MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: It’s something that had occurred in Sucre when his father was a pharmacist. That killing happened and those boys, the twins, were studying in Cartagena at the School of Medicine.
PATRICIA CASTAÑO: We went to Sucre with Gerald Martin. We looked over the whole story. We went to the place where the Italian they killed is buried. The one from the Crónica. We saw the gravestone, one of those gravestones that has a photo of the deceased. And everybody tells you a version. “They came in through this door and went out through this one,” and yadayadayada.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: Gabito wasn’t in Sucre when they killed Cayetano [Gentile]. He was studying in Barranquilla. His father and mother were there. So I told Gabito what I knew. What I had witnessed. He came here to my house and I told him about it right here on this terrace. Look, that happened on Monday, February 21 or 22 of 1951, in Sucre, a town on the water. Cayetano and I had been together the previous Saturday, when the wedding of Miguel Reyes Palencia, a Sucreño who lived in San Marcos, and Margarita Chica, took place. That’s Ángela Vicario in the novel. We went to the port with Cayetano to watch the departure of the newlyweds. I haven’t forgotten that I almost became a criminal because I took my father’s gun to pursue the Chicas. The Chicas took refuge in a house across from the Palencia family’s house as you pass the church. When I saw Víctor, who was brandishing a knife, claiming grief as his reason for stabbing Cayetano, I ran out with a gun in my hand. When he saw where I was going, he went inside and locked the door.
JAIME GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I was ten years old when they killed Cayetano Gentile. When I heard about it, I ran out to see, and there in the living room I saw him, lying on a cot, very pale, of course, because he had already lost a great deal of blood; there was mud on his shirt along with blood, and at that moment the doctor was removing the stethoscope and declaring him dead. Sometime later, when Gabito was working on his Chronicle of a Death Foretold, he confronted a doubt: whether or not it had rained in January, when they killed Cayetano. He’s always had the idea that tragic events have to do with the weather. Somebody said that in Sucre it never rains in January. Then I said to him: “Well, it did rain, because I remember Cayetano’s shirt splattered with mud.” Doubts remained. After the novel came out, talking about this with my sister Margot, she remembered another interesting fact, which was that shortly before the death of Gentile, my brother Luis Enrique and she were talking to him in the port, and it was raining, and a boy tripped and fell in front of them, and Cayetano picked him up and his shirt was covered with mud. In other words, it was definitely raining that day, which is why I remembered the shirt covered with mud.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: When Miguel Reyes brought Margarita back, it caused a scandal in the neighborhood farther down. Everybody there knew what had happened. But where we lived, near the plaza, we didn’t.
She gets married on Saturday night, and they kill Cayetano on Monday. At eight in the morning. Eight. Eight-thirty. Sunday night he slept in his house and went out to run an errand. He never knew they were looking for him. And I was with him that morning. We went to the port that morning. He was in love with a girl whose last name was Nasser. Her father was from Egypt. Her mother’s family was Italian. Her name was Nidia. Nidia Nasser. They had an appointment to meet at the port, and since the sweethearts were talking, what was I going to do there. So I left them alone. The plan was to meet back at the port to take our dugout out to the farm.
We were outside waiting for Cayetano to come back. He had to go look for a maid he had to take back to the farm. He was coming to meet us in our dugout when the Chicas arrived and attacked Cayetano. So then the first thing I did was run to the second floor in my house for a gun, a .38 by the way, my father’s white star, and ran out of there. Like a madman. I don’t know why, but I went out holding the revolver. I didn’t know yet what had happened. Then, when I got to Cayetano’s house, I found out that the Chicas had knifed him, that they were already in the house across the street where Víctor Palencia lived. Then I went out heading there. When I came out, they barred the door. They surrendered. The others came in and handed them over to the police.
RAFAEL ULLOA: Gabito’s mother didn’t want him to tell that story. She felt sorry for Cayetano’s mother. He wrote it after she died.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: The wedding was on Saturday, the supposed honeymoon that night, and on Monday the sweethearts would go to San Marcos. But it didn’t happen that way, because that night, after the incident that kept them from consummating the marriage, Miguel Reyes returned Margarita to her mother, as if she were damaged goods. Well, he realized she wasn’t a virgin. So he returned her to her mother ceremoniously, because he was of Santanderean origin. Then the trouble started because Margarita’s family put her in the confessional so she’d say who the man was who . . . Well, who had been the one . . . Well, who was the husband. So she said it was Cayetano. Cayetano Gentile had been engaged to her. But Cayetano broke the engagement because, while he was studying at the Javeriana University, she found a sweetheart from Guaranda. Another town. Possibly for that reason, Cayetano didn’t marry her. When I reached the door, he was already clutching his guts so they wouldn’t spill out. They had knifed him. Víctor Chica, especially. Víctor is the killer. He was the killer. Not Joaquín. Joaquín went to help his brother. He didn’t take part in the killing. He intervened, calming down his brother. Víctor was a butcher, he slaughtered cattle. He’s the one who takes them to market, and he had a knife. A knife for killing cattle was used to kill Cayetano.
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: When Gabo brought out the book, the twins wanted to sue him.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: Then, what is it that happens to me? Margarita denounces him, taking her revenge because Cayetano’s social and economic position in town was higher than hers. Then, when Cayetano abandoned her, what she did was a typical act of vengeance by a woman who’d been wounded. What I think is that she took her revenge on Cayetano because Cayetano didn’t marry her. Now, it’s very possible, I think it’s almost one hundred percent true, that she was Cayetano’s woman. That she did have sexual relations with him. Now, Cayetano left her, and her pointing him out as the one who had taken her virginity, is her revenge on Cayetano.
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: One of the things that Gabo wanted was information about the trial. The murder trial took place in Cartagena, and another of my uncles, whose name is Antonio de la Vega, was the judge. He had access to the papers and my uncle went to get them. They were in the basement of the Palace of Justice in Cartagena and were covered with damp, like the scene in the movie; I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, which is pretty bad. It evokes the place but the actors are pretty bad, even if they’re great actors. Rupert Everett should be hanged. The same thing that happened with Love in the Time of Cholera. I never thought I’d say that the Chronicle film was better than something else. So my uncle is the judge. Do you remember that they’re going to look for the papers and everything’s flooded? Gabo takes that from reality and uses it for the novel.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: At that time there was an idea in the penal code, which was the defense of honor. There’s no defense of honor there. Since we always lived in an up-to-date way, that was true under Benito Mussolini’s Italian penal code, from which the Colombian was copied. Copied. Copied. So there it is. Under the penal code of the year 1936, one could claim defense of honor, but a murder took place there because there was observation. Observation is when I begin to watch the victim to find out his movements, what he does and doesn’t do to facilitate the attack.
Miguel Reyes Palencia was from a Conservative family on his mother’s side. Liberal on his father’s side. But a refined man. A correct man. Miguel Reyes lives in Barranquilla now. Margarita lives in Sincelejo. She wasn’t as pretty as the girl in the movie.
MARIELA DE MARTÍNEZ: She’s a dressmaker.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: There’s gossip. I’m telling it to you as gossip. Miguel Reyes came back afterward to Margarita and they had something. They were husband and wife again. But sporadically. That’s like living for a while on the ashes of a dead man because those two killed him. Those two are the intellectual authors of Cayetano’s death. Why? For one of two reasons: either she’d had previous sexual experience, which is most likely, with some men from Guaranda, boyfriends she had in Guaranda, which is why Cayetano broke it off with her; or else, Cayetano really was her first husband.
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: He’s very interested in the theme of honor. And the theme of honor placed on the woman, because he does that in his early stories and he’s done it in other screenplays that he’s written. It’s part of the film Time to Die.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: In the villages, everybody has his own version. The story is the death of a man stabbed by some other men for reasons of honor. In my opinion, what happens is that this girl was already an older woman. If she had been a minor, a child, a girl younger than fifteen or twelve years old, there might have been a charge of corruption of minors or carnal violence. But if she’s a woman in her twenties, what carnal violence can there be? She went to bed with the man because she liked him. She was in love with Cayetano. Now, I believe that the business with Miguel was a lifesaver, because a woman in her twenties is almost a spinster. Because in a village, a girl that age is already over the hill.
So Cayetano died saying he was innocent. I believe Cayetano because a man who’s going to die tells the truth. Cayetano, when I came in, said: “I’m innocent, I’m innocent. I die an innocent man. These people have killed me.” So I went out to kill Víctor . . .
PATRICIA CASTAÑO: Sucre . . . Sucre is an incredible city. A tale he wrote also comes from there; it’s called “Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo.” That story he gave to a lady named Tachia Quintana, his girlfriend in Paris, and he gave her the rights to that story.
GERALD MARTIN: How could I not include Tachia in the biography? Tachia is woman number two in his life. Tachia’s the one who appears in his books. She’s in The Colonel (they were living together in Paris, suffering from hunger, when he wrote it), in One Hundred Years of Solitude, in The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.
PATRICIA CASTAÑO: The year before last, Tachia put on a piece for theater about that story in Cartagena, for the first time, and in Bogotá, for something like three days. And it’s very impressive because that story is about a flood in Sucre, Sucre. And the day after Tachia completed her presentation in Bogotá, which was Saturday night, and we were having the worst winter in Colombia, a super photograph appeared that said that Venice is in Sucre. It shows that day’s flooding in Sucre. I mean, what’s incredible is to think that fifty years after Gabo’s description, the people in Sucre, Sucre, continue to live the same drama.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: The fundamental fact is true. Afterward, on top of that, comes the magic of Gabito, the style of Gabito. Now, the facts are true, they’re certain. What happens is that Gabito has a great imagination, and besides that, a great pen. The work is his and the literary work is his, but the facts are exact. There’s no exaggeration or any invention. Those were the facts. Now, when I tried right here to tell Gabito, to give him my explanation, he said: “If you give me your explanation you’ll ruin the idea I have. What I want to do is write a novel.”
GREGORY RABASSA: Many things that I translated have become clichés. Now they call everything “Chronicle of a so-and-so foretold.”
* García Márquez wrote Chronicle of a Death Foretold in 1981 based on real events that occurred in 1951 in Sucre when his parents lived there. A groom returns his bride hours after the wedding claiming she was not a virgin. Her brothers go out and murder the man they thought to be her first lover. It is said he waited so long to write it because his mother had asked him not to write about it and he only did after she died. His mother, Luisa Santiaga, has a cameo in the novella.