Strange Pilgrims (1992)

Strange Pilgrims (Spanish: Doce cuentos peregrinos, lit. 'Twelve Pilgrim Stories') 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 García Márquez's central questions. García Márquez himself spent some years as a virtual exile from his native Colombia.

The 12 Stories

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

Bon Voyage, Mr. President

An overthrown Latin American president, Mr. President, is exiled to Martinique. The 73-year-old man develops a peculiar pain in his ribs, lower abdomen, and groin. He travels to Geneva, Switzerland in search of a diagnosis. After extensive medical testing, he is informed that the problem resides in his spine. A risky operation is recommended to relieve the pain. The President meets a fellow countryman, Homero Rey, who works as an ambulance driver at the hospital. Homero schemes to sell an insurance plan and funeral package to the sick man, but the President is no longer wealthy and lives frugally. He is reduced to selling his dead wife's jewelry and other trinkets to pay the cost of his medical expenses and operation. Homero and his wife, Lázara, grow fond of Mr. President. They provide financial assistance and care for him after he is discharged from the hospital. The President returns to Martinique. His pain is unimproved but no worse either. He resumes many of his bad habits and considers going back to the country he once ruled, only this time as the head of a reform group.

The Saint

The story is centered on a character named Margarito Duarte and takes place in Rome. Margarito is originally from a small Andean village in 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."

The Airplane of the Sleeping Beauty

A man reflects on a peculiar flight experience from Paris to New York when the beautiful woman seated next to him asks him to not, under any circumstances, let anyone disturb her sleep during the flight. The woman remains asleep throughout the entire flight thanks to the help of the man, who thwarts any efforts by the flight attendant to awaken her but he becomes increasingly obsessed and fascinated with the sleeping woman and the situation. The narrator imagines the woman as an almost unreachable object of desire, akin to Sleeping Beauty. As the flight continues, he contemplates the nature of his obsession with her slumber and the possible parallels to the voyeuristic tendencies of others. After an eventful night, he reflects on how life can pass by unnoticed, and when the woman finally awakens, she behaves indifferently towards him, leaving him with a sense of disappointment and realization about the fleeting nature of connections. "The Airplane of the Sleeping Beauty" recounts García Márquez's personal impressions, when he fell in love at first sight with a woman at an airport in Paris.