Chronicle of a Death Foretold Lies and Deceit Quotes

Victoria Guzman, for her part, had been categorical with her answer that neither she nor her daughter knew that the men were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him. But in the course of her years she admitted that both knew it when he came into the kitchen to have his coffee. They had been told it by a woman who had passed by after five o'clock to beg a bit of milk, and who in addition had revealed the motives and the place where they were waiting. "I didn't warn him because I thought it was drunkards' talk," she told me. Nevertheless, Divina Flor confessed to me on a later visit, after her mother had died, that the latter hadn't said anything to Santiago Nasar because in the depths of her heart she wanted them to kill him. (1.20)

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." (1.35)

The night he arrived he gave them to understand at the movies that he was a track engineer, and spoke of the urgency for building a railroad into the interior so that we could keep ahead of the river's fickle ways. (2.3)

The two oldest daughters had married very late. In addition to the twins, there was a middle daughter who had died of nighttime fevers, and two years later they were still observing a mourning that was relaxed inside the house but rigorous on the street. (2.15)

No one would have thought, nor did anyone say, that Angela Vicario wasn't a virgin. She hadn't known any previous fiancé and she'd grown up along with her sisters under the rigor of a mother of iron. (2.38)

Furthermore, with the reconstruction of the facts, they had feigned a much more unforgiving bloodthirstiness than really was true, to such an extreme that it was necessary to use public funds to repair the main door of Placida Linero's house, which was all chipped with knife thrusts. (3.5)

According to what they told me years later, they had begun by looking for him at Maria Alejandrina Cervantes's place, where they had been with him until two o'clock. That fact, like many others, was not reported in the brief. Actually, Santiago Nasar was no longer there at the time the twins said they went looking for him, because we'd left on a round of serenades, but in any case, it wasn't certain that they'd gone. "They never would have left here," Maria Alejandrina Cervantes told me, and knowing her so well, I never doubted it. (3.6)

Before stepping onto land, they took off their shoes and went barefoot through the streets up to the hilltop in the burning dust of noon, pulling out strands of hair by the roots and wailing loudly with such high-pitched shrieks that they seemed to be shouts of joy. I watched them pass from Magdalena Oliver's balcony, and I remember thinking that distress like theirs could only be put on in order to hide other, greater shames. (4.19)

What we discovered inside seemed to be a woman's natural items for hygiene and beauty, and I only learned their real use when Angela Vicario told me many years later which things were the old wives' artifices she had been instructed in so as to deceive her husband. (4.23)

"I didn't do any of what they told me," she said, "because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was all something dirty that shouldn't be done to anybody, much less to the poor man who had the bad luck to marry me." So she let herself get undressed openly in the lighted bedroom, safe now from all the acquired fears that had ruined her life. "It was very easy," she told me, "because I'd made up my mind to die." (4.28)