Strange Pilgrims

Strange Pilgrims is a collection of 12 short stories written by acclaimed Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. García Márquez, the winner of the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of 11 novels and novellas, dozens of short stories, and various works of nonfiction and film. Strange Pilgrims was published in 1992, though most of its stories were initially written in the 1970s and 1980s. The stories in this collection contain elements of García Márquez’s hallmark magical realism, although several of the stories are straight realism. The stories explore themes related to The Bittersweet Nature of Impermanence, The Influence of Context on Identity, and The Latin American Experience of Europe. 

This study guide refers to the Alfred A. Knopf 1993 hardcover edition, translated by Edith Grossman.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, child death, death by suicide, animal death, child sexual abuse, child abuse, mental illness, racism, religious discrimination, gender discrimination, rape, sexual violence, sexual harassment, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual content, and graphic violence.

Language Note: Strange Pilgrims was written in a time when many terms related to race, disability, gender, etc., that are now considered offensive were still in common use. This study guide does not reproduce this language unless offering a direct quote from the text.

Plot Summaries

In the Prologue, García Márquez explains how the collection’s stories originated in his own experiences living in Europe as a younger man. Given the stories’ long road to publication, he compares them to journeying pilgrims.

The first story, “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” explores the encounter between a deposed Caribbean president and a countryman he meets in Geneva, Switzerland. The elderly former president is in Geneva to seek medical treatment; an ambulance driver, Homero Rey, befriends him, hoping to sell him insurance and a funeral plan. When Rey discovers that the deposed leader is broke, he helps the elderly man pay for his medical treatment and takes care of him after surgery. After he recovers, the former president returns to Martinique, where he lives in exile, and begins contemplating a return to his former country and an attempt to lead a reform movement there.

“The Saint” tells the story of Margarito Duarte, who discovers that his deceased daughter’s body has not decayed even after many years. He therefore brings his daughter’s body from Colombia to Rome to have her canonized as a saint, but he is repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to meet with the pope. After two decades, he is no closer to success than when he arrived in Rome, but he has not lost faith and, saintlike, persists in what he sees as his holy mission.

The collection’s third story, “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” recounts the narrator’s encounter with a beautiful Andean woman whom he watches sleep all night on a plane bound for New York from Paris. The narrator creates a brief fantasy relationship with the sleeping woman and feels disappointed when the plane lands; she departs without seeming to recognize all he has invested in the imagined relationship.

In “I Sell My Dreams,” the narrator learns of the death of a Colombian woman he had known many years before in Vienna. “Frau Freida” made a living selling her prophetic dreams to wealthy patrons; it was on her insistence that the narrator left Vienna, after she had a dream that he was in danger. He met her again, years later, in Barcelona, where he introduced her to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and she and Neruda had simultaneous dreams that each of them was dreaming about the other.

“I Only Came to Use the Phone” is the story of Maria de la Luz Cervantes, a young Mexican woman whose car breakdown outside Barcelona results in a bus ride to a mental institution where she is mistakenly hospitalized. She is treated terribly but finally manages to get a message to her husband. When he arrives to see her, the staff convince him that she truly has a mental illness, and he leaves her there, to her great fury and despair.

The following story, “The Ghosts of August,” recounts a first-person narrator’s overnight stay in a castle haunted by the ghost of a man, Ludivico, who murdered his own wife. In the morning, the narrator is shocked to discover himself not in the bed he went to sleep in but in the bed in which Ludovico murdered his wife.

The protagonist of “Maria dos Prazeres” is a 76-year-old Brazilian woman living in Catalonia. She has had a dream that she believes foretells her death—but after many months of preparation for this event, she discovers that she has misinterpreted her vision and that it was about the revival of her passions, not about the end of her life.

“Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen” explores the experiences of Prudencia Linero, a Colombian woman who travels to Italy hoping to meet with the pope. In Naples, she encounters behavior she finds callous, hypocritical, and dishonorable. She is particularly shocked when 17 tourists die from eating tainted oyster soup, and she decides that she hates Italy.

In “Tramontana,” a supernatural wind creates desperation and misery in the Spanish village of Cadaqués. A young Caribbean man who has already experienced this wind vows never to return to the village. A group of Swedish tourists, mocking his “superstitions,” kidnaps him and tries to force him to go with them to Cadaqués. Desperate to avoid this fate, he throws himself from the moving vehicle and dies.

The collection’s next story, “Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness,” is narrated by a nearly nine-year-old Colombian boy who is spending the summer in Sicily. His parents are away, and he and his brother have been left in the care of Miss Forbes, a strict and emotionally abusive German nanny. The boys try unsuccessfully to poison her, but ultimately it is an unknown person who stabs her to death in her room one night.

“Light is Like Water” is the story of two Colombian boys who discover that they can sail on and dive in light just as one might sail on or dive in water. They beg a boat and diving equipment from their parents and flood their Madrid apartment with light. One night, they host a party for all their schoolmates. They flood the apartment with so much light that their friends drown.

The final story in the volume is “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.” In this story, Billy Sanchez and Nena Daconte, the children of two privileged Colombian families, are traveling through Europe on their honeymoon. Nena’s finger is pricked by a rose, and she ends up bleeding so much that she must be hospitalized. Billy has trouble visiting her in the hospital. When he finally gains admittance, he learns that Nena has bled to death.