“The Saint” (1981)

There is no way I don’t like this story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published originally in 1981 and translated into English in 1993. Part of me wants to register the wannabe literary note that crops up among horror anthology editors. I found this story in a Year’s Best anthology for 1994, which means by the logic of these things stories published in ’93. It’s edited by the durable team of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. This particular story is a Windling pick. With that note registered, I must say with Windling (and Datlow too, no doubt) that Garcia Marquez is always a pure pleasure to read and I don’t know how this story doesn’t stand as horror or weird or fantasy at least, for which “magic realism” anyway might just be an alternate spelling. Setting aside the multiple frames and filters—that’s the literary part, of course—it’s about a guy who, because the cemetery is being moved, has to dig up the corpses of his wife, who died giving birth, and his daughter who died at age 7, 11 years earlier. He discovers his daughter’s body has not decomposed. His wife, by comparison, is “dust.” The flowers in his daughter’s hand that she was buried with are still alive and smell sweet. Also her body weighs nothing now. Lots of good details here. It is obviously a miracle, she deserves to be canonized as a saint, and, because the father has nothing else to live for, he packs it / her into a cello case and leaves Colombia for Rome to meet with the pope. The story is told by someone who met the Colombian in Rome while he (the narrator) was in film school—film school! In Rome! Everyone who sees the corpse of the daughter is impressed, but comically dozens of others are also in Rome seeking sainthood for their own non-decomposed corpses. As Garcia Marquez, or the film school narrator guy, describes it, most of the other corpses are more like mummified. This case—come on, the flowers are still alive. She weighs nothing. Go ahead, put her on a scale. The Colombian stays in Rome for 22 years, seeking audience with four different imaginary popes. The film school narrator guy left Rome long ago and is back for some reason and happens to run into the Colombian. The story is full of memories of Rome when they met, the strange case of the Colombian’s daughter, and just sort of all the wonder and pathos of life. Garcia Marquez is so good it’s no wonder horror editors want to claim him for fantasy literature. In many ways it is where he belongs, though his stories even more are about the sensory joys and mysteries of being alive and sentient.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Strange Pilgrims
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
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