Strange Pilgrims

In “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” Homero functions as the story’s deuteragonist. He is an ambulance attendant who works at a Geneva hospital. Mired in poverty, he schemes to sell insurance and funeral services to wealthy patients in order to earn a small commission. He is a skillful liar, easily convincing Mr. President that he was one of the student leaders who supported Mr. President’s campaign. He is not ashamed of the machinations he engages in to survive: Even years after meeting Mr. President, he tells “anyone willing to listen” the truth about how he met the former president and what his real intentions were in befriending the man (14).

Like Mr. President himself, Homero is morally complex. He is a timid man, not overly ambitious, but he loves his wife and children, and his primary motive for any shady dealings is to create a better life for them. His attitude toward Mr. President is not totally disingenuous: He was one of the man’s supporters—even if not really a leader of that support—and still respects the former president deeply. He is quick to empathize with the elderly man and believes his claims of poverty far more readily than his suspicious wife does. He is generous with his own time and limited resources, ironically ending up eroding his own financial position by helping the very man he intended to take money from.

Homero himself points out that his name is the Spanish equivalent of “Homer,” the ancient author credited with writing the Odyssey. This epic poem tells the story of Odysseus, whose journey home from the Trojan War takes a decade because the gods constantly intervene to prevent his return. This allusion nods to Homero’s status in Europe; he is not really at home there and is on a “journey” not fully under his own control. Like the eponymous character Odysseus, he must survive by his wits in a world that seems to conspire against him. He thus represents one possible response to The Latin American Experience in Europe, one of the collection’s major themes.

In “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” Lázara is Homero Rey’s wife. She is a Puerto Rican woman of Yoruban descent. She first came to Geneva working as a nursemaid for a Puerto Rican financier who eventually returned to Puerto Rico, abandoning Lázara to her fate in Geneva. She believes in astrology and associates her own fiery and determined nature with being a Taurus. Her dream is to be “an astrologer to millionaires” (15), but she works as a hospital aide and as an occasional cook for wealthy families.

Lázara deeply loves her husband and is in league with him in his scheme to get money from Mr. President. She is a proud woman who cleans her home rigorously and borrows fancy servingware to host Mr. President for dinner. Her instant dislike for the man offers a new perspective on Mr. President; to ordinary people not yet under his charismatic spell, he is little more than a privileged, self-centered, power-hungry criminal. The fact that Lázara eventually falls under his spell is a testament to the magnitude of his charm.

Margarito Duarte is the protagonist of “The Saint.” When the story opens, he is an elderly man whose physical appearance has changed greatly since the narrator last saw him but whose essential nature remains unchanged. As a younger man, he had “the Andean intellectual’s solemn manner” and wore “funereal clothes” (36), but after decades in Rome, he looks like any other older Roman man—a detail that hints at The Influence of Context on Identity. He is an honest, earnest person who is happy to spend time with his fellow expatriates in Rome but who does not participate in the same libertine pleasures they are constantly engaged in. The narrator calls him “secretive […] and tenacious” (36). Duarte needs these qualities because he is in Rome on a decades-old mission to get his deceased daughter recognized as a saint. He perseveres through indifference and corruption, his faith never wavering. His devotion to this single cause and his innocent faith cause the narrator to see Duarte himself as saintly, more like a mythical figure than a human man.

In “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” the titular character remains unnamed, as the narrator never learns her name—or really, anything at all significant about her. She is beautiful, with long black hair, green eyes, and light brown skin. She sits down on the plane and precisely arranges her things around her, instructs the flight staff not to wake her, and falls asleep for almost the entire journey. She wakes just as the plane begins to land, and once it is on the ground, she leaves the plane quickly. This is the narrator’s entire experience with her—and yet she is the object of his fascination for the entire journey.

The sleeping woman thus functions as an object of the narrator’s desire and exists to reveal the narrator’s nature rather than her own. He projects his own wishes onto her and toasts her sleeping form, engaging in a brief fantasy relationship with what is in truth just a sleeping stranger. He thinks of her as a “storybook creature,” and this view of her as more fictional object than real-life human subject is reinforced by his behavior: For instance, he spends the entire flight ogling her despite the wedding band she wears and, despite the fact that she is Andean—presumably, like the narrator himself—he exoticizes her with claims about her supposed “aura of antiquity” and voice “tinged with Oriental sadness” (54, 58). He romanticizes and exaggerates the connection between them, revealing himself to be self-centered and foolishly self-indulgent.

“Frau Frieda” is the nickname of the protagonist of the story “I Sell My Dreams.” She is a Colombian woman who came from a large family in Caldas and who showed a talent for prophetic dreams early in her life. When she was still a very young woman, she moved to Vienna to study music. She is a courageous, clever, and determined woman who greatly impresses the group of Colombian students she spends time with in Vienna. They learn that when she was impoverished and suffering during the cold Austrian winter, she sought out a house that looked comfortable and offered her services as a dreamer. Gradually, she builds a fortune in Vienna and is able to retire to Portugal—one of the collection’s relatively rare depictions of Latin American success in Europe.

Her name is an allusion to Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, whose name was originally spelled “Frieda” before she changed the spelling to distance herself from her German heritage amid rising anti-German sentiment during the period leading up to World War II. This allusion is suggested by the text’s mentions of the snake ring (snakes were a prominent feature of Kahlo’s paintings), the woman’s unattractiveness and charisma (both attributes commonly associated with Kahlo), Pablo Neruda’s arrival in Barcelona (Neruda was a friend of Kahlo’s), and the narrator’s ironic emphasis on the “German” nature of the nickname. This evocation of Kahlo suggests that, like Kahlo, the protagonist is a powerful and talented woman whose work explores the connection between the conscious and the unconscious.

Maria de la Luz Cervantes is the young Mexican protagonist of the story “I Only Came to Use the Phone.” The story’s narrator describes her as a tactful and charming woman who is comfortable in environments that even some men find intimidating. In her younger days, she had an independent, pragmatic nature and a tendency to end relationships abruptly and without sentimentality. A turning point in her story was leaving Saturno—her husband in the narrative present—for another man who ended up abandoning her at the altar. When she returned to Saturno, she was emotionally defeated. She gave up her dream of acting to support Saturno’s career as a magician by being his assistant and moved with him to Barcelona.

In the narrative present, she still shows some of her pragmatic, determined, and independent nature when she is involuntarily incarcerated in a mental institution. She tries repeatedly to get the staff to believe her story about her incarceration being a case of mistaken identity and to let her use the phone. She reluctantly trades sex for help in getting a message to her husband. She breaks a portrait of Franco and a stained glass window, symbols of the Spanish authorities’ unjust imprisonment of her. Ultimately, however, Maria is a dynamic character whose incarceration changes her. She becomes docile and complacent, a victim of the historical practice of “treating” independence and nonconformity in women by declaring them “insane” and forcing them to submit to authority.

Ludovico is the man who, centuries past, built the castle in which the narrator and his family spend the night in “The Ghosts of August.” He stabbed his wife to death in their marital bed and then turned his own dogs on himself. He was torn apart by the dogs and now, centuries later, haunts the castle at night, trapped in a “purgatory of love” (93). Other than the fact that Ludovico was a powerful man who patronized both the arts and war, no details about him are given. He is a flat and static character who embodies the intrusion of past violence and bygone beliefs into the present day.

Maria, the protagonist of the story “Maria dos Prazeres,” is a 76-year-old woman living in Catalonia. She is originally from Brazil and has dark skin and “wiry hair and pitiless yellow eyes” (98). Maria is a sex worker who has many critical thoughts about the carelessness and insensitivity of men. She is still vain about her appearance even at 76. Her last name, “Prazeres,” is a Portuguese word meaning “pleasures.”

Despite her fierce appearance, Maria is unexpectedly tender-hearted in some ways. She has an intuitive understanding of animals and trains her beloved dog not only to cry but to cry specifically at the gravesite she has chosen for herself so that she will have a mourner as long as the dog is alive. She is meticulous in preparing her will so that all of the people she loves will have mementoes of her after her death. Because she has kept her tenderness hidden for so long, Maria herself is surprised at the end of her story when she realizes that the fear she has been feeling—and attributing to the approach of death—is actually a fear of experiencing sincere romantic passion for the first time. Her story contrasts with much of the collection’s emphasis on The Bittersweet Nature of Impermanence, as Maria rediscovers a kind of youth despite her age.

Prudencia is the widowed Colombian protagonist of “Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen.” She travels to Italy hoping to see the pope; she is a devout Catholic and hopes that this will bring her peace following her husband’s death. She is so devout, in fact, that she has vowed to wear the rough costume of a religious pilgrim for the rest of her life. She chooses the habit of Saint Francis, the patron saint of animals, and the story shows her to be hypersensitive to the fates of animals—particularly small birds, with whom she is symbolically identified. The practice of eating songbirds in Naples especially upsets her and suggests that Prudencia herself will, figuratively, be “eaten” by Naples.

Prudencia is vulnerable because she is an innocent—even naive—character. She is hurt by the change in attitude she sees in her Italian shipmates once the ship lands in Naples; when they draw away from her, she does not understand that they see her as their inferior. She sees cruelty and hypocrisy in the Italians’ callous attitudes toward death and suffering and in the casual way they practice their religion.

In “Miss Forbes’s Summer of Pleasure,” Miss Forbes is a German nanny in charge of two Colombian boys during their family’s summer in Sicily. Her personality is divided into daytime and nighttime sides. During the day, she wears overtly military-style clothing and projects a disciplined persona. She refuses to swim when the boys have their daily diving lesson and instead sits on the beach sweating, developing a powerful “monkey urine” funk. She lectures the boys constantly about European decorum and scrutinizes every detail of their appearance and behavior, punishing them for every small lapse. At night, however, she swims, bakes and eats sweet treats, drinks wine, and sings German songs to herself in her room. Often, she cries herself to sleep and appears in the morning with swollen, red eyes.

At the end of the story, a letter arrives from Germany that lightens her daytime mood. That night, she is stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. The narrator sees that she did not struggle against her attacker and surmises that Miss Forbes saw the attack as “the inexorable price of her summer of happiness” (156). This suggests that Miss Forbes felt guilty about the hypocrisy of her divided personality and saw her own nighttime indulgences as a kind of sinful weakness deserving of punishment. By extension, this suggests that the European imposition of values onto Latin Americans is similarly hypocritical and may also have terrible repercussions.

In “Light Is Like Water,” Toto and Joel are the nine- and seven-year-old protagonists, brothers who learn to navigate light like water and who unintentionally cause the deaths of 37 other children. They are bright children but, as their father notes, need external motivation to succeed at school. They have no intrinsic interest in good grades and school prizes, being more motivated by their own pleasures, which center on water. Even though they have left their seaside home in Colombia for a temporary stay in landlocked Madrid, the boys beg for a boat and diving equipment in exchange for getting good grades. When their parents are out, the two break lightbulbs and sail their boat and dive in the “flood” of light. Throughout the story, their manipulation of light symbolically suggests their innocent “light-filled” youth. Ironically, their goodness and innocence are what end up killing their classmates. Wanting to share their pleasures with their friends, they host a party during which all of their classmates drown in the light. As the product of the boys’ longing for their home by the sea, the deaths also speak to the collection’s interest in exile and displacement.

Billy is the Colombian protagonist of “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.” He is Nena Daconte’s husband and the father of her unborn child. Before meeting Nena, he was considered “an ignorant brute” and engaged in impulsive (167), sometimes violent behavior. Even though he is deeply in love with Nena, he is not truly considerate of her perspective. For instance, on the night the story opens, he keeps driving despite her exhaustion simply because he takes so much pleasure in driving the luxury car his father has given him as a wedding gift. Nena believes that underneath his “bitter shell” is “a frightened, tender” person (167), but in truth, his behavior is often self-involved and childish. Billy is a dynamic character, however; away from his father’s constant indulgence, Billy must face consequences and function independently for the first time, and this causes him to grow into a more mature and self-reflective person.