Why?
"Sons of bitches!" Santiago shouted as the knife pierced his hand. Why, he tried to ask, but his mind was too occupied with the pain to form coherent words. The knife pulled out and struck him again. "Oh, mother of mine!" he exclaimed before losing himself in blackness.
Santiago opened his eyes to find the Vicario brothers still knifing him against the door. However, he could no longer feel the pain of his wounds. He laughed dryly, amused by the fact that they could not hurt him. One of the twins sliced his stomach open, and Santiago watched as his own intestines exploded from his body. Yet even then, he could feel nothing. Kneeling, Santiago took his innards in his hands. He rose, still holding his intestines and again tried to question his killers, but again found that he could not bring the words to his lips. In a state of confusion, he began to walk.
He walked completely around the house and went in through the kitchen door. Seeing him, Wenefrida Márquez called out to him, "Santiago, my son, what has happened to you?"
"They've killed me Wene child," Santiago replied. He stumbled and fell before he had the chance to continue his thought. They've killed me, but I do not understand why. He managed to get back up and brush the dirt from his guts before he was again swallowed by darkness.
Santiago awoke, this time to an empty room. Lifting his head from the floor, he saw an old woman sitting cross-legged beside him. Confused, he was about to ask her name, but suddenly realized that he already knew it. "Yolanda?" he asked, startled.
The woman smiled. "Are you so surprised to see me?"
"But, you're…" Santiago fished for some way to say it tactfully.
"Dead?" Yolanda Xius stated, so bluntly that Santiago almost flinched. "Yes, I am."
"I don't understand. What has happened to me?" Santiago asked.
"Do you not already know?" she replied.
With a wave of her hand, the scene around them changed to one much more familiar to him. The two now stood in Santiago's own living room. In one corner, several people were crafting some sort of box out of wood, while another group was gathered around something that Santiago could not see from where he was standing. Moving closer, he noticed the stink of rotting flesh and wrinkled his nose in disgust. He continued to walk toward the group, despite the awful stench emanating from its center. Without knowing why, he felt a pressing need to see what was happening. No one seemed to notice him as he stepped into the crowd. Peering over one man's shoulder, he caught a glimpse of what everyone was looking at and let out a gasp of shock as he stared down at his own face, his dead eyes staring blindly back up at him.
Nausea swirled in the pit of his stomach. He turned back to Yolanda Xius and groaned, "Take it away. Don't make me look at this any longer."
"Very well." Smiling sympathetically, she waved her hand, and once more they were in the empty room. However, it was no longer empty. There was a small chair in one corner of the room, which Yolanda now occupied. "Well?" she prompted.
"Am I dead?" Santiago asked. Yolanda Xius only nodded in response. Santiago crumpled to the floor, still nauseated and confused by all that had happened. The word he had been unable to speak earlier he now croaked out, "Why?"
She smiled and again motioned with her hand, summoning up another time and place. The room they were in was dark. Santiago could not tell where they were, or even the time of day, as the curtains were tightly drawn so that no light could get in. Despite the darkness, he was somehow able to see a mass writhing on a bed set against one wall of the room. Looking closer, he could make out a leg or an arm escaping from under the blanket every now and then. He could also hear low moaning and quick breathy sounds coming from there as well. Suddenly, a head protruded from one end, thrown back in ecstasy. Santiago just had time to recognize the face of Angela Vicario before he was again returned to the no longer empty room. It now contained a bed as well, which he was sitting on.
Repulsed by what he had just been shown, Santiago yelled at Yolanda, "Why did you have to show me that? That…that…" At a loss for words, he redirected his sentence. "What does that have to do with me?"
"All in time," Yolanda replied soothingly, "All in time." With another hand gesture, the scene changed once more.
This time, they arrived to find a somewhat older Angela slumped resignedly on a couch, a man sitting across from her. The man spoke anxiously to her, apparently trying to coax something out of her. "Come, Angela. Tell me, please. Who is it you are trying to protect? No one believes that it is him. You only told your brothers that it was because you didn't believe they would dare go up against Santiago Nasar." Santiago jerked in surprise at the mention of his name.
Angela barely acknowledged the man's arguments, hardly looking up from her embroidery. Her only response was to say, "Don't beat it to death, cousin. He was the one. I should know."
Upon his return to the room, Santiago found Yolanda occupied for the first time since he had been there. She was turned away from him, and he crossed the room to see what she could possibly be doing. He looked over her shoulder to find that she was writing in a journal of some sort. The current page read, "Yes, it is I, Yolanda Xius, who has been taking-" Santiago could read no more because at that point Yolanda noticed him behind her and snapped shut the book.
She looked somewhat indignant, but that quickly passed, and she asked him calmly, "Are you satisfied? Do you understand now why you have died?"
"On the contrary," Santiago sighed, now more confused than ever, "I have less of an idea now than I did while I was being stabbed to death."
"If you have not figured it out by now, this should make it clear to you," Yolanda said.
Another wave of the hand, another shift of setting, and Santiago was standing in the middle of a courtroom. There was Angela again, now on the witness stand. "And what do you know of the decedent, Santiago Nasar?" the investigating magistrate asked her.
Santiago leaned in with interest, wishing to finally discover what his part in all of this was. Although he knew she could not see him, it seemed as if Angela looked directly at him as she spoke, a silent apology in her eyes. "He was my perpetrator."