This appearance does not improve as the book progresses. Because their first set of knives is taken away, the twins go to the butcher Faustino Santos twice to have knives sharpened for the murder. In piecing together the story later on, the narrator says, "Faustino Santos told me that he'd still been doubtful, and that he reported it to a policeman who came by a little later to buy a pound of liver for the mayor's breakfast" (Marquez 53). He is doubtful, but he reports it to the police; he reports it to the police, but he still sharpens the twins' knives when they come back a second time. There is a vague sense of civic duty in the report, but a greater sense of curiosity and possibly even macabre justice in the butcher's actions. This is also shown by father Amador, who is asked to conduct the autopsy on Santiago: "My first thought was that it wasn't any business of mine but something for the civil authorities'"( Marquez 70). There is no real sense of responsibility here.
There is a sense that the town wanted to watch the drama play out, however; regardless of Santiago's guilt or innocence, the moral outrage that such a scandal would cause was a source of entertainment. In fact, Santiago and Angela may never have been together, and eventually "no one believed that it had really been Santiago Nasar [who had slept with Angela]. They belong to two completely different worlds. No one had ever seen them together, much less alone together" (Marquez 89-90). It was not even about a sense of moral outrage, then, but more a morbid curiosity and fascination with spectacle that led them to disregard the value of a man's life. This is why when Santiago "learned at the last moment that the Viscario brothers were waiting for him to kill...
This is much the same conclusion that the outside magistrate came to when he finally came to the town to make an investigation. The narrator notes, "what had alarmed him the most at the conclusion of his excessive diligence was not having a single clue, not even the most improbable, that Santiago Nasar had been the cause of the wrong" (Marquez 99). That is, there was absolutely no reason for the Viscario twins to have gone after Santiago other than Angela's word, and n reason for the town to stand by and watch as two drunken, bleary-eyed and violent men planned and carried out the brutal murder of a third innocent party. It was not merely a he-said she-said situation, but "such was the perplexity of the investigating magistrate over the lack of proof against Santiago Nasar that his good work at times seemed ruined by disillusionment" (Marquez 100). There was absolutely no reason for the town to have suspected Santiago, and thus allowed the Viscario twins to carry out their crime.
In Chronicle for a Death Foretold, the people of the town allow their own curiosity to override both their moral judgment and their perception of reality. The reader is left to sort the puzzle out, and even here there are no definite answers. The uncertainty of the story emphasizes the uncertainty of intention and perception, however, allowing the book to reveal some profound and fundamental truths regarding human nature. It is this human insight that marks Marquez as a modern master of fictional uncertainty.
