Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is the last work of fiction published by Marquez. It was published in 2004. After being diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1999 he began work on a planned three volume memoir titled Living to Tell the Tale. Only the first volume was published, in 2002. Then this novella. Although he publicly claimed to continue to write, nothing more was published before his death, in 2014, in Mexico City, age 87.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is told in first person by an old, unnamed, man. The book begins on his 90th birthday, in August, and ends on his 91st birthday. He lives alone, with a housekeeper named Damiana. He has no children. He was never married. He worked as a journalist (as did Marquez) and a teacher. He still writes a weekly column for the local newspaper.

For his birthday, he decides to treat himself by hiring a prostitute. He has been a long-time customer of a brothel run by a woman named Rosa Carbacas. He calls her. He requests a young girl, a virgin. Rosa finds a girl for him, age 14, and the narrator visits the brothel that evening.

The opening pages, as Marquez sets up the scene, are icky. I almost put the book down. But once at the brothel the narrator finds the girl asleep. Rosa has given her a sedative to calm her fears. The narrator doesn’t wake her. Instead he admires her, lies down beside her, sleeps chastely next to her through the night, wakes before her in the morning, exits. Thus begins a year of sometimes nightly, sometimes interrupted by weeks, visits to the brothel and the girl. She sleeps through every visit. She has one line in the entire book when she speaks in her sleep, “It was Isabel who made the snails cry.” He reads to her. He sings to her. He fixes up the room where they meet. He brings her small gifts: jewelry, a bicycle to ride to her daytime work sewing buttons onto clothes. He writes short messages to her, written in lipstick on the mirror, but there’s no certainty she knows how to read. He never learns her name. He calls her, Delgadina.

Through the year, and the novella, he claims to fall in love with this girl, and he reminisces about previous women in his life. He boasts to have had 541 women before he stopped counting, and never had a woman he didn’t pay for. But the novel is not a laundry list of illicit affairs, thank goodness. Besides Rosa and Delgadina only three women make significant appearances in the novel, only one a prostitute, and none of them “melancholy.” There is Damiana, the housekeeper. There is Ximena Ortiz, a women he was engaged to but abandoned at the altar. And Casilda Armeta, a former prostitute he frequented, who recognizes him on the bus one day during the course of the year, hears about his infatuation with Delgadina, and advises him to act on his love.

Supposedly the story is that, at the age of 90, a lonely, unaccomplished, weary man finally experiences true love, and is reborn. The novel ends on a happy note as he begins to look forward to living past 100 and making a kind of home with his sleeping girl. But his love is self-love projected onto the girl. She remains a complete blank, a multiplication to the extreme of his virgin fantasy. The story is beautifully told, but it is fairy-tale, not a love story.

The books he reads to the sleeping girl are, tellingly, The Little Prince, Perrault’s Tales (Perrault wrote Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella among others), Sacred History (i.e. the non-historical stories of Genesis and Exodus) and The Arabian Nights “in a version sanitized for children.” He claims to be a lover of literature but prefers dictionaries over the classics in his library. He is a music critic for his newspaper but tells us, one day at noon, he puts on “an exquisite program of music” consisting of “Wagner’s Rhapsody for Clarinet and Orchestra” which is actually an Adagio mis-attributed to Wagner; “Debussy’s Rhapsody for Saxophone” not that composer’s finest work; and “Bruckner’s String Quartet” which is a student work. So maybe Marquez is signaling that his narrator’s self-regard is more evolved than his taste.

The novel begins with an epigraph from Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, which has a similar plot. The novel also has antecedents in Lolita and Death in Venice. Old men. Distant, inaccessible love objects. Delusions.

Like all Marquez, this is worth reading, and it’s very short. I read Chronicle of a Death Foretold last summer, which is excellent, fascinating. Love in the Time of Cholera is an actual love story and beautiful. One Hundred Years of Solitude is his finest.