powering him, filling him, completely inhabitating him'. This nameless figure, like the man in The Third Resignation' (1947), with its usages of enclosure and transformation from both Poe and Kafka, grows resigned to his state. The Night of the Curlews' (1953) represents the revenge of birds on men who drunkenly imitate them and then resign themselves to blindness when 'the birds jump on the table and peck out their eyes'. In 1946, Marquez began writing inspired by Kafka's Metamorphosis, a tale of helplessness written by a man who promoted socialism and who, for Marquez, 'recounted things in German the same way my grandmother used to'.2 The power enclosure encoded in Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982) is the machismo hunt, instigated by the epigraph : 'the hunt for love is haughty falconry'. Marquez assembles the mosaic of a moral, legal and erotic stasis, as compulsory as the work he admires above all others, Oedipus Rex—the plot of the Greek city state as fate-coi..rolled as Macondo, archaic and finally stupefying in its pattern of revenge as fate—equally reversible : fate as revenge. It is that subject in its total population subservience, a control exerted on the writer himself, fascinated by a plot recounted without judgement, without commentary or Sophoclean chorus. Macho obsession operates with the penetration of an overwhelming smell; resistance is not simply impossible, it is not envisaged. A code of honour, a totalising smell, life by machismo : this is the triad of power. The third section proceeds with the verdict of archaic primitivist law, a permission for the coding of a society: The lawyer stood by the thesis of homicide in legitimate defence of honour, which was upheld by the court of good faith, and the twins declared at the end of the trial that they would have done it again a thousand times over for the same reason. It .was they who gave a hint of the direction the defence would take as soon as they surrendered to their church a few minutes after the crime. The Church condones the_assassination oftheVicario twins' sister s alleged stealer of virginity as 'innocent before God'. Marquez constructs a mosaic narrative to resist judgement of that judgement; the first-person system prevents investigation of motivation. Whether Nasar in fact courted another woman, Flora Miguel, his fiancee, or whether Angela Vicario lied, is irrelevant to the narrative, especially when it is re-read. The epigraph infers that training a falcon to hunt is a viable metaphor for assassination within the consciousness a culture impregnates into its productions, its citizens. The embedding of crime in dense social detail by multiple reportage locks the legalism into place—the replacement of'the broken mirror of memory' by a whole mirror which holds a static reflection of a culture. The mistaken security such a culture scene might afford is given in Nasar's dream a week before his murder, and reportedly by his mother to Marquez—who identifies himself both in the story and in the Mendoza con-journal of Arts and Ideas 21