Strange Pilgrims (2 page)

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

H
E 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. The President did not recognize his usual café on the pier because they had taken down the green awning over the entrance, and the flower-filled terraces of summer had just been closed. Inside the lights burned in the middle of the day, and the string quartet was playing a piece by Mozart full of foreboding. At the counter the President picked up a newspaper from the pile reserved for customers, hung his hat and cane on the rack, put on his gold-rimmed glasses to read at the most isolated table, and only then became aware that autumn had arrived. He began to read the international page, where from time to time he found a rare news item from the Americas, and he continued reading from back to front until the waitress brought him his daily bottle of Évian water. Following his doctors’ orders, he had given up the habit of coffee more than thirty years before, but had said, “If I ever
knew for certain that I was going to die, I would drink it again.” Perhaps the time had come.

“Bring me a coffee too,” he ordered in perfect French. And specified without noticing the double meaning, “Italian style, strong enough to wake the dead.”

He drank it without sugar, in slow sips, and then turned the cup upside down on the saucer so that the coffee grounds, after so many years, would have time to write out his destiny. The recaptured taste rescued him for an instant from his gloomy thoughts. A moment later, as if it were part of the same sorcery, he sensed someone looking at him. He turned the page with a casual gesture, then glanced over the top of his glasses and saw the pale, unshaven man in a sports cap and a jacket lined with sheepskin, who looked away at once so their eyes would not meet.

His face was familiar. They had passed each other several times in the hospital lobby, he had seen him on occasion riding a motor scooter on the Promenade du Lac while he was contemplating the swans, but he never felt that he had been recognized. He did not, however, discount the idea that this was one of the many persecution fantasies of exile.

He finished the paper at his leisure, floating on the sumptuous cellos of Brahms, until the pain was stronger than the analgesic of the music. Then he looked at the small gold watch and chain that he carried in his vest pocket and took his two midday tranquilizers with the last swallow of Évian water. Before removing his glasses he deciphered his destiny in the coffee grounds and felt
an icy shudder: He saw uncertainty there. At last he paid the bill, left a miser’s tip, collected his cane and hat from the rack, and walked out to the street without looking at the man who was looking at him. He moved away with his festive walk, stepping around the beds of flowers devastated by the wind, and thought he was free of the spell. But then he heard steps behind him and came to a halt when he rounded the corner, making a partial turn. The man following him had to stop short to avoid a collision, and his startled eyes looked at him from just a few inches away.

“Señor Presidente,” he murmured.

“Tell the people who pay you not to get their hopes up,” said the President, without losing his smile or the charm of his voice. “My health is perfect.”

“Nobody knows that better than me,” said the man, crushed by the weight of dignity that had fallen upon him. “I work at the hospital.”

His diction and cadence, and even his timidity, were raw Caribbean.

“Don’t tell me you’re a doctor,” said the President.

“I wish I could, Señor. I’m an ambulance driver.”

“I’m sorry,” said the President, convinced of his error. “That’s a hard job.”

“Not as hard as yours, Señor.”

He looked straight at him, leaned on his cane with both hands, and asked with real interest:

“Where are you from?”

“The Caribbean.”

“I already knew that,” said the President. “But which country?”

“The same as you, Señor,” the man said, and offered his hand. “My name is Homero Rey.”

The President interrupted him in astonishment, not letting go of his hand.

“Damn,” he said. “What a fine name!”

Homero relaxed.