicario, Angela's mother, insists that Bayardo "identify himself properly" before the wedding and so he produces his whole family, makes it known that he is the son of General Petronio San Roman, the "hero of the civil wars of the past century," and presents his beautiful mother and two "provocative" sisters. It doesn't take long for the town to realize that "Bayardo San Roman was going to marry whomever he chose."

Angela, however, remains opposed to marrying him. Her family decides, despite her lack of love for the man, that the marriage will go on, and they arrange a short four-month engagement. Bayardo does all he can to win Angela's love. He asks her what house in the town she likes best and she points out the widower Xius'. Bayardo tells Xius that he wants to buy the house and the widower initially refuses because everything in it had been his wife's; however, when Bayardo Xius makes him an outrageous offer, putting "ten bundles of thousand-peso notes" in front of him, Xius can't refuse any longer. With tears of rage in his eyes, Xius sells Bayardo the house and dies two months later.

One massive problem remains, however: Angela Vicario is not a virgin. She plans to tell her mother and thus cancel the wedding but her friends convince her to fake her virginity by staining her wedding sheets with blood. On the wedding night itself, however, Angela is unable to feign virginity, thus Bayardo returns her to her family.

The narrator next describes the wedding and the feast that followed it. After one problem-Bayardo showed up two hours late and Angela refused to put on her wedding dress until he arrived-the proceedings are magnificent. The narrator, along with his brother Luis Enrique and Cristo Bedoya, were with Santiago Nasar at the wedding and the party the whole night. These four were very close friends; they all cannot believe that if Santiago had taken Angela's virginity, as he is accused, he would not have told him. Bayardo is very friendly with the four during the wedding feast, even discussing the cost of the wedding with Santiago, who is planning a wedding of his own.

The official wedding festivities end at six p.m., when Bayardo and Angela leave to consummate their marriage, but the townsfolk continue celebrating until around midnight, when Santiago Nasar, Cristo Bedoya, Luis Enrique, and the narrator retire to Maria Alejandrina Cervantes's "house of mercies." There they meet the Vicario brothers, who drink and sing with Santiago just five hours before they kill him.

Pura Vicario, Angela's mother, goes to bed around eleven p.m. on the wedding night only to be awakened by three slow knocks on the door. She finds Bayardo San Roman and Angela, in a shredded satin dress and with a towel wrapped around her waist. He leaves Angela with her, saying, "Thank you for everything, Mother. You're a saint." For the next two hours, Pura silently beats Angela-bringing her to the verge of death without even waking her husband. When the twins arrive home, shortly before three, Pedro asks her "who it was." She replies quickly, only taking "the time necessary to say the name," Santiago Nasar.

Analysis

Though Santiago's death is treated as an astonishing and unjust occurrence, Garcia Marquez hands down no simple condemnations in his novel. Every character is flawed and complicated, containing some portion of blame for the sequence of events that culminates in the murder. Chapter Two focuses on one of the most complicated of all these characters: Bayardo. Mysterious, wealthy, reclusive, soft-spoken but with an iron will-Bayardo is difficult to pin down. The narrator says that "he seemed to me like a very sad man," while Luisa Santiaga claims, "He reminded me of the devil" (granted, no one else in the story senses evil in Bayardo). Bayardo is at once capable of ostentatious displays of love and charm and also of ruthless selfishness-as in his transaction with Xius, whom he badgers into selling his home, eventually killing the man.

We also may want to condemn Bayardo for returning Angela, but the way in which he does it, with a soft-spoken thank you to Angela's mother, is strange and unsettling-perhaps engendering a measure of sympathy in the reader. Garcia Marquez does not make Bayardo or Angela simply condemnable any more than he makes Santiago purely loveable (recall Santiago's sexist molesting of Divina Flor, his servant). This is a pattern repeated throughout his novel-and indeed, in many of his other works as well. All of his characters contain obvious imperfections; all share in ultimate guilt but all deserve a measure of the readers' sympathy as well. His purpose, then, is not to blame individuals, but to invite us to consider larger intersections of fate, society, community, and memory.

Which is not to say that the individuals in the novel aren't interesting. Rather, they are full of mystery and strangeness-which Garcia Marquez highlights by using unconventional narrative techniques. For instance, the narrator pointedly mentions that Bayardo San Roman went missing for two hours prior to his wedding, only to arrive "the perfect image of a happy bridegroom." In most novels, we would learn what went on in that two-hour interval, but in this novel we never do. Perhaps there is something strange and significant in his absence, perhaps not-Garcia Marquez leaves his novel open to such loose ends, knowing that human life is full of such unexplainable details. His novels-containing both surreal coincidences and their opposite, purely random asides-recreate the perplexity of everyday life: of meaning formation itself.

The chapter closes with Angela's absurdist beating at the hands of her mother-whose rage is so violent that she nearly kills her daughter, yet so controlled that she never makes a sound during the beating. Pura beats her daughter with the same combination of steeliness and propriety that she herself displays-she can't forgive her daughter, it seems, for doing what she would never have done: for surrendering herself.

As for Angela's confession, the narrator makes two things clear: both Santiago's likely innocence and Angela's relative freedom from blame. He writes, when Pedro asks her who did it, that she "only took the time necessary to say the name. She looked for it in the shadows, she found it at first sight among the many, many easily confused names from this world and the other, and she nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has even been written." Santiago's name is picked from the "shadows"-any man's name would have done as well (which implies, perhaps, that all men, as complicit in the patriarchal society that values her only for her virginity, share some blame for what follows). As in so many later events, Santiago is "like a butterfly" pinned to a wall (which, later, he in fact is, by the twins' daggers) by random fate. Angela needs a name in order not to be beaten to death, and the name that comes to her, for whatever reason, is Santiago's.

Summary

Chapter Three describes the manner in which the Vicario twins went about killing Santiago. It begins with their acquittal, after they had spent three years in prison awaiting trial for the murder, because the homicide was ruled in "legitimate defense of honor."

The narrator then describes the number of people whom the brothers told about their plan to murder Santiago: at least twenty-two. They went about their scheme publicly, even sharpening their knives at the meat market. Next, the brothers visit the milk shop, where they discuss their plan with a policeman, Leandro Pornoy, and with Clotilde. Clotilde is the most concerned of those who are in on the plot, knowing the twins to be scared and immature and thus "capable of everything." She tells her husband, Don Rogelio de la Flor, of the murder plot, only to be dismissed as silly.

Pornoy tells the mayor, Colonel Lazaro Aponte, about the twins plot; he too is dismissive until he discovers that Bayardo San Roman had returned Angela Vicario to her family. Realizing that Santiago Nasar might be in real danger, he takes the twins' knives away and sends them home, failing to detain the brothers (which Clotilde recommends). The mayor then forgets to tell Santiago, only remembering when he sees him waiting to greet the bishop. Clotilde, in an attempt to warn Santiago herself, sends a beggar woman with a message to Victoria Guzman, the Nasars' servant, and also warns Father Amador. Victoria Guzman, however, fails to warn Santiago, and Father Amador is too preoccupied with the bishop's visit to pass on the warning.

Having been sent home, the twins get into a disagreement about whether or not they have fulfilled their duty to try and kill Santiago. Pedro thinks they have but Pablo forces his twin to continue with the plan. With two new knives they head back to the milk shop, meanwhile stopping at the home of Pablo's fiancée, Prudencia Cotes, where they discuss the murder over coffee. Prudencia tells the narrator that she approved of Pablo's design; she later waits three years while he is in prison and marries him upon his release.

Back at the milk shop, Clotilde tries to get the twins drunk on a bottle of rum so that they will be unable to go through with the killing. The twins drink too slowly, though, meanwhile continuing to mention their plan to all who come by.

The narrator then tells how Santiago, the narrator, Luis Enrique, and Cristo Bedoya spent the night in revels while the twins plotted Santiago's death: from Maria Alejandrina Cervantes's whorehouse and they went serenading until after four a.m., including a trip to Xius' old house where they serenaded a lone Bayardo, unaware that he had returned Angela. Santiago Nasar then catches an hour of sleep at his house before the bishop's arrival and the narrator goes to sleep with his lover. Luis Enrique, meanwhile, goes to the milk shop for some cigarettes, where the twins tell him of their plan to kill Santiago. Luis responds by saying "Santiago Nasar is dead" and stumbles home. He does not later remember saying this, and his next memory after passing out is his sister the next morning, crying, "They've killed Santiago Nasar!"

Analysis

This chapter concentrates on the possibility that the Vicario twins didn't really want to kill Santiago Nasar. The narrator writes, "The Vicario brothers...had done much more than could be imagined to have someone to stop them from killing [Santiago], and they had failed." At every step they try merely to enact their vengeance-without ever having to fulfill it. They hang out at the milk shop, more or less waiting to be stopped; then they wait in front of Santiago's door-the last place anyone would have thought he'd go. Thus even the murderers deserve some sympathy. They are acting as mere performers of a public, social expectation to avenge their family honor. The failure of coincidence to inform Santiago of their plot-despite their best efforts to broadcast it-is more to blame, in a way, than they are, for the murder.

However, some individuals clearly carry more of the burden for Santiago's death than others. The mayor, for instance, refuses to detain the twins even when doing so would have been a favor to them. As Clotilde says, he should "spare those poor boys from the horrible duty that's fallen on them." Clotilde, like Cassandra (the Trojan princess in ancient mythology who was gifted with foresight but condemned to be always ignored), is the only character who realizes the danger of the twins' spoken intent. She sees their unwillingness to kill, coupled with their determination to do so if the opportunity comes. And like Cassandra, her warnings go unheeded, lost in the shuffle of others' concerns and a general failure of perspicacity.

But can we truly blame anyone for Santiago's death? Perhaps only abstractions-such as the institution of gender relations presented in the book-are completely blameworthy. Garcia Marquez clearly dramatizes the double standard of sexuality at play in the depicted society: premarital sex is the ultimate transgression against society, while for the men-who hang out at Maria Cervantes' brothel-it is totally acceptable, even for those who are engaged to be married, such as Santiago and the narrator. According to the narrator, Maria Cervantes "did away with my generation's virginity." By "my generation," of course, he means "the men in my generation." His very language contains the double standard that Santiago's death exposes.

And who, after all, is truly "virginal" in the novel? Virginity connotes purity-and Garcia Marquez is careful to show that none of his characters-not one-is perfectly pure. All are guilty; each has secrets and weaknesses. Thus he subtly undermines the very notion of valuing "virginity." To value virginity-as a symbol of perfection or unstainedness or what have you-is to misunderstand the human animal, which is full of guilt and corruption and frailty. No wonder, then, that the unrealistic value placed on female virginity leads to unnatural murder-the emphasis is itself unnatural.

Summary

The chapter begins after Santiago's stabbing, as he is in his death throes on the kitchen floor; his dogs are howling uncontrollably and Placida Linero orders that they be locked up in the stable. At noon they escape and burst back into the house, after which Placida orders them killed. Following the dogs' death the house is silent.

The mayor orders that Santiago's body be refrigerated until Dr. Dionisio Iguaran, who is out of town, can perform an autopsy. Their attempts at refrigeration fail, however; Santiago's body rots until Father Amador, who had briefly attended medical school, is prevailed upon to perform the autopsy. The body comes back badly botched, "as if [they'd] killed him all over again after he was dead," along with the judgment that there were seven fatal stab wounds and many more smaller ones. Father Amador also notes that Santiago's liver revealed a poorly cured case of hepatitis, meaning that he would only have lived a few more years anyway, an opinion later disputed by Dr. Iguaran.

The chapter goes on to describe the fallout after Santiago's death. The narrator, for instance, visits his lover, Maria, only to find her gorging herself: her way of mourning. He falls asleep while mourning with her and is awoken when she tries to make love to him; she soon stops, however, saying, "I can't. You smell of him."

Pedro and Pablo Vicario, who are in jail, also smell Santiago everywhere. They are afraid to sleep, where they commit the murder again in their dreams. Also, they both have horrible excretory problems-Pedro suffers from sergeant's blennorrhea, which makes urination painful, and Pablo suffers from "pestilential diarrhea." They are further troubled because the generally peaceful Arab community had been vengeful after Santiago's death. Eventually Susana Abdala, the ancient matriarch of the Arab immigrants, cures both Pedro's blennorrhea and Pablo's diarrhea.

The narrator relates the fates of the Vicario family: after the debacle, they retire from the town and never return, moving to Manaure instead. The twins insist that their killing was honorable all the way up to their trial day, when they are absolved. They move to Riohacha near Manaure where Pablo marries Prudencia and becomes a goldsmith. Pedro, meanwhile, reenlists in the army and disappears one morning in enemy territory.

Bayardo's fate is also related: Colonel Aponte finds him in Xius' house, still wearing his wedding clothes, "in the last stages of ethylic intoxication." His mother and two sisters come and carry him to their boat in a hammock, still drunk and looking as though he was dead.

Angela and her mother, meanwhile, move to an Indian village in the upper Guajira. The narrator notes that he saw her there twenty-three years after the murder and is surprised by "the way in which she'd ended up understanding her own life." She has matured and grown witty and she doesn't shy away from recounting the details of the wedding and murder, though she never tells the identity of her true lover.

Angela tells the narrator the while her mother was beating her she realized that she loved Bayardo. One day long afterwards she saw him in a hotel lobby in Riohacha and from that day on she "went crazy over him." She wrote him letters continually though he never replied, and in so doing "she became lucid, overbearing, mistress of her own free will, and she became a virgin again just for him, and she recognized no other authority than her own nor any other service than that of her obsession." She wrote him a letter once a week for seventeen years and finally Bayardo arrived at her house, old fat and balding, with two suitcases, one filled with clothing "in order to stay," and another with almost two thousand letters that she'd written to him, all unopened.

Analysis

Santiago Nasar's dogs, first shown in Chapter One begging for the rabbits' innards while Victoria Guzman cooks, make a memorable repeat appearance. Divina Flor, while holding the dogs off in Chapter Four, screams, "Help me! What they want is to eat his guts." Thus, once again, time has looped back on itself: Santiago's death, present from the beginning, has come to pass: the eviscerated white rabbit has become the eviscerated youth in white linens. Such repetitions emphasize the death's "foretold" nature; no one, Garcia Marquez, could have prevented this innocent from dying.

And it's not just the dogs that are obsessed with guts in the fourth chapter. Another main event of the section is Father Amador's botched autopsy of Santiago, whose gore and wounds evoke much of the meaning of this passage. For a good deal of the book, Santiago is treated as a sort of idea, a man maligned by fate and misremembered by the community that failed him. In Chapter Four, however, Garcia Marquez shows him as a human being. His death throes are described in horrific, close detail, and Garcia Marquez makes much of the comparison to Jesus Christ, noting stigmata in Santiago's left hand. Like Christ, Santiago has been sacrificed for a sin that he (likely) did not commit; he is a scapegoat, a sacrificial lamb in white linen. And like Christ, his martyrdom is recorded in gruesome physical detail.

And the autopsy-a second death, as his mother notes-is just as disrespectful and senseless as the murder itself. It tells us nothing new at all. Perhaps its only function is to make the villagers feel better about their failure to prevent the death-after all, Father Amador "discovers" that Santiago would only have lived a short while longer anyway due to an enlarged liver. We can doubt very much the truth of this conclusion; it seems merely to serve as a sort of umbrage for a guilty town. As with the constant talk of coincidences, the town would rather blame fate for Santiago's death than scrutinize themselves.

Similarly, the majority of townsfolk don't even consider Santiago a victim of this murder. They consider Bayardo the only victim, because only he has lost honor, assuming that Santiago slept with Angela and thus deserved his death and that Angela, through Santiago's killing, has been redeemed. Again, as with the autopsy, this is umbrage from collective guilt: we know how unlikely it is that Santiago slept with Angela, but the townsfolk by and large seem to require a simple explanation for his death. They need him to be guilty-though he probably isn't-so that they don't have to see themselves as guilty. Garcia Marquez, however, insinuates that everyone in the town shares the stain of guilt.

And every character shares innocence as well. Even Angela, who seems easiest to condemn for her randomly chosen death sentence, finds redemption. She explains to the narrator many years after that the reason she could not fake her virginity-in other words, fake her virtue-is that she was, in fact virtuous. He writes that she had a "pure decency...carried hidden inside the solidity her mother had imposed." Her willingness to reveal her indecency (her lost virginity) is, in fact, an act of decency; Angela, like everyone, contains both innocence and corruption. She is corrupt in the weak bodily sense that her patriarchal society values-she is deflowered. But within herself she is pure, uncorrupt. As she says, she is a second virgin. Then again, she condemns an innocent man and stands by her lie forever. We will never get a simple reading on a Garcia Marquez character; they are both deceived and deceivers, innocents and fallen, human through and through.

Finally, one of the most magical parts of this novel is the return of Bayardo with his suitcase full of unopened letters. The gesture captures the incredible sense of grief and love that follows a betrayal: Bayardo can't bring himself to read the letters, Angela can't bring herself to stop writing them. When he returns, toting seventeen years of Angela's most anguished outpourings, it is as though he brings her life back with him. The same solid pure decency that kept her from deceiving Bayardo ultimately wins him back; her stubborn reliance on her self-defined-not society-defined-virtue. Angela is a charming, witty woman, as full of mystery as her lover when the novel closes, making it all the easier to forgive her youthful, extorted condemnation of Santiago.

Summary

For years after, no one in town can discuss anything but the murder. They become obsessed with the number of coincidences that aligned in order to make the murder possible; some are never able to forgive themselves for their part in the murder. For instance, while Placida is able to explain why she locked the main door (Divina swore she'd seen Santiago enter and go upstairs), she can't forgive herself for failing to notice the omens in Santiago's dreams.

The narrator shifts to twelve days after the murder, when the investigating magistrate comes to town. The magistrate, who is unnamed, notes in the margins of the case that "he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature." He is further alarmed at "not having found a single clue, not even the most improbable, that Santiago Nasar had been the cause of the wrong."

Shifting to the murder day, we learn that the twins tell Santiago's good friend Indalecio Pardo, about their plan. Indalecio loses the nerve to warn Santiago when he sees him. On the morning, Santiago walks with Cristo Bedoya, who notices strange looks among the crowd but is not yet aware of the plan. The crowd parts for them, not wanting to touch a man who will soon die.

After Cristo and Santiago part, Yamil Shaium, an Arab who had immigrated with Santiago Nasar's father, warns Cristo of the plot, but Cristo is unable to find Santiago again. Somehow, no one has seen him enter his fiancée's home off the square. Cristo goes to Santiago's house, where he tells Victoria of the plot (she already knows); when he cannot find Santiago he leaves without telling Placida, for want of frightening her.

Back in the square, Pedro Vicario calls to Cristo to warn Santiago but Cristo is still unable to find his friend. He tells Colonel Aponte, who swears that he sent the twins home but agrees to take care of the matter again. Instead the mayor stops by the social club to check on a dominoes date. Cristo meanwhile goes to the narrator's house, where he assumes Santiago must have gone, only to hear distant shouting and learn that he was too late.

When Santiago arrives at her house, his fiancée Flora, who knew of the plot, furiously returns his love letters to her, saying, "Here you are, and I hope they kill you!" She later explains that she didn't believe they would really kill Santiago but thought they would force him to marry Angela. Santiago has no idea what caused her outburst and calls after her, rousing the whole family, at which point Flora's father, Nahir Miguel, informs him of the plot. Santiago is totally confused, and thus clearly innocent, so Nahir tells him to hide in their house or take a rifle for protection.

Santiago, however, leaves without the rifle, afraid and baffled-unable even to find his own house. The twins see him and walk after him; Clotilde Armenta screams for Santiago to run. Meanwhile, Victoria had finally told Placida about the murder plot; Placida asks Divina if her son is at home, and when Divina swears that he is, she locks the door, seeing the Vicario brothers running at the house with their knives out. Santiago, shut out of his own house seconds too late, is killed. The twins stab him repeatedly, including a horizontal slash across his stomach that releases his viscera.

Just then, a group of angry Arab immigrants brandishing guns chase the twins to the church. Santiago stumbles into the house through the back door "that had been open since six" and dies in the kitchen.

Analysis

This chapter does not contain much that is new-we've already seen these events before, several times. It serves rather to place these events in a larger, literary context, mostly through the testimony of the visiting judge. This investigating magistrate-who interprets the events of this novel much like a reader or a critic himself-clearly sides with many of the conclusions that Garcia Marquez has already invited us to accept. He concludes that Santiago Nasar's behavior during the morning of his death was "overwhelming proof of his innocence" and that Angela's impassivity in naming him as her perpetrator suggested the she was lying. Moreover, the judge determines that the Vicario brothers don't want to murder Santiago-they even tell Indalecio Pardo, a good friend of Santiago Nasar's, about their plan to kill him; when Clotilde Armenta tells him to warn Santiago, Pedro tells him, "Don't bother. No matter what, he's as good as dead already." This statement was "too obvious a challenge;" the twins "must have thought that he was just the right person to stop the crime without bringing any shame on them."

But the magistrate's purpose is not just to tie up these loose ends. After all, we could be reasonably sure that Santiago is innocent and that the Vicarios are ambivalent about killing him well before the magistrate passes his judgment. What the magistrate brings that is new is a sense of the preceding events as literature. The judge in this chapter states that "he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature." This is a tongue-in-cheek comment if ever there was one, as the proceeding-though based on a real event-is, in fact literature. Indeed, Garcia Marquez' novel is literature, to a great degree, because of, not in spite of, the use of coincidences.

Garcia Marquez uses these coincidences in two ways, both of which get at the deepest resonances of the novel. On the one hand, the series of unbelievable chances that result in Santiago's death suggest that the death was fated, that no one could have stopped it. There is a sense of magic in this reading, of inescapable destiny. This theme has been developed from the very first words of the book, even from the book's very title. Santiago's death is "foretold." He dreams ominous dreams, responds strangely to the rabbit guts, etc. All the way until his death, it is as though fate works through the townsfolk, keeping them from warning him until it's too late. Even Santiago himself is, in this reading, complicit in his own death. He goes for the front door, resulting in his murder-not the back, which would have saved him. As characters comment throughout the book, he's already dead. There's no saving him.

But on the other hand, maybe all of these coincidences aren't coincidences at all. The narrator records them twenty-seven years after the fact, remember, and the people he interviews seem uniformly willing to shirk their complicity in the murder onto a sense of the murder's fatedness. Taking the two prongs of "magical realism": if the sense of fate in the book is what makes it magical, it is this attentiveness to magic as a human psychological condition that makes the book realistic. Only in hindsight do these coincidences seem so bafflingly coincidental. Perhaps, in reality, they are simply instances of selfishness and strategy-Divina Flora, remember, has reason to hate Santiago, and she may very well cause his death when she tells Santiago's mother that her son is safe upstairs-with a reasonable measure of chance. Perhaps the very act of calling Santiago's death a "series of coincidences" is merely a collective purging of conscience. He could have been saved-he should have been saved-but he wasn't, and so, in hindsight, people pretend he never could have been saved, or that he deserved to die, or that he would have died anyway of an "enlarged liver."

Given that Garcia Marquez based this novel on the real-life death of a friend of his, it seems reasonably that the second reading might be the more accurate. His story is not just a beautiful evocation of magic and fate, it is a specific condemnation of cultural practices-such as honor killings and enforced virginity-that result in chaotic, vigilante "justice." Santiago's death, though beautifully and carefully crafted in the language of destiny, is not destined. It is the result of moral failure, for which all members of society-including Santiago himself-can assume some burden of the guilt.

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