Santiago Nasar, the richest man in the town, son of an immigrant Arab father, was killed that morning by Pablo and Pedro Vicario.

That’s what we are told at the beginning of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. There’s no suspense to it, there’s no anticipation, no will-it-happen won’t-it-happen. He dies. Murdered by the brothers of the newly married Angela Vicario.

This did not come as a surprise. It was right there in the title. We were going to read about a death that had most definitely happened and from the looks of it, we were just going to be told how the daylight murder came about in the small, nondescript town in Latin America.

There isn’t much left to the imagination as the unnamed narrator tells his tale. Bayardo San Roman, a newcomer to the town had married Angela Vicario the night before. Considering the long-standing reputation of the Vicario family, the wedding had indeed been a grand affair. The entire town was part of the wedding celebrations that had gone deep into the night. The mood was still jubilant the following morning, when Bayardo San Roman was seen dragging his new bride back to her parents’ home. Very soon her twin brothers, Pablo and Pedro were out, still drunk from the wedding revelry, their pig-slaughtering knives by their sides, baying for Santiago Nasar’s blood.

The narrator prods at the story - decades after the crime was committed — and tries to get first hand reports as to how events came about, right till the point Santiago Nasar was found dead, slaughtered like a pig by the Vicario brothers.

In a tightly-knit town like that, nothing could be kept secret for too long — and neither was the well-known attempt to murder Nasar, or the reason for the Roman-Vicario marriage failing a night after the wedding. The newly-wed husband had learnt on the night of the wedding of his newly-wed wife’s dalliance with another man before their nuptials. A crime by itself in Latin American culture, he would have nothing of it. Bayardo San Roman felt cheated, he thought of himself as an object of ridicule. A man out of place, he was now also a man out of time. So he took the only recourse available to him - he dragged his wife back to her house and left her there.

The Vicario family was in shambles. Their daughter had brought shame to the house, a most fatal, funereal kind of shame. Angela’s distraught mother beats her grown, married daughter — the only way she could think of to dissipate her pent up anger, humiliation, frustration — just to find the answer to one question. Who was this man that her daughter had secretly been with before her marriage? A crying, cornered, hurt, Angela merely offers up a name to save herself — Santiago Nasar.

And the die is cast. Her brothers set off to do the only thing they can think of within the parameters of their Latin American culture. They intend to murder Santiago Nasar and avenge their sister’s honor. Or at least what’s left of it.

What Marquez masterfully sets out in pursuit of from that point onwards is to unravel the way how Latin American society works. The Vicario brothers were pretty vocal about their end objective — the death of Santiago Nasar at their hands. They weren’t shy or reticent about their plans. Matter of fact, they were willing to tell the same to anyone patient enough to lend them an ear. Still under the influence of drink and revelry, the brothers went about their business through the heart of the town, carrying their knives, sharpening them, proudly announcing that a man was going to die at their hands this morning.

But what the narrator understands through his interviews with the various people who saw the Vicario brothers that morning was that no one actually took those threats seriously. After all, the Vicario family has been long-settlers in the village. They had made their name and fortune in the city, they fitted the bill of “good-people”. And while these good-people might scream and rant through their misfortunes, they wouldn’t actually follow up on their threats. And so they were ignored.

And even when Faustino Santos, a butcher friend of the brothers, feels that there might be some truth to the brothers’ announced intentions, and rushes to inform the constabulary, Officer Leandro and Colonel Aponte take their own sweet time to rush into action. They merely find the twins, take their knives away and shoo them off dismissively. There was obviously no cause for concern since good-people don’t murder. Even when Clotilde Armenta, proprietor of the milk shop shares her concerns with the Colonel, believing the boys to come back with a fresh set of knives and carry out the murder, her choice of words is important - “It’s to spare those poor boys from the horrible duty that’s fallen on them.”

The narrator records the words as they come. Even when a concerned citizen like Armenta tries to intervene and stop them from murdering another man, she does it to protect the Vicario brothers from their “horrible duty”.

The conversations keep flowing in through the entire book, as the narrator keeps talking to various people — including Nasar’s own mother, who inadvertently was ultimately responsible for the death of her son. And each record, while describing the reality of that morning, lapses into magical descriptions of what had happened, of foreboding dreams that spelt the reality that was to come. We, the reader, know exactly what happened — and yet, the vivid imagery used, the powerful descriptions of a near fantastic town and her people, the unbelievable events that follow one another, everything that happens is as real as it can be, while being unbelievably magical at the same time. The narrative is real, it happened — but it is strange to believe, strange to believe that no one in that small town could actually prevent the death of Santiago Nasar.

What is even more concerning is that not once does the narrator check for the veracity of Angela Vicario’s admission that Santiago Nasar was her past lover. All he does is speak to people about what they saw happened, he never asks them if Nasar truly deserved the fate he was destined to live through. Angela Vicario takes Nasar’s name in a state of duress. And that automatically seals his fate that fateful morning. Couple this with the narrator returning to the town to carry out his investigation a decade later, and his nameless nature throughout his entire reportage, there begins a niggling doubt at the back of the reader’s head that maybe Nasar was innocent of his accusation, that perhaps Angela Vicario’s secret lover was none other than the man narrating the entire fiasco to us!

It is the sheer mastery of Marquez’s narrative style that keeps up guessing and double-guessing ourselves as we turn each page frantically for answers. At this point we too are witnesses, having learnt about everything that happened before the murder in such arduous detail. And yet we never really get any definite solution to our quandary since the narrator — if he indeed were the secret lover, a big if — wasn’t going to play into our hands after such a long time. All he does is hold up a mirror to us of a reality besieged by human ignorance, indifference and a society split wide open with cultural issues that tend to outweigh the moral truth. Real, yet fantastic.

Instead, all that we know is that Santiago Nasar had to die since Angela Vicario signed his death sentence as per social custom. Santiago Nasar died that morning on his way to welcome the Bishop who was passing through the town. He died quite like the very man the Bishop and the entire town prayed to every passing moment, like Jesus Christ, taking perhaps the sins of others on to himself.

And what of Bayardo San Roman and Angela Vicario? What fate does society will for the ill-fated couple? Naturally, neither of them can stay on in the town anymore. Shame-faced, the Vicarios move out, as does Bayardo San Roman. And in true magical lore, only when they are separated does Angela Vicario fall in love with her estranged husband. Maybe she was always in love with him as she chose to walk to the alter with him. Her presence of a past lover has no bearing on her falling for Roman at present. But magically, no one concerns themselves with that — not even the star-crossed lovers. So Angela starts writing letters to Bayardo San Roman expressing her love for him, one for each week for 17 years. Right till the time Bayardo San Roman comes back to her, to be reunited with his wife. He carried with him each and every letter Angela had ever written to him over the period of their separation.

They were all unopened.