Strange Pilgrims

Reflections on Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I. Summary

Strange Pilgrims is a compilation of short stories about Caribbean émigrés in Europe, mostly contained to Barcelona, Spain and Italy, with a few stories taking place elsewhere.  

Below I offer a brief summary of each of the twelve stories, but first, allow me to identify the concatenations that Garcia Marquez delicately weaves throughout the stories. Listed in no particular order, but numbered for the sake of clarity, they are 1) beauty, 2) deception, 3) dreams, 4) Italian singing, and 6) ignominy. These themes peek in and out of different stories with all the playfulness of a rubix cube, sometimes appearing for deliberate manipulation, other times seen merely on the oblique, as if in a passing turn. They appear as themes, as motifs, and as tools throughout the stories, but underneath them each of the characters experiences a greater problem. Reading story after story, all of the characters confront an inescapable loneliness that is the result of obstinate life, life surrounded by death but insistent on living.

More on this in the summaries and following section:

“Bon Voyage, Mr. President”

An overthrown Caribbean president lives in poverty in Geneva, where he discovers he needs a surgery to continue living. A couple from his home country befriends him and helps him to pay for his surgery, despite their original intention to con him out of his money. After the couple nurses him back to health, he leaves Geneva, and writes back that he decides he will attempt to regain his presidency, but only after leaving the couple and their family more impoverished than they had been before. The story is really about Làzara, the wife, and how she is deceived by the president. 

“The Saint”

Margarito Duarte carries his dead daughter around the Vatican in a cello-sized display case. Not only has she not decomposed, but she looks alive and has become weightless. Told from the perspective of a film student in Italy who befriends Margarito, this story intersperses youthful Italian gallivanting with Margarito’s failure to canonize his daughter. Only in the final few paragraphs do you realize the story is more about the narrator’s perspective than Margarit’s struggle.

“Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane”

A tragically comic story about a beautiful woman who manages to sleep through a twelve hour plane ride from Paris to New York and the twisted man who spends all twelve hours contemplating her. Would be good for teaching a gender lens.

“I Sell My Dreams”

When a flood in Cuba crushes a woman wearing a distinctive ring, the narrator reminisces about a woman he knew who made a living interpreting her own dreams.

“’I Only Came to Use the Phone”

The first genuinely disturbing story. Marìa’s car breaks down, and the only ride she manages to hitch is to an insane asylum, where she is forced to stay for months, not allowed to use the phone to call her husband, Saturno the Magician, who in the meantime assumes his wife has run away with another man.

“The Ghosts of August”

Who believes in ghosts? A family inadvertently spends the night at a castle in Arezzo, Italy, a castle supposedly haunted by the troubled spirit of Ludovico, a crazed genius who stabbed his wife and had his own hunting dogs kill him. Awakened by the bright light of the rising sun, the narrator is about to dismiss his worries about Ludovico’s ghost, when he realizes he and his wife are lying in bed on the third floor of the castle. They went to bed on the first…

“Maria dos Prazeres”

Maria dos Prazeres is a well-to-do but now elderly prostitute who thinks she is about to die, and so she buys a plot in one of the most noble graveyards in Barcelona and then trains her dog to cry at her grave. Time passes, and Maria lives on, well beyond when she thought she would surely be dead. One day, returning from her grave, she and her dog, Noi, are trapped in the rained and driven home by a young man, who asks if he may come up to her room afterwards. Honestly, I am not entirely sure how to interpret the ending of this story, but my impression is that the story ends with her experiencing the ecstasy of anticipating this new, young lover. If my interpretation is accurate, then the ending is an exemplary scene of an obstinate life hanging on despite the certainty of death.

“Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen”

Tells the story of an elderly woman who travels from the Caribbean to Rome to gain an audience with the Pope. The story is not about that audience, but rather about her harsh exposure to post-war (WWII) Italy. The title comes from seventeen Englishmen who are poisoned from eating oyster soup in the dining of the hotel in which the woman almost stays.

“Tramontana”

“Tramontana” is a haunting story. The title refers to a powerful land wind that rages through Barcelona and nearby towns for three days. Tramontana is so powerful that one cannot walk in the street while it blows, and one would be unwise to leave the house at all. By the end of the story, Tramontana causes two suicides.

“Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness”

Of the twelve stories, this is the only other one that I have difficulty with on a superficial level, along with Maria dos Prazeres. Miss Forbes is a German governess hired to educate two South American children, living in Europe, in the manners of European high society. When the boys discover how hypocritical Miss Forbes truly is, they try to poison her. Miss Forbes dies, but to the boys shock, her dead body is not placidly poisoned in her bead, but on the floor, riddled with 27 mortal stab wounds. 

“Light is Like Water”

A fascinating, almost metafictional story about two boys in Madrid who earn a small boat and diving gear for doing well in school. How do they use their rewards in land-locked Madrid? They flood their apartment with light.

“The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow”

Nena Daconte and her husband of three days, Billy Sanchez, drive across the Spanish and French countryside to their honeymoon location in Paris. Nena, however, has cut herself on a rose-thorn, and her finger will not stop bleeding. By the time they get to Paris, she has lost most of her blood, and is admitted to the hospital. Because she must go to intensive care, Billy is turned away until visiting hours the following Tuesday, almost a week later. Billy checks into an apartment and tries to return to the hospital multiple times, but is unable. When next Tuesday comes around, he returns to the hospital, but does not find Nena. Instead, he finds the doctor that admitted her, who reveals that Nena bled to death the previous Thursday and all of Paris has been looking for Billy since then.

II. Response

I thought these stories were brilliantly executed. What Garcia Marquez does so well is he makes the reader realize, early on, that something about the situation in the story is not right. In most cases, however, the reader does not discover what is awry until the very end of the story. The example that sticks out most to me is the second story, “The Saint.” At first, the reader might think the story is about Margarito and his quest to get his daughter canonized, but quickly the focus of the story drifts. The reader asks, “Why have we drifted from Margarito and his daughter?” But at the end of the story, when the narrator says, “Then I had no doubt, if I ever had any at all, that he was Saint Margarito […] he had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization” (53), he is merely repeating what the reader already knows. In the narrators last few paragraphs, the reader discovers that the story is more about the narrator and how jaded his worldview has become upon his return to Rome. The real question to ask is, “What has happened to this once blissful film student?”

III. Context in Literature: Similarities and Differences

Reading through these stories, I was reminded of the Caribbean-American novels I read last Spring for my Caribbean literature course. While Garcia Marquez tells a different sort of emigrant experience, the struggle for identity, for sense-making in a new place, for sacrifice, and for maturity are much the same. They are personal struggles, not the broader societal struggles that Achebe treats in Things Fall Apart. It may seem inappropriate to compare Things Fall Apart to Strange Pilgrims, but I think for the purpose of this study it can be beneficial. Short stories tend to be a more intimate genre compared to the novel. It makes sense that Garcia Marquez’s stories would be more about the characters he follows and their reactions upon being transplanted, and less about the idea of colliding cultures.

Another theme to highlight in these stories in the context of world literature is the role of travel, which in these stories is inherent and often accomplished by the exposition. What does traveling do to these characters? Why are they traveling? A few of them travel for recovery from illness. Others travel for vacation or sightseeing. Still others travel for much more peculiar reasons. But are any of them traveling for battle, like Odysseus or Gilgamesh and Enkidu? How has the notion of travel changed over the years? What historical developments have made this possible? From here, one could also address globalization and the interactions between Caribbean and Latin American countries and other western nations like America and European countries when commercial travel and economic interactions are becoming increasingly international.

IV. Teaching and Learning

I could justify using Strange Pilgrims to meet a variety of educational objectives. The stories could be used to scaffold “theme” across a full-length work of literature. Even though SP is a compilation of short stories, the same themes are blatantly incorporated across stories, if only as reminiscent of previous tales, to remind the reader she is still reading the same book. But simply tracking the different themes and images would be inappropriate. I would have students reflect on how images appear differently across stories, how they change, how they evolve or devolve, increase or decrease in significance. Practicing this with short stories would cater to adolescents relatively short attention spans by allowing them to progress story by story, gaining the reading skills necessary to focus their attention throughout one full-length narrative, like a novel.

The moves Garcia Marquez makes in setting up and telling these stories are so transparent that they would be ideal for teaching students how to write short stories. Specifically, “Light is Like Water” is a playful example of how to establish a metaphor and run with it, carry it to fruition. The narrator in the story even says, “This fabulous adventure was the result of a frivolous remark I made while taking part in a seminar on the poetry of household objects” (158).

I also noticed in the introduction that many of the stories in this collection were originally screenplays, journalistic notes, taped interviews, and other media. Knowing that many of the stories originated in other forms, I would encourage students to pick a story and rewrite it in a different medium.