Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Author:Gabriel Garcia Marquez [Márquez, Gabriel García]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141917276
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen

The first thing Señora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha. She did not tell anyone, of course, since no one would have understood on that senile ocean liner filled to overflowing with Italians from Buenos Aires who were returning to their native land for the first time since the war, but in any case, at the age of seventy-two, and at a distance of eighteen days of heavy seas from her people and her home, she felt less alone, less frightened and remote.

The lights on land had been visible since daybreak. The passengers got up earlier than usual, wearing new clothes, their hearts heavy with the uncertainties of putting ashore, so that the last Sunday on board seemed to be the only genuine one of the entire voyage. Señora Prudencia Linero was one of the very few who attended Mass. In contrast to the clothes she had worn before, when she walked around the ship dressed in partial mourning, today she had on a tunic of coarse brown burlap tied with the cord of Saint Francis, and rough leather sandals that did not resemble a pilgrim’s only because they were too new. It was an advance payment: She had promised God that she would wear the full-length habit for the rest of her life if He blessed her with a trip to Rome to see the Supreme Pontiff, and she already considered the blessing granted. When Mass was over she lit a candle to the Holy Spirit in gratitude for the infusion of courage that had allowed her to endure the Caribbean storms, and she said a prayer for each of her nine children and fourteen grandchildren who at that very moment were dreaming about her on a windy night in Riohacha.

When she went up on deck after breakfast, life on the ship had changed. Luggage was piled in the ballroom, along with all kinds of tourist trinkets the Italians had bought at the magic markets of the Antilles, and on the saloon bar there was a macaque from Pernambuco in a wrought-iron cage. It was a brilliant morning in early August. One of those exemplary postwar summer Sundays when the light was like a daily revelation, and the enormous ship inched along, with an invalid’s labored breathing, through a transparent Stillwater. The gloomy fortress of the Dukes of Anjou was just beginning to loom on the horizon, but the passengers who had come on deck thought they recognized familiar places, and they pointed at them without quite seeing them, shouting with joy in their southern dialects. To her surprise, Señora Prudencia Linero, who had made so many dear old friends on board, who had watched children while their parents danced, and even sewn a button on the first officer’s tunic, found them all distant and changed. The social spirit and human warmth that permitted her to survive her first homesickness in the stifling heat of the tropics had disappeared.

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