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

portable latrine, a washstand with its pitcher and basin, and two makeshift beds with straw mats. Colonel Aponte, under whose orders it had been built, saidthat there was no hotel that was more humane. My brother Luis Enrique agreed, because one night they’d locked him up after a fight among musicians, and the mayor allowed him the charity of having one of the mulatto girls stay with him. Perhaps the Vicario brothers could have thought the same thing at eight o’clock in the morning, when they felt themselves safe from the Arabs. At that moment theywere comforted by the honor of having done their duty, and the only thing that worried them was the persistence of the smell. They asked for lots of water, laundry soap, and rags, and they washed the blood from their arms and faces, and they also washed their shirts, but they couldn’t get any rest. Pedro Vicarioalso asked for his laxatives and diuretics and a roll of sterile gauze so he couldchange his bandage, and he succeeded in having two micturitions during the morning. Nevertheless, life was becoming so difficult for him as the day advanced that the smell took second place. At two in the afternoon, when the heaviness of the heat should have melted them, Pedro Vicario couldn’t stay there lying on the bed, but the same weariness prevented him from standing. The pain in his groin hadreached his throat, his urine was shut off, and he suffered the frightful certainty that he wouldn’t sleep ever again for the rest of his life. “I was awake for eleven months,” he told me, and I knew him well enough to know that it was true. He couldn’t eat any lunch. Pablo Vicario, for his part, ate a little bit of everything they brought him, and fifteen minutes later unloosed a pestilentialcholerine. At six in the afternoon, while they were performing the autopsy on Santiago Nasar’s corpse, the mayor was summoned urgently because Pedro Vicario was convinced that his brother had been poisoned. “He was turning into water right in front of me,” Pedro Vicario told me, “and we couldn’t get rid of the idea that it was some trick of the Turks.” Up till then he’d overflowed the portable latrinetwice and the guard on watch had taken him to the town hall washroom another six times. There Colonel Aponte found him, in the doorless toilet boxedin by the guard, and pouring out water so fluently that it wasn’t too absurd to think about poison. But they put the idea aside immediately when it was established that he had only drunk the water and eaten the food sent by Pura Vicario. Nonetheless,the mayor was so impressed that he had the prisoners taken to his house under a special guard until the investigating judge came and transferred them to the panoptic prison in Riohacha.
    The twins’ fear was in response to the mood in the streets. Revenge by the Arabs wasn’t dismissed, but no one, except the Vicario brothers, had thought of poison. It was supposed, rather, that they would waitfor nightfall in order to pour gasoline through the skylight and burn up the prisoners in their cell. But even that was too easy a supposition. The Arabs comprised a community of peaceful immigrants who had settled at the beginning of the century in Caribbean towns, even in the poorest and most remote, and there they remained, selling colored cloth and bazaar trinkets. They were clannish, hard-working,and Catholic. They married among themselves, imported their wheat, raised lambs in their yards, and grew oregano and eggplants, and playing cards was their only driving passion. The older ones continued speaking the rustic Arabic they had brought from their homeland, and they maintained it intact in the family down to thesecond generation, but those of the third, with the exception of SantiagoNasar, listened to their parents in Arabic and answered them in Spanish. So it was inconceivable that they would suddenly change their pastoral spirit to avenge a death for which we all could have been to blame. On the