Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

Author:Gabriel García Márquez [Márquez, Gabriel García]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780756943790
Publisher: Perfection Learning
Published: 2003-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

4

THE DAMAGE FROM THE KNIVES WAS only a beginning for the unforgiving autopsy that Father Carmen Amador found himself obliged to perform in Dr. Dionisio Iguarán’s absence. “It was as if we killed him all over again after he was dead,” the aged priest told me in his retirement at Calafell. “But it was an order from the mayor, and orders from the barbarian, stupid as they might have been, had to be obeyed.” It wasn’t entirely proper. In the confusion of that absurd Monday, Colonel Aponte had had an urgent telegraphic conversation with the governor of the province, and the latter authorised him to take the preliminary steps while he sent an investigating magistrate. The mayor was a former troop commander with no experience in matters of law, and he was too conceited to ask anyone who knew where he should begin. The first thing that bothered him was the autopsy. Cristo Bedoya, who was a medical student, managed to get out of it because of his intimate friendship with Santiago Nasar. The mayor thought that the body could be kept under refrigeration until Dr. Dionisio Iguarán came back, but he couldn’t find a human-sized freezer, and the only one in the market that would serve the purpose was out of order. The body had been exposed to public view in the centre of the living room, lying on a narrow iron cot while they were building a rich man’s coffin for it. They’d brought in fans from the bedrooms and some neighbouring houses, but there were so many people anxious to see it that they had to push back the furniture and take down the bird cages and pots of ferns, and even then the heat was unbearable. In addition, the dogs, aroused by the smell of death, increased the uneasiness. They hadn’t stopped howling since I went into the house, when Santiago Nasar was still in his death throes in the kitchen and I found Divina Flor weeping in great howls and holding them off with a stick.

“Help me,” she shouted to me. “What they want is to eat his guts.”

We locked them up in the stable. Plácida Linero later ordered them taken to some place far off until after the funeral. But toward noon, no one knew how, they escaped from where they were and burst madly into the house. Plácida Linero, just once, lost her grip.

“Those shitty dogs!” she shouted. “Kill them!”

The order was carried out immediately and the house was silent again. Until then there hadn’t been any concern at all for the state of the body. The face had remained intact, with the same expression it wore when he was singing, and Cristo Bedoya had put the intestines back in place and wrapped the body in linen strips. Nevertheless, in the afternoon a syrup-coloured liquid began to flow from the wounds, drawing flies, and a purple blotch appeared on the upper lip and spread out very slowly, like the shadow of a cloud on water, up to the hairline.

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