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

other hand, no one thought about reprisals from Plácida Linero’s family, who had been powerful and fighting people until their fortune ran out, and had bred more than two barroomkillers who had been preserved by the salt of their name.
    Colonel Aponte, worried by the rumors, visited the Arabs family by family and that time, at least, drew a correct conclusion. He found them perplexed and sad, with signs of mourning on their altars, and some of them sitting on the ground and wailing, but none harbored ideas of vengeance. The reaction that morning had grown out of the heatof the crime, and the very leaders admitted that in no case would it have gone beyond a beating. Furthermore, it was Susana Abdala, the centenary matriarch, who recommended the prodigious infusion of passion flowers and great absinthe that dried up Pablo Vicario’s cholerine and unleashed at the same time his brother’s florid flow. Pedro Vicario then fell into an insomniac drowsiness and his recoveredbrother earned his first sleep without remorse. That was how Purísima Vicario found them atthree o’clock in the morning on Tuesday when the mayor brought her to say good-bye to them.
    The whole family left, even the older sisters with their husbands, on Colonel Aponte’s initiative. They left without anyone’s noticing, sheltered by public exhaustion, while the only survivors of that irreparableday among us who were awake were burying Santiago Nasar. They were leaving until spirits cooled off, according to the mayor’s decision, but they never came back. Pura Vicario wrapped the face of the rejected daughter in a cloth so that no one would see the bruises, and she dressed her in bright red so nobody might think she was mourning her secret lover. Before leaving she asked Father Amador toconfess her sons in jail, but Pedro Vicario refused and convinced his brother that they had nothing to repent. They remained alone, and on the day of their transfer to Riohacha they had recovered so much and were so convinced that they were right that they didn’t want to be taken out by night, as had been done with the family, but in broad daylight and with their faces showing. Poncio Vicario, thefather, died a short time later. “His moral pain carried him off,” Angela Vicario told me. When the twins were absolved they remained in Riohacha, only a day’s trip from Manaure, where the family was living. Prudencia Cotes went there to marry Pablo Vicario, who learned to work with preciousmetals in his father’s shop and came to be an elegant goldsmith. Pedro Vicario, without love or a job,reenlisted in the armed forces three years later, earned his first sergeant’s stripes, and one fine morning his patrol went into guerrilla territory singing whorehouse songs and was never heard of again.
    For the immense majority of people there was only one victim: Bayardo San Román. They took it for granted that the other protagonists of the tragedy had been fulfilling with dignity, and evenwith a certain grandeur, their part of the fortune that life had assigned them. Santiago Nasar had expiated the insult, the brothers Vicario had proved their status as men, and the seduced sister was in possession of her honor once more. The only one who had lost everything was Bayardo San Román: “poor Bayardo,” as he was remembered over the years. Still, no one had thought of him until after theeclipse of the moon the following Saturday, when the widower Xius told the mayor that he’d seen a phosphorescent bird fluttering over his former home, and he thought it was the soul of his wife, who was going about demanding what was hers. The mayor slapped his brow, but it had nothing to do with the widower’s vision.
    “Shit!” he shouted. “I’d completely forgotten about that poor man!”
    He wentup the hill with a patrol and found thecar with its top down in front of the farmhouse, and he saw a solitary light in the bedroom, but no one answered his knocks. So they broke down a side