The Making of the Magical : STRANGE PILGRIMS: Twelve Stories, <i> By Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Translated by Edith Grossman (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 188 pp.)</i>

Twelve out of 64; the figure comes from the prologue to these short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is its theme and the occasion for a precious insight into the alternating ticktock of creation and nothingness that painfully advances a writer’s clock.

The prologue, in fact, is one of the best pieces in “Strange Pilgrims” and this is not a reflection on what follows, some of which is splendid. It is a story itself, and marked by the author’s perilous synthesis of the illusory magical and the illusory real. It tells of the erratic gestation of the other 12 stories and the dozen years or so they took to be completed; as if art were the picaresque journey and not the destinations.

In the mid-’70s, Garcia Marquez felt drained after finishing “The Autumn of the Patriarch.” Traveling around Europe with his family, he filled a school notebook with 64 sketches of stories. He completed and published two of them, and ran out of energy. The effort of writing a short story, he tells us, is as great as beginning a novel; the same wrenching standing-start without the long journeying pleasure.

The notebook disappeared. He reconstituted 30 of the 64 pieces; then discarded all but 18, and once again lost energy. He changed genres, published five as newspaper columns, and used six more for films and television. Then he rewrote them from a once-again shifting sensibility, whereupon six of them “left for the wastebasket.” There was another complete rewrite. And after all the wandering and metamorphosis--art flees ahead just as you arrive--he tells us that he has no idea whether they are finished:

“New readers will know what to do with them. Fortunately, for these strange pilgrims, ending up in the wastebasket will be like the joy of coming home.”

It is a kindly thought to toss to a reviewer; it becomes almost a philanthropy to remark that five or six of the dozen are still sketches, magical twists without a convincing context, rabbits without a hat. The magic part of Garcia Marquez’s magic realism is not a flavor of its own; it is a condiment that brings out the flavor of his reality. The short story form can be a trap. The uncanny transformations and sweet narrative simplicities that give buoyancy to his continental novels are sometimes too concentrated on his islets, producing a sugar rush.

Thus, for instance: a short story in which the narrator and his family visit a friend in Italy, and find themselves mysteriously transported in their sleep to the bedroom of the dead man who once owned the house; or a fantasy about the deadly effect of a simoom-like wind in a town near Barcelona. An enticing metaphor turns forcedly insistent when two children, told that the light in a light bulb is like water filling a tub, drown after they break the bulb while their parents are at the movies. A story about a woman who finds herself imprisoned in an insane asylum because of a vengeful misunderstanding has some nice detail--one of the brutal nun-wardens is “skilled in the art of killing by mistake”--but essentially it is a trite Saki-like bit of spooky irony.

In at least half the stories, though, there is something of Garcia Marquez at his best. With a surreal phrase or a magic image he allows us to see reality, grave and comic at once, in a unique light. Virtually all are about old age, and treat it as a shipwreck that turns into an unimaginable voyage.

In “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” a precursor of “The General in His Labyrinth,” we meet another exiled, formidably self-willed Latin American ruler in exile. This one walks by Lake Geneva, sits in the park, and takes his sparse meals with the dignity, the precious ritual--formal dark suits, a stiff hat--and the authority of habit that summons up centuries of Hispanic hidalgos; on the skids and letting nothing go. Here and in many other of the stories, Garcia Marquez evokes the wry pathos of these childlike and theocentric egos adrift among Europe’s amiable pragmatisms. The owner of a busy restaurant, told that his client is a former president, smiles and says, “For them I always have a table.” A park attendant complains when the old man picks a flower for a boutonniere: “Those flowers don’t belong to God, Monsieur. They’re city property.”

In “Maria dos Prazeres,” the incongruity of expatriation is a victory. A slum child in Brazil, the protagonist has risen to independence, prosperity and dignity as an expensive prostitute. It is a worn paradox, but Garcia Marquez uses it as an old hoe to turn new earth. Now in her 70s, Maria is interested only in making a decent end. Her will meticulously allocates the treasures of her Barcelona apartment. She buys a grave-site at Montjuich, and trains her dog to follow the bus-route to the cemetery. She also trains it to shed tears. A child she befriends will take care of the dog when she dies and let it run loose every Sunday. Thus she will be properly mourned. The story ends not with death, however, but with sweet unexpected life.

“The Saint” tells of a Colombian who brings the uncorrupted corpse of his 7-year-old daughter to Rome where daily, for decades and through the reign of four Popes, he totes the cello-sized coffin from one Vatican bureaucrat to another, seeking canonization. Absurd and oddly serene, it says a great deal about Latin American boundlessness in a bounded Europe, about bureaucracy and about sanctity.

Of all these stories, the most remarkable seems to me to be “Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen.” An old Colombian widow--her husband had lain for years in a coma, waking just before his death to have his picture taken with each member of the family--makes a pilgrimage to Italy dressed in full Franciscan habit. She is helpless, whirled about, utterly bewildered as she struggles to find her bearings in Naples, where she lands. She avoids a cheap third-floor hotel because there are 17 English tourists in shorts--their thighs resemble smoked salmon--sitting in the lobby. The hotel she settles on, two floors above, has no dining room so she eats out. On her return, ambulances are taking away the 17 Englishmen, now dressed in blazers and flannels and all dead from eating oysters in the dining room.

The surreal story winds delicately around an irresistible human portrait. Senora Prudencio Linero has traveled out from the customs of a lifetime; a voyage more fearsome than Columbus’s. She takes in all the strangeness of the new Old World--17 dead Englishmen are just one more oddity--with a comic fear that turns into dignified courage, and misapprehensions that turn into ingenious insight. She draws a deep breath--taking refuge in her hotel room, she urinates “in a thin stream that allowed her to recover the identity she had lost during the journey”--and forges on. She is one of Garcia Marquez’s grand personages.