Strange Pilgrims

“He sat on a wooden bench under the yellow leaves in the deserted park, contemplating the dusty swans with both his hands resting on the silver handle of his cane, and thinking about death.”

The story’s tone is established immediately in its first sentence’s descriptive detail. Mr. President sits under “yellow leaves,” which are associated with autumn and, symbolically, with the approach of death. His cane has a silver head, like an elderly man, and he rests his hands atop it as if fatigued. The Jardin Anglais is “deserted,” and even its famous swans are “dusty”—a subversion of the collection’s broader association of birds with youth and innocence, but one that reflects its depiction of Europe as a place of decay and corruption. These details create a wistful, melancholy tone reinforced by the man’s thoughts of death.

“At that moment Homero saw him with his heart and laid down his weapons.”

The passage metaphorically compares Homero’s manipulations to weapons. It suggests that Mr. President’s extreme humility utterly “disarms” Homero, and from this moment, Homero’s intentions toward the elderly man are sincere instead of an attempt to flatter and manipulate Mr. President into giving him money. The shift in Homero’s identity—from manipulator to manipulated—demonstrates The Influence of Context on Identity.

“At last Margarito requested that the weightlessness of the body be verified. The functionary verified it but refused to admit it.”

Duarte’s innocent faith in his daughter’s saintliness and in the Holy See’s duty to canonize her contrasts with his actual experiences in Rome. He perseveres as he is ignored and turned away again and again. When at last he is able to see someone with some authority, the man behaves dishonestly despite his religious calling and refuses to acknowledge evidence that he himself has verified. This supports the collection’s theme of The Latin American Experience of Europe as a place of corruption and exploitation.

“[T]he diamond light of another time had turned muddy, and the places that had once been mine and sustained my memories were strange to me now.”

The narrator’s metaphor comparing the remembered past to a diamond that has become less brilliant with time conveys a sense of diminished value and a tone of melancholy. His commentary about the places that once were “his” having become strange to him shows his alienation from both Rome and his own remembered past, supporting the story’s exploration of the bittersweet nature of impermanence.

“She was beautiful and lithe, with soft skin the color of bread and eyes like green almonds.”

The narrator’s fixation on the woman at the airport is entirely physical, as his first description of her conveys. The similes comparing her physical features to items of food frame her as a consumable, inanimate object of pleasure.

“After I got rid of the excesses of champagne, I caught sight of myself, contemptible and ugly, in the mirror.”

The device of the narrator seeing himself in the mirror allows for a brief symbolic moment of self-recognition during his long night of fantasy. Although the narrator is literally looking at his physical reflection in the mirror, he also “sees” a deeper truth about himself: His behavior, even more than his visage, is “contemptible and ugly.”

“‘Only poetry is clairvoyant,’ he said.”

This statement, which the narrator attributes to the famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, makes a claim for the mystical powers of poetry—and, by extension, fiction, as the word “poet” also refers to a novelist in the earlier story “The Saint.” Making a legendary writer like Neruda the origin of this sentiment lends it ethos, or authority based on character. The idea is in keeping with García Márquez’s beliefs about the power of storytelling and his incorporation of elements of magical realism into his writing.

“‘You cannot imagine how extraordinary she was,’ he said. ‘You would have been obliged to write a story about her.’”

The ambassador’s comment about Frau Frieda is ironic on multiple levels. There is dramatic irony in the reader’s awareness that the narrator actually knows Frieda well. There is also a sly, metafictional irony in the fact that the narrator is telling this story about Frieda now—within the world of the book, he is the story’s “writer.”

“At first she resisted the canonical hours with their mindless routine of matins, lauds, vespers, as well as the other church services that took up most of the time.”

The detailed description of the religious routine imposed on the inmates at the mental institution identifies the facility as affiliated with the Catholic Church. Since the Catholic Church played a significant role in colonialism and that era’s oppression of Indigenous peoples in Latin America, Maria’s reaction to this routine suggests the unwilling “captivity” of those subjected to colonial rule. This develops the text’s theme of the Latin American experience of Europe.

“This has been death.”

Maria’s metaphorical comparison of being locked up in a mental health facility to being dead conveys how completely erased she feels by the experience. Her previous identity and her personal agency are gone, and she is now just another inmate, perceived by others inaccurately through the lens of her captivity. This supports the collection’s focus on the influence of context on identity.

“The moment was magical. There stood the bed, its curtains embroidered in gold thread, the bedspread and its prodigies of passementerie still stiff with the dried blood of his sacrificed lover.”

The imagery of the bed is a study in contrasts: Details that emphasize luxurious grandeur, like the gold embroidery and the “prodigies of passementerie”—ornate textile decorations—clash sharply with the “still stiff” blood of Ludovico’s wife. The alliteration of repeated “m,” “p,” and “s” sounds creates a lyricism that also contrasts with the idea of a crime scene that has been left untouched for centuries. That the narrator finds this “magical” is paradoxical and helps to develop the collection’s tone of nostalgia.

“‘What foolishness,’ I said to myself, ‘to still believe in ghosts in this day and age.’”

The narrator’s thoughts upon waking are ironic, as he will soon discover that something “ghostly” has happened to himself and his wife during the night. He would like to believe that he is living in a modern age in which the beliefs and actions of the past—like Ludovico’s murder of his wife and superstitions about ghosts—are irrelevant. However, he discovers that the world of today is “haunted” by the violence of the past.

“Although he was new at the job, he knew enough about it not to expect this kind of festive welcome at eight o’clock in the morning, least of all from a merciless old lady who at first glance seemed a madwoman escaped from the Americas.”

The Catalonian salesman’s first impression of Maria conveys the prejudices many Latin Americans face in Europe. Maria has done nothing unusual to merit being described as an “escaped” “madwoman,” but her appearance is enough to alarm the man, a fact that develops the theme of the Latin American experience of Europe. The use of the specific diction “madwoman” ties Maria thematically to another Maria in the text—the Maria who is involuntarily consigned to a mental institution in “I Only Came to Use the Phone”—implying a European perception of Latin America as fundamentally irrational.

“On her first visit, her heart had skipped a beat when she saw the three nameless graves near the gate.”

Maria’s visceral reaction to the unmarked graves of the anarchists reveals her political leanings—leanings she has had to hide to cater to the powerful men who pay her for sex. She also feels that her own identity has been erased by her history of being trafficked from Brazil into European sex work as a child, so she reacts with empathy to the erasure of the anarchists’ names.

“To her surprise, Señora Prudencia Linero, who had made so many dear old friends on board, who had watched children while their parents danced, and even sewn a button on the first officer’s tunic, found them all distant and changed.”

The change in the Italian passengers’ demeanor once the ship reaches Naples surprises Prudencia; it is her first taste of the Latin American experience of Europe, and she does not yet understand that her ethnicity marginalizes her in this new setting. This characterizes Prudencia as both kind-hearted and naive. The specific details of the ways that Prudencia helped others on board and the diction “dear old friends” support this characterization. The tasks she undertook for European passengers were typical of the tasks servants undertake, not the actions of a high-status equal. Although Prudencia believes that she has made “dear old friends,” the narrator deploys the phrase sarcastically, as, in an 18-day crossing, it is possible to develop “dear friends” but not “old friends.” The passage also develops the story’s theme of the influence of context on identity: As long as the ship was in the liminal space of the ocean crossing, the European passengers saw Prudencia as worthy of kindness, but now, having reached Italian shores, they see her as beneath them.

“All at once, in a kind of hallucination, Señora Prudencia Linero felt that she was in a chicken cage rising slowly through the center of an echoing marble staircase, catching glimpses of people in their houses with their most intimate misgivings, with their torn underwear and acidic belches.”

The phrase “kind of hallucination” suggests that Prudencia is having not just a stray thought but a vision—that her idea contains an important spiritual truth. In this case, the image of Prudencia as a chicken caught in a cage where she is forced to confront others’ failings functions as a symbolic metaphor that explores her vulnerability and displacement, supporting the text’s theme of the Latin American experience of Europe. She has already seen a disturbing incident in which chicks were accidentally trampled on the docks, and this comparison of her to a chicken suggests that she, too, will be “trampled” by Naples. The wire cage also reflects the motif of Catholicism by functioning as a symbol of the confessional, where she sees others’ weaknesses exposed. This reinforces that Prudencia embodies a spiritual sincerity that the Europeans around her lack.

“Then the wind began. First in intermittent gusts that became more frequent until one of them remained, unmoving, without pause, without relief, with an intensity and cruelty that seemed supernatural.”

Several devices contribute to the harsh power of this description of the tramontana wind. The wind is personified as capable of cruelty and is also, in a touch of magical realism, characterized as “supernatural.” The first sentence in the passage is brief, giving the statement about the wind beginning more visual power. It is followed by a much longer sentence that uses asyndeton (the absence of a conjunction where one is expected), anaphora (the repeated use of a word at the beginning of successive phrases or clauses), and redundancy to gradually build the description in a way that mimics the building power of the wind.

“But there was no way to dissuade the Swedes, who dragged the boy away with the European intention of curing him by force of his African superstitions.”

The heritage of Caribbean peoples—often combining Indigenous, European, and African ancestry—is a source of prejudice for the Swedes that, to the narrator, typifies all of Europe. The Swedes see the young Caribbean man’s beliefs as “superstitions,” when the events of the story prove that he simply has access to a supernatural truth that they are ignorant of. This dismissal of Latin American cultural knowledge is a part of the book’s exploration of the Latin American experience of Europe.

“She smelled of monkey urine. ‘That’s how every European smells, above all in summer,’ our father told us. ‘It’s the smell of civilization.’”

The comedic contradiction between the idea of “civilization” and the smell of “monkey urine” contributes a rare note of humor to an otherwise grim tale. The identification of this animal smell with Europeans undercuts their claim to cultural superiority and portrays Miss Forbes’s strict insistence on following the arbitrary rules of upper-class European deportment as ironic, hinting that her real motive is a kind of animalistic aggression toward the boys in her care.

“It was as if he had tossed a grenade on the table. Miss Forbes turned pale, her lips hardened until the smoke of the explosion began to clear away, and the lenses of her glasses blurred with tears.”

The simile comparing the narrator’s younger brother’s critical remark about the soup at dinner to a grenade is hyperbolic, conveying the emotional “explosiveness” of the situation. This is the first time one of the boys has truly behaved badly, and they anticipate swift and terrible punishment from Miss Forbes. The simile of the grenade is extended into a conceit by the next sentence, which develops the comparison with the phrase “until the smoke of the explosion began to clear away.” The moment is of such magnitude that Miss Forbes is temporarily too stunned to speak. In fact, instead of punishing them, she retreats, her “soldier” facade crumbling in the face of the first real threat to her authority.

“[T]hey filled the apartment to a depth of two fathoms, dove like tame sharks under the furniture, including the beds, and salvaged from the bottom of the light things that had been lost in darkness for years.”

The magical-realist premise of light that can support a boat and be navigated by divers creates a comparison of this light to the ocean itself. The simile comparing the boys to “tame sharks” conveys their innocent connection to nature and to the ocean. It is this innocence that allows them to swim down into the depths and free things previously captive to darkness.

“[F]loating through the entire house were their thirty-seven classmates, eternalized in the moment of peeing into the pot of geraniums, singing the school song with the words changed to make fun of the headmaster, sneaking a glass of brandy from Papa’s bottle.”

The details of the children’s final actions emphasize innocent, school-age mischief. The diction “eternalized” makes it clear that now, the children will never lose this innocence—drowned in the light, they will always be young. This lends nuance to the theme of transience, suggesting that permanence, too, can come at a cost.

“That afternoon, aching with the punishment he had received, Billy Sanchez began to be an adult.”

Both Billy and Nena are initially portrayed as somewhat childlike. Billy in particular has never had to live with the consequences of his bad behavior and, as a result, has not really grown up. However, after the security guard’s harsh reaction to Billy trespassing at the hospital, he begins to understand that, away from home, he will be held responsible for his choices—and for the first time, he takes a step into adulthood. This develops the collection’s theme of the influence of context on identity.