Strange Pilgrims Read Online Free PDF Page A

and others,” he said. “All of us usurping an honor we did not deserve with an office we did not know how to fill. Some pursue only power, but most are looking for even less: a job.”
    Lázara became angry.
    “Do you know what they say about you?” she asked.
    Homero intervened in alarm:
    “They’re lies.”
    “They’re lies and they’re not lies,” said the President with celestial calm. “When it has to do with a president, the worst ignominies may be both true and false at the same time.”
    He had lived in Martinique all the days of his exile, his only contact with the outside world the few news items in the official paper. He had supported himself teaching classes in Spanish and Latin at an official
lycée
, and with the translations that Aimé Césaire commissioned from time to time. The heat in August was unbearable, and hewould stay in the hammock until noon, reading to the hum of the fan in his bedroom. Even at the hottest times of the day his wife tended to the birds she raised in freedom outdoors, protecting herself from the sun with a broad-brimmed straw hat adorned with artificial fruit and organdy flowers. But when the temperature fell, it was good to sit in the cool air on the terrace, he with his eyes fixed on the ocean until it grew dark, and she in her wicker rocking chair, wearing the torn hat, and rings with bright stones on every finger, watching the ships of the world pass by. “That one’s bound for Puerto Santo,” she would say. “That one almost can’t move, it’s so loaded down with bananas from Puerto Santo,” she would say. For it did not seem possible to her that any ship could pass by that was not from their country. He pretended not to hear, although in the long run she managed to forget better than he because she lost her memory. They would sit this way until the clamorous twilights came to an end and they had to take refuge in the house, defeated by the mosquitoes. During one of those many Augusts, as he was reading the paper on the terrace, the President gave a start of surprise.
    “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I’ve died in Estoril!”
    His wife, adrift in her drowsiness, was horrified by the news. The article consisted of six lines on the fifth page of the newspaper printed just around the corner, in which his occasional translations were published and whose manager came to visit him from time to time. And now it said that he had died in Estoril de Lisboa, the resort and refuge of European decadence, where he had never been and which was, perhaps, the only placein the world where he would not have wanted to die. His wife did die, in fact, a year later, tormented by the last memory left to her: the recollection of her only child, who had taken part in the overthrow of his father and was later shot by his own accomplices.
    The President sighed. “That’s how we are, and nothing can save us,” he said. “A continent conceived by the scum of the earth without a moment of love: the children of abductions, rapes, violations, infamous dealings, deceptions, the union of enemies with enemies.” He faced Lázara’s African eyes, which scrutinized him without pity, and tried to win her over with the eloquence of an old master.
    “Mixing the races means mixing tears with spilled blood. What can one expect from such a potion?”
    Lázara fixed him to his place with the silence of death. But she gained control of herself a little before midnight and said good-bye to him with a formal kiss. The President refused to allow Homero to accompany him to the hotel, although he could not stop him from helping him find a taxi. When Homero came back, his wife was raging with fury.
    “That’s one president in the world who really deserved to be overthrown,” she said. “What a son of a bitch.”
    Despite Homero’s efforts to calm her, they spent a terrible, sleepless night. Lázara admitted that he was one of the best-looking men she had ever seen, with a devastating seductive