Whodunnit? A Textual
Investigation of the Deflowering of Angela Vicario in
Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
Paul Lehmann
Why all the
mystery?
Marquez does not reveal the identity of the person who
is responsible for Angela’s loss of virginity.
However, he does not leave us without evidence. A careful reading of the text can lead us to reasonable conclusions
about who did it and why.
Why doesn’t Marquez just tell us who is
responsible? This is not a conventional
mystery novel: there is no clear revelation at the end to satisfy our
curiosity. Marquez demands a higher
degree of thought from his readers than that.
He causes us to question the reliability of the narrative through the
contradictions evident in the various reports.
As a result, we begin to piece together the subtext through hints,
allusions and logical deduction. We are
being compelled to constantly question the agendas of the various narrative
voices present. Why are they lying? What are they trying to conceal? How are they trying to represent
themselves? What is revealed by their
deception? This leads us to question the
text itself. Why does Marquez create so many
misleading elements? Why all the
contradictions? What is hidden by the
surface text?
Marquez is explicit in telling us, through the
narrator that part of the evidence is missing as he rescues some 322 pages….from the more than 500 that
the brief must have contained. (p259).
The magistrate, whose job, like the reader’s, it is to decode the
chronicle, is a man burning with the
fever of literature…with marginal
notes…(which)
seemed to be written in blood. He is so
perplexed by the enigma of the chronicle that he keeps falling into lyrical distractions that ran contrary to the rigor of his
profession. (p259) This last element clearly assists us to see
the need to be rigorous in our reading of the text and to avoid the distraction
of the lyrical.
The character who knows the secret is clearly Angela,
so it is to her that we look for evidence in the text. Early in the text, we
are encouraged to join with the Vicario brothers and
to go in search of their sister’s lost
honor. (p230) Later in the text, she would recount (her story) in all its details to anyone who wanted to
hear it, except for one item that would never be cleared up: who was the real
cause of her damage. (p251) Angela
is clearly a fictional embodiment of the text itself. The text also recounts its story in all its
details to anyone who wants to hear it except
for the one item. Left here, there
seems to be no hope of deciphering the conundrum. But the text does not leave us without
hope. Because we know that Angela wrote (Bayardo) a feverish letter…in which…she let out the
bitter truths that she had carried rotting in her heart ever since that ill-fated
night (p255).
The description of these letters (p254) describes them
in terms strongly suggesting encoded messages: notes, secret, little messages, furtive, invented, complicity. There is direct allusion to a fraudulent proof of my love and imagined sexual
intercourse. (p255) But when Bayardo returns to Angela, he is carrying the letters unopened: but he is carrying the secret
in his hands. This is a direct, and
consciously fictional, allusion to the secret of the text which the reader
carries in their hands: written in letters, directed to the reader, needing to
be opened, centred in
Angela, the truth delivered in notes, communicated furtively, invented, and imagined. The narrator decalres that for
this chronicle I had to be satisfied with a few disconnected notes.
(p251)
So let us try to open these letters.
Eliminating the
main suspect:
The one character who could not have taken Angela’s
virginity is Santiago Nasar. Apart from the fact that the text tells us
that she looked like a nun (p206),
and that even her sisters’ husbands found it difficult…to break the circle because they went together everywhere (p207),
the text also tells us that Santiago was only known to have a conventional relationship with his fiancee, Flora Miguel, and a sexual one with the prostitute
Maria Alejandrina
Cervantes. (p251) His predatory sexual attitude towards Divina Flor is opportunistic as
she is in his home. He calls Angela the booby (p251). The narrator is explicit: no one believed that it had really been
So why accuse him?
When her brother demands the name of her lover, she looked for it in the shadows, she found it
at first sight among the many, many easily confused names from this world and
the other… (p219) There is no suggestion
here of giving up a lover: rather of picking a name at random from among
many.
If not
So if there were no men available, how did it happen that
she was not a virgin on her wedding night?
Evidence:
1.
She was predisposed to find hidden
intentions in the designs of men. (p207)
i.e. She was preoccupied with sexual thoughts
in relation to men. Marquez is also signalling the hidden
intention in this design of men –
i.e. the novel.
2.
She didn’t want to marry (Bayardo). (p209)
3.
She did not love Bayardo. (p209)
4.
She chooses the least obtainable house in town for a home, hoping to
place an obstacle in the path of the marriage. (pp209-210)
5.
She considered suicide to avoid the marriage. (p212)
6.
Discussions with her two confidantes convinces her that the stain of honor on the wedding sheets is all that matters to a
husband. (p212)
7.
She decides to deceive Bayardo (p212) although
not in the way that the text seems to suggest.
8.
She has the capacity to fake virginity but refuses to do it. (p249, 252)
9.
She later tells the narrator the
truth about her misfortune (the wedding night)…in order to cover up the other misfortune, the real one, that was
burning in her insides. (p252)
10.
She later becomes totally obsessed with explicit sexual fantasies regarding
Bayardo. (p255)
We are encouraged to try to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made
absurdity possible. (p257) What is the absurdity which is possible? What could be more absurd than for a young
woman to fake, not virginity, but loss of virginity in a society where
virginity in a woman was highly valued?
Who, instead of pretending that her hymen is intact by douching with the
astringent alum, and faking the blood of virginity with mercurochrome, to
deceive her husband, fakes the prior loss of virginity to deceive him.
Consider the evidence above with this in mind: she knows that if she is not able to display
evidence of her virginity, she will be rejected by the husband she does not
want. It is a clear way out of the marriage.
Further support is given by her graphically sexual dreams
and fantasies 20 years later. Here is a
woman, branded as immoral, who has not had the pleasure of a sexual
relationship apart from one violent sexual encounter on her wedding night. (p218)
Marquez writes that she became the mistress of her own free will, and she became a virgin again just
for him. (p254) Consider the double entendre here: mistress of her own free will. Angela did not lose her virginity as a result
of being a man’s mistress, but
because she became mistress of her own
free will. A mistress, is a woman who is in
charge of a situation, or one who has a sexual relationship with a woman who is
not her husband. Angela is a mistress
also: she puts herself in charge of a situation (her marriage) in which she is
apparently powerless, but also has a sexual relationship with her own will by
tearing her own hymen so that there will be no blood of virginity on her
wedding night.
Finally, she
became a virgin again just for him, strongly indicates that she was a
virgin the first time and that she has been a virgin just for him (Bayardo).
Re-reading the text with this perspective in mind causes the
rest of it to make sense.