Chronicle of a Death Foretold
I. 1 On the day…
A. Precision of day and time
II. Twenty-seven years later
A. Time span after the events: Time of the chronicle
III.Plácida Linero… told me..
A. Narrator / Chronicler:
1. Chronicler: A writer or compiler of a chronicle, a recorder of events.
2. Chronicle: 1. a. A detailed and continuous register of events in order
of time; a historical record, esp. one in which the facts are narrated
without philosophic treatment, or any attempt at literary style.
IV. She had a well earned reputation…
A. Alternative ways of knowing: the interpretation of dreams
V. 2 6:05 till 7:05: An hour of History
VI. Many people coincided….But most agreed that…a thin drizzle like the one Santiago
Nasar had seen in his dream grove.
A. Problems of History
1. Partial views
2. Myth and legend
3. Literature…
VII. 3 What is known about historical figues: the subject of the chronicle
VIII. 4 So she would remember him forever
A. Problems of History
1. Memory
IX. 5 The chronicler’s mission: to put the broken mirror of memory back together from
so many scattered shards.
X. No sooner had I appeared…
A. Presence and Memory
XI. I saw him in her memory
A. Literature and Memory
XII. 7 church pomp and the movies: History and Fiction
XIII. Victoria Guzmán…: Did it rain or did it not rain.
XIV. 8-9 Divina Flor…: Destiny and repetition: Literature and History
XV.
Victoria Guzmán needed almost twenty years…
A. Alternative ways of knowing: a revelation
XVI. 10-11 Historical background
XVII. The investigating judge...
A. Law and the impulse of the rational
XVIII. 13 Easy truths of habit vs. the laws of reason and logic
XIX. But in the course of her years...
A. The problems of History: willful deception
XX.
Nevertheless Divina Flor confessed...
A. The problems of History: contradictory testimony
XXI. 14-15 Someone who was never identified...
A. The problems of History: mysterious turns
XXII. 16 He already looked like a ghost
A. The problems of History: retroactive evaluations
XXIII. The men who were going to kill him: They were hard-looking, but of a good
sort...
A. History upheld by Fiction
XXIV. 17 It was a breath of the Holy Spirit
A. Agents of History
XXV. Plácida Linero was right...
XXVI. 18 In those days...
A. The conventions of History
XXVII.
19 the bunch of figures needed to calculate...
A. Local History
XXVIII.
20 Life will be too short for people to tell about it.
A. The problems of History: time to tell
XXIX. 21 It was a strange insistence...
XXX. 22 I had my own very real reasons for believing...
A. The problems of History: self justification
XXXI. If I 'd known, I would have...
XXXII.
But it was even stranger that my mother didn't know either
A. Alternative ways of knowing: secret threads of communication
XXXIII.
23 But after the bishop passed without setting foot on land...
A. The problems of History: relative importance of events
XXXIV.
24 Margot learned about it in a thorough and brutal way..
A. But no matter how much they tossed the story back and forth, one could
explain to me how poor Santiago Nasar ended up being involved in such a
mix-up.
XXXV. 26 EXAMINE THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE ON THIS PAGE.
A. Who speaks?
B. Under what authority?
XXXVI.
SECTION TWO
XXXVII.
27 He looked like a fairy...
XXXVIII.
28 My mother wrote to me...
XXXIX.
It might have been true, but...
A. The problems of History: he had a way of speaking that served to conceal
rather than to reveal
XL. 29 ...my mother is accustomed to noting that kind of superfluous detail when she
wants to get to heart of the matter.
A. A problem of History?
XLI. 30 ...but you told me that things like that shouldn't be put into writing
A. A problem of History: decorum
XLII. 31 Three people who had been in the boardinghouse confirmed that it had
taken place, but four others weren't sure. On the other hand, all versions agreed
that...
XLIII. 36 It came to be said that he had wiped out villages and sown terror in
Casanare (...) he produced his entire family.
A. The problems of History: rumors
XLIV. But the main attraction was the father: General Petronio San Román (...) one of
the glories of the Conservative regime for having put Colonel Aureliano Buendía to
flight in the disaster of Tucurinca
A. Tucurinca: A town close to Aracataca where GGM was born: "Ya en mi niñez
no era fácil distinguir unos pueblos de los otros. Veinte años después era
todavía más difícil, porque en los pórticos de las estaciones se habían caído las
tablillas con los nombres: Tucurinca, Guamachito, Neerlandia, Guacamayal. Y
todos eran más desolados y polvorientos que en la memoria" (Already in my
childhood it was not already easy to distinguish some towns from the others.
Twenty years later it was still more difficult, because in the porches of the
stations the small boards with the names had fallen: Tucurinca, Guamachito,
Neerlandia, Guacamayal. And all of them were more desolated and dusty than
in memory.).
http://www.calle.com/info.cgi?lat=10.6500&long=-74.1667&name=Tucurinc
a&cty=Colombia&alt=141
B. Aureliano Buendía: http://www.fictional100.com/buendia.html
XLV. 37 ...the man who gave the orders for Gerineldo Márquez to be shot in the back
XLVI. 38 I would have said the same.
XLVII. 41 No one would have thought, nor did anyone say, that Angela Vicario wasn't
a virgin.
XLVIII.
46 In those days... God understood such things.
XLIX. But no one yet knew what cards Bayardo San Román was playing.
L. Nor was it known what cards Santiago Nasar was playing.
LI. I have had to repeat this many times, because the four of us had grown up
together in school... such a big secret.
LII. 48 I had a very confused memory of the festival before I decided to rescue it
piece by piece from the memory of others.
LIII. In the course of the investigations for this chronicle I recovered numerous
marginal experiences...
LIV. 49 Many knew that in the confusion of the bash I had proposed marriage to
Mercedes Barcha as soon as she finished primary school...
A. It was during this time (c. 1946) that García Márquez met his future wife.
While visiting his parents, he was introduced to a 13 year old girl named
Mercedes Barcha Pardo. Dark and silent, of Egyptian decent, she was "the most
interesting person" he had ever met. After he graduated from the Liceo
Nacional, he took a small vacation with his parents before leaving for the
University. During that time, he proposed to her. Agreeing, but first wishing to
finish primary school, she put off the engagement. Although they wouldn't be
married for another fourteen years, Mercedes promised to stay true to him.
B. http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_biography.html
LV. 51 He had the green color of dreams.
LVI. 52 Only Pura Vicario knew what she did during the next two hours...
LVII. SECTION THREE
LVIII. 55 ...but the priest recalled the surrender as an act of great dignity.
LIX. 56 Furthermore with the reconstruction of the facts, they had feigned a much
more unforgiving bloodthirstiness than really was true...
LX. Still, in reality it seemed that the Vicario brothers had done nothing right with a
view to killing Santiago Nasar...
LXI. That fact, like many others, was not reported in the brief.
LXII. 57 ...such an unforeseen reason that the investigator who drew up the brief
never did understand it.
LXIII. There had never been a death more foretold.
LXIV. 64 I can remember with certainty that it was almost five o'clock and it was
beginning to rain.
LXV. 67 ...perhaps because he had trouble describing them...
LXVI. 69 Neither of the two mentioned that disagreement in their separate
statements...
LXVII. 70 It wasn't raining... Just the opposite...
LXVIII.
71 Hortensia Baute ....was the first to weep for Santiago Nasar.
LXIX. 76 MISTAKE IN TRANSLATION: ...the bad taste left by that memory changed
her life.
LXX. 77 Until then it hadn't rained...
LXXI. 79 My brother doesn't remember it.
LXXII.
SECTION FOUR
LXXIII.
86 But despite the havoc wrought on the body, Father Amador's report
seemed in order...
LXXIV.
The report says....
LXXV. 96 For the immense majority of people there was only one victim: Bayardo San
Román...
A. Actors in the tragedy...
LXXVI.
99 ...he left a trail on the ground... the memory of a victim.
LXXVII.
101 There is a declaration of him...
LXXVIII.
Of Angela Vicario, on the other hand, I was always receiving periodic
news...
LXXIX.
102 I could not bring myself to admit that life might end up resembling
bad literature so much.
LXXX. 103 On the contrary, she would recount it in all its details ... except for one item
that would never be cleared up...
LXXXI.
104 The current version, perhaps the most perverse...
LXXXII.
Don't beat it to death, cousin ... He was the one.
LXXXIII.
106 The truth is that she spoke of her misfortune without any shame in
order to cover up the other misfortune...
LXXXIV.
108 Six months later she had written six letters with no reply...
LXXXV.
109 At first they were a fiancée's notes...
LXXXVI.
110 From then on she was no longer conscious of what she wrote nor to
whom she was really writing...
LXXXVII.
111 He was carrying a suitcase...
LXXXVIII. SECTION FIVE
LXXXIX.
113 For years, we couldn't talk about anything else...
A. Our daily conduct...
B. ...trying to give order to the chain of many chance events...
C. none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge...
D. Many never got to know...
XC.
114 Hortensia Baute...
A. Flora Miguel
B. Aura Villeros
C. Don Rogelio de la Flor
XCI. 115 But I never discovered the name...
XCII. 116 ...322 pages filched from the more than 500 that brief must have
contained...
A. ...it was obvious that he was a man burning with the fever of literature...
B. Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so
many coincidences forbidden to literature...
XCIII. 118 My personal impression is that he died without understanding his death.
XCIV. 125 Of course it wasn't raining...
XCV. 131 The version that went around was... The truth is that...
XCVI. 135 I don't understand a God-damned thing...
XCVII.
143 They've killed me, Wene child...