Strange Pilgrims Read Online Free PDF

power and a stud’s virility. “Just as he is now, old and fucked up, he must still be a tiger in bed,” she said. But she thought he had squandered these gifts of God in the service of pretense. She could not bear hisboasts that he had been his country’s worst president. Or his ascetic airs, when, she was convinced, he owned half the sugar plantations in Martinique. Or the hypocrisy of his contempt for power, when it was obvious he would give anything to return to the presidency long enough to make his enemies bite the dust.
    “And all of that,” she concluded, “just to have us worshipping at his feet.”
    “What good would that do him?” asked Homero.
    “None at all,” she said. “But the fact is that being seductive is an addiction that can never be satisfied.”
    Her rage was so great that Homero could not bear to be with her in bed, and he spent the rest of the night wrapped in a blanket on the sofa in the living room. Lázara also got up in the middle of the night, naked from head to toe—her habitual state when she slept or was at home—and talked to herself in a monologue on only one theme. In a single stroke she erased from human memory all traces of the hateful supper. At daybreak she returned what she had borrowed, replaced the new curtains with the old, and put the furniture back where it belonged so that the house was as poor and decent as it had been until the night before. Then she tore down the press clippings, the portraits, the banners and flags from the abominable campaign, and threw them all in the trash with a final shout.
    “You can go to hell!”
    A WEEK after the dinner, Homero found the President waiting for him as he left the hospital, with the requestthat he accompany him to his hotel. They climbed three flights of steep stairs to a garret that had a single skylight looking out on an ashen sky; clothes were drying on a line stretched across the room. There was also a double bed that took up half the space, a hard chair, a washstand and a portable bidet, and a poor man’s armoire with a clouded mirror. The President noted Homer’s reaction.
    “This is the burrow I lived in when I was a student,” he said as if in apology. “I made the reservation from Fort-de-France.”
    From a velvet bag he removed and displayed on the bed the last remnants of his wealth: several gold bracelets adorned with a variety of precious stones, a three-strand pearl necklace, and two others of gold and precious stones; three gold chains with saints’ medals; a pair of gold and emerald earrings, another of gold and diamonds, and a third of gold and rubies; two reliquaries and a locket; eleven rings with all kinds of precious settings; and a diamond tiara worthy of a queen. From a case he took out three pairs of silver cuff links and two of gold, all with matching tie clips, and a pocket watch plated in white gold. Then he removed his six decorations from a shoe box: two of gold, one of silver, and the rest of no value.
    “It’s all I have left in life,” he said.
    He had no alternative but to sell it all to meet his medical expenses, and he asked Homero to please do that for him with the greatest discretion. But Homero did not feel he could oblige if he did not have the proper receipts.
    The President explained that they were his wife’s jewels, a legacy from a grandmother who had lived in colonial times and had inherited a packet of shares in Colombian gold mines. The watch, the cuff links, and tie clips were his. The decorations, of course, had not belonged to anyone before him.
    “I don’t believe anybody has receipts for these kinds of things,” he said.
    Homero was adamant.
    “In that case,” the President reflected, “there’s nothing I can do but take care of it myself.”
    He began to gather up the jewelry with calculated calm. “I beg you to forgive me, my dear Homero, but there is no poverty worse than that of an impoverished president,” he said. “Even surviving seems