Free Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa

to make him understand that we tropical people have larger livers than greenhorn Galician Spaniards.” The report concluded that thecause of death had been a massive hemorrhage brought on by any one of the seven major wounds.
    They gave us back a completely different body. Half of the cranium had been destroyed by the trepanation and the ladykiller face that death had preserved ended up losing its identity. Furthermore, the priest had pulled out the sliced-up intestines by the roots, but in the end he didn’t know what to dowith them, and he gave them an angry blessing and threw them into the garbage pail. The last onlookers ranged about theschoolhouse windows lost their curiosity, the helper fainted, and Colonel Lázaro Aponte, who had seen and caused so many repressive massacres, ended up being a vegetarian as well as a spiritualist. The empty shell, stuffed with rags and quicklime and sewed up crudely with coarsetwine and baling needles, was on the point of falling apart when we put it into the new coffin with silk quilt lining. “I thought it would last longer that way,” Father Amador told me. Just the opposite happened and we had to bury him hurriedly at dawn because he was in such bad shape that it was already unbearable in the house.
    A cloudy Tuesday was breaking through. I didn’t have the courageto sleep at the end of that oppressive time, and I pushed on the door of María Alejandrina Cervantes’ house in case she hadn’t put up the bar. The gourd lamps were burning where they hung from the trees and in the courtyard for dancing there were several wood fires with huge steaming pots where the mulatto girls were putting mourning dye onto their party clothes. I found María Alejandrina Cervantesawake as always at dawn, and completely naked as always when there weren’t any strangers in the house. She was squatting like a Turkish houri on her queenly bed across from a Babylonic platter of things to eat: veal cutlets, a boiled chicken, a pork loin, and a garnishing of plantains and vegetables that would haveserved five people. Disproportionate eating was always the only way she could mournand I’d never seen her do it with such grief. I lay down by her side with my clothes on, barely speaking, and mourning too in my way. I was thinking about the ferocity of Santiago Nasar’s fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination. I dreamed that a woman was coming into theroom with a little girl in her arms, and that the child was chewing without stopping to take a breath and the half-chewed kernels of corn were falling into the woman’s brassiere. The woman said to me: “She crunches like a nutty nuthatch, kind of sloppy, kind of slurpy.” Suddenly I felt the anxious fingers that were undoing the buttons of my shirt, and I caught the dangerous smell of the beast oflove lying by my back, and I felt myself sinking into the delights of the quicksand of her tenderness. But suddenly she stopped, coughed from far off, and slipped out of my life.
    “I can’t,” she said. “You smell of him.”
    Not just I. Everything continued smelling of Santiago Nasar that day. The Vicario brothers could smell him in the jail cell where the mayor had locked them up until he couldthink of something to do with them. “No matter how much I scrubbed with soap and rags Icouldn’t get rid of the smell,” Pedro Vicario told me. They’d gone three nights without sleep, but they couldn’t rest because as soon as they began to fall asleep they would commit the crime all over again. Now, almost an old man, trying to explain to me his state on that endless day, Pablo Vicario told mewithout any effort: “It was like being awake twice over.” That phrase made me think that what must have been most unbearable for them in jail was their lucidity.
    The room was ten feet square, and had a very high skylight with iron bars, a