Strange Pilgrims

Prologue: Why Twelve, Why Stories, Why Pilgrims

THE TWELVE STORIES in this book were written over the last eighteen years. Before they reached their current form, five of them had been journalistic notes and screenplays, and one was a television serial. Fifteen years ago I recounted another during a taped interview with a friend who transcribed and published the story, and now I’ve rewritten it on the basis of his version. This has been a strange creative experience that should be explained, if only so that children who want to be writers when they grow up will know how insatiable and abrasive the writing habit can be.

The first story idea came to me in the early 1970s, the result of an illuminating dream I had after living in Barcelona for five years. I dreamed I was attending my own funeral, walking with a group of friends dressed in solemn mourning but in a festive mood. We all seemed happy to be together. And I more than anyone else, because of the wonderful opportunity that death afforded me to be with my friends from Latin America, my oldest and dearest friends, the ones I had not seen for so long. At the end of the service, when they began to disperse, I attempted to leave too, but one of them made me see with decisive finality that as far as I was concerned, the party was over. You’re the only one who can’t go, he said. Only then did I understand that dying means never being with friends again.

I don’t know why, but I interpreted that exemplary dream as a conscientious examination of my own identity, and I thought this was a good point of departure for writing about the strange things that happen to Latin Americans in Europe. It was a heartening find, for I had just finished The Autumn of the Patriarch, my most difficult and adventurous work, and I did not know where to go from there.

For some two years I made notes on story subjects as they occurred to me, but could not decide what to do with them. Since I did not have a notebook in the house on the night I resolved to begin, my children lent me one of their composition books. And on our frequent travels they were the ones who carried it in their schoolbags for fear it would be lost. I accumulated sixty-four ideas with so many detailed notes that all I needed to do was write them.

In 1974, when I returned to Mexico from Barcelona, it became clear to me that this book should not be the novel it had seemed at first, but a collection of short stories based on journalistic facts that would be redeemed from their mortality by the astute devices of poetry. I already had published three volumes of short stories, yet none of them had been conceived and composed as a whole. On the contrary, each story had been an autonomous, occasional piece. And therefore writing these sixty-four story ideas might be a fascinating adventure if I could write them all in a single stroke, with an internal unity of tone and style that would make them inseparable in the reader’s memory.

I composed the first two—The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow and Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness—in 1976, and published them soon afterward in various literary supplements in several countries. I continued working without a break, but in the middle of the third story, the one about my funeral, I felt myself tiring more than if I had been working on a novel. The same thing happened with the fourth. In fact, I did not have the energy to finish them. Now I know why: The effort involved in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel, where everything must be defined in the first paragraph: structure, tone, style, rhythm, length, and sometimes even the personality of a character. All the rest is the pleasure of writing, the most intimate, solitary pleasure one can imagine, and if the rest of one’s life is not spent correcting the novel, it is because the same iron rigor needed to begin the book is required to end it. But a story has no beginning, no end: Either it works or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, my own experience, and the experience of others, shows that most of the time it is better for one’s health to start again in another direction, or toss the story in the wastebasket. Someone, I don’t remember who, made the point with this comforting phrase: Good writers are appreciated more for what they tear up than for what they publish. It’s true I didn’t tear up the first drafts and notes, but I did something worse: I tossed them into oblivion.

I remember having the composition book on my desk in Mexico, shipwrecked in a squall of papers, until 1978. One day, when I was looking for something else, I realized I hadn’t seen it for some time. It didn’t matter. But when I was sure it really wasn’t on the desk, I panicked. Every corner of the house was searched. We moved furniture, pulled the library apart to be certain it hadn’t fallen behind the books, and subjected the household help and our friends to unforgivable inquisitions. Not a trace. The only possible—or plausible?—explanation was that in one of my frequent campaigns to exterminate papers, the notebook had gone into the trash.

My own reaction surprised me: The subjects I had forgotten about for almost four years became a question of honor. In an attempt to recover them at any cost, and with labor that was as arduous as writing, I managed to reconstruct the notes for thirty stories. Since the very effort of remembering acted as a purge, I eliminated without pity the ones that seemed beyond salvation and was left with eighteen. This time I was determined to write without a break, but I soon realized I had lost my enthusiasm for them. And yet, contrary to the advice I always give young writers, I did not throw them out. I refiled them instead. Just in case.

When I began Chronicle of a Death Foretold, in 1979, I confirmed the fact that in the pauses between books I tended to lose the habit of writing, and it was becoming more and more difficult for me to begin again. That is why, between October 1980 and March 1984, I set myself the task of writing a weekly opinion column for newspapers in various countries, as a kind of discipline for keeping my arm in shape. Then it occurred to me that my struggle with the material in the notebook was still a problem of literary genres and they should really be newspaper pieces, not stories. Except that after publishing five columns based on the notebook, I changed my mind again: They would be better as films. That was how five movies and a television serial were made.

What I never foresaw was that my work in journalism and film would change some of my ideas about those stories, so that now, when I wrote them in their final form, I had to be very careful to separate my own ideas with a tweezers from those suggested to me by directors while I was writing the scripts. In fact, my simultaneous collaboration with five different creators suggested another method for writing the stories: I would begin one when I had free time, drop it when I felt tired or some unexpected project came along, and then begin another. In a little over a year, six of the eighteen subjects had left for the wastebasket, among them the one about my funeral, for I never could make it the wild revel it had been in my dream. The remaining stories, however, seemed ready to begin a long life.

They are the twelve in this book. Last September, after another two years of intermittent work, they were ready for printing. And that would have concluded their endless pilgrimage back and forth to the trash can if I had not been gnawed by a final, eleventh-hour doubt. Since I had described the European cities where the stories take place from memory, and at a distance, I wanted to verify the accuracy of my recollections after twenty years, and I made a fast trip to reacquaint myself with Barcelona, Geneva, Rome, and Paris.

Not one of them had any connection to my memories. Through an astonishing inversion, all of them, like all of present-day Europe, had become strange: True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality. This meant I could not detect the dividing line between disillusionment and nostalgia. It was the definitive solution. At last I had found what I needed most to complete the book, what only the passing of the years could give: a perspective in time.

When I returned from that fortunate trip I rewrote all the stories from the beginning in eight feverish months, and because of my helpful suspicion that perhaps nothing I had experienced twenty years before in Europe was true, I did not have to ask myself where life ended and imagination began. Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation. Because I worked on all the stories at the same time and felt free to jump back and forth from one to another, I gained a panoramic view that saved me from the weariness of successive beginnings and helped me track down careless redundancies and fatal contradictions. This, I believe, is how I achieved the volume of stories closest to the one I had always wanted to write.

Here it is, ready to be brought to the table after all its wandering from pillar to post, its struggle to survive the perversities of uncertainty. All the stories except the first two were completed at the same time, and each bears the date on which I began it. The order of the stories in this edition is the same they had in the notebook.

I have always thought that each version of a story is better than the one before. How does one know, then, which is the final version? In the same way the cook knows when the soup is ready, this is a trade secret that does not obey the laws of reason but the magic of instinct. However, just in case, I won’t reread them, just as I have never reread any of my books for fear I would repent. New readers will know what to do with them. Fortunately, for these strange pilgrims, ending up in the wastebasket will be like the joy of coming home.

Gabriel García Márquez

CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, APRIL 1992

Bon Voyage, Mr. President

HE SAT ON a wooden bench under the yellow leaves in the deserted park, contemplating the dusty swans with both his hands resting on the silver handle of his cane, and thinking about death. On his first visit to Geneva the lake had been calm and clear, and there were tame gulls that would eat out of one’s hand, and women for hire who seemed like six-in-the-afternoon phantoms with organdy ruffles and silk parasols. Now the only possible woman he could see was a flower vendor on the deserted pier. It was difficult for him to believe that time could cause so much ruin not only in his life but in the world.

He was one more incognito in the city of illustrious incognitos. He wore the dark blue pin-striped suit, brocade vest, and stiff hat of a retired magistrate. He had the arrogant mustache of a musketeer, abundant blue-black hair with romantic waves, a harpist’s hands with the widower’s wedding band on his left ring finger, and joyful eyes. Only the weariness of his skin betrayed the state of his health. Even so, at the age of seventy-three, his elegance was still notable. That morning, however, he felt beyond the reach of all vanity. The years of glory and power had been left behind forever, and now only the years of his death remained.

He had returned to Geneva after two world wars, in search of a definitive answer to a pain that the doctors in Martinique could not identify. He had planned on staying no more than two weeks but had spent almost six in exhausting examinations and inconclusive results, and the end was not yet in sight. They looked for the pain in his liver, his kidneys, his pancreas, his prostate, wherever it was not. Until that bitter Thursday, when he had made an appointment for nine in the morning at the neurology department with the least well-known of the many physicians who had seen him.

The office resembled a monk’s cell, and the doctor was small and solemn and wore a cast on the broken thumb of his right hand. When the light was turned off, the illuminated X ray of a spinal column appeared on a screen, but he did not recognize it as his own until the doctor used a pointer to indicate the juncture of two vertebrae below his waist.

Your pain is here, he said.

For him it was not so simple. His pain was improbable and devious, and sometimes seemed to be in his ribs on the right side and sometimes in his lower abdomen, and often it caught him off guard with a sudden stab in the groin. The doctor listened to him without moving, the pointer motionless on the screen. That is why it eluded us for so long, he said. But now we know it is here. Then he placed his forefinger on his own temple and stated with precision:

Although in strictest terms, Mr. President, all pain is here.

His clinical style was so dramatic that the final verdict seemed merciful: The President had to submit to a dangerous and inescapable operation. He asked about the margin of risk, and the old physician enveloped him in an indeterminate light.

We could not say with certainty, he answered.

Until a short while before, he explained, the risk of fatal accidents was great, and even more so the danger of different kinds of paralysis of varying degrees. But with the medical advances made during the two wars, such fears were things of the past.

Don’t worry, the doctor concluded. Put your affairs in order and then get in touch with us. But don’t forget, the sooner the better.

It was not a good morning for digesting that piece of bad news, least of all outdoors. He had left the hotel very early, without an overcoat because he saw a brilliant sun through the window, and had walked with measured steps from the Chemin du Beau-Soleil, where the hospital was located, to that refuge for furtive lovers, the Jardin Anglais. He had been there for more than an hour, thinking of nothing but death, when autumn began. The lake became as rough as an angry sea, and an outlaw wind frightened the gulls and made away with the last leaves. The President stood up and, instead of buying a daisy from the flower vendor, he picked one from the public plantings and put it in his buttonhole. She caught him in the act.

Those flowers don’t belong to God, Monsieur, she said in vexation. They’re city property.

He ignored her and walked away with rapid strides, grasping his cane by the middle of the shaft and twirling it from time to time with a rather libertine air. On the Pont du Mont-Blanc the flags of the Confederation, maddened by the sudden gust of wind, were being lowered with as much speed as possible, and the graceful fountain crowned with foam had been turned off earlier than usual.