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‘Who killed Santiago Nasar?’

On Thursday July 17, Alliance française de Kandy presents an adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Crónica de una muerte anunciada' (A chronicle of a death foretold) as a dramatic monologue entitled: 'Who killed Santiago Nasar?' This dramatic monologue is scripted and presented by Mark Amerasinghe.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's story is about a murder in the name of family honour. Practically the whole town knew, hours before the killing that the Vicario twins were waiting to kill Santiago Nasar.

A whole town, paralyzed into inaction by a strange combination of forces, forces of social prejudice and blind convention, of chance, of circumstance, of sheer indifference, of a desire for revenge, of 'Oh! It is none of my business', looked on, while the twins, butchers by profession, "carved up Santiago Nasar like a pig."

The story of the washing clean of Angela Vicario's honour by Santiago Nasar's sacrificial death, is told by a close associate of the victim, more than 20 years after the events of that fateful Monday, the same Monday on which the bishop made a fleeting visit to the town.

In telling his story the narrator combines his own recollections of the event, the reminiscences of the principal players in the drama still living, and of so many people not directly involved in the murder, but in some way connected to it, and of snippets from the judicial record compiled by the investigating magistrate. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's telling of the story, the tale does not unfold in a neat temporal sequence.

We hear about the cause for the killing after hearing that the twins are waiting to kill Santiago Nasar. We read about the acquittal of the twins, before we read in the last few pages of the novel of the actual gruesome killing.

It is as if the chronicle is compiled of a juxtaposition of the reminiscences of the narrator, as his re-kindled memories slip into his mind.

In this adaptation of the novel, for dramatic purposes, Mark Amerasinghe falls back on the devices (used in his four previous monologues) of extensive excision, functional selection and regrouping and translocation of text.

The Colombian novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was born in the small town of Aracataca, Colombia. He began life as a journalist and his left-wing leanings and friendship with Fidel Castro, led to his being banned entry to the United States and to his leaving the land of his birth.

He returned to Colombia in 1980. He is one of those writers with which the words 'magic realism' are associated.