The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother recap

Seven stories place the marvelous beside hardship without separating one from the other. An aged winged man becomes a profitable attraction before recovering and flying away; a coastal village remakes itself after adopting a magnificent drowned stranger as one of its own; and a dying senator's affair with Laura Farina becomes the scandal attached to his final months. Other narrators confront a phantom ship and a fraudulent miracle worker whose abused apprentice develops real power. In the title tale, fourteen-year-old Eréndira accidentally burns down her grandmother's mansion and is forced into sexual exploitation to repay an endlessly inflated debt. She falls in love with Ulises, who helps her escape but cannot initially free her from the grandmother. After his poison and explosives fail, he kills the old woman with a knife. Eréndira takes the grandmother's gold and runs away alone, leaving Ulises behind.

After heavy rain, Pelayo finds a decrepit old man with enormous wings collapsed in his courtyard. He and Elisenda shut the stranger in a chicken coop, and villagers arrive with competing theories about what he is. Father Gonzaga doubts that the captive is an angel and seeks guidance from church authorities, but the crowd treats him as a source of cures and entertainment. Pelayo and Elisenda charge admission and become wealthy. Public interest shifts to a more understandable traveling marvel, leaving the old man neglected. Years later his feathers recover; he struggles into the air and flies away while Elisenda watches him vanish. The next story moves to a coastal settlement where an uncanny scent from the sea briefly revives hopes and memories among residents accustomed to disappointment, then recedes without permanently changing their material lives.

Children discover the body of an unknown drowned man on the shore of a tiny village. As the women clean the exceptionally large and handsome corpse, they imagine the difficulties and generosity of his life and give him the name Esteban. The men confirm that he belongs to no neighboring community. By the time the village gives him an elaborate burial at sea, everyone has claimed kinship with him. They resolve to widen their doors, strengthen their houses, and plant flowers so their home will be worthy of his memory. In the next story, Senator Onésimo Sánchez campaigns through a desert town while secretly counting down the months left before his predicted death. He falls in love with Laura Farina, whose father sent her to obtain a favor. Their relationship becomes public, and the senator dies on schedule with the scandal and Laura's presence defining his last days.

A boy repeatedly sees a vast ocean liner passing where no ship can be, but the adults mock his reports. Determined to prove the apparition, he guides the ghost ship toward land with a light. The enormous vessel enters the village and establishes the truth of the vision through its catastrophic arrival. In the following story, Blacamán the Bad travels as a false healer, staging wonders and abusing the boy he has taken as an assistant. The apprentice eventually discovers a genuine ability to restore the dead. Renaming himself Blacamán the Good, he uses his gift to prosper and turns on his former master. He revives the older man only to keep him confined in a tomb where repeated death and restoration become punishment for the cruelty once inflicted on him.

Fourteen-year-old Eréndira serves her grandmother without rest in a desert mansion. After she falls asleep and a candle sets the house ablaze, the grandmother makes her responsible for the entire imagined value of the loss. She sells Eréndira's sexual services and carries her from town to town, growing rich while continually extending the debt. Missionaries temporarily remove the girl, but the grandmother recovers control. Ulises, the son of orange growers, falls in love with Eréndira and helps her flee; the grandmother tracks them down and takes her back. At Eréndira's urging, Ulises tries poison and then explosives, but the old woman survives both. He finally kills her with a knife. Eréndira seizes the vest holding the grandmother's gold and runs into the desert alone. She does not wait for Ulises, who is too injured to pursue her, and she disappears beyond reach.

Ulises returns to Eréndira and makes repeated attempts to kill her grandmother. Poison and an explosion fail, but he finally attacks the old woman with a knife and kills her after a prolonged struggle. Instead of joining him, Eréndira takes the grandmother's vest filled with gold and runs alone into the desert. Ulises, bloodied and exhausted, calls after her but cannot follow. She disappears beyond the horizon and is never seen again. The grandmother's control is broken, yet the story does not turn the escape into a shared romantic future: Eréndira claims the portable wealth produced by her exploitation and leaves both her abuser and would-be rescuer behind.