Santiago Nasar

The description of the main character, Santiago Nasar, is both detailed and
exquisite. Santiago is handsome, young, and well-mannered and has an enviable
fortune at the tender age of twenty-one. He is a lover of horses, a fan of
falconry, and, from his father, he is supposed to have learned both courage and
prudence. Santiago is portrayed as a happy young man. He is described as pale,
curly-haired, and, like his father, with Arabian eyes and long, dark eyelashes.
He is the only child of a marriage of convenience. From his father he has
inherited a cattle ranch, named the “Divine Face.” He is known as a peaceful
man, although he is also a lover of guns. However, he is never armed unless he
is dressed to tend his ranch. Being a first-generation Colombian of Arabic
descent, the reader might expect that Santiago practices the Islamic religion, but
in-stead he is deeply Catholic. On the day he is killed, he was hoping to kiss the
bishop’s ring. His social life, although he is a rich and rather aristocratic young
man, is as simple as that of the rest of the towns folk. A lover of parties,
Santiago Nasar has an intimate group of friends. His friends include the
narrator, the narrator’s brother, Luis Enrique, and Cristo Bedoya. The four
friends grew up together, went to school to-gether, and vacationed together.
Their friendship lasted right up to the day Santiago was killed. When Santiago
was fifteen, he fell completely in love with Marı´a Cervantes, a local prostitute.
The love affair lasted fourteen months. It was so strong that his own father
stepped in to end it, entering the brothel and dragging Santiago out after
delivering a beating with his belt. To complete the punishment, the father
isolated his son at the ranch. At the time of Santiago’s death, he was formally
engaged to Flora Mi-guel, a loveless arrangement favored by both families. The
marriage was to be held within the year. Fate plays an important role in the
character development of Santiago. He is accused by Angela Vicario of being
responsible for the loss of her virginity. This is the reason why he is killed at the
hands of Angela’s brothers. Everyone in town, including his best friends and his
maids, knows that he has been sentenced to die—except Santiago himself. Ac-
cording to the police report, he died from seven stab wounds. What seems ironic
is that there is never any proof that Santiago is, in fact, responsible, as Angela
claimed. Among the many facts supporting San-tiago’s innocence are the facts
that he and Angela were never seen to-gether in public, he considered her a
“fool,” and they belong to separate social classes in a town where social class
determined identity. Supporting a case for Santiago’s guilt is Santiago’s fame as
a “spar-row hawk,” who liked young girls, especially those beneath his social
class (like his father before him). The narrative voice, however, suggests that
Angela Vicario was probably protecting someone she really loved and picked
Santiago’s name because she thought that her brothers would never dare to kill
such an important man as Santiago. However, one way or another, Santiago
dies. As the narrative voice explains, never was a death more foretold. Despite
all the efforts, no one is able to stop it, not even Father Carmen Amador or the
mayor, Colonel La´zaroAponte.

Bayardo San Roman

The husband of the bride, Bayardo San Roma´n, is a thirty-year-old man whose
personality evokes opposing remarks. “He looked like a fairy,” but “I could
have buttered him and eaten him alive,” say sone of the female characters. He is
known for his honesty; good heart; religious inclinations; knowledge of Morse
code, trains, and medicine; ability as a swimmer; and love of a good party. On
top of all this, he is immensely rich: the townspeople gossip that “he’s
swimming in gold”. However, he is not a man whom someone gets to know
when they first meet him, and his golden eyes, says the narrator’s mother, “re-
minded me of the devil”. He is heartless when he literally brow- beats Xius into
selling him his house in order to please Angela’s caprice and to demonstrate his
own power. Although Bayardo San Roma´n is a member of a distinguished
family, he shows up in town alone. Nobody knows where he came from or what
he stands for. Before he even meets Angela Vicario, and after seeing her only
once, he decides that he is going to marry her, and six months later, he does. He
never tries to court her, but instead seduces her family, showering them with
presents and his charming personality. Angela and Bayardo’s wedding is both
extravagant and costly, perhaps to hide the fact that their marriage is a loveless
one. In fact, their fated marriage only lasts five hours. Bayardo San Ro-ma´n
takes his wife back to her parents when he discovers that Angela is not a virgin.
After the tremendously emotional embarrassment of being held up to ridicule,
Bayardo locks himself in his new home and is found intoxicated a week later.
Finally his family comes to his rescue and takes him away. Bayardo continues
to surprise the reader with his strange personality up to the end of the novel.
Seventeen years after that fateful Monday when he returned his wife to her
mother, he seeks out Angela. He is now fat, balding, old, wearing glasses and, as
if he has lost all his pride, returns to the woman who had caused him such
embarrassment.

Angela Vicario
Angela Vicario’s role is twofold. She is the cause of the death of one main
character, Santiago Nasar, and the reason for the destruction of another, Bayardo
San Roma´n. She is a member of a poor and simple family. Her father, Poncio
Vicario, has gone blind from the eyestrain of his work as a goldsmith. He is a
man without a will of his own, who is dominated by his wife. His wife and
Angela’s mother, Purı´sima del Car-men Vicario, was a schoolteacher until she
married Poncio. She rules the house with an iron fist. Angela has two older
sisters, both married, and twin brothers, Pedro and Pablo, who are pig butchers
by trade. Angela is a beautiful twenty-year-old who, like her father, lacks
character and determination and does not enjoy the moral support of her mother.
She lives in fear of her mother’s demanding character, a fear that is emphasized
on the night when her parents, her sisters, her husband’s sisters and her twin
brothers decide that she must marry a man she has hardly seen and does not
love. Although she makes explicit her lack of love for her husband-to-be, her
mother flatly responds, “Love can be learned too”. Angela tries to commit
suicide but does not have the strength to do so, so she realizes that she has no
other alternative but to marry Bayardo San Roma´n. She arrives at this decision
with the hope that she will manage to fool Bayardo into believing that she is a
virgin on the night of their wedding. On the day of the wedding, she continues
the charade by wearing the traditional dress of a virgin. This is later interpreted
as a profanity against the sacred symbols of purity. In truth, how-ever, she is
horrified in the knowledge that she has to face her husband that night. Her
husband does not have to think twice about what to do once he becomes aware
that his wife is not a virgin. He decides to denounce his marriage and return
Angela to her parents. Although humiliated and full of shame, her feeling of
horror changes into one of liberation when Bayardo takes her back to her
parents. Angela not only knows that he does not love her, she also considers
herself inferior to him and says that he is too much of a man for her. After the
death of Santiago, Angela and her family are asked by the town’s mayor to
leave the town forever. Angela then undergoes a change. She spends her time
embroidering and regains her zest for life. Inexplicitly, she cries after Bayardo
and nearly goes insane over him, so much so that she starts to write frequent,
desperate love letters. This absurd obsession continues for seventeen years,
during which she writes nearly 2,000 letters but gets not a single response. She
takes consolation in the fact that her letters are not returned to her.

Pedro and Pablo

Pedro and Pablo, the twin brothers of Angela, are twenty-four years old and
known in town by their good looks. They have the innocent demeanour of a
child, and their reputation is that of good young men. Their fate, however, is to
kill Santiago to restore Angela’s honor and reputation. Pedro is six minutes
older than his brother. He seems to be more imaginative, decisive, sentimental,
and authoritarian. When they both show up to enlist in the military at the age of
twenty-one, Pablo is exempted so that he can help take care of his family.
During his time in the military, Pedro’s character develops as one willing to give
orders and to decide for his own brother. It is Pedro who decides that theymust
kill Santiago Nasar. Throughout the novel the reader becomes aware that the
twins do not really want to kill Santiago yet must do so to save the family’s
honor. The narrator states that the twins did more than could be imagined to get
someone to stop them, yet no one did so. From the very start of the ordeal, they
publicly announce that they are going to kill Santiago Nasar. They tell the priest,
the police, and every passerby. When the news reaches the mayor, he half-
heartedly tries to stop the crime by taking away their knives, but they get others.
As if to confirm their child-like innocence, they bless themselves when they see
the town’s priest and bless themselves again right before killing Santiago. On
the day when they are taken into custody and put in jail, they suffer mental and
emotional torment. Pedro affirms that he can smell Santiago on him regard-less
of how much he washes himself. He adds that he cannot sleep, an insomnia that
continues for eleven consecutive months. Pablo suffers from diarrhea, which
leads Pedro to think that his brother had been poisoned. Although the brothers
suffer the psychological fallout of having killed a man, they do not view
themselves as sinners and refuse to confess themselves to a priest when they
have the opportunity to do so. When they leave jail, they decide to do so in
broad daylight so that everyone can see their faces and judge their innocence
and lack of shame. The mission of the Vicario brothers in the novel is odious.
The twins especially fear that the Arab community in town will react against
them; but the Arabs in town, surprisingly, hold no grudge against the killers.