Read Online Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez - Free Book Online

and she had straight black hair that reached to her shoulders, and an aura of antiquity that could just as well have been Indonesian as Andean. She was dressed with subtle taste: a lynx jacket, a raw silk blouse with very delicate flowers, natural linen trousers, and shoes with a narrow stripe the color of bougainvillea. “This is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” I thought when I saw her pass by with the stealthy stride of a lioness while I waited in the check-in line at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for the plane to New York. She was a supernatural apparition who existed only for a moment and disappeared into the crowd in the terminal.
    It was nine in the morning. It had been snowing all night, and traffic was heavier than usual in the city streets, and even slower on the highway, where trailer trucks were lined up on the shoulder and automobiles steamed in the snow. Inside the airport terminal, however, it was still spring.
    I stood behind an old Dutch woman who spent almost an hour arguing about the weight of her eleven suitcases. I was beginning to feel bored when I saw the momentary apparition who left me breathless, and so I never knew how the dispute ended. Then the ticket clerk brought me down from the clouds with a reproach for my distraction. By way of an excuse, I asked her if she believed in love at first sight. “Of course,” she said. “The other kinds are impossible.” She kept her eyes fixed on the computer screen and asked whether I preferred a seat in smoking or nonsmoking.
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said with intentional malice, “as long as I’m not beside the eleven suitcases.”
    She expressed her appreciation with a commercial smile but did not look away from the glowing screen.
    “Choose a number,” she told me: “Three, four, or seven.”
    “Four.”
    Her smile flashed in triumph.
    “In the fifteen years I’ve worked here,” she said, “you’re the first person who hasn’t chosen seven.”
    She wrote the seat number on my boarding pass and returned it with the rest of my papers, looking at me for the first time with grape-colored eyes that were a consolationuntil I could see Beauty again. Only then did she inform me that the airport had just been closed and all flights delayed.
    “For how long?”
    “That’s up to God,” she said with her smile. “The radio said this morning it would be the biggest snowstorm of the year.”
    She was wrong: It was the biggest of the century. But in the first-class waiting room, spring was so real that there were live roses in the vases and even the canned music seemed as sublime and tranquilizing as its creators had intended. All at once it occurred to me that this was a suitable shelter for Beauty, and I looked for her in the other waiting areas, staggered by my own boldness. But most of the people were men from real life who read newspapers in English while their wives thought about someone else as they looked through the panoramic windows at the planes dead in the snow, the glacial factories, the vast fields of Roissy devastated by fierce lions. By noon there was no place to sit, and the heat had become so unbearable that I escaped for a breath of air.
    Outside I saw an overwhelming sight. All kinds of people had crowded into the waiting rooms and were camped in the stifling corridors and even on the stairways, stretched out on the floor with their animals, their children, and their travel gear. Communication with the city had also been interrupted, and the palace of transparent plastic resembled an immense space capsule stranded in the storm. I could not help thinking that Beauty too must be somewhere in the middle of thosetamed hordes, and the fantasy inspired me with new courage to wait.
    By lunchtime we had realized that we were shipwrecked. The lines were interminable outside the seven restaurants, the cafeterias, the packed bars, and in less than three hours they all had to be closed because there was nothing left to