54 pages • 1-hour read
Strange Pilgrims
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death, death, child sexual abuse, sexual violence, substance use, racism, and mental illness.
The Bittersweet Nature of Impermanence
Many of the stories in Strange Pilgrims explore the impact of shifts in time and place. The characters’ experiences demonstrate that these changes can bring a kind of bittersweet pain and that the relationship between the present and the past is complex. García Márquez makes clear in the Prologue that this depiction is based on his own feelings when he returned to Europe after many years’ absence. “True memories seemed like phantoms,” he comments, adding that “This meant that I could not detect the dividing line between disillusionment and nostalgia” (xii). The passage of time and his years spent back at home in Latin America alienated him from his own happy memories of the time he had spent in Europe as a young man, and he experienced himself as an unreliable narrator of his own life.
The narrator who appears in most of the stories is, like García Márquez, a writer who has returned to Europe after many years away, and his narration draws similar attention to the contrast between past and present. In “The Saint,” his description of his past in Europe is filled with vivid sensory detail, marking the past as a time of excitement and happiness. In the somewhat bleak present, he cherishes these memories of the ever-receding past. His relationship with the past is not wholly nostalgic, however, and the past can sometimes bring pain. In “The Ghosts of August,” he has an unsettling encounter with the past in the form of a supernatural visitation, and he shares complicated memories of old friends who have died in more than one story, clearly treasuring his memories of them but feeling pain over their passing.
The narrator’s sense of the bittersweetness of life’s transitory nature is crystallized in the story “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane.” The story condenses the development and loss of a relationship—even if only in the narrator’s own mind—into the space of a transatlantic flight. As the characters move rapidly through time and space together, the narrator believes himself to have fallen in love with his seatmate; he spends the night giddily imagining a relationship with her, but at the same time, he is keenly aware of the absurdity of his situation. He begins to feel that “the devastation of love” is “terrible” and that he is “contemptible” (60). Toward morning, knowing that the end of the encounter is imminent, he wishes he could wake her and thereby “recover [his…] youth” (61). Linking the loss of his imagined relationship to the loss of his youth conveys his disillusionment over the effects of the passage of time. The absurd premise of the story conveys how the meaning of life events shifts as time passes; a relationship that seemed significant at one stage of life becomes absurd as passing time lends a new perspective, and memories become complex, slippery things, generating mixed emotions.
The narrator of Strange Pilgrims is not the only character who experiences the bittersweetness of changes in time and place. The boys in “Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness” at first experience Europe as a place of carefree pleasure—but their happiness is suddenly stolen by Miss Forbes’s arrival, and it is never fully recovered. Frau Frieda has the pleasure of a successful relocation to Europe, but her death in the bizarre wave incident in Havana suggests that her relocation has come at a heavy price: Moving to Europe and selling her dreams has alienated her from her true self, and she can no longer return to the past she has given up. Indeed, many of the relocated Latin American characters spend their time in Europe yearning for their past at home in Latin America. The boys in “Light is Like Water” desperately miss their home by the sea, and as Prudencia enters the port of Naples in “Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen,” she “[suffers] for the first time in her life the sharp pain of being a foreigner” and realizes that “[e]very voyage must be like this” (118). Her simultaneous desire to be in Europe and be at home in Colombia is, the narrative suggests, not limited to the experience of traveling through physical space. It is also linked to the passage of time as Prudencia “[leans] on the railing and [contemplates] the vestiges of so many extinct worlds in the depths of the water” (118).
The impossibility of recovering the past or fully returning to a place one has left behind is embodied in Margarito Duarte, the protagonist of “The Saint.” Duarte spends 20 years displaced from his Andean homeland, trying to get his deceased daughter recognized as a saint. The happiest time in Duarte’s life was fleeting—he was briefly married to a beautiful woman who was expecting their first child, but his wife died in childbirth. For a time, he had the consolation of his daughter, but then she, too, died. Duarte comes to Europe carrying the pine box that contains his daughter’s remains, symbolically carrying with him the memory of his happy past and seeking some kind of formal recognition that the past is not really gone—that it lives forever, uncorruptible. Because others refuse to recognize his daughter as a saint, he feels that he cannot return to his homeland; he is doomed to remain a “strange pilgrim” in Europe, trapped in his memories and never fully engaged in the present.
The book suggests that the impermanence of experience is inescapable. It may even be beneficial: in “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” when the protagonist learns that he may be dying, he experiences a renewed interest in life. After his diagnosis, he begins indulging again in the physical pleasures of food and drink he has long denied himself. He even considers ending his exile in Martinique, feeling that it is better to risk a return to his home country than “[die] of old age in his bed” (35). Confronted with the greatest impermanence of all—that of his own life—Mr. President sees clearly how precious the present moment can be and, unlike Margarito Duarte, is able to let go of the agony of impermanence and fully embrace its joys. However, this comes at a cost to those around him, suggesting that a measured recognition of transience and mortality, if painful, is also central to human feeling.
The Latin American Experience of Europe
An image in the collection’s final story, “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” encapsulates Strange Pilgrims’ depiction of the Latin American experience in Europe. In this story, Billy Sanchez finds that each time he tries to head for the Eiffel Tower, it seems to shift away from him. Much like the Eiffel Tower, Europe itself seems to hold out great promise for the collection’s Latin American characters—and yet this promise is largely an illusion, a goal post that constantly recedes into the distance because of a long and troubled history between the two regions.
The collection’s Latin American characters are often dismissed by the Europeans they encounter, treated as cultural and racial inferiors. In “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” Billy is told by diplomats that he is now in “a civilized country” (183), implying that his own homeland is not “civilized,” and that European norms are “ancient and learned, in contrast to the barbaric Americas” (183). The German Miss Forbes, in “Miss Forbes’s Summer of Pleasure,” holds a similar attitude, constantly lecturing the Colombian boys about the superiority of European customs. In “Tramontana,” Swedes cavalierly declare a young Caribbean man to be their property and mock his multiracial heritage and culture with comments about his “African superstitions.”
The stories demonstrate that this kind of prejudice often forces Latin Americans in Europe into poverty, making it difficult for them to attain the dreams they came to Europe chasing. In “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” Homero and Lázara scrape to get by, working at menial jobs and taking every chance to make a little money, even when these opportunities are morally dubious. Frau Frieda finds herself cold, hungry, and alone in Vienna and is forced to sell her dreams, trading an important part of herself and her cultural heritage to wealthy Europeans in order to survive.
Latin American characters also find their agency severely curtailed in Europe in a way that hearkens back to the slavery and oppression of colonial times. The Swedes who claim the young Caribbean man literally kidnap him and throw him into their van. The titular character in “Maria dos Prazeres” is brought to Europe from Brazil by sex traffickers when she is still a child. In “I Only Came to Use the Phone,” Maria de la Luz Cervantes loses her freedom and her identity when she is mistakenly incarcerated in a Catholic-run mental institution. Such stories recall the centuries of colonial rule in Latin America, when Indigenous and mestizo peoples were kidnapped and enslaved, renamed and indoctrinated into foreign cultures and religions, and exploited both sexually and economically.
These allusions to the historical relationship between Europe and Latin America suggest that the exploitation of Latin Americans by Europeans is a legacy of colonialism. The collection’s depiction of Europe as a corrupt and decaying place also implies that something rotten in the culture of Europe itself allows this exploitation to continue. Multiple stories portray the Catholic Church, a pillar of European history and culture, as money-hungry and hypocritical. In “I Sell My Dreams,” the narrator describes a “gluttonous” character as being like “a Renaissance pope” (67), implying that the supposed restraint and asceticism of the Church is a charade. The Church mocks and dismisses Margarito Duarte when he presents them with genuine evidence of a miracle, and in “Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen,” Prudencia finds that she must pay for an audience with the pope. More broadly, Europe is often depicted as a place of decay, haunted by its own terrible past. Prudencia sees Naples as “a city of ghosts” and likens her taxi to “a funeral carriage” (122). In “The Ghosts of August,” the literal ghost of a murderous nobleman haunts a castle, and the blood of his murdered wife mysteriously appears in the present.
By contrast, Latin America is depicted as a place of genuine spirituality and innocence. Margarito Duarte, in “The Saint,” has “the Andean intellectual’s solemn manner” and refuses to participate in the corrupt pleasures of Europe (36), instead devoting himself to his doomed spiritual pilgrimage. Prudencia in “Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen” and Nena in “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” are both likened to fragile birds in danger of being crushed by the realities of Europe. Indeed, the farther Nena travels into Europe, the more she is endangered. Her blood, a symbol of her heritage, leaves a trail, marking her journey away from the innocence of her home into the corruption of Europe.
“Light is Like Water” conveys this clash between the innocence of Latin America and the corruption of Europe clearly. The boys in this story yearn for their Colombian home and try to recreate its environment in Madrid. The light they flood their apartment with is a symbol of their purity and innocence. Significantly, only they can navigate this light. Thirty-seven of their classmates die because they are part of a “population [that has] never mastered the science of navigating on light” (161), a passage that implies the Colombian boys have a fundamentally different experience and worldview than their European peers. Ultimately, the collection suggests that the pleasures of such cross-cultural encounters are often fleeting and the legacy sorrowful.
The Influence of Context on Identity
Over and over again, the characters in Strange Pilgrims find that identity is not static—it can shift according to context. Moreover, these shifts are rarely under the characters’ control. Rather, their identities evade their attempts at self-definition even as those around them impose their own constructions and interpretations onto the protagonists, often in violent and oppressive ways.
Even characters’ names are often temporary, granted by context rather than constant from birth. The narrator admits that he never learned “Frau Frieda’s” name, for example; even years later, he still calls her by the nickname given to her by their crowd in their younger days in Vienna. The name of Duarte’s daughter is never revealed: Throughout her story, she is only known by the sobriquet “The Saint,” reflecting the context in which the narrator encounters her. The woman the narrator sits next to on the plane in “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane” is similarly nameless, identified only through her actions aboard a single flight. These context-specific identifiers reveal the broader way in which identity hinges on environment.
A particularly noteworthy nickname is that of the protagonist of the first story, “Bon Voyage, Mr. President.” His actual name is never given, though most of the characters certainly know it. Instead, they address him by the context in which they first knew him—as the president of an unspecified Caribbean country. When he first meets Homero and Lázara, he is in the midst of an attempt to reform himself, however. He has given up coffee, alcohol, smoking, and rich foods and has been living for many years in peaceful exile in Martinique. He disavows his identity as a leader, telling his new friends that “It would be the worst thing that could happen to [their] poor country if [he] were president” (20). His confrontation with his own mortality in Geneva derails his efforts at reform, however, and he takes up his old habits again—even, at the end of the story, asserting that he may return to his country to try to reassume power there. In the context of his diagnosis and the European environment, his true identity reasserts itself, and he realizes that he wants, once again, to be “Mr. President.”
Other characters experience contextual shifts in identity as a result of how they are perceived in different settings. Prudencia, in “Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen,” enjoys the company of her Italian shipmates on her journey over to Europe, feeling that she is well-liked and has made genuine friends. Their seeming respect for her evaporates, however, as soon as the ship enters the Bay of Naples. They withdraw from her and treat her coldly because, in the context of these European surroundings, they view the Colombian woman as their inferior. Similarly, Billy Sánchez de Ávila, in “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” finds that he is an entirely different person in Europe than he was in Colombia. In Colombia, he was the son of privilege, able to behave like an impulsive and self-centered child and protected from the consequences of his actions by his parents’ wealth and political connections. He was powerful and even feared. In Europe, however, he is weak: He is looked down on and has no sense of how to navigate the social landscape. He encounters obstacle after obstacle and finds himself lost both literally and figuratively. This forces him to confront his false understanding of himself as successful and competent and begin, for the first time, to shape an authentic adult identity, suggesting that a change in context and perspective can be necessary, if painful, for identity-formation.
Other changes are merely destructive, however. Maria de la Luz Cervantes experiences two notable identity shifts in “I Only Came to Use the Phone.” Early in adulthood, she is a free-spirited and liberated woman who centers herself and her own goals. She has dreams of being an actress and enters and leaves relationships with men without much sentimentality. She shocks Saturno when she first leaves him, saying only that “There are short loves and there are long ones. […] This was a short one” (79). At this stage of her life, she has confidence in herself as a powerful and competent person who can rely on herself without hesitation. After she is left at the altar, however, her confidence crumbles, shaking her belief in herself as an independent agent. She returns to Saturno and capitulates completely to him, devoting herself to him and to his dreams instead of her own.
The subsuming of her identity into Saturno’s is only the first of her dramatic shifts in identity: An even more dramatic shift occurs when she is mistakenly detained at the mental hospital. She is perfectly healthy when she enters the facility, and she is outraged at the injustice of being held there. She uses logic to try to argue and bargain her way out, and she is unable to reconcile herself to the institution’s routines and rules. After Saturno abandons her there, however, she slowly becomes what her new context insists she is. By the end of the story, she has utterly given up on her understanding of herself as a free and independent person. She is “content with the peace of the cloister” and has become just another case number among the ranks of imprisoned women (91). Her story serves as the collection’s ultimate warning about how an oppressive context can mold the identities of those it oppresses.
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