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LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM MAGAZINE

Year XXXV, No. 69. Lima-Hanover, 1st Semester 2009, pp. 329-341
SANTIAGO NASAR AND CHRIST BEDOYA:
THE NAMES THAT ANNOUNCE DEATH
Ángel Esteban
University of Granada
Shortly after publishing the Chronicle of an announced death and
After receiving the Nobel Prize, García Márquez published an article, "El
story after the story ", where he affirmed, about his last
work: "my biggest job was to discover and reveal the almost infinite series of
tiny and chained coincidences that within a society
as ours did possible an absurd crime "(1991,
324). What is already known from the first line of the story hides
a multitude of problems of impossible resolution, because those
talles are brilliantly overshadowed by continuous false clues
or ambiguous. In this way, the most complicated novel to write about
Colombian author assumes a perplexity that makes her exalted and
tensely attractive: the self that narrates (for the first time the narrator is
a first person who also identifies with the author) knows it
all because he lived it and investigated it later, but at the same time
appears as if drowned by the unknowns, and we do not know if it is
that does not know the details or does not want to recognize them. The novel
It could well be an accumulation of excuses to alleviate the weight of
responsibility, or a catharsis, if he were really, as they have
pointed some, the author of the grievance that triggers the tragedy.
Indeed, Gonzalo Díaz-Migoyo has suggested that the narrator is the
who has removed Angela's virginity (1988, 74-86), based on the
comment that Gabo himself makes his friend Plinio Apuleyo
Mendoza when, speaking about Oedipus Rex , he affirms that it is the histo-
detective ideal because the researcher discovers that he himself
He is the murderer. Something similar has Santiago Gamboa in the prologue
that makes the work in the edition of El Mundo . When the young man wrote
tor asks the Nobel if he had ever been tempted to
writing a novel, he replies that he has already done it: it is Cróni-
of an announced death , and by making a panegyric of the genre,
expresses his predilection for the tragedy of Sophocles "because in the end

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one discovers that the detective and the murderer are the same person "
(Gamboa 1999, 2).
Armando Estrada, reflecting on the meaning of power in the
work, suggests that the insistence on the exculpation of Santiago leads to
a series of questions. It's funny that most of them have
to do with the position of the narrator, that is, if he really knows
whether or not Santiago's innocence, if the narrator could not or could not
will come to know the truth about the culprit, if the narrator conceals the
Beratly the name of the deflorador, etc. (Estrada 2006, 311).
But this researcher never arrives, although he is very close, to
Pechar from the narrator himself. It is a commonplace of the police novel
that the one who tells or investigates the crime is involved in it. By
example, in the novel by Sábato El túnel , when Juan Pablo Castel
arrives at María Iribarne's room and Hunter takes care of him, these
they talk about literature and art and at one point Hunter
tells Juan Pablo a possible argument for a police novel-
ca, in which exactly that happens:
Look: a man has a mother, a wife and a boy. One night they kill myst
Riosamente to the mother. The investigations of the police do not reach any
result. Some time later they kill the woman; the same thing. Finally
they kill the boy. The man is mad, he wants everyone, over
everything to the son. Desperate, he decides to investigate the crimes on his own.
With the usual inductive, deductive, analytical, synthetic methods,
etcetera, of those geniuses of the police novel, concludes that
the murderer must kill him now. On the calculated day and time, the
go to the place where the fourth murder must be committed and wait for the
assassination
if not. But the killer does not arrive. Check your deductions: you could have
Wrong the place: no, the place is fine; could have miscalculated the
time: no, the time is fine. The conclusion is horrifying: the murderer must be-
already in place . In other words: the murderer is himself , who has
the other crimes in a state of unconsciousness. The detective and the assassin
they are not the same person (Sábato 1993, 131-132).
In Chronicle of an announced death it is possible that something happens
similar but, like so many other things, it's something that never
will know, because the narrator manages to compose a fabric of
tracks and contrapistas, which are in the end the central point of the novel and
what makes it so attractive. We want to know who he was and while
we read, when we go intuiting that Santiago is a poor victim
ma, we begin to suspect everyone. And that is possible because the
Novel is constructed as a Panopticon. Michel Foucault, in Vigilar
and punish , explains that the panoptic constructions, devised by
Benjamin Bentham in the eighteenth century, began to put into practice
in the early nineteenth century, and with them it was intended that a single
gilante in a central tower of a prison could know where it

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They find exactly the prisoners, one by one, without the need of
see them in their entirety, but through a backlight effect ema-
swim of the silhouettes of their bodies (Foucault 1981, 203). This effect
to, studied in depth and with much success by Aleida Rodrí-
guez for the novel by García Márquez (1985, 261-269), allows us
analyze the perspective from which the narrator, who is his own
García Márquez, guides the data that he distributes wise and ordered-
from the first line until Santiago Nasar collapses
definitely.
But in this work we come across an even greater obstacle, and it is the
burden of the author's "intention of veracity", which is also the
rrador. If the narrator was homodiegetic, as is, but not
identify with the author, there would be no problem in defining the
reality of fiction, because a text based on a real fact, in the
when it becomes a novel, it ceases to be a document
historical and becomes a fictitious, autonomous, independent material.
However, in Chronicle ... there is a desire to approach dangerous-
to the field of real reality, starting with the title, following
by the theme and ending with the accommodating characters. TO
nobody escapes that "I am me" because it is a journalist
(García Márquez is) who writes chronicles, his wife is called Mer-
cedes Barcha ("Many knew - he says - that in the unconsciousness of
parranda I proposed to Mercedes Barcha to marry me ")
(2003, 42-43), his brothers are Jaime, Margot, Luis Enrique,
nun, the doctor is called Iguarán and is cousin of his mother (42), Geri-
neldo Márquez also makes an appearance (32), as well as his aunt Wenefri-
da Márquez (117), his father plays the violin (42), his brother Luis Enrí-
than the guitar (65), etc. To top it off, when the author is asked
about the process of creating that work, he does not hesitate to say that
"The best literary formula is always the truth" (Mendoza 1982, 28),
sentence that supposes a "paradoxical synthesis" of the dialectic of
opposites between reality and fiction (Ruffinelli 1985, 277). But, if
give to the revelation of Roland Barthes, according to which "no
Critura is more artificial than the one that pretended to paint Nature
more closely "(1992, 70), we have to harbor suspicions and discon-
trust the realistic purpose. At Las Meninas , we understand that what
there it appears is absolutely realistic and credible : the Infanta and her
ladies of company exist, the painter's study in Feli's court
ie IV also, likewise the kings reflected in the mirror of the
background, to which Velázquez is portraying and, of course, the
I'm a painter working. We can imagine how many times that is-
dinner or the like could be repeated throughout the life of Veláz-
Quez Now, from the moment that stamp is torn

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to reality and becomes a work of art ceases to be life and becomes
fiction, with its absolute autonomy.
Paradoxically, realistic elements have become
fiction and, nevertheless, the work translates reality, corroborates it or
he denies, he takes sides with her. In the case of the novel of
García Márquez, the real elements have also become
in fiction work and have acquired autonomy, but there is a series of
strategies, of artifices, that tell of reality more than one's own
copy of it. This is what happens, for example, with the names of
main characters. The author comments on Vivir to tell her that,
as the real event had taken place in the town where his fa-
milia and those affected were close friends, his mother asked him to
wait for the dead man's mother to die or change the names
of the protagonists (Cremades and Esteban 2002, 265). And it's very inte-
resante, to corroborate the thesis that we are defending, observe
how the characters respond to the exact names of their
family members are real fictional characters, but those who have
symbolic names, such as Santiago Nasar, translate realities that
they are met directly or ironically.
Santiago Nasar and Cristóbal (or Christ) Bedoya transpose in their ac-
the same teleological connotation of his nomination. In a
superficial level, Santiago owes the name to García's mother
Márquez, Luisa Santiaga, which is also the name of the mother of
Nasar in the novel, as the same author says in Vivir para contarla ,
but in a field, coincidentally? symbolic the relationship with the apostle
Tol Santiago is clear. The word in Spanish comes from the cry of
war of the Spanish Sancte Jacobe (Oh, Saint Jacobo!), that in the
Century XIII had become Santi Yagüe (Tibón 1986, 213). San Jacobo
or St. James the Greater, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ, comes
from the Hebrew Yeagob, Yago, which means "the supplanter", the one that
place in place of the other. In the same way, Santiago Nasar suffers
death instead of the one who really snatched Angela's virginity.
Santiago is, according to tradition, the first martyr apostle, the first
He will follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ and put himself in his place.
Santiago Nasar took the blame of another, and was executed wrongly
(like Jesus Christ) in a bloody death and linked to a
madero (the door of the house), to free others from their ignominy.
In the New Testament, James is considered a brother
of Jesus Christ, and his identification with him is quite pertinent. But
In García Márquez's novel, communion between one and the other is
even greater, because his surname is Nasar, that is, the Nazarene, who
is the qualifier by which Jesus Christ is named at the moment of
judgment that will lead to death, and that clearly appears in the

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upper part of the cross, since the initials INRI mean "Iesu Na-
Rex Iudeorum zarenus ". Jaime Concha in 1982 was approaching this
parallelism: "between Nasar and Nazarene we perceive an echo that
communicates in depth with a paradigm, with the archetype of
sacrifice by antonomasia "(6). In this, Ruf-
Finelli (1985, 281) and Penuel (1985, 758).
For the rest, certain expressions in the novel corroborate this
parallelism. For example, a few that have to do with the
Comparisons with animal sacrifices. Jesus Christ was compared
to a "lamb brought to the slaughterhouse" or a "mute sheep before the
shearers "(Isaiah 53, 7) and is, at the same time, the" Lamb of God who
remove the sins of the world "(John 1, 29-30-35-36). Santiago Nasar
he was "cut like a pig" (García Márquez 2003, 4); little an-
, when Christ Bedoya gives him the data on the sacrificed animals
In the wedding of the previous night, Santiago says "This will be my
marriage ": ironically, Santiago joins eternally the death
you, through a sacrifice, an hour later, in the same way
that in Angela's marriage, "forty bucks", "on the
pigs "and" four calves ", which, in addition, for greater
incidence, are put to roast "in the public square" (18), place where
Santiago will be killed a little later, before the eyes of all
people, just as Jesus Christ was crucified before the eyes
of all the locals. When the narrator explains the place where
the brothers take the knives to kill Santiago, exposes that
"At the back of the patio, the twins had a pig farm, with
his sacrificial stone, and his cutting table "(39). Now, the
The clearest passage in which this comparison takes effect is
when the brothers Vicario go to the butcher shop to sharpen the knives
to kill Santiago. And this is where the panoptic narrator, construed
It causes the comment:
I had to ask the butchers sometime if the office of killing
faith did not reveal a soul predisposed to kill a human being. Protest-
Ron: "When you sacrifice a beef you do not dare to look him in the eye."
He told me that he could not eat the meat of the animal that slaughtered.
Another told me that he would not be able to sacrifice a cow he had known.
before, and less if he had taken his milk. I reminded them that the brothers
The Vicario sacrificed the same pigs that they raised, and they were so
miliaries who distinguished them by their names. "It's true," one replied, "
but notice that they were not given names of people but flowers. "(51)
It is true that on many occasions those who are accustomed to
brads to kill men are not able to sacrifice animals. In
the novel by the Colombian Fernando Vallejo, La Virgen de los hitos ,
the boy protagonist, Alexis, feels unable to shoot with

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a badly wounded dog, to avoid pain, and it's Fernando, the narra-
dor, who has to do it. Alexis is a hit man used to
shoot against other boys and adults without the slightest charge of
awareness. However, with the animals it values restrictions of
awareness. In the case of the Vicario / sicario brothers, there is no
in reverse, because deep down Santiago is a non-murderous being
swim, if not sacrificed, like animals, since their very name
responds to the idea of sacrifice. Santiago, the one that replaces another,
is the subject suited to the concept of the sacrificial, because it is
always present the idea of immolating something or someone, offering it in
holocaust, not by virtue of his behavior or his own being, but
to obtain realities alien to what the sacrificed represents,
but which will be achieved according to that holocaust.
That is, you can sacrifice someone or something to placate the dioceses.
ses, to avoid a plague, to recover the honor, etc. Thats why he
The concept of sacrifice is different from that of pure homicide or murder.
In the Old Testament there is an inverse relationship to that of the novel,
and that can be argued as a counterpoint, between the sacrifice of
a man and that of an animal. It is about the episode in which Yahweh
test Abraham's faith and suggest that he kill his son Isaac and
Offer as a sacrifice. When the prophet lifts the weapon for
to the son, then listen to the voice from heaven, recover his son, and see
a ram "behind him locked in a thorn by the horns: and
Abraham went and took the ram and offered him a burnt offering instead of
his son "(Genesis 22, 13).
Within the zoological context, roosters have a particular importance
because they are linked to the life of the people of Santiago and the
betrayed by Jesus Christ, who will unleash his
sion and death. Relevance in the Colombian cultural context is
beyond doubt, and García Márquez himself has commented on more than
an occasion when cockfighting is an event in
his country and in other points of Hispano-America. Therefore, he did not hesitate
moment when in the early sixties they suggested that he
a script for a film, taken from the story of Juan Rulfo El Ga-
gold , in which the precious animal becomes the protagonist,
and turns its owner into a protagonist, precisely when confronted
against other roosters. But, in addition, the rooster is one of the
the most precious items that the people can make. To a doctor, a
lawyer, etc., is popularly rewarded with a rooster, and
Sometimes it is the only way to pay for quality service.
Also, when the narrator recounts what the
years after the death of Santiago in the town, he does not hesitate
affirm that they were "the roosters of the dawn" those that "surprised" to

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all trying to sort out the coincidences that had caused the
absurd, and that they also did it because they could not "continue living
without knowing exactly what was the site and the mission that he had assigned
I swim the fatality "to each one (García Márquez 2003, 94).
Because of that, the town was ready, the morning they were going to
kill Santiago, on the dock of the port, with countless roosters,
that they were going to be offered to the bishop. And in the environment of the
Passion, the
rooster is the one who sings twice when Peter has denied Christ
three (Matthew 26, 73-75; Mark 14, 70-72; Luke 22, 59-60 and John 18,
26-27), something that the Nazarene himself announced to the apostle when he
He told him that he would give his life for Him (Mark 14, 30). That cock singing,
which can be considered as a symbol of the beginning of the process of
suffering of the Nazarene, in the work of the Colombian is also the
announcement of what is going to happen to Santiago, because he is witness
of the huge scandal unleashed by the animals moments before
of his death. When Divina Flor explains what happened since the last
At the moment when he saw Santiago until his death, he explains: "Then
the ship's whistle ended and the roosters began to sing. Was a
So great a commotion, that he could not believe there were so many roosters
in the town, and I thought they were coming in the bishop's ship "(García
Márquez 2003, 13). The magnitude of the uproar mimics irony and
hyperbole the simple song of the Rooster of the Passion. Several pages ade-
lante, the narrator abounds: "everywhere were the crates of
well-rounded cocks that took him as a gift to the bishop, because the
Crescent soup was his favorite dish. (...) But it did not stop. Apa-
He laughed at the turn of the river, grumbling like a dragon, and then the
band of musicians began to play the bishop's hymn, and the roosters
they began to sing in the crates and upset the other roosters
of the people "(16). Here the carnivalesque effect is so disproportionate,
that exceeds the simple meaning of counterpoint to the bad gesture
of the bishop, who does not even stop and get off the ship but, without
However, when he is in front of the crowd, Santiago enters
they make "the sign of the cross in the air" (17). In addition, Santiago Na-
sar is also directly related to the event that announces its
death, because "he had contributed several loads of firewood to the
public requests of Father Carmen Amador, and there were also
caught himself the most appetizing crested roosters "(17). Those ga
The ones chosen by Santiago will no longer be sacrificed to entertain the
palate of the bishop, but instead a very different sacrifice is
It's about to happen, as soon as the roar of the roosters calms down.
There is still one more nuance that relates the animals to the anti-
cipation of death, and in this case it is a kind of
vigil that James, as the omniscient Christ, does in a way

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unconscious. There are several places in the Gospel where Jesus Christ
announces that he is going to die (John 3, 13-17; Luke 9: 21-22; Mark 8, 27-
35). Santiago does it indirectly, the same morning of his death
you, when Victoria Guzmán is in the kitchen tearing off
the entrails to a rabbit, and then pulls the dogs. Santia-
Go see the scene and say: "Do not be a barbarian. Imagine that it was a
to be human "(García Márquez 2003, 10). Up to here it would not stop being
an ironic coincidence with what was going to happen next. But new-
mind the panoptic narrator takes sides so that the figure of San-
tiago evoque what is (the one that puts himself in the place of another), through
of the following comment, just after the words of the protagonist
nista:
Victoria Guzman needed almost twenty years to understand that a man
accustomed to killing unarmed animals will express suddenly similar
horror. "Holy God," she exclaimed, scared, "so all that was
a revelation! "(10).
But the similarities of Santiago with the Nazarene go beyond
of animal symbology. The day they were going to kill him, Santiago Na-
sar got up and put on "a white linen shirt and pants"
(5), and it is important that, on the day he resembled Jesus, by type
of death, he was dressed like him, in white, because "had it not been
by the arrival of the bishop he would have put on the khaki dress and
riding boots ", to go to the Hacienda El Divino Rostro (5). Not even
The detail of the name of the inherited estate is banal. Any alu-
religious or biblical study could have been explained simply by
the Catholic substratum of Colombian society, but in this case, the
allusion to the "Divine Face" clearly moves in the vicinity of the
Passion and Death of Christ. That exact name for the face of
Jesus Christ does not refer to the sweetness of the Resurrection, innocence
of Jesus the Child, the anger expelling the sellers of the Temple, the
intelligence that radiated in his speeches, but to suffering during
you the Passion and Death. The iconography is vast and forceful in
this aspect.
Before the Passion and Death, the Nazarene that is going to become
the Divine Face celebrates a party with his disciples. An echo of it
is the party that Santiago Nasar makes with his friends in the
apostolic act of María Alejandrina Cervantes "(4) 1 , on the other side
the "house of mercies" (44). There the narrator meets, his
brother Luis Enrique and Cristo Bedoya, the brothers Pedro and Pablo
Vicar, etc. That is to say, all the "apostles" with the Nazarene, drinking
and singing "five hours before killing him" (44). But centrémo-
We finally at the exact moment of death. The square starts
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to populate people. Some have seen Santiago approaching, and not
they help, like Indalecio Pardo, who "did not dare to prevent it",
when I was with Christ Bedoya: "He slapped his shoulder
each one and let them continue "(100). And the reason why he did not do it
the account to the narrator years later, on the same page of the book:
"I loosened the pasta", as happens with most of the apostles
and disciples of Jesus: disappear, out of fear or shame, from
of the moment of judgment and the path of Calvary. What's more, the narrator
he says immediately that those who passed by him "did not dare to
touch him". After all these disagreements and betrayals of the
nearby, all the people go to the square to see who is going to be
sacrificed: "The people returning from the port, alerted by the
He started taking positions in the square to witness the crime.
men "(107), as in an improvised Golgotha. And when the homicides
They do their job, nobody prevents it: it's the same stamp that
in biblical history, further underpinned by the comparisons that
appear in the work and are inevitably linked to sacrifice
in the Cross of Christ: first the door acts as the le-
do not. When they are already killing him, the narrator says:
He leaned back against his mother's door, without the least resistance.
as if he just wanted to help them kill him in pieces
the same (...). Then they both continued to stab him against the door,
with alternate and easy hits (115)
That image, clearly Christological, that is left to nail in the
wood without offering resistance, is the symbolic culmination of
vo door intensifier throughout the novel, an element that is
it is spinning, strategically, in various parts of the text.
In the first chapter, when the narrator describes the process of
construction of the house - in which we certainly discovered a new
It coincides with the life of Christ: the gifts of the father of Santia-
go as a carpenter-, a lot of space is devoted to the position and use
of the two entrance doors to the house: the front and the rear.
That's important because the front door, finally, will be the
"Guilty" of the death of Santiago, when it closed just when the
Vicario brothers reach the victim preventing him from entering. As
a macabre, premonitory and miserable coincidence, is called
from old "The fatal door" (12). And in the middle of the work, in the
reconstruction of the facts, a typical exaggeration of the style of
Colombian reveals again the prominence of the door
as a log on which Santiago was nailed, by securing the narrator
that "it was necessary to repair with public funds the main door of

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the house of Plácida Linero, which was chipped at the tip of a knife
llo "(48).
Also, the data relative to the state of the body of Santiago
after the homicide they contract new debts with the Nazarene. To the
The fourth chapter of the fourth chapter describes the result of the
autopsy and it is concluded that what happened with that
body "was a massacre" (72) and that, like Christ, there was no
he "nothing healthy" (Isaiah 1, 6, Psalm 22, 17). Of the two pages that
narrate this event, three data are highly significant: the seven
fatal injuries, the side injury and the stigmas of the hand
Reject The researcher reports that "Seven of the numerous injuries
they were mortal "(García Márquez 2003, 73). In the biblical tradition
speaks constantly of the Seven Wounds of Christ on the Cross,
the Seven Words that he pronounces before dying, collected in the
zo of the Via Crucis, which has fourteen stations, that is, seven
plus seven, the Seven Wounds opened in the Heart of Mary, the Seven
You suffer from Mary, and all those wounds, both those of Christ and
those of Mary, are constantly reflected in Catholic iconography
like seven daggers. Also, Simeon tells Maria, as part of the
Child that is presented in the Temple, that "a sword of seven edges
it will pierce your heart "(Luke 2, 33-35). Of those seven wounds, in the
case of Santiago Nasar, one specifies "in the second space
right intercostal that interested the lung "(García
Márquez 2003, 73), recalling the one thrown at the side of Christ,
where blood and water came out (John 19:34). Finally, the moment is-
loom of comparison is one in which the narrator can not re-
to be similar: "I had a deep throb in the palm of the
right hand. The report said: 'It seemed like a stigma of the Crucifix-
do '"(García Márquez 2003, 73-74).
We have seen how, in the coincidences of the history of Santia-
With the crucifixion of Christ, the charismatic figure also intervenes
ca of the Virgin Mary. Well, in an ironic way, the figure of
Mary, at the foot of the Cross, in front of Jesus, invests in the case of San-
tiago, because the mother, wanting to save her son, closes the door, is
say, "prepare" the log so that the murderers kill at will
his son, nailing him mercilessly in that fatal door.
Along with James, an alter ego completes the image of Jesus, and
It is Cristóbal Bedoya, also called in the text Christ. This accepts
tion, rather than a suggestion, is a direct denomination. But it is
that "Cristobal" exactly fulfills in the novel the function that im-
apply your name. The term comes from the Greek Cristoforo , that is, by-
Christ, "he who leads Christ" (Tibón 1986, 68). The tradition,
dating from the sixth century, refers to San Cristóbal as a giant that

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He finds Jesus as a child and, taking him in his arms,
It passes a river. In effect, in the novel he is his intimate friend, who
He goes to see the bishop, also on the way back, and then goes to look for-
what to the square, to your house and everywhere when you know you are going to
kill. There are those who have thought that so much concern to save
the friend carries the weight of conscience hidden, and that he could well
be Cristóbal the one that carries the blame of the accusation by which
is going to kill Santiago. But it is an unlikely hypothesis. In the
cinematographic version of the work that Francesco Rosi directed in
1987, and in which Rupert Everett, Ornella Mutti, Irene Pa-
Pas, Lucia Bosé and Anthony Delon, the theory makes more sense because
the narrator is the same Christ Bedoya, who returns to the town almost
thirty years later to unearth the ghosts of the past.
Rather, it is necessary to allude, in the novel, to the deep friendship between
both, for which logically one wishes to save the other from the death
tea. Moments before the tragedy, Cristóbal goes to the house of Santia-
go to ask about him, and the narrator offers some details of that
identification with one another: "Cristo Bedoya not only knew the
house as well as his, but he had so much confidence with the
family that pushed Placida Linero's door to pass from there
to the adjoining bedroom "(García Márquez 2003, 103-104). Some
have seen in it not only "a double of Santiago Nasar, who is clearly
marked as a Christ figure in the text "(Rahona and Sieburth 1996, 441),
but also a certain incestuous connection, because Cristóbal,
when he sees the mother sleeping "is transfixed by the beauty of
Plácida, so much so that he spends precious time watching her sle-
ep rather than saving Santiago's life "(Boschetto 1986, 126-127),
attending to the narrator's words:
A beam of dusty sunlight came through the skylight, and the beautiful woman
Asleep in the hammock, on her side, with her girlfriend's hand on her cheek,
an unreal aspect. "It was like an apparition," Cristo Bedoya told me. The
He watched for a moment, fascinated by her beauty, and then crossed the
Silently, he passed by the bathroom, and entered the bedroom
by Santiago Nasar (García Márquez 2003, 104).
Although the interpretation is clearly excessive and very own
of certain American critics, for whom any word
has a double Freudian, psychoanalytic and sexually
Viado, it is true that the interconnection between the two is patent. In
First, he does not spend so much time observing it, but only "a
tante ", and secondly, what does incest have to do with
Tempering the beauty of a friend's mother. Now, it
understands this only in a context in which the two characters are
they identify absolutely. But it is more logical to allude to that union to

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through cultural elements that can be better recognized in a
Colombian as García Márquez, as we are proposing
niendo on the basis of religious icons, around the symbolism
of the names. Cristóbal is the one that takes Santiago, and he does it until
the last moment, just before learning that they are going to kill him,
when they come back from the port. It takes him by the arm (García Márquez 2003,
100) and those around, who already know what is going to happen, the ob-
they serve in a strange way:
The people dispersed towards the square in the same sense as them. Was
a crowded crowd, but Escolástica Cisneros thought that the
Two friends walked in the center without difficulty, inside a circle
empty, because people knew that Santiago Nasar was going to die, and he did not dare
They were going to touch him. Christ Bedoya also remembered a different attitude
towards
they. "They looked at us as if we were wearing a painted face," he told me (100).
In a way, the reproach of Santiago also falls on his do-
ble, his other self, who is the only one who dares to touch him. The final irony
is that, despite all the efforts that Christ makes for
save Santiago from the moment he finds out, his job is
unsuccessful It is also the only person who seriously intends to
to scratch the jaws of fate and to close the empire of conventions
social regulations that govern honor. But that can not be
do, because the same thing happened to Jesus Christ in his particular struggle
against what was already written, when he said "Father, if possible,
let this cup pass from me "(Matthew 26, 39). In short, both Santiago
Nasar as Cristóbal mean, from the reality of their
names, what the symbolism gives them directly or ironically, and
his fate is obscurely linked to the seal that, from the baptismal font
badly, their own parents conferred them in an involuntary way.
NOTE:
1. The italic is mine. The adjective apostolic has a clear ironic sense, because
In that house, those who meet do not have the same intentions as the apostles.
toles when they are together. However, in her own way, María Alejandrina Cer-
vantes performs an "apostolate" of the body, and attracts many to his lap,
unite them in a "common cause" and, in a certain way, comforting and salvific.
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