Seventeen poisoned Englishmen

Title: Doce Cuentos Peregrinos (Strange Pilgrims)
Author: Gabriel García Marquez
Publication: 1992
Country: Colombia
Language: Spanish

Although this collection of short stories was finally published in 1992, Gabriel García Márquez tells us in the prologue that he started writing them almost 20 years before.
The prologue ("Why twelve, why tales, why pilgrim") is the story of how the notes he wrote for 64 stories turned into these 12 short tales after a pilgrimage from the desk to the bottom of a drawer to the thrash can, and almost constitutes another tale itself.

Essentially, this collection of the stories of random latin americans in Europe talks about loneliness, even oblivion, the lack of self-identity that people experience when they find themselves alone in a foreign country far away from home. In some of them, the narrator is also a character witnessing the story. In some others, he's outside it.
In these tales there's not much of his "magic realism" that you can identify. They are great short narrative works, in his style of narrative: clear, not aiming for beauty in the form but powerfully strong in the content.
Let me show you just one extract of his description of Rome, from "The Saint":

"After lunch Rome would succumb to its August stupor. The afternoon sun remained immobile in the middle of the sky, and in the two o'clock silence one heard nothing but water, which is the natural voice of Rome. But at about seven the windows were thrown open to summon the cool air that began to circulate, and a jubilant crowd took to the streets with no other purpose than to live, in the midst of backfiring motorcycles, the shouts of melon sellers, and love songs among the flowers on the terraces".

I can say I have a favorite, which is, by far, "Seventeen poisoned Englishmen" (though I'd have translated it as "Seventeen Englishmen poisoned"...). I don't want to spoil it for you, so I included the whole story at the end of this entry, in pdf format. Or at least I think I did. This is the first time I embed a pdf document in a blog entry, so please, be indulgent...
This story is called Seventeen poisoned Englishmen, but it could as well have been called "A corpse floating in Naples harbor" or "A miserable priest begging for a coffee in a terrace". All those things happen at some point along the story, but the story has nothing to do with them (or with the Englishmen).
It narrates the experience of Señora Prudencia Linero in Naples. We know the reason of her trip, but it doesn´t matter at all.
I really don´t want to spoil it! I think I should just let you read it, and then we can discuss, if you want ;)
Will get you intrigued with the first paragraph:

"THE FIRST THING Senora 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 on that ancient ocean liner, overflowing with Italians from Buenos Aires returning to their native land for the first time since the war, would have understood. But at least it made her feel less alone, less frightened and remote, at seventy-two years of age and at a distance of eighteen days of heavy seas from her people and her home."

Enjoy!

Author Gabriel García Marquez dies

Gabriel García Marquez died today at the age of 87. I was going to blog about him, but I just found this New York Times article that is much better than anything I can write...

So, instead of writing anything myself, I decided to copy here the opening of some of his great novels, for you to enjoy (and maybe to get you interested!).


El coronel no tiene quien le escriba / No one writes to the colonel (1961)

The colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one little spoonfulleft. He removed the pot from the fire, poured half the water onto the earthen floor, andscraped the inside of the can with a knife until the last scrapings of the ground coffee,mixed with bits of rust, fell into the pot.While he was waiting for it to boil, sitting next to the stone fireplace with anattitude of confident and innocent expectation, the colonel experienced the feeling thatfungus and poisonous lilies were taking root in his gut. It was October. A difficultmorning to get through, even for a man like himself, who had survived so many morningslike this one. For nearly sixty years---since the end of the last civil war--the colonel haddone nothing else but wait. October was one of the few things which arrived.
(Check out the first 30 pages of this novel in English here)

El coronel destapó el tarro del café y comprobó que no había más de una cucharadita. Retiró la olla del fogón, vertió la mitad del agua en el piso de tierra, y con un cuchillo raspó el interior del tarro sobre la olla hasta cuando se desprendieron las últimas raspaduras del polvo de café revueltas con óxido de lata. Mientras esperaba a que hirviera la infusión, sentado junto a la hornilla de barro cocido en una actitud de confiada e inocente expectativa, el coronel experimentó la sensación de que nacían hongos y lirios venenosos en sus tripas. Era octubre. Una mañana difícil de sortear, aun para un hombre como él que había sobrevivido a tantas mañanas como ésa. Durante cincuenta v seis años -desde cuando terminó la última guerra civil- el coronel no había hecho nada distinto de esperar. Octubre era una de las pocas cosas que llegaban.
(Read this novel in Spanish here)


Cien años de soledad / A hundred years of solitude (1967)

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.
(Read this novel in English here)

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de 20 casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo.
(Read this novel in Spanish here)


Crónica de una muerte anunciada / Chronicle of a death foretold (1981)

On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit. "He was always dreaming about trees," Placida Linero, his mother, told me twenty-seven years later, recalling the details of that distressing Monday. "The week before, he'd dreamed that he was alone in a tinfoil airplane and flying through the almond trees without bumping into anything," she said to me. She had a well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people's dreams, provided they were told her before eating, but she hadn't noticed any ominous augury in those two dreams of her son's, or in the other dreams of trees he'd described to her on the mornings preceding his death.
(Read this novel in English here)

El día en que lo iban a matar, Santiago Nasar se levantó a las 5.30 de la mañana para esperar el buque en que llegaba el obispo. Había soñado que atravesaba un bosque de higuerones donde caía una llovizna tierna, y por un instante fue feliz en el sueño, pero al despertar se sintió por completo salpicado de cagada de pájaros. «Siempre soñaba con árboles», me dijo Plácida Linero, su madre, evocando 27 años después los pormenores de aquel lunes ingrato. «La semana anterior había soñado que iba solo en un avión de papel de estaño que volaba sin tropezar por entre los almendros», me dijo. Tenía una reputación muy bien ganada de interprete certera de los sueños ajenos, siempre que se los contaran en ayunas, pero no había advertido ningún augurio aciago en esos dos sueños de su hijo, ni en los otros sueños con árboles que él le había contado en las mañanas que precedieron a su muerte.
(Read this novel in Spanish here)


El amor en los tiempos del cólera / Love in the time of cholera (1985)

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.
(Read this novel in English here)

Era inevitable: el olor de las almendras amargas le recordaba siempre el destino de los amores contrariados. El doctor Juvenal Urbino lo percibió desde que entró en la casa todavía en penumbras, adonde había acudido de urgencia a ocuparse de un caso que para él había dejado de ser urgente desde hacía muchos años. El refugiado antillano Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, inválido de guerra, fotógrafo de niños y su adversario de ajedrez más compasivo, se había puesto a salvo de los tormentos de la memoria con un sahumerio de cianuro de oro.
(Read this novel in Spanish here)


Del amor y otros demonios / Of love and other demons (1994)

An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path. Three of them were black slaves. The fourth, Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles, the only child of the Marquis de Casalduero, had come there with a mulatta servant to buy a string of bells for the celebration of her twelfth birthday. They had been instructed not to go beyond the Arcade of the Merchants, but the maid ventured as far as the drawbridge in the slum of Getsemaní, attracted by the crowd at the slavers' port where a shipment of blacks from Guinea was being sold at a discount. For the past week a ship belonging to the Compañía Gaditana de Negros had been awaited with dismay because of an unexplainable series of deaths on board. In an attempt at concealment, the unweighted corpses were thrown into the water. The tide brought them to the surface and washed the bodies, disfigured by swelling and a strange magenta coloring, up on the beach. The vessel lay anchored outside the bay, for everyone feared an outbreak of some African plague, until it was verified that the cause of death was food poisoning.
(Read this novel in English here)

Un perro cenizo con un lucero en la frente irrumpió en los vericuetos del mercado el primer domingo de diciembre, revolcó mesas de fritangas, desbarató tenderetes de indios y toldos de lotería, y de paso mordió a cuatro personas que se le atravesaron en el camino. Tres eran esclavos negros. La otra fue Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles, hija única del marqués de Casalduero, que había ido con una sirvienta mulata a comprar una ristra de cascabeles para la fiesta de sus doce años. Tenían instrucciones de no pasar del Portal de los Mercaderes, pero la criada se aventuró hasta el puente levadizo del arrabal de Getsemaní, atraída por la bulla del puerto negrero, donde estaban rematando un cargamento de esclavos de Guinea. El barco de la Compañía Gaditana de Negros era esperado con alarma desde hacía una semana, por haber sufrido a bordo una mortandad inexplicable. Tratando de esconderla habían echado al agua los cadáveres sin lastre. El mar de leva los sacó a flote y amanecieron en la playa desfigurados por la hinchazón y con una rara coloración solferina. La nave fue anclada en las afueras de la bahía por el temor de que fuera un brote de alguna peste africana, hasta que comprobaron que había sido un envenenamiento con fiambres manidos.
(Read this novel in Spanish here)



That's it for today. You can find in Wikipedia a list of his works, in English and in Spanish. My next one will probably be Doce cuentos peregrinos (Strange Pilgrims in English, though the literal translation would be Twelve pilgrim tales).

Enjoy your reading! :)

El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No one writes to the colonel)

Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Year: 1961
Language: Spanish
Country: Colombia


This short novel written by Gabriel García Marquez tells the story of an old colonel, whose name we'll never know, who has lived his last 50 years waiting for a letter that is supposed to arrive with next Friday's mail. This letter will come along with an important economical compensation for his merits in the army, under the orders of Aureliano Buendía, a character that is mentioned a few times along the novel and becomes one of the members of the Buendía family in A hundred years of solitude (1967).
In fact, it's not until now (while writing this post) that I found out that the Colonel was written before the solitude! Not only that, but also Macondo, the village where the Colonel lives, which is also the setting where all the 100 years of solitude unfolded, appeared for the first time in other two of his works back in 1955.

However..., I had read A hundred years of solitude before, and for some reason it was nice to go back to this decadent village where everything is static, stuffy, dusty and ruined.
Although written, as it was, six years before the solitude, this story takes place about 50 years after Aureliano Buendía's death, which might be about 30 years after the end of the hundred years of solitude (and about 150 years after the foundation of Macondo, whose decadency we attend along that novel).

It's funny, though.
If we take the facts chronologically according to the story, we have that a certain José Arcadio Buendía founded a village named Macondo. Somewhere along the future generations of his descendents we find an honorable general called Aureliano Buendía. During the glory days of Macondo, the so called Banana Boom, the Americans come to the village and settle their banana plantations. But Macondo was fated from the very day of its foundation, and eventually the Americans will leave. Decades after its slow but inexorable decadency, and also decades after general Aureliano's death, we find our unnamed colonel, walking the same ruined streets and alleys. Which is to say, after a few decades of not having news from Macondo, we find out that the village remained just the way we left it, and there's still someone alive to remember the Buendía family with us.
If, on the other hand, we take the facts chronologically according to our reality, we find that one fine day, during a train trip, García Márquez passed by a banana plantation named Macondo that got his attention for some reason. After that, in 1955, he mentions the village for the first time in two works (that I haven't read). Then, in 1961, he puts our coronel in a ruined Macondo, though he recalls those glory days following general Aureliano's orders. And finally, in 1967, he decides to tell us the whole story of Macondo and its founding family.

Anyways, all this was just the excitement of my discovery!
Let's talk about the novel..., though there's not much more to talk about without spoiling it, so I will just say this: it's not thrilling. Solitude, misery and old age are the main topics. It's a very well written short story that is nevertheless very slowly unfolded, in a village where nothing happens, where nothing has happened since we left it 30 years ago.
You don't need to read the solitude first, but you most probably will enjoy this one better if you did. Which, again, is funny, if we have in mind that it wasn't written until six years after...