Strange Pilgrims

The third, fourth, and fifth stories in the collection focus on female figures. All three are, like the men in the earlier stories, “pilgrims” traveling between Europe and the Americas. Maria is Mexican, “Sleeping Beauty” is Andean, and Frau Fieda is Colombian. Despite being the main characters of these stories, however, two of the women are not true protagonists because they lack sufficient agency to be the prime movers behind their stories’ plots. Moreover, each of their stories is narrated by a man. Two of these men—the narrators of “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane” and “I Sell My Dreams”—are active participants in the stories’ plots, but the final narrator is a nameless, faceless figure who briefly interrupts what originally seems to be third-person narration to make it clear that he is reporting events he heard about through a group of friends in Barcelona. These structural choices echo the marginalization that the women experience as a result of not only their ethnicity but also their gender. 

“Sleeping Beauty” is the most passive of the three central figures. She exists only as a mythic site of male fantasy. In truth, the narrator knows nothing about the individual woman behind the beauty he fetishizes—not even her name. The sobriquet the narrator gives her is a reference to a story in which an unconscious princess is brought back to life by a prince’s kiss. The original Sleeping Beauty is not a willing participant; decisions about her body and her fate are made for her by a man she does not know. Similarly, the male narrator obsesses about the beauty of the woman next to him on the plane. He catalogues the minutiae of her appearance, gazing at her “for several hours,” assuming a right to the pleasure he feels while watching her. He imagines that their seating arrangement is like “a marriage bed” and that they are similar to “old married couples” because she does not wish him good morning after she wakes (59, 61), thus reinterpreting even her indifference through the lens of his desire. His sorrow when the encounter is over belongs entirely to him, as the woman is completely unaware of his fascination with her. “Sleeping Beauty” simply exists as a screen onto which the male narrator projects his own desires and his reflections on The Bittersweet Nature of Impermanence.

Maria de la Luz Cervantes is not as passive as “Sleeping Beauty,” but in the end, her agency is completely taken away from her. It is significant that she is Mexican by birth because several elements of the story suggest a comparison of her situation to the oppression of Indigenous Latin American groups during colonial times. In particular, the details of the mental institution’s decor and routines—a portrait of Franco, the keeping of the Church’s canonical hours, the beatings dealt out to underdressed inmates, its “gloomy medieval dining room” (83), and so on—evoke Spain, the Catholic Church, and history. These elements of the story suggest that colonial times may be long past, but Latin Americans traveling in Europe continue to feel the echoes of this era of history.

However, Maria’s story is not just about The Latin American Experience of Europe; her story is also about her gender. Her husband, Saturno, is threatened by her agency because he is terrified that she will leave him. Over time, he pressures her to “mature” by giving up her own dreams and “dedicat[ing] herself to him” (80). After her final act of independence, he knows that she has capitulated to his control when he finds her asleep on the couch, dressed in an outfit similar to the one Duarte’s daughter was buried in—she has become his “Sleeping Beauty,” passively waiting for his kiss to wake and claim her. This desire to control Maria makes Saturno vulnerable to the institution’s claims that she needs to be incarcerated: When she is securely locked away, Maria’s agency is nullified. Eventually, she stops struggling against her captivity and becomes “content with the peace of the cloister” (91). This metaphor comparing the institution to a convent reinforces the sense that her fate is directly tied to her gender while also suggesting the forced assimilation of Indigenous Americans to Christianity. The fact that the formerly fiercely independent woman has been reduced to such passivity is a stark illustration of The Influence of Context on Identity.

Of the three female central figures in this section, Frau Frieda is the only one who retains her agency. Indeed, in sharp contrast to “Sleeping Beauty,” her power to shape not only her own but others’ lives is precisely what fascinates the male narrator. Her ability to tell the future based on her dreams is a magical-realist element that invokes a common belief in Latin American cultures—that sleep is a transitional state between life and death and that sleepers can therefore sometimes access the spiritual realm of the dead. Her special ability is thus linked to her identity as a Colombian woman. When, starving and cold during a Vienna winter, she decides that she must sell her dreams to survive, she is symbolically selling a piece of her own identity.

The outcome of this decision adds layers of nuance to the text’s thematic ideas about the Latin American experience of Europe and to its Sleeping Beauty motif. Frieda becomes very successful by selling her dreams—so successful that she can maintain a luxurious lifestyle in Europe and manipulate her patrons. She becomes the Sleeping Beauty whose sleep is the source of power, not weakness, proving that for some extraordinary Latin American “pilgrims,” success in Europe is possible. Her ultimate fate, however, suggests that this power comes at a price: Frieda has sold part of her Latin American identity in order to achieve European dreams—and when she returns to Latin America in the form of a visit to Cuba, the natural environment kills her.