The Wanderers’ by Guadalupe Nettel - Refugee Series # 2

The second short story which I would like to introduce is ‘The Wanderers’ by Guadalupe Nettel. She is a Mexican writer and the short story is translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes. The short story opens with a profound observation of childhood. The narrator describes childhood as something which ‘lingers crouched silently in our grown-up bodies and one day when we are old it reappears like lightning, striking us with its freshness, its innocence’ and this is when ‘we will get the last glimpse of it’. The story is about the friendship of Camilo and the narrator. Camilo’s parents arrived from Uruguay to Mexico. The two families lived in the same building - ‘Villa Olimpica’. The building was full of exiles and when the children played in the evening, their screeches and yells came in different accents, Mexican, Chilean, and Argentinian’. The narrator connects the inhabitants of the building and the birds which lived on the trees in the garden near the building. The narrator loved birds. She liked the songs, colours, sizes and feathers. In fact, it is the fascination with birds that takes the story forward. She remembers the trip with her father to the aviary which transformed her father into a bird enthusiast. The narrator’s family moves away from Villa Olimpica due to her father’s teaching job and the narrator says goodbye to Camilo. In one of her sea expeditions to spot the Brown Pelican, the father, daughter and the team of biologists’ unintentionally catches an albatross. They don’t kill it but sets it free. The short story talks about Baudelaire’s poem on Albatross, in which the bird is described as - ‘sky born kings, graceless and mortified. The narrator never wrote to Camila because she was ‘intimidated by the distance and time’ It was only when she was in France that she wrote to Camila. By 1983, half of the residents of Villa Olimpica left the building and went home. The author compares this to the natural behaviour of the albatross ‘even after flying across, barely touching the land’ some kind of ‘instinct guides them home’, not only to their country of origin ‘but just a few meters from the place where they were born’. The story is built on the symbol of Albatross. Unlike Coleridge who presents the bird as a cursed being (inspired by Baudrillard) here, the bird is connected to human lives and is also linked with the themes like migration, exile and homecoming.