Marquez Serves Up Sweet Memories

Review by Rawlins McKinney February 9, 2006 Issue

Last month Gabriel Garcia Marquez confessed in an interview that he had not written a single line in 2005. Could Memories of My Melancholy Whores be the 78-year-old Nobel Prize winner’s last published work?

If you consider the subject matter out of context you might say “I hope so!” or even “He should have stopped with his 2003 memoir Living to Tell the Tale.” The narrator of this short novel is an ugly, embittered old journalist who plans to celebrate his 90th birthday by procuring and deflowering a 14-year-old virgin. Child pornography? No, not even close. There are only a few writers who could turn such a sordid premise into a beautiful although unconventional love story. Marquez is one of them.

The unnamed narrator of Memories of My Melancholy Whores opens with the declaration that the year he turned 90, he wanted to give himself “the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” He tells us that he has never gone to bed with a woman he didn’t pay. He was engaged at one point but on his wedding day he locked himself in his room, leaving his bride at the altar. He endures a long, loveless and dreary life as a newspaper columnist and teacher. He admits that although he is intellectually gifted, he is a poor teacher (his students call him Professor Gloomy Hills) and a mediocre journalist. He was a favorite of caricaturists because of his exemplary ugliness. He keeps a record of the prostitutes he has bedded. One brothel selected him as “Client of the Year” twice. By the time he is 50 he has listed 514 women he has been with at least once. He stops counting after that.

Throughout his long life, he has no awareness of getting older. He had never thought “about age as a leak in the roof indicating the quantity of life one has to live.” This attitude changes as he approaches his 90th birthday. He decides to write his column about turning 90. He wants to celebrate with a libertine night. On this birthday his desire “was so urgent it seemed like a message from God.” He calls a madam he has not seen in years and says, “Today’s the day." She recognizes his voice and knows what he wants. The irony is that she had offered young virgins to him in the past and he had always turned them down. And now he is giving her an impossible task. Despite her protests, she has a girl for him within an hour.

The madam tells him that the girl is 14 and frightened. She is also tired; she has worked all day in a button factory. The madam confesses she has given the girl a mixture of bromide and valerian to drink and she is now sleeping. He enters the room and finds a carefully groomed adolescent lying nude on a huge bed. He contemplates her from the edge of the bed, “my five senses under a spell.” Despite the heavy makeup, he sees her as a “tender young fighting bull.” He undresses, gets in the bed but does not wake her. His only physical acts are gently caressing and embracing the sleeping girl. He then sleeps. When he awakes, he knows that this is something new for him. Up until now he had chosen his whores more for their price than their charms, and “had made love without love.” Now he had discovered the “improbable pleasures of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of modesty.” He says goodbye to the still sleeping girl with a kiss on her forehead. It is then that he begins to feel the weight of his years and thus to start “to count minute by minute the minutes of the nights I had left before I died.”

He returns to his virgin every week. She always sleeps; no words are exchanged. Their liaison is always sensual but never sexual. The old man is blessed with love for the first time in his life but it comes with a cost: he finally has an awareness of his own mortality. It’s a price he is happy to pay.

Let’s hope that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s first work of fiction in 10 years is not his last. Memories of My Melancholy Whores is evidence that the creator of such masterpieces as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera is still in his prime as he approaches 80. While his latest effort may not sell the 10 million copies that Solitude did, it will surely claim a special niche in the oeuvre of this literary giant.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 115 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, available at booksellers at local libraries.

(Top)

More Book Reviews