How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
She had a well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people's dreams, provided they were told her before eating, but she hadn't noticed any ominous augury in those two dreams of her son's, or in the other dreams of trees he'd described to her on the mornings preceding his death. (1.1)
This is the very first incident of a failed supernatural vision that we have in the novel, but it's definitely not the last. Pay attention to all of the moments of the supernatural that you come across as you read. Doesn't it seem like almost all of them are wrong?
Quote #2
My mother gave him the final blessing in a letter in October: "People like him a lot," she told me, "because he's honest and has a good heart, and last Sunday he received communion on his knees and helped with the mass in Latin." (2.4)
This is the narrator's mother speaking. She is known for almost being able to predict the future, and it's later revealed that she actually had a vision of Bayardo as the devil. So why do you think she writes down this impression? Is this just another example of the failure of magic?
Quote #3
It came to be said that he had wiped out villages and sown terror in Casanare as troop commander, that he had escaped from Devil's Island, that he'd been seen in Pernambuco trying to make a living with a pair of trained bears, and that he'd salvaged the remains of a Spanish galleon loaded with gold in the Windward Passage. Bayardo San Roman put an end to all those conjectures by a simple recourse: he produced his entire family. (2.17)
Since Bayardo is a stranger with no family, it's easy to assign all kinds of supernatural and outlandish ideas to him. The narrator says that he puts an end to all of these conjectures by bringing in his family, but is that true? If we remember it correctly, they acted pretty darn strangely as well.