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startled when they heard it that it was left established in the brief in separatedeclarations. According to them, my brother said: “Santiago Nasar is dead.” Then he delivered an episcopal blessing, stumbled over the threshold, and staggered out. In the middle of the square he crossed paths with Father Amador. He was going to the dock in his vestments, followed by an acolyte who was ringing the bell and several helpers carrying the altar for the bishop’s field mass. TheVicario brothers crossed themselves when they saw them pass.
    Clotilde Armenta told me that they’d lost their last hopes when the priest passed by her place. “I thought he hadn’t got my message,” she said. Nonetheless, Father Amador confessed to me many years later, retired from the world in the gloomy Calafell Rest Home, that he had in fact received Clotilde Armenta’s message and others moreperemptory while he was getting ready to go the docks. “The truth is I didn’t know what to do,” he told me. “My first thought was that it wasn’t any business of mine but something for the civil authorities, but then I made up my mind to say something in passing to Plácida Linero.” Yet when hecrossed the square, he’d forgotten completely. “You have to understand,” he told me, “that the bishopwas coming on that unfortunate day.” At the moment of the crime he felt such despair and was so disgusted with himself that the only thing he could think of was to ring the fire alarm.
    My brother Luis Enrique went into the house through the kitchen door, which my mother left unlocked so my father wouldn’t hear us come in. He went to the bathroom before going to bed, but he fell asleep sittingon the toilet, and when my brother Jaime got up to go to school he found him stretched out face down on the tile floor and singing in his sleep. My sister the nun, who wasn’t going to wait for the bishop because she had an eighty-proof hangover, couldn’t get him to wake up. “It was striking five when I went to the bathroom,” she told me. Later, when my sister Margot went in to bathe before goingto the docks, she managed with great effort to drag him to his bedroom. From the other side of sleep he heard the first bellows of the bishop’s boat without awakening. Then he fell into a deep sleep, worn out by carousing, until my sister the nun went into the bedroom, trying to put her habit on as she ran, and she woke him up with her mad cry:
    “They’ve killed Santiago Nasar!”

T HE DAMAGE from the knives was only a beginning for the inclement autopsy that Father Carmen Amador found himself obliged to do in Dr. Dionisio Iguarán’s absence. “It was as if we killed him all over again after he was dead,” the aged priest told me in his retirement at Calafell. “But it was an order from the mayor, and orders from that barbarian, stupid as they might have been, had to beobeyed.” It wasn’t entirely proper. In the confusion of that absurd Monday, Colonel Aponte had had an urgent telegraphicconversation with the governor of the province, and the latter authorized him to take the preliminary steps while he sent an investigating magistrate. The mayor was a former troop commander with no experience in matters of law, and he was too conceited to ask anyone who knewwhere he should begin. The first thing that bothered him was the autopsy. Cristo Bedoya, who was a medical student, managed to get out of it because of his intimate friendship with Santiago Nasar. The mayor thought that the body could be kept under refrigeration until Dr. Dionisio Iguarán came back, but he couldn’t find a human-sized freezer, and the only one that would serve the purpose in the marketwas out of order. The body had been exposed to public view in the center of the living room, lying on a narrow iron cot while they were building a rich man’s coffin for it. They’d brought in fans from the bedrooms and some neighboring houses, but there were so many people anxious to see it