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Anurag Chauhan
The Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Gabriel García Márquez on the Fragility of Life
A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.
The young twentieth century wreaked havoc on the world in the guise of the World War. It sculpted deep craters in the hearts of societies and cultures. And so, set off bitter yet beautiful brooks of numerous works of art.
“The Waste Land” (1922) is one such great work that shone through the darkness of time. T.S. Eliot exhibits in his masterpiece the fragility of human life and the complex web of society and economy that engulfs people in its ambitions and aspirations and bogs them down into ignorance to do the stupidest of things.
In its fourth part “Death by Water”, Eliot reminds us of our petty nature of existence and how helpless we are against the grand scheme of reality. It is like how the “Man” feels like being a great big thing, jostling to the top of his mountain of achievements, but at the end of the day, the only climax of his story is just to die and lie in the lap of this cosmic ocean of infinitude.
Death by Water - T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
The Chronicle of a Death Foretold
This sense of illusion and inebriated vision is what Gabriel Garcia Marquez explores in his “not-so-mysterious” murder thriller “The Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1981), where everyone knows who is going to murder whom, yet the murder cannot be evaded.
The artfully crafted story of this imaginary world not just evokes the theme of crime, its cause and repercussions but also functions as a critique of social orientation concerning human relationships, their nature and the ambits that society establishes for them.
It reflects on the entangled threads of man and his fate and when they turn into the shackles of darkness where no light of hope breaks through. The uncertainties of life, Marquez exemplifies, are the vortices of time that are hungry to swallow us while we are on the quest for new lands.
The story essentially orbits the chaos created by the newlywed Angela Vicario when she is sent back home by her five hours old husband, Bayardo San Román. Bayardo finds on the wedding night that Angela is not a virgin, which makes her ineligible to be his wife.
Angela's only two confidantes, who worked with her making cloth flowers, dissuaded her from telling her mother the truth before the wedding night,
“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.
Later when her family, trembling with rage, interrogates who it was,
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 always been written,
and said, “Santiago Nasar”.
And then, her two brothers, Pablo and Pedro Vicario go on a mission to “defend their honor”, which is obviously, by killing Santiago Nasar.
The process of arranging knives for this mission makes everyone aware of the fact that the two brothers are going to kill Santiago Nasar, as they feel that this is a matter of honor and “honor can’t wait”.
The lawyer stood by the thesis of homicide in legitimate defense of honor, which was upheld by the court in good faith, and the twins declared at the end of the trial that they would have done it again a thousand times over for the same reason.
Marquez also puts a bit of irony in the process. When someone asks the Vicario brothers why they want to kill Santiago Nasar, they reply, “He knows why”, which is ironic in the sense that it was Angela who was just making things up to save herself from all the burden. She named Nasar because he was rich as one of the reasons, and she thought that nobody would kill a rich person like Nasar, or at least it is what the narrator feels is true.
Reconvening the Old Yarns
Gabriel Garcia Marquez takes us twenty-three years ahead through the eyes of the narrator in a remote village where he meets the aged and mature Angela Vicario.
When I saw her like that in the idyllic frame of the window, I refused to believe that the woman there was who I thought it was, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit that life might end up resembling bad literature so much. But it was she: Angela Vicario, twenty-three years after the drama.
He converses with Angela Vicario on various things, obviously most of them being from her past, as he could not realize that he is sitting with the headwater of all the anecdotes that happened so many years ago.
Everything else she told without reticence, even the disaster of her wedding night. She recounted how her friends had instructed her to get her husband drunk in bed until he passed out, to feign more embarrassment than she really felt so he’d turn out the light, to give herself a drastic douche of alum water to fake virginity, and to stain the sheet with Mercurochrome so she could display it the following day in her bridal courtyard.
…
On the contrary, she would recount it in all its details to anyone who wanted to hear it, except for one item that would never be cleared up: who was the real cause of her damage, and how and why, because no one believed that it had really been Santiago Nasar.
On further proceeding of the trial stage, what had alarmed the judge the most at the conclusion of his excessive diligence was not having found a single clue, not even the most improbable, that Santiago Nasar had been the cause of the wrong.
When the investigating magistrate asked her with his oblique style if she knew who the decedent Santiago Nasar was, she answered him impassively: “He was my perpetrator.” That’s the way she swears in the brief, but with no further precision of either how or where.
The truth is that she spoke about her misfortune without any shame in order to cover up the other misfortune, the real one, that was burning in her insides. No one would even have suspected until she decided to tell the narrator that Bayardo San Román had been in her life forever from the moment he had brought her back home. It was a coup de grace.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez depicts with his plot playing with time, that humans create circumstances and situations for themselves according to what they think and consequently act. As James Allen explains with the analogy that, “As the plant springs from, could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them.”
Mistress of her fate for the first time, Angela Vicario, then discovered that hate and love are reciprocal passions. She kept writing letters to Bayardo San Román without quarter for seventeen years, like plucking the strings of her love songs with the plectrum of her pen. The more letters she sent, the more the coals of her fever burned.
Until one August day, a fat, slightly bald man with glasses, wearing a sweaty shirt, stood at the door. He took a step forward to her and said, “Well, here I am”. It was Bayardo San Román.
Devotion to the Cult of Defects
Gabriel Marquez, with his brilliant prose, puts up an implicit criticism on society and its perception and indifference towards the circumstances of the lives of people it is made of. He illustrates the selfish nature of the society, that as long as things don't seep down to its hierarchy, it will not be concerned with anything even if it costs someone's life.
The news of the Vicario brothers going to kill Santiago Nasar spread like wildfire. In a matter of hours, it became so common that people were not even surprised to hear that again as they thought it to be a rumor and impossible. Some said, “Don’t be silly, those two aren’t about to kill anybody, much less someone rich.”
Amongst a large flock of rusted souls, there were folks who saw the imminent danger hanging over the head of someone they knew so well that they tried everything they proposed to do to put off the horrible act.
Cristo Bedoya, a friend of Santiago Nasar who was with him until a few minutes before he was murdered, “only took the time to grasp Yamil Shaium’s information before he ran out of the store to catch Santiago Nasar. He had seen him turn the corner, but he couldn’t find him among the groups that were beginning to break up on the square. Several people he asked gave him the same answer, “I just saw him with you.”
On the veranda, he came upon Divina Flor, who was carrying a pail of water and a rag to clean the floor in the living room. She assured him that Santiago Nasar hadn’t returned. He went to his room and searched everywhere and tried everything to ensure that this crime never gets to its destination.
While Cristo Bedoya had been looking for him, Santiago Nasar had gone into the house of Flora Miguel, his fiancée, just around the corner from where he’d seen him for the last time. “It didn’t occur to me that he could be there,” he told the narrator, “because those people never got up before noon.”
Nahir Miguel, the father of Nasar’s fiancée, did what he could at the time to save Santiago but failed.
“Only you can know if they’re right or not,” Nahir told Santiago. “But in any case, you’ve only got two paths to follow now: either you hide here, in this house which is yours, or you go out with my rifle.”
Marquez manifests, in the end, the murder of Santiago Nasar with such detailed intricacies that it seems as if he is painting the feelings of the victim and the audience enjoying the show going on outside the house of Nasar. “The people had stationed themselves on the square the way they did on parade days.”
His brilliant expression of the scene brings the blood running down alive to the eyes of the readers and allows them to see the color of fate and the cries of innocence. “No matter how much I scrubbed with soap and rags, I couldn’t get rid of his smell,” Pedro Vicario said.
Gabriel Marquez implies the fact, with his meandering story, that “What has to happen, happens.” Even when the well-wishers of the protagonist take it to the end, they could not stop the brutal stabbing of Nasar right out of the gate of his house. Destiny and Time played a doubles to win over all the struggle to save Nasar's life, even when the whole world got into it.
Cristo failed to outplay the deception of time and seemed to be lost in the maze of predestination. He was so close and yet so far from pulling Nasar out of the mouth of death.
Santiago Nasar only needed a few seconds to get in when the door closed. The Vicario brothers kept knifing him until their breath became polluted with the smell of Nasar’s blood. They did not hear the outs of the whole town, frightened by its own crime. “I felt the way you do when you’re galloping on horseback,” Pablo Vicario declared.
The Tombs of Sand
Through “The Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, Gabriel García Márquez broadens the scope of light that is refracted by Eliot's “Death by Water”. He goes one step ahead into the waters to enlighten us on the intertwined nature of love, life, and society.
T.S. Eliot illustrates the blindness behind man’s visionary ambitions as he transverses through the waters of time. He intimates to the sailor of time to be wary of the transient nature of life. The islands of his achievements are like the castles of sand, which will eventually transform into the tombs of sand. The whirlpool of fate will inevitably gulp down everything one has or plans to conquer in the future.
Gabriel García Márquez sails us through the uncertainty of this world. His design of the plot and the characters and the fabric of his narrative is full of perceptive insights into the tides of the real world and its aspects that we control and those which control us.
Why did the tragedy of Angela become the tragedy of Santiago? Because of what Angela or Bayardo did or because of what her brothers and the society did? It is difficult to come down to any certainty in that respect, but what becomes certain to us is the sense of uncertainty that is prevalent in our lives and ambitions.
As Kahlil Gibran beautifully puts it,
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides.
Read and Contemplate on the empiricist dissection of love by Francis Bacon, and on the Rabindranath Tagore's depiction of silent love and the searcher of hearts.
Get your own copy of T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land”, and Gabriel García Márquez's “The Chronicle of a Death Foretold” from here.
Or download a summary pdf of this essay.
