Character Analysis
The Perfect Man
Bayardo San Román is perfect. Too perfect.
He's a handsome hunk of man and all the ladies in town want a piece of him. He's a track engineer, who knows more about telegrams than the telegrapher, knows as much about medicine as a doctor, is a good drinker, goes to church, and swims better than the best swimmers in town. And that's not all. He's also filthy stinking rich.
We don't know about you, but that tips off our Spidey senses. There is something suspicious about this guy. No one can really be that perfect, can they?
Uncle Moneybags
The first crack in Bayardo's mask comes in how he seems to rely on money. For him, money is the answer to everything:
Bayardo San Roman, for his part, must have got married with the illusion of buying happiness with the huge weight of his power and fortune, for the more the plans for the festival grew, the more delirious ideas occurred to him to make it even larger. (2.29)
Everyone knows that money doesn't buy happiness, so why didn't he get the message? Also, what's wrong with him that he's trying to fix it with money? He bought his wife from her family with money, and now he's trying to ensure a happy marriage with money, but we're pretty sure this isn't going to work out well.
And it only gets worse. It turns out that Bayardo doesn't just use the money to try and make himself happy—he doesn't seem to mind using it to make other people unhappy. He uses his unlimited resources to force the poor old widower Xius out of his home:
Five minutes later, indeed, he returned to the social club with his silver-trimmed saddlebags, and on the table he laid ten bundles of thousand-peso notes with the printed bands of the State Bank still on them. The widower Xius died two months later. "He died because of that," Dr. Dionisio Iguarán said. "He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart." (2.37)
Did you read that? Xius died because of Bayardo's greed. If that's not enough to convince you that this perfect man is not so perfect, we're not sure what will do it.
More than Meets the Eye
From the moment that he arrives in town, Bayardo San Román is kind of like a Transformer. No, he's not a car that changes into a giant robot—though we wouldn't put that past Marquez, who probably would have gotten a kick out of that sort of plot twist. We mean that he appears to be one thing, but is really another. The only problem? We don't know what his real form is.
The narrator's mom says that he reminds her of the devil; someone else thinks that he's gay, and the narrator is sure that he's a very serious and sad man. But which one is true? Are any of these things true at all?
When we look at the character of Bayardo San Román, all we have are questions. Why did he come to the town? Why did he choose Angela? What happened after he found out that Angela wasn't a virgin? Why was he passed out drunk after the wedding? We don't have the answers to any of those questions. He's a total mystery, more so than any of the other characters, and that's exactly why we don't trust him.
Seriously, no one seems to know anything about him, not even the narrator:
The only time I tried to talk to him, twenty-three years later, he received me with a certain aggressiveness and refused to supply even the most insignificant fact that might clarify a little his participation in the drama. In any case, not even his family knew much more about him than we did, nor did they have the slightest idea of what he had come to do in a mislaid town, with no other apparent aim than to marry a woman he had never seen. (4.25)
So even his family doesn't know what's up with him. What is he hiding that he keeps under such a tight lock and key? We're sure that it has to be something huge…but we're never going to find out.