Strange Pilgrims (21 page)
Authors: Gabriel García Márquez
On the same night when he endured his desire to cry with rage, Nena Daconte’s parents called off the search and took away the embalmed body in the metal coffin, and those who saw it repeated over and over again for many years that they never had seen a more beautiful woman, dead or alive. And therefore when Billy Sánchez at last entered the hospital on Tuesday morning, the burial had already taken place in the mournful cemetery of La Manga, a few meters from the house where they had deciphered the first keys to their happiness. The Asian doctor who told Billy Sánchez about the tragedy wanted to give him some tranquilizers in the hospital waiting room, but he refused. Billy Sánchez left without saying good-bye, without anything to say thank you for, thinking
that the only thing he needed with great urgency was to find somebody and beat his brains out with a chain in revenge for his own misfortune. When he walked out of the hospital, he did not even realize that snow with no trace of blood was falling from the sky, in tender, bright flakes that looked like the downy feathers of doves, or that there was a festive air on the streets of Paris, because it was the first big snowfall in ten years.
1976
G
ABRIEL
G
ARCÍA
M
ÁRQUEZ
CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place twenty-seven years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society—not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.
Fiction/Literature
THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
General Simon Bolivar, “the Liberator” of five South American countries, takes a last melancholy journey down the Magdalena River, revisiting cities along its shores, and reliving the triumphs, passions, and betrayals of his life. Infinitely charming, prodigiously successful in love, war, and politics, he still dances with such enthusiasm and skill that his witnesses cannot believe he is ill. Aflame with memories of the power that he commanded and the dream of continental unity that eluded him, he is a moving exemplar of how much can be won—and lost—in a life.
Fiction/Literature
LIVING TO TELL THE TALE
No writer of his time exerted the magical appeal of Gabriel García Márquez. In this autobiography, the great Nobel laureate tells the story of his life, from his birth in 1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. The result is as spectacular as his finest fiction. Here is García Márquez’s shimmering evocation of his childhood home of Aracataca, the basis of the fictional Macondo. Here are the members of his ebulliently eccentric family. Here are the forces that turned him into a writer. Warm, revealing, abounding in images so vivid that we seem to be remembering them ourselves,
Living to Tell the Tale
is a work of enchantment.
Autobiography
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.
Fiction/Literature
MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES
On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit—he has purchased hundreds of women—he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic,
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
is an exquisite addition to the master’s work.
Fiction/Literature
NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING
In 1990, fearing extradition to the United States, Pablo Escobar—head of the Medellín drug cartel—kidnapped ten notable Colombians to use as bargaining chips. With the eye of a poet, García Márquez describes the survivors’ perilous ordeal and the bizarre drama of the negotiations for their release. With cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and journalistic rigor, García Márquez evokes the sickness that inflicts his beloved country and how it penetrates every strata of society, from the lowliest peasant to the President himself.
Nonfiction
OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria—the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport—is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love—and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible,
Of Love and Other Demons
is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.
Fiction/Literature
THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
In 1955, García Márquez was working for
El Espectador
, a newspaper in Bogotá, when in February of that year eight crew members of the
Caldas
, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is García Márquez’s account of that sailor’s ordeal.
Nonfiction
STRANGE PILGRIMS
In Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortune-telling position with a wealthy family. In Geneva, an ambulance driver and his wife take in the lonely, apparently dying ex-President of a Caribbean country, only to discover that his political ambition is very much intact. In these twelve masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience.
Short Stories/Literature
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