Strange Pilgrims

The focus of the final three stories is the death of innocence, bringing the collection full circle. An early story in Strange Pilgrims features the incorruptible body of a Colombian child—she is saintlike, her innocence preserved forever because she died in the “pure” land of her birth. The Latin American young people featured in the final three stories all complete the journey to Europe while still living, but while there, they each encounter devastating experiences that end their innocence, offering key support to the book’s thematic arguments regarding The Latin American Experience of Europe.

In “Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness,” the shock of seeing Miss Forbes’s bloody corpse ends the boys’ innocence: “Never, for the rest of our lives,” the narrator says, “would we forget what we saw in that fleeting instant” (156). In “Light Is Like Water,” the children unintentionally cause the deaths of 37 of their classmates. By highlighting the childish mischief the drowned children were engaged in at the moment of their deaths, the story draws a clear line between the dead children, whose innocence is “eternalized in the moment” (161), and the living children, who will have to live with the aftermath of the incident. Billy and Nena are not children, but “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” emphasizes their youth and their more childlike qualities, implying that their wealthy parents have coddled and protected them in ways that have prevented their full maturity. Their story ends with Nena’s death and Billy’s unwilling emergence into adult reality.

These losses of innocence are specifically tied to the European setting. The children in “Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness” would not have encountered Miss Forbes at home in Colombia. The children in “Light Is Like Water” only begin the Madrid light flood because they have been removed from their Colombian home by the sea. Billy and Nena are perfectly able to navigate their world in Colombia; it is only the unfamiliar and sometimes hostile context of Europe that creates obstacles they cannot overcome. Like many Latin Americans in the collection, these characters find that the pleasures of Europe can only be theirs temporarily, further developing the volume’s theme of The Bittersweet Nature of Impermanence. In “Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness,” the narrator and his brother are initially enjoying their summer in Sicily, but their happiness is brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of the German nanny who imposes strict, Western European ideas of propriety and berates and punishes them for the most minor transgressions. Her prejudice against their backgrounds intrudes on their happiness, causing their pleasures to slip away into the past. Similarly, Billy and Nena initially enjoy their experience of Europe. The farther they travel into the continent, however, the less pleasure they experience. The weather turns foul, Nena’s finger bleeds more and more profusely, and they are unable to get help until it is too late.

By showing how happiness slips away for Latin Americans in Europe, the stories contribute to the book’s consideration of The Influence of Context on Identity. This theme is particularly evident in “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.” In Colombia, Billy is the privileged child of high-status parents, protected from the day-to-day obstacles that other people face routinely. He is a larger-than-life character who does not have to consider the consequences of his choices. In Europe, he is shocked to find that his Colombian identity carries little weight. For the first time, he has to contend with things like parking tickets, hospital rules, and making his own arrangements for food and shelter, and he is both literally and figuratively lost at times.

It is not only the Latin American characters who illustrate how context influences identity. Miss Forbes is a German temporarily transferred to the new environment of Sicily, and she finds this shift difficult to navigate. Away from her own community, she decides to experiment with parts of her personality that she feels she must keep hidden at home: She drinks, sings, eats sweets, and swims in the sea. Significantly, however, she only does these things under cover of darkness. She tries to preserve her strict, rule-bound German identity by hiding her indulgences. Miss Forbes’s violent death at the end of the story seems to the young narrator to be a punishment for the happiness she grasped at in secret, reinforcing the idea that the identity shifts that occur in new environments may come at a great cost.