Chronicle of a Death Foretold

When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.

They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.

He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.

There had never been a death so foretold.

A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.

Tenía una manera de hablar que más bien le servía para ocultar que para decir.

Halfway through one August day, while she was embroidering with her friends, she heard someone coming to the door. She didn't have to look to see who it was. "He was fat and was beginning to lose his hair, and he already needed glasses to see things close by," she told me. "But it was him, God damn it, it was him!

She was certain that the Vicario brothers were not as eager to carry out the sentence as to find someone who would do them the favor of stopping them.

They’re perfect,” she was frequently heard to say. “Any man will be happy with them because they’ve been raised to suffer.

He was carrying a suitcase with clothing in order to stay and another just like it with almost two thousand letters that she had written him. They were arranged by date in bundles ties with colored ribbons, and they were all unopened.

The truth is that she spoke about her misfortune without any shame in order to cover up the other misfortune, the real one, that was burning in her insides.

Anda, niña- le dijo temblando de rabia-: dinos quién fue. Ella se demoró apenas el tiempo necesario para decir el nombre. Lo buscó en las tinieblas, lo encontró a primera vista entre los tantos y tantos nombres confundibles de este mundo y del otro, y lo dejó clavado en la pared con su dardo certero, como a una mariposa sin albedrío cuya sentencia estaba escrita para siempre. -Santiago Nasar- le dijo.

On the morning that they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat bishop was coming on.

The only thing that didn't occur to her was to give up. Nevertheless, he seemed insensible to her delirium; it was like writing to nobody.

Then they both kept on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other side of fear.

«Parecían dos niños», me dijo. Y esa reflexión la asustó, pues siempre había pensado que sólo los niños son capaces de todo.

...I caught the smell of a warm woman and I saw the eyes of an insomniac leopard in the darkness...

Cuando despierte - dijo- , recuérdame que me voy a casar con ella !