At the Core of Chronicle of a Death Foretold

On page 52, as the Vicario brothers are talking too loudly at the grindstone about killing Santiago Nasar, the narrator writes: "I was to ask the butchers sometime later whether or not the trade of slaughterer didn't reveal a soul predisposed to killing a human being. They protested: "When you sacrifice a steer you don't dare look into its eyes." One of them told me that he couldn't eat the flesh of an animal he had butchered. Another said that he wouldn't be capable of sacrificing a cow if he'd known it before, much less if he'd drunk its mile. I reminded them that the Vicario brothers sacrificed the same hogs they raised, which were so familiar to them that they called them by their names. 'That's true,' one of them replied, 'but remember that they didn't give them people's names but the names of flowers.'"

What's most interersting to me in this passage is the repetition of the word sacrifice. For whatever reason, this passage hyperlinked in my mind to Abraham and Isaac before it went to any sacrificial lamb abstraction. There is a solemnity to the sacrificial duty that contrasts with the "trade of slaughterer." Are these tradesmen "sacrificing" cows or hogs? The question is rhetorical. This is commerce, not religion. Yet, the sacrificial duty falls upon the Vicario brothers, and they resist it; Clotilde Armento refers to the "horrible duty" five pages later.

The repetition of sacrifice, its juxtaposition with slaughterers, and the narrator's explicit inquiry into the general human condition, adds another facet to the problem, the "necessary question," of the text. Must the Vicario brothers act to stave off plague, if a bit of Greek tragedy can be introduced here? Is the greater good served by the murder of Santiago Nasar? Does it matter whether Santiago Nasar is guilty of the crime, as long as he has been named by the oracle as the one who must pay for it? In other words, is Santiago Nasar the sacrificial lamb, his guilt irrelevant to the problem at hand? On page 50, the narrator quotes the Vicario brothers as speaking "after they had been absolved." I must find out whether or not Rabassa has translated the word so that it has this specifically religious implication, or if forgiven, exonerated or another more secular word could have been placed there.

In Borges' fiction, Inferno I, 32, he writes of a leopard in a cage: "God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem."

Are the Vicario brothers, the culpable townspeople and Santiago Nasar all precisely located in their "exact place in the weft of the universe?" Is that where we find people who find themselves bound to a task they don't choose or understand?

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Chronicle, right…let’s get after it.

First, thoughts for which I don’t need text references.
The narrator. I like and don’t like not knowing his motivation. That probably means that I’m intrigued. He falls outside my most recent paradigm for admirable narrators, as he doesn’t try to give energy to the storytelling. In fact, as objective as he is, he probably takes energy out of the story. I found myself wanting him to contextualize the testimony of other characters, to correct their errors. I mean, was it raining or not raining? Characters disagree on the weather, but he doesn’t tell us that anyone is wrong.

But let’s get at motivation. On the one hand, he was tight with Santiago Nasar. It makes sense, then, that he would try to get at the truth, try to justify for himself whether or not he was justly killed. On the other hand, he refers to his project as a chronicle, way of arranging the facts in their accurate order. He doesn’t refer to his task as investigation or inquiry, and do he doesn’t aim at a conclusion or a verdict. At the end, he implicates himself through his use of the first-person plural, but I’m not sure that his chronicle is a search for absolution.

Let’s get at the whole sexual jealousy thing. To me, the most striking irony in the text is Pedro Vicario’s gonorrhea. To piss painfully, or not at all, and to have the painful pissing delay by half an hour the murder you’re going to commit because someone had sex with your sister – well, that’s an irony I can enjoy. The acid-scarred faces of Afghani women, the stoned to death rape victims (do I mean adulterers, fornicators?) of Pakistan and Jordan: these women are a buzzkill to my delight in irony.

And yet, the narrator treats Senora Cervantes as a goddess, as do all the boys who learn from her the arts of love. He makes two references to having sex with her in language that is refined and poetic, just as, perhaps, the experience was. I highlighted them, but I can’t remember them now.

Anyway, in what kind of insular world must I live to have my sense of self wrapped up in a woman’s virginity? I understand the discomfort that comes from awareness that the one you’re with had a sex life prior to her awareness of your existence. Somewhere there is likely rooted an insecurity among men that you’ll be compared to a previous lover, or that your partner did something with someone else that you don’t want to picture her doing – maybe something you did with someone you didn’t quite respect as much. Worst case scenario: what if she enjoyed doing something she doesn’t do with you? And if you’re prone to judgment, then wishing won’t make her “prior bad acts” inadmissible in the courtroom of your psyche. And so you’ll want to control her, to make sure not only that she doesn’t do what you don’t want her to do, but also that she doesn’t even think about it.

Are the most masculine men the most insecure? If they are, is it because they have the farthest to fall? Just look at Bayardo San Roman – not the fat, greasy guy at the end, but the Renaissance man who arrives mysteriously in this backwater town while the narrator is off at college. Look at Othello and his search for strawberries. If that bitch was unfaithful to me before she even knew I existed, well, I’ll kill her, dammit.

The worse irony of the situation is the harshness with which women police other women. Yes, they have their secrets, their ways of getting around the laws dictated by the insecurities of men, but they judge as harshly as any vulnerable swordsman.