Writer. Contributing Editor at The Discarded Image. Digital Content Strategist. Here's where I publicly explore the books I'm reading, the projects I'm working on, and other current interests. Ninety years of melancholy
Memories of My Melancholy Whores is, as the title declares, a story of loneliness and degradation, a “narration of the miseries of my misguided life,†the protagonist declares. We never learn his name, but we do learn that he is a 90-year-old Colombian newspaper columnist. He’s spent all of his days in his decaying house with his books and music, and all of his nights in poorly-ventilated brothels with prostitutes.
“I was on the verge of ruin but well-compensated by the miracle of still being alive at my age,†he realizes on his 90th birthday. To celebrate, he determines to spend the night with a 14-year-old virgin, and he makes arrangements with a madam with whom he has done business for decades. But that night when he arrives at the rented room to meet the girl, she is asleep, and rather than wake her he spends the night watching her from the shadows. (Yes, it’s creepy.) Night after night he makes the same arrangements, and night after night she is sleeping when he arrives, exhausted from her long days of caring for her siblings and sewing buttons in a clothing factory.
He begins to care for her, bringing her flowers and food, repairing the room where she sleeps. Rather than seeing her as a means to his own gratification, he begins to think of her as a person: “I asked myself in astonishment: what does a woman think about while she attaches a button? . . . I learned how much my suffering had corrupted me.†He comes to see sex as “a servitude that had kept me enslaved since the age of thirteen†and “the consolation you have when you can’t have love.†The self-discovery process changes his habits and the tone of his columns, and when his readers notice, he becomes the subject of national conversation.
It’s an abrasive book, disturbing on multiple levels, not the least of which is the apparent cultural difference regarding the age of consent. But it also has a hopeful quality, as the protagonist—who has had hundreds of companions, but no companionship—discovers what it means to care for another human being. And the imagery, even when raw, is rich–picture the gaunt, miserable old man pedaling his basket-clad bicycle to a brothel in a cloud of cheap cologne.
Memories is the latest by Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Question: Is it plausible that after 90 years a person would suddenly learn fundamental lessons of humanity?
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