Postponing death with erotic love
A review of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book ‘Memories of My Melancholy Whores’
(The article was published in the INDIA TODAY edition dated October 31, 2005)
The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” A typical Marquez opening and this birthday boy, a doddering mediocrity who has lived his life so far in carnal loneliness in a colonial house, is a bona fide citizen in the pages of the greatest living storyteller. “The sad scholar”, an unaccomplished columnist of “exemplary ugliness”, and an eternal bachelor who has never gone to bed with a woman he didn’t pay. (By the time he was 50, there were 514 women, but he, a nameless moralist with his own sexual omerta, had stopped counting.) He gets the girl, in a familiar brothel, sleeping there naked, in foetal position, cleaned and polished, “drenched in phosphorescent perspiration”. The seducer sings love in her ear, and names her after a song. In this little book of love and liberation, she never wakes up for him, utters a word to him; all the awakening is within the old man, the newly transformed lover, whose love becomes a bolero, and whose columns become eagerly awaited love letters—and mortality is being postponed. A life that began as pornography metastasises into pure eroticism.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written some of the greatest love stories in which lovers wait for 51 years, nine months and four days to declare their “eternal fidelity and everlasting love”, as Florentino Ariza does in Love in the Time of Cholera. Elsewhere, the possessed flagellates himself to extirpate the demon, “the most terrible one of all”, as in Of Love and Other Demons. Then, in Latin America the erotic lover could be a five-year-old boy (Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother) or a non-agenarian hack. The lovers in Memories of My Melancholy Whores too are placed in the Marquezian enigma: she speaks only one sentence in the book; he has reinvented her in the delirium of desire. The relationship is sensual but not sexual, for her reality is subordinate to his life-prolonging fantasy. And as love lengthens his nights, it is no longer el realismo magical but the cascading resonance of a parable that animates the pages. And, unlike most erotic stories, it ends with a moral: the lover could now recognise himself “on the remote horizon of my first century”. The novel itself is like a stray sentence of burning beauty from a master.
(The article was published in the INDIA TODAY edition dated October 31, 2005)
