One rainy spring afternoon, while María de la Luz Cervantes was driving alone back to Barcelona, her rented car broke down in the Monegros desert. (…)

Source: Márquez, Gabriel García “I only Came to Use the Phone.” In: Strange Pilgrims. Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman. Alfred A. Knopf 1993 and Penguin 1994.

Available at [🔗] .

Available at pp. 71-88 of [🔗] followed by [🔗] starting on line 7.

Available at pp. 71-91 of [🔗], [🔗], and [🔗]. You need to sign up to the non-profit digital public library Internet Archives at [🔗].

current affairs

Márquez’s story was written in 1978—a time when there was lots of criticism of mental asylums and there was a political movement to move mental health patients into community care. Now, a few decades later, there is a backlash. In The New York Times article “The modern asylum,” Christine Montross defends a return to psychiatric institutionalization.

links

Christine Montross “The modern asylum.” New York Times, 18 February 2015. [🔗]

questions

María has had a turbulent past. Does this in any way explain why she comes to cooperate, at least in some respects, with the treatment that she is receiving in the hospital?
How do you account for Saturno’s treatment of María when he visits her in the asylum? Why does Maria turn against him at the end of the story?
What do you make of the last paragraph? What do you think happened to María?
Can we read the story as a social criticism against mental asylums? Following the New York Times article “The modern asylum,” what has gone wrong with deinstitutionalisation and why would we want to return to psychiatric institutionalisation?