Strange Pilgrims

Seventy-six-year-old Maria dos Prazeres, a Brazilian woman who has lived in Catalonia for most of her adult life, has a dream that convinces her that she will die soon. She carefully prepares a detailed will. She buys a burial plot in a hilltop cemetery, mindful of the flood that unearthed many graves in her hometown cemetery in Brazil. While the plot salesman is at her house, her little dog, Noi, comes inside from his morning walk. The salesman is astonished when the dog appears to be crying actual tears. Maria explains that the dog is upset to find a stranger in the house so early in the morning. She shocks and embarrasses the young man by revealing that she is a sex worker, brought to Europe by sex traffickers as a child. For the most part, she is retired from this work: The only man who still visits Mara is an old friend, the Count of Cardona, who discreetly comes to see her once a month.

For months, Maria busies herself beautifying the area around her future grave and teaching Noi to find the grave on his own and to weep there so that, after her death, she will have at least one mourner. All around her, she sees signs of political and social changes that she interprets as signs of death. In the fall, during one of his visits, the count remarks positively about Franco’s decision to have three Basque separatists executed. Maria is incensed and feels as if she is seeing the count clearly for the first time. She tells him that if the execution happens, she will poison the count; astonished, the count never returns to visit her.

Maria orders herself an unmarked gravestone, mimicking the unmarked stones of the anarchists she has seen in the cemetery. She tells a neighbor’s child that she would like her to look after Noi following Maria’s death. On a rainy November day when she accepts a ride home from a kind stranger, she is disconcerted when the young driver suggests that he should come up to her apartment. She tells him not to make fun of her, but he assures her that he is serious. Maria is terrified of the feelings she experiences, but she eventually agrees that he can come upstairs with her. Suddenly, she realizes that she has misunderstood her dream and that it is not about death at all.

Colombian widow Prudencia Linero travels to Italy, hoping to find solace for her grief by seeing the pope. She notes that few of the Italians on board her ship attend Mass. When the ship reaches Naples, Prudencia dons a rough brown burlap tunic and leather sandals, having made a vow to God to wear this simple pilgrim’s outfit—the habit of Saint Francis—for the rest of her life in return for being able to travel to see the pope. She is hurt by the change in attitude she sees among her fellow passengers; to her, it seems that they treated her as a friend during the sailing but are now drawing away from her as the ship docks in Europe.

The passengers spot the corpse of a drowned man floating in the bay. Given his clothing and the gift he clutches in his hand, they surmise that he fell from a boat where people were celebrating a wedding—a frequent occurrence at this time of year. As the other passengers disembark, they accidentally trample baby chicks that have been set loose on the docks. Prudencia waits onboard for the arrival of the Neapolitan counsel, whom her son has contacted to meet her to help her arrange her travel to Rome. She sits alone in the sun, sweating and praying. An officer jokes that her prayers are useless because “Even God goes on vacation in August” (121). He explains that it is Sunday and that the counsel is probably not working; he advises Prudencia to get a hotel room and try to contact the counsel on Monday.

In her hotel room, she lies on the bed and weeps from loneliness and grief. She recalls the three decades she spent tending to her comatose husband and the intense love she had for the man. Later, she eats at a restaurant where a disreputable-seeming priest asks her to buy him a cup of coffee and a grappa. She learns from the priest that she must pay for an audience with the pope. On the way back to her hotel, she is uncomfortable in the unfamiliar cultural atmosphere of Naples, which feels disreputable to her.

Near her hotel, Prudencia sees 17 dead Englishmen being carried to a long row of ambulances. She learns that they were all accidentally poisoned by oyster soup served in their hotel. An onlooker blames the men for their own deaths, suggesting that they were ignorant for eating oysters in August. Prudencia barricades herself in her hotel room and lies on the bed crying, thinking how much she despises a country where something like this could happen.

The Caribbean narrator tells of the death of a young Caribbean man in Spain. He explains that he saw the young man in Barcelona shortly before his death, when the man was trying to explain to a large group of Swedish tourists why he could not come with them to Cadaqués, and they were insisting he accompany them. The narrator understands why the young man wanted to avoid Cadaqués, as he himself traveled there with his family and experienced the tramontana, a cold wind that, in spring and summer, sweeps down from the north, bringing a kind of supernatural misery into the area.

The house they were staying in faced the mountains, as is the Catalan custom, whereas Caribbean homes usually face the sea. The wind was thus particularly harsh for the narrator’s family. The narrator found the wind horrifying and experienced it as a personal persecution. On the day the wind finally broke, the narrator’s children found the house’s porter dead by suicide. The narrator and his family left Cadaqués immediately, vowing never to return.

The narrator recounts having seen the group of Swedes in Barcelona force the young Caribbean man into their van, mocking him for his superstitions about the tramontana. The next morning, the narrator learned that, desperate to escape a return to Cadaqués, the young man died by hurling himself from the van while it was moving.