"He never left it loaded," his mother told me. I knew that, and I also knew that he kept the guns in one place and hid the ammunition in another far removed so that nobody, not even casually, would yeild to the temptation of loading them inside the house. It was a wise custom established by his father ever since once morning when a servant girl had shaken the case to get the pillow out and the pistol went off as it hit the floor and the bullet wrecked the cupboard in the room, went through the living room wall, passed through the dining room of the house next door with the thunder of war, and turned a life-size saint on the main altar of the church on the opposite side of the square to plaster dust. Santiago Nasar, who was a young child at that time, never forgot the lesson of that accident.
The book starts with, "On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on."
"Chronicle of a Death Foretold", is the story of Santiago Nasar's murder.
Put together by the narrator twenty seven years after Santiago Nasar is killed, the narration goes back and forth in the past and the present. Ironically, almost everybody in the town knew that Santiago Nasar was going to be killed but they can't stop the murder from happening. Towards the end, he just needed a few seconds before he could get to a safe place, but the incident was to happen, and even Santiago Nasar gets to know that he is going to die. "They've killed me, Wene child," are his last words before falling on his face.
Read on ... [emphasis added by me].
On the day they were going to kill him, his mother thought he'd got his days mixed up when she saw him dressed in white. "I reminded him that it was Monday," she told me. But he explained to her that he'd got dressed up pontifical style in case he had a chance to kiss the bishop's ring. She showed no sign of interest. "He won't even get off the boat," she told him. "He'll give an obligatory blessing, as always, and go back the way he came. He hates this town."
Santiago Nasar knew it was true, but church pomp had an irresistible fascination for him. "Its like the movies," he told me once. The only thing that interested his mother about the bishop's arrival, on the other hand, was for her son not to get soaked in the rain, since she'd heard him sneeze while he was sleeping. She advised him to take along an umbrella, but he waved good-bye and left the room. It was the last time she saw him.
She insisted that they go together right away because breakfast was already made. "It was a strange insistence," Cristo Bedoya told me. "So much so that sometimes I've thought that Margot already knew that they were going to kill him and wanted to hide him in your house." Santiago Nasar convinced her to go on ahead while he put on his riding clothes, because he had to be at The Divine Face early in order to geld some calves. He took leave of her with the same wave which he'd said good-bye to his mother and went off toward the square on the arm of Cristo Bedoya. It was the last time she saw him.
Santiago Nasar didn't reply, but said something in Arabic to Yamil Shaium, and the latter answered him, also in Arabic, twisting with laughter. "It was a play on words we always had fun with," Yamil Shaium told me. Without stopping, Santiago Nasar waved good-bye to both of them and turned the corner of the square. It was the last time they saw him.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works belong to a literary prose form called magical realism. In this style of writing, there are a lot of un-realistic happenings in the narration. However, the characters assume that these are quite real and accept them as normal with respect to their daily happenings. Chronicle of a Death Foretold has less of this style when compared to his other short stories like the Eyes of a Bull Dog etc.
