Twelve stories from abroad

Twelve stories from abroad ( Spanish Doce cuentos peregrinos ) is a volume of short stories published in 1992 by the Colombian Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez about the miraculous experiences of Latin Americans in Europe. The translation into German by Dagmar Ploetz and Dieter E. Zimmer was published in 1993. In the foreword, the author explains the long genesis that ended with the writing between 1976 and 1982 (see below).

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Have a good trip, Mr. President (Buen viaje, señor presidente)

The 73-year-old president of a Caribbean country, banished abroad after a military coup , is incognito in Geneva to find out the causes of his pain after thirty years of unsuccessful treatment. The neurologist advises him to have a spinal surgery. In the clinic, the ex-president is recognized by one of his supporters, the ambulance driver Homero Rey de la Casa, who had to flee to Switzerland because of his participation in street fights, where he has been with his wife Lázara Davis and two children for about ten years lives. Homero invites his idol to dinner in his apartment and hopes to win the favor of the supposedly rich man and maybe get scholarships for the children Bárbara and Lázaro or a better-paying job. But the president is no longer the shining figure of yore, but a sick man. Depressed, he tells of his failures as a politician and his meager income as a teacher in exile on the island of Martinique . He lives extremely modestly and asks his hosts to sell his late wife's jewelry to a jeweler so that he can pay his medical expenses. But the proceeds are not enough and Homero supplements the rest from his modest savings. For this, the President gives the children his wedding ring and watch before his return trip. After a year he wrote them that his pain had returned, but that he was no longer paying attention to it and was no longer following a diet. He plans to return to his country and take the lead in a renewal movement for a just cause “if only for the petty fame of not dying of old age in bed. In this sense [...] the trip to Geneva was fateful. "

The saint (La santa)

When the cemetery of a village in the Colombian Andes had to be cleared due to the construction of a dam, the parish clerk Margarito Duarte found the body of his daughter, who had died at the age of eleven, while excavating the dead. The diocese saw this as a sign of holiness and Margarito packed the body in a cello-shaped pine wooden box and traveled to Rome to display the miracle in the Vatican and to have the dead canonized . Here the first-person narrator meets him, a student at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, and experiences Margarito's ordeal with him: The administrative apparatus repeatedly delays his inputs and prevents him from advancing to the Holy See with ever new objections. First of all, Pius XII's hiccups. Then he is admitted to an audience at Castel Gandolfo, but the Pope does not see him. When the first-person narrator happened to meet Margarito again in Rome after twenty-two years, five popes had died and the old and tired man was still waiting, but had not given up hope. The poet is convinced that he is the saint: "Without realizing it, he has been fighting for the just cause of his own canonization for twenty-two years by virtue of his daughter's immaculate body."

Sleeping Beauty's Plane (El avión de la bella durmiente)

At the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris , the first-person narrator sees the most beautiful woman he has seen in his life, dressed with exquisite taste, with the aura of millennia like from the Andes. After a moment, she disappeared into the crowd. The departure will be postponed by nine hours due to heavy snowfall. In search of the beautiful one he wanders through the halls again and again without success, but to his delight she is the person sitting next to him on the plane. He hopes to talk to him, but she ignores him, orders the steward not to wake her for dinner, puts on the sleeping mask and sleeps eight hours until landing. During the night the narrator lies next to the "sleeping fairytale creature [...] closer together than in a marriage bed". "It was an intense journey [...] we both stayed alone in the twilight of the world [...] the Atlantic night was infinite and pure, and the plane seemed to hang motionless between the stars." In the morning she wakes up on time, puts on make-up and climbs "With a conventional apology in the purest American Spanish" passes over him and leaves without saying goodbye: Without saying "thank you for all that I had done for our happy night, and disappeared into the jungle of New York until today sunrise ".

I rent myself to dream (Me alquilo para soñar)

A storm in Havana kills the housekeeper of the Portuguese ambassador. Her snake-shaped ring, which the newspaper reports on, reminds the first-person narrator of a young Colombian fortune-teller whom he met during his time in Vienna after the Second World War . In his local pub she was given the tongue twister name "Frau Frida" from his Latin American fellow students. She had been a clairvoyant since childhood, and made a living by “dreaming” other people's futures. In this way she gained influence over her employers, was richly rewarded by them and even made an heir in their wills. The narrator also believed her, despite his skepticism, and immediately traveled to Rome when she advised him to leave Vienna.

Thirteen years later, he met "Frau Frida" by chance in Barcelona while he was having lunch with Pablo Neruda . The Chilean poet did not believe in her dream interpretations, but ironically had a reciprocal dream labyrinth experience with her during the siesta sleep: he dreamed of her, that she dreamed of him. Mrs. Frida had marketed her skill in Vienna and amassed a fortune, eventually sold her property in Austria and lived, if not traveling, in a castle-like villa in Porto .

The Portuguese ambassador, whom the narrator asked in Cuba about the unsuccessful employee, confirmed his suspicion and raved about her: "You cannot imagine what an extraordinary person she was [...] you could not have resisted the temptation, one To write history about them ”. He answered his question about this peculiarity with: "She dreamed."

"I only came to make a phone call" (Sólo vine a hablar por teléfono)

The story is about the twenty-seven year old Mexican María de Cervantes, who, as a former variety artist, assists her husband, the salon magician Saturno, in her performances. After settling in Barcelona eight months ago , Narrator met the two of them in Cadaqués and learned of the unstable relationship that had been broken by three affairs over the past five years by the beautiful woman, who had been capricious and volatile in love since her youth . On the way back from visiting relatives in Zaragoza , María broke down in the spring thunderstorm and was taken by a bus driver to a house with a telephone connection to inform her husband. They stop at a monastery and the bus occupants, mentally ill women, are unloaded and taken to the psychiatric ward by guards. She asks for a phone but is mistaken for a patient and is not taken seriously. You don't believe her story and lock her up with the others. She tries in vain to flee. In response to resistance, she is tied to the bed, sedated and registered as a mentally ill person.

Meanwhile, her husband is worried and investigates: the car was found robbed, but there is no trace of her. So Saturno thinks María has left him again and he decides to forget her forever.

It's summer now. After several unsuccessful attempts to escape and phases of resignation, María gives in to the advertisements of a lesbian guard. In return, this forwards a message to Saturno. When he gets to the hospital, he lets the doctor convince him that his wife is sick and is being treated well. Influenced in this way, he interprets Maria's description of the conditions in the monastery and the vehement request to free her from prison as an obsession and consoled her. She then refuses to see him and he finally resignedly stops visiting. He remarries and returns to Mexico. María fits into her situation and appears to a friend on the last visit before the demolition of the old building "extremely lucid [...] a little overweight and satisfied in the quiet of the monastery."

Augustspuk (Espantos de agosto)

The first-person narrator visits the Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva with his wife and two sons in his Renaissance castle near Arezzo . On their search for the way, they are warned by an old goose-lady that the old house is haunted. Since they don't believe in ghosts, they laugh at the superstitious woman. However, the two children are thrilled by the creepy idea of ​​meeting a real ghost. Finally they reach their destination and are expected by the writer friend for lunch. On the flower terrace with a view of the Toscana hilly landscape in the August light, the host recounts the tragic end of the castle builder: In “passionate madness” Ludovico stabbed “the lady of his heart in the bed in which they had just made love”, and let himself be torn to pieces by his fighting dogs. Silva seriously assures them that at midnight, Ludovico's ghost wandered the hallways. Then they visit the huge and gloomy building, v. a. the original bedroom with the bedspread still stiff from the dried blood of the beloved. The writer persuades the visitors to have dinner and an overnight stay. The narrator and his wife sleep deeply in a modernized room on the ground floor and wake up the next morning on the first floor in Ludovico's "cursed" four-poster bed with the dusty curtains and the blood-soaked sheets.

María dos Prazeres

The Brazilian mulatto María dos Prazeres was sold by her mother to a ship officer at the age of fourteen in Manaos and came to Barcelona. He left her there and she had to work as a prostitute for half a century. Then she retired from the business, bought an apartment in the Gracia district , renovated it and furnished it with old ornate furniture that she had bought cheaply at auctions over the years. The only connection between the now 76-year-olds and her past is the monthly visits from Count Cardona, a former customer. Their friendship ends when he reveals himself to be a Franco supporter while she worships the anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, who was killed in the civil war .

Ever since she had “the revelation that she would die before Christmas” three months ago, she has been preparing for her death: In a will she decreed the distribution of her inheritance in detail, she bought a grave in the Montjuïc cemetery , where too Durutti is buried, and trains her poodle Noi, whom she wants to bequeath to a nine-year-old neighbor girl, to find the way to the cemetery on her own and to cry at her grave. She increasingly feels that her end is near, but “[t] he life met her on an icy November afternoon.” On the way home in the rain, a luxury limousine stops and the young chauffeur with “curly, short hair and a Roman bronze profile” drives her to her doorstep and asks her to come into her apartment. She feels mocked, but he assures me that he would never do that and "certainly not [with] a woman like [s] you". She reconsiders her “clairvoyant dream”: “'Dear God,' she said with astonishment, 'So it wasn't death!'” […] And understood that it was worth waiting so many, many years and so on To have suffered a lot in the dark, and if it had only been to live this moment. "

Seventeen poisoned Englishmen (Diecisiete ingleses envenenados)

After a happy marriage with many children, the Colombian woman Prudencia Linero, nine children and fourteen grandchildren, looked after her invalid, dawning husband for thirty years. She has never left her hometown of Riohacha and rarely left her home during her husband's illness. After his death, the 72-year-old told her children that she had vowed a pilgrimage as a Franciscan to the Holy Father and that she would travel to Rome alone. After eighteen days of navigation, she reached Naples .

The story is about her stay in the port city, where she stayed, before continuing on the next day by train. A taxi driver takes you to a building with a guesthouse on each of the nine floors. However, she does not want to stay in the recommended hotel on the third floor, the only one with a dining room, when she sees a group of seventeen young English men, uniformly dressed in shorts and beach sandals, lying asleep in a long row of armchairs in the lounge. Instead, she takes a room on the fifth floor and has dinner at a restaurant in town. On her return to the hotel she sees the corpses of the English being removed. They poisoned themselves from an oyster soup eaten in their dining room. In her bed on the fifth floor she prays “seventeen rosaries for the eternal peace of mind of the seventeen poisoned Englishmen”.

Tramontana

The story is about the effect of a "merciless tenacious land wind which, like the natives and a few writers who have become wise through damage, believe that it carries seeds of madness within itself". During a visit to Barcelona, ​​the first-person narrator experiences how a clique of young drunk Swedes urged a Caribbean singer of around twenty to come with them to Cadiqués to continue the party. He refuses for fear of the Tramontana blowing there , "because he was filled with the certainty that, should he ever return, death awaited him." They do not listen to his objections and drag him into the car. In a panic, he throws himself "in an attempt to escape an inevitable death, from the moving car into the abyss".

This incident, described as a framework story, reminds the narrator of a similar accident about fifteen years ago during his last family vacation in Cadiqués. At that time he had an "inexplicable premonition that something was going to happen". The premonition came true when the caretaker, an old sea dog, who passed his old age in the popular holiday resort and believed “that after every Transmontana one ages by several years”, secured the doors and windows. Then "the wind [...] came without a break, without relief, with an intensity and a violence that had something supernatural", and after a few days they find the caretaker hanged in his room.

Woman's Happy Summer Forbes (El verano feliz de la señora Forbes)

A Colombian family from Guacamayal spends their holidays on the island of Pantelaria south of Sicily. The then nine-year-old first-person narrator and his two-year-old brother experience a summer party with lots of fun and freedom in the first month: The lively, chatty cook Fulvia Flaminea with her “tendency to disorder” brings Mediterranean flair, ease and joie de vivre into the house. The children spend most of the time on the beach and in the sea. Your diving instructor is Oreste, who is around 20 years old and armed himself with “six knives of various shapes and sizes” for the adventurous underwater hunt for water snakes and octopuses, which he “cannot imagine anything other than physical scuffle with the animals”. After swimming, he and the cubs catch rats at night. He combines his youth and a thirst for adventure with animal beauty. When Ms. Forbes first saw the young fisherman dressed in tiny swimming trunks, who "resembles a sea creature with his body, which is constantly smeared with engine grease", she says, "you couldn't imagine a more beautiful person than him". Yet his beauty does not protect him from its severity. One day, to the horror of the residents, he nailed a black and phosphorescent moray eel over the front door. She looks "with her still lively eyes and the saw teeth in the gaping jaws like witchcraft of gypsies" and is reminiscent of a "crucified serpent". From then on, even with her educated explanations about the importance of the moray eel as a royal dish in ancient times, the teacher can no longer persuade the children to eat fish.

The story focuses on the second part of the holiday and begins with the “crucified” moray eel. After the parents, a writer and a teacher, set out on an educational trip to the Aegean Sea , the "Sergeant from Dortmund" takes over the regiment. Mrs. Forbes was employed by her father, "blinded by the ashes of European acts of glory", to convey order and western culture to the sons. She arrives in military boots, costume and felt hat, organizes the daily routine like a school timetable and operates according to the principle of “reward and punishment”. However, the children soon discover that the teacher has a dark night side: she sings in her room and sobs, declaims verses, then sneaks through the house, gets drunk, stuffs herself with sweets, watches forbidden films on television with the sound turned off for minors and swims secretly in the sea. Their authority is waning and the children plan to kill them. To do this, they pour the poisonous remains of an ancient amphora recovered from the sea into their wine bottle. The next day she doesn't show up for breakfast. The boys go to the beach alone and dive with Oreste in the sea. Upon their return, they learn from Fulvia that Mrs. Forbes was killed by twenty-seven knife wounds in her bedroom that night. It “could be seen that they had been inflicted on her with the fury of a restless love and that Mrs. Forbes had received her with the same passion, without even screaming, without crying, with her beautiful soldier voice declaiming Schiller and in her mind that this was the inevitable price for their happy summer. "

The light is like the water (La luz es como el agua)

The Colombian first-person narrator from Cartagena de Indias lives with his wife and two sons Toto and Joel for some time in Madrid . The children want a rowboat for Christmas even though there is no navigable water nearby. But since they are successful in school, their wish is granted. While her parents are in the cinema, as they do every Wednesday, they transport the boat to the servants' room with the help of their classmates and remember a statement made by the father after his participation "in a seminar on the poetry of everyday objects". He explained the function of the light bulb to Toto by making a comparison: "The light is like water [...] you open the tap and it flows out." So the sons smash a light bulb, switch on the lamp and "a stream of golden and fresh light begins to flow like water from a cracked pear. ”On this lake they drive around between the furniture islands in the apartment. This is repeated every Wednesday. The following year they want diving equipment and “dive like tame sharks under the furniture and beds, and from the bottom of the light they hide the things that they have lost in the dark over the years . “After successfully completing school, the brothers are allowed to celebrate a class party in their apartment. Because a cascade of light oozes from the balconies, spreads over the facade in torrents and finds its way to the large avenue, the fire department is alerted. Furniture, household items, and thirty-seven classmates are floating around the house. "Because they switched on so many lights at the same time that the apartment was flooded, and the whole fourth grade of elementary school" had drowned. "In Madrid, a distant city [...] with no sea or river, whose mainland natives have never been masters in the art of driving light."

The trail of your blood in the snow (El rastro de tu sangre en la nieve)

The narrator learned the tragic love story from the young Colombian Billy Sanches de Avila and researched the labyrinth of events in Paris . Billy knows his wife Nena Daconte from their primary school days and from birthday parties in Cartagena de Indias, because they belong to the provincial nobility who "have directed the fate of the city as they see fit" since colonial times. Then they part ways. Billy, neglected by neglect by his mother, who is fixated on her affairs, joins a gang of young people who were notorious for their rioting, while Nena learns four languages ​​without an accent in a Swiss boarding school. The now 18-year-old meets the 17-year-old bully after her return from Europe in a lido when Billy's gang rushes over the women's cloakroom and he breaks into Nena's cabin, swinging an iron chain. She is very controlled and his anger is directed against himself by pounding his fist against the wall and hurting himself. The two fall in love with each other during his doctoring, develop a passionate relationship and in the process she discovers a "frightened and affectionate orphan" in the bat. After three months they get married in January, Nena is already two months pregnant, and they fly to Madrid. There, the diplomatic mission of your country will present you with the precious gifts from your parents. a. a Bentley convertible owned by Billy's father, in which they go on their honeymoon in Paris. When Nena sticks her ring finger on the roses presented by the ambassador, she plays it with a joke, but during the night drive through France the bleeding intensifies into a trickle. She holds her hand out of the window to cool down and the blood drips into the fresh snow. In Paris they go to a hospital and Nena is immediately taken to the intensive care unit. Billy is not allowed to stay with her and is put off for the next permitted visit in almost a week. Now he gets into a labyrinth of bureaucracy and the plot runs past each other in two separate threads, especially since Billy does not speak French and has left the travel organization to Nena. All documents are in his wife's bag at the clinic, so he stays overnight in a simple hotel nearby. From here, he repeatedly visits the hospital and his embassy. Nobody can help him. You either declare yourself not responsible or refer him to the orderly course of things in a civilized country. An official explains to him that “there is nothing left but to bow to reason”. Billy resigned. When he was allowed to enter the hospital on the prescribed visiting day, he found out that his wife's bleeding could not be stopped and that she died two days after admission. While he was in his room, in a café and in front of the hospital, the clinic's inquiries at the pre-booked hotel and at the embassy, ​​as well as calls on the news, had been unsuccessful, and Nena's parents had meanwhile had the embalmed daughter in their family vault in La Manga buried. "When he left the hospital, he didn't even notice that snow was falling from the sky without any traces of blood."

Emergence

In the “Prolog. Why twelve, why strange, why stories, ”says the author of the eighteen-year history of the book. At the beginning of the seventies he started collecting ideas for 64 stories in Barcelona, ​​some of them in newspaper articles ("The trace of your blood in the snow", "The happy summer of Mrs. Forbes") and film scripts and as an exposé for a television series. Over time, the ideas were changed again and again and the drafts revised and finally twelve of them were written between 1976 and 1982. During a subsequent trip to Europe he discovered that none of the European cities described in the stories from his memory corresponded to reality: "The actual memories seemed to me phantasms, while the false memories were so convincing that they had replaced reality." He wrote all over again in eight months without wondering "where life ended and where the imagination began."

reception

The "Twelve Stories" were mostly assigned to South American magical realism by literary criticism , "whose fantasy has meanwhile enjoyed high recognition value on the world market as a kind of Latin American literary folklore". The Colombian had redeemed his resolution to "write about the strange things that happen to Latin Americans in Europe". For Falcke, the stories in the collection are the best, excluding any explanatory elements. In this context, Saldívar criticizes Márquez 'final comment in The Saint , according to which Margarito Duarte is the Saint. The reader should actually come to this insight.

For Falcke, the narratives present themselves “as case histories of the immutability of the factual, about which people may be amazed and speculate, but over which they have no influence”. And therein lies the fascinating thing about these stories: “That they attract interpretations like a magnet and at the same time keep the most contradicting interpretations playfully in the balance of undecidability. Everything is conceivable ”. This interpretative approach focuses on the existential and transcendent dimension: The old continent here “only provides the ground for the curious satyr play to which García Márquez lightly mixed in some acts of tragedy from a larger stage. And they deal with being a stranger in the world in a very absolute sense. "

Kregel, on the other hand, differentiates between the classification of García Márquez's work in a summary of magical realism and emphasizes that García Márquez, in “those tongue-in-cheek Twelve Stories, undermines the perception of the supposedly exotic, magical-realistic Latin American continent - by successfully taking his well-known writing style to European locations and uses nomadic protagonists. ”It is often forgotten that García Márquez originally had no intention of writing“ magically realistic ”; “This designation was given to his famous work only later, while the critics initially drew parallels with the realism of Balzac, for example. It was only after a few years that the novel “Cien años de soledad” and the special writing style of its author (not without reason) were given a prominent place in the ancient history of magical realism. ”In any case, García Márquez operates with a lot of irony keeps awareness of the frequent threshold and upheaval situations. Because the "paradigm of alterity that Latin America explained to the other, [could] today be regarded as largely historical". This opens up the opportunity and space to rediscover the multidimensional work of the Colombian author, which ranges from journalism to novel and from film to screenplay.

Varia

fable

Some of the twelve stories leave the reader with the impression of a small, independent work of art - despite the mixture of outrageous invention and the inviolable reality of the fable. Seventeen poisoned Englishmen and Tramontana are excluded from such an aesthetically successful execution . In Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen , Marquez does not go beyond the - admittedly excellent - description of the inner workings of Mrs. Prudencia. The unmotivated death of the many Englishmen was foolishly and wantonly incorporated into the plot. The reader is just as perplexed before the suicide of the young man and the old sailor in Tramontana .

Lack of transparency

The European reader does not understand a number of things; can only guess at it. For example, in Gute Reise, Mr President, the Caribbean country from which the President and Homero come is kept secret. Both come from a country in which there is a village of San Cristóbal de las Casas. The president's birthday is on March 11th, found asylum after the aforementioned coup on Martinique, and one of his successors is named Sáyago.

Narrative point of view

In some of the texts it seems that Marquez is hiding behind the first-person narrator, a married writer from the Caribbean with two teenage sons. In Frau Forbes' happy summer, however, one of the two sons tells the story.

Crudity

In The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow there is talk of the "smell of shit".

Adaptations

Before the publication of the "Twelve Stories", García Márquez processed some actions in film scripts:

In 1988 he conceived the television series “Amores difíciles” consisting of six 90-minute films, which were jointly produced by the Spanish broadcasting company RTVE and the “International Network Group” and coordinated by the “New Latin American Cinema Foundation”. Each film was directed by a renowned Latin American filmmaker. The scripts, written by the author together with the directors, were based on stories or episodes of novels by García Márquez: two of them from "Twelve Stories", the others from "Love in the Times of Cholera" and from short stories.

• The film “Milagro en Roma” (1989) directed by the Colombian director Lisandro Duque Naranjo is a version of the story “The Saint”.
• "El Verano de la Señora Forbes" (1989) by the Mexican Jaime Humberto Hermosillo is based on the story: "The happy summer of Mrs. Forbes" (cast: Hanna Schygulla , Francisco Gattorno, Alexis Castanares and others).

In 1992 the author wrote the screenplay for the six-part television series “Me alquilo para soñar”, an adaptation of the story “I rent me to dream” (cast: Hanna Schygulla, Charo López and Fernando Guillén et al.) Together with the Brazilian director Ruy Guerra )

The Spanish songwriter Lashormigas (Salvar Pau) composed the song “El rastro de tu sangre en la nieve” in 2015, which is inspired by Gabriel García Márquez's story. It was released in 2020 in the album “Lo más bien”.

literature

Text output

Used edition

• Gabriel García Márquez: “Twelve stories from abroad”. German by Dagmar Ploetz and Dieter E. Zimmer. Kiepenheuer & Witsch Cologne 1993. ISBN 3-462-02238-5

Secondary literature

• Dasso Saldívar: Journey to the Origin. A biography of Gabriel García Márquez. Translated from the Spanish by Vera Gerling, Ruth Wucherpfennig, Barbara Romeiser and Merle Godde. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-462-02751-4

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gabriel García Márquez: "Twelve Stories from Foreign Countries". Kiepenheuer & Witsch Cologne, 1993.
2. ↑ Autobiographical references by Reto E. Wild: "When the trade wind blows in Cartagena de Indias". Neue Zürcher Zeitung Nov. 15, 2001. www.nzz.ch
3. ↑ Eberhard Falcke: “It was like that!” Zeit Online, April 23, 1993. www.zeit.de
4. ↑ Saldívar, p. 523, footnote 16
5. ↑ Susanne Klengel: “The magic of changing aspects: literary-historical-medial lessons. Gabriel García Marquez in memoriam ”. Latin America Institute, Free University of Berlin, April 22, 2014.www.lai.fu-berlin.de
6. ↑ Edition used, p. 202, 15. Zvu
7. ↑ Alessandro Rocco: "Gabriel García Márquez and the Cinema: Life and Works". Woodbridge 2014. books.google.de