Memories of My Melancholy Whores By Gabriel García Márquez

This book, I have read twice.  After “My Cousin Rachel“, I wanted to keep up with the soul nourishing reading spree.  I ransacked my book collection, even scanned through the book list according to Harold Bloom’s Western Canon for inspiration.  I have read “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” once, possibly in the year of 2004.  I wish I had started writing book summary or introduction since the day I have started reading.  It is without a doubt one of the top-10-things-to-do-if-I-could-turn-back-time.

Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian writer who has awarded with Nobel Price in Literature in 1982.  I have always wanted to read his books.  Both “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera” look mightily heavy.  Perhaps one day I will consume them.  For now, I am happy to have read his modern novella, especially since I enjoy reading short story format.

The topic of humanity has a wide reaching coverage.  To that extend, I shall not read this book purely from the angle of morality.  Any mature individual should be able to tackle the material with an open mind.  Those things that you may not approve of in life do not mean that they do not exist.  Nor should they be conveniently ignored.  I do not believe that the writer uses the book to endorse certain objectionable behaviors.  Rather, he uses it to bring out a facet of life that some of us rather not look at.

Because of its mature content, I would not recommend this book to the young adults (nor should you continue reading this post if you are one).  Also, this post may contains spoilers.  In case if you plan to read the book, you may wish to come back later instead.

The narrator of the story is turning ninety.  And he has an idea on what to get for his birthday.

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

This one simple, yet genuine statement kick starts the story, sets the tone of what is to come, and basically tells the book in one line.  Slowly, the author introduces the main character: his near-century long career of being a mediocre columnist, his wedding that he failed to turn up, his stumbling into the scene of prostitution when he was merely twelve, and decades of paid sex without love, without friends.  Why does not he get married?  Why frequent the prostitutes?  To that, his reply is:

Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.

No, that does not justify his action of sleeping with more than five hundreds women by the age of fifty.  Nor it was his intend to boost his conquest.  It is a consolation.  For someone who has lived for decades without someone to love, it sounds melancholy to me.  As a reader, I do not despise the main character.  I sympathy him.

I do not know the era the story sets in.  There is a hint that it may be in the ’60s.  I suppose the era does not matter.  Even in today’s world, underage girls are sold into prostitution (more can be read in CNN’s The Freedom Project).  When this ‘adolescent virgin’ turns out to be a 14 years old girl, part of me frown upon the main character’s moral standard, even though he did not specify his requirement for the virgin’s age.  Part of me, however, is aware that this is a slice of reality.

I woke in the small hours, not remembering where I was.  The girl still slept in a fetal position, her back to me.  I had a vague feeling that I had sensed her getting up in the dark and had heard water running in the bathroom, but it might have been a dream.  This was something new for me.  I was ignorant of the arts of seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night a random, more for their price than their charms, and we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were.  That night I discovered the improbable pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of modesty.

The beauty of Márquez’s work is that he can tell something plain in such a ordinary and neutral way that when read, it is uplifting.  That honesty and so directly to the point, I can’t help but to feel for the main character.  Making love without love and hiding the true forms in the dark.  No, there is no sex between the ninety years old man and the fourteen years old girl.  In fact, for a year, they spend time with him watching her sleeps.  He names the girl Delgadina, in accordance to a Mexican folk song.  I did some research in the Internet.  The folk song tells a story of a young girl whose father proposed a marriage with her.  She refused, was locked up as punishment, and died of thirst.  The song ends with the girl going to Heaven while her father to Hell.  It is in some way fitting to this novella.  The girl is young and her client could be as old as her great grandfather.  It kept me thinking how the story would resolve itself to be.

I cannot find words to describe the relationship between this girl and the old man.  After the first night (of he watching her sleeps), the old man has fallen in love.  Most interactions between these two throughout the book are one directional.  Some are highly imaginary.  Others, I am not too sure.  It is as though this platonic love from him to her is mostly his virtual creation.  Is it how love is born?  Because of this, the old man has changed, starting with the way he writes his columns.  All of a sudden, he is happy.  His new work has gained popularity.  From then on, a twin plot surfaces.  It is a story of celebrating being ninety.  That ‘age isn’t how old you are but how old you feel’.  The main character’s transformation can be best illustrated below.

Thanks to her I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by.  I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.  I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time.  I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

Another plot is the main character’s recollection of some of the women he encountered in his life.  Each encounter is memorable.  One of them retired from prostitution and was married.  She said to him: Today I look back, I see the line of thousands of men who passed through my beds, and I’d give my soul to have stayed with even the worst of them.

Melancholy.  Isn’t it so?

I found there are quite a few take home messages upon reading “Memories of My Melancholy Whores”.  It is never to late too transform ourselves in a positive manner, as what we always envisage ourselves to be.  Celebrate the present, regardless the physical state we are in.  Love, or rather loving others is the path to happiness.