It was a massacre, performed at the public school with the help of the druggist, who took notes, and a first-year medical student who was here on vacation. They had only a few instruments for minor surgery available and the rest were craftsmen’s tools. But despite the havoc wrought on the body, Father Amador’s report seemed in order and the investigator incorporated it in the brief as a useful piece of evidence.
She had gone beyond what was possible to make Angela Vicario die in life, but the daughter herself had brought her plans to naught because she never made any mystery out of her misfortune. On the contrary, she would recount it in all its details to anyone who wanted to hear it, except for one item that would never be cleared up: who was the real cause of her damage, and how and why, because no one believed that it had really been Santiago Nasar.
Her life as a rejected wife continued on, simple as that of an old maid, still doing machine embroidery with her friends just as before she had made cloth tulips and paper birds, but when her mother went to bed she would stay in the room until dawn writing letters with no future.