Strange Pilgrims

1st edition cover

Strange Pilgrims (original Spanish-language title: Doce cuentos peregrinos) is a collection of twelve loosely-related short stories by the Nobel Prize winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.

Not published until 1992, the stories that make up this collection were originally written during the seventies and eighties. Each of the stories touches on the theme of dislocation, and the strangeness of life in a foreign land, although quite what "foreign" means is one of Mr. García Márquez's central questions in this book. Mr. García Márquez himself spent some years as a virtual exile from his native Colombia.

The twelve stories are:

• Bon Voyage, Mr President (Buen Viaje, Señor Presidente)
• The Saint (La Santa)
• Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane (El Avión de la Bella Durmiente)
• I Sell My Dreams (Me Alquilo para Soñar)
• "I Only Came to Use the Phone" (Solo Vine a Hablar por Teléfono)
• The Ghosts of August (Espantos de Agosto)
• María dos Prazeres
• Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen (Diecisiete Ingleses Envenenados)
• Tramontana
• Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness (El Verano Feliz de la Señora Forbes)
• Light is Like Water (La Luz es como el Agua)
• The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow (El Rastro de tu Sangre en la Nieve)

Story summaries

The Saint

The story is centered around a character named Margarito Duarte and takes place in Rome. Margarito is originally from the small Andean village of Tolima, Colombia but travels to Rome in order to begin the process of having his deceased daughter recognized as a saint. Margarito lost his wife shortly after the birth of their only daughter and she died soon after at the age of seven from an essential fever. Eleven years after her death the villagers are forced to move their loved ones from the cemetery to another location as the space is needed for a new dam. When his daughter is unearthed she is found to be still intact and completely weightless. The villagers decide that she is a saint and pool funds to send Margarito with his daughter's body to Rome. There he meets the narrator at the pensione where they are both staying. Nothing seems to come from his inexhaustible attempts to canonize his daughter and he eventually loses contact with the narrator and other characters of the story. However, twenty-two years later, and after the death of four popes, Margarito and the narrator meet again by chance and the narrator finds that Margarito is still waiting for his daughter's recognition as a saint. It is then that the narrator realizes that the true saint of the story is really Margarito. The narrator states, "Without realizing it, by means of his daughter's incorruptible body and while he was still alive, he had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization."

Sleeping Beauty And The Airplane

Gabriel Márquez sees the most beautiful woman he has ever seen in an airport and falls in love at first sight. By coincidence, she happens to be his neighbor on the plane. As soon as she takes her seat, she adopts a mannerism that is not welcoming of outside attention and quickly goes to sleep. The author never speaks a word to her. The story expresses a voyeuristic adoration.

Light is Like Water

Two young boys ask for a boat in return for their good grades. When their parents finally buy them the toy sail boat, they break the light bulbs in their home and the light comes flowing out like water. They use the light to sail around their home every Wednesday, and invite their friends to go sailing with them as well. The boys and their friends end up drowning in the light.

I Only Came To Use The Phone

A woman's car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. She hitches a ride on a bus on its way to a mental institute. Before she knows what's happening, she has been admitted as a patient. Her husband, referring to their trouble-ridden history, believes she has run off with another man. When she finally finds an opportunity to call him, he curses her and hangs up. She is forced to sleep with a guard to pass along the full message to her husband. When he arrives, he takes the doctor's account to heart and leaves the woman at the hospital, where she eventually adopts the role of insanity imposed upon her by the medical staff.

summary

In the terrifying story I Only Came to Use the Phone, a philosophical question emerged: is it the husband or the wife who was at fault? Personal bias served as the main conflict in the story. With this, I mean that an individual’s biased opinion regarding another individual could lead to the development of an incorrect judgment, which then creates an error in opinion. Using this as basis, I think it is Maria’s husband and not she who was guilty of Maria’s subsequent, mad-like decision never to leave the mental hospital. He had a biased opinion against his wife, which led to his error in opinion and judgment. Maria’s husband was biased against her actions since the very beginning. When Maria failed to return home, he immediately concluded she had left again as she had previously done to him as well as to other men before him. He was at fault since he did not even thought that she must have met some trouble along the road, which indeed was what happened when her car broke down in the Monegros Desert. Instead of worrying about a possible disaster that must have befallen her, he believed that she just ran off with a new man. When Maria finally got the chance to contact her husband for her real condition and whereabouts, he went to the mental hospital and spoke to the doctor, who confessed that Maria had a mental illness. Here, the husband again wrongly assumed that there must be some truth since Maria was behaving rather oddly. Upon deciding that she should stay longer in the hospital instead of being freed, he had judged against his wife. Our idea of truth gets distorted because of the human error of personal bias. Our distance from truth even contributes to this distortion, because we can only approximate truth but never reach it. As a result of this farness and personal subjectivity, we have different ways of seeing truth. Maria says the truth that she was not crazy, but her husband has his own brand of truth based on the accounts in which Maria manifested her seeming madness. This is a flaw on the husband’s part because his manner of philosophy was lazy and incomplete. He philosophized lazily because he believed truth to come only from an authority, such as the mental hospital expert. Against the truth of a professional, that of Maria’s would not carry weight, so her husband wrongly assumed she was crazy. Also, he philosophized incompletely because he did not consider all sides of possibilities. Her past actions made him believe she had ran off again, while it was possible too that she might have met some trouble along the way. He did not even see through her enraged protestations when she could not convince him that she was not crazy. Instead, he decided that her agitated behavior was characteristic of the mental illness she was suffering from. Being at fault, the husband has caused the ruin of Maria’s life when she decided to stay in the mental hospital as a result of his error in opinion and judgment. It may be seen as a devastating decision on the part of Maria, but it may actually be a right one, especially that no one believed the truth about her sound mentality.

María dos Prazeres

The man from the undertaking establishment came to visit María Dos Prazeres early one morning. She greeted him in her curlers and robe and escorted him into her antique-filled living room. She had recently had a vision of death at the age of seventy-six and wanted to make all preparations before her death. She picked a plot of the hill cemetery, Montjuich. She didn't want to be washed away one day. Her dog, Noi, came in and after she scolded him he cried. The man was amazed that Noi cried. María said it was important to teach a dog to laugh and cry. He asked her what she did for a living. She told him she was a whore. She had retired to the town of Gràcia and furnished her apartment with objects the Fascists had stolen from residences abandoned by the Republicans in the stampede of defeat, which she had bought at secret auctions. The only part of her past that remained was her friendship with the Count of Cardona, who continued visiting her the last Friday of every month for supper and after-dinner love. She began making countless visits to the cemetery every Sunday to prepare her plot. After many attempts, she succeeded in having Noi pick out her grave on the massive hill of identical graves. The final test for the dog was letting him leave her house to see if he would make it to the gravesite after a two-hour journey. When he did, she knew she would have someone to cry over her grave. One rainy day in November, she got a ride from the cemetery back home with a young man in a big car. He asked if he could come up. She thought this was her dream of death, but realized it was her moment to live.