Strange Pilgrims

The fairytale character of Sleeping Beauty is referenced or alluded to several times in these stories, serving as a prominent motif. In the original story, a princess is cursed to fall into a death-like sleep after she pricks her finger on a spinning wheel. She is finally woken by a prince who discovers her sleeping form and kisses her. After she wakes, they marry. In “The Saint,” the child’s body is tacitly compared to Sleeping Beauty when she is described lying in her coffin, looking like a sleeping bride. In the following story, “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” the attractive woman—directly referred to as “Sleeping Beauty”—sleeps while the male narrator admires her and engages in romantic fantasies about her, wishing that he could wake her. In “I Only Came to Use the Phone,” the moment when Saturno knows his wife has capitulated to his control is when he finds her sleeping on the couch, “with the crown of orange blossoms and long tulle train worn by virgin brides” (79). “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” features a young woman who dies after pricking her finger on a rose, a flower linked to the Sleeping Beauty story, as the sleeping woman’s name is “Briar Rose” in some versions of the story.

A key part of the Sleeping Beauty story is the central figure’s passivity. She falls into her death-like sleep after an accident caused by others’ malevolence. She cannot rescue herself and simply becomes the site of another’s heroism and control. The Sleeping Beauty figures in Strange Pilgrims are similarly passive—a dead child, sleeping women, and a young newlywed who accidentally pricks her finger and dies as a result. Their function is to highlight the actions of the men around them and to characterize these men through their response—or lack of response—to the helpless female figure. The motif thus hints at the intersection of the Latin American Experience in Europe with gendered oppression.

The motif also connects to the collection’s exploration of the border between sleep and death, as in the original story, the princess sleeps for so long—100 years—that it is, functionally, as if she has died. In “The Saint,” Duarte’s deceased child is described as “still sleeping after a long stay underground” (38). In “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” the unnamed “Sleeping Beauty” takes pills to help her sleep, and she sleeps so soundly that the narrator worries “that the pills she had taken were not for sleeping but for dying” (59). In “I Sell My Dreams,” the woman who has just died spent a lifetime selling the product of her sleep—her dreams—and is given an allusive nickname that invokes the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who famously painted El Sueño (La Cama)—“The Dream (The Bed)”—as an exploration of the relationship between sleep and death. In “The Ghosts of August,” Ludovico’s ghost appears only when the narrator is sleeping.

Many Latin American traditions see sleep as a transitional state linking the conscious, living world to the spiritual world of the dead. Dreams are sometimes believed to bring messages from this spiritual realm into the everyday world of the living—which is exactly what happens in “I Sell My Dreams.” The repeated association of women with sleep and death in Strange Pilgrims suggests that they are more intimately connected with the unseen world than are the collection’s male characters.