Memories of My Melancholy Whores is ballyhooed by its publishers as the first work of fiction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 10 years.
It turns out not to have been worth the wait.
After the author's magical portrait of his own youth and apprenticeship in a classic memoir (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003), this very slight novella -- a longish short story, really -- plays like a halfhearted exercise in storytelling, published simply to mark time.
This tale demonstrates that the shorter form of the story does not lend itself to Garcia Marquez's talents: his penchant for huge, looping, elliptical narratives that move back and forth in time is cramped in this format, as is his desire to map the panoramic vistas of an individual's entire life. The fertile inventiveness that animated his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude is decidedly muted in these pages, and the reverence for the mundane realities of ordinary life, showcased in more recent works, seems attenuated as well. As a result, Memories of My Melancholy Whores feels like a brittle little fable composed on automatic pilot.
For some time now Garcia Marquez has been interested in writing from the vantage point of old age, and this story takes that impulse to an extreme. Its narrator, a former scholar known by his students as Prof. Gloomy Hills, is turning 90 and decides to celebrate his birthday by having sex with a young virgin. He places a call to the madam of his favorite brothel and makes arrangements to spend the night with a 14-year-old girl. In the course of recounting the relationship he develops with this girl, whom he calls Delgadina, the old man also ruminates about "the miseries" of his "misguided life."
Prof. Gloomy Hills, we learn, lives in his parents' house, proposing "to die alone, in the same bed in which I was born and on a day that I hope will be distant and painless." In addition to having taught Spanish and Latin grammar, he served for 40 years as the cable editor at El Diario de La Paz, a job that involved "reconstructing and completing in indigenous prose the news of the world that we caught as it flew through sidereal space on shortwaves or in Morse code." He now scrapes by on his pension "from that extinct profession," combined with the even more meager sums he earns writing a weekly column.
In his nine decades of life, the narrator has never had any close friends or intimate relationships. "I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay," he says, "and the few who weren't in the profession I persuaded, by argument or by force, to take money even if they threw it in the trash. When I was 20 I began to keep a record listing name, age, place, and a brief notation on the circumstances and style of lovemaking. By the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once. I stopped making the list when my body no longer allowed me to have so many and I could keep track of them without paper."
Such passages read like a sad parody of Garcia Marquez's radiant 1988 novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, which chronicled love (not just sex) in all its myriad varieties. Worse, we receive no insight into why the narrator has led such a libertine but lonely existence, no insight into why he has never examined his inner life.
All this changes, we are asked to believe, when Prof. Gloomy Hills meets Delgadina and, for the first time in his life, falls in love. He does not touch her that first night, nor the next night, nor the one after. Instead, he simply watches as she sleeps next to him on the bed -- exhausted from her day job at a factory, and overcome by the valerian potion the madam has given her to calm her nerves.
As the narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with this innocent young woman -- who, truth be told, does little ever but doze in his presence -- fantasy and dreamlike hallucinations begin to take over. After one imagined exchange with her, he says: "From then on I had her in my memory with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with her. I changed the color of her eyes according to my state of mind: the color of water when she woke, the color of syrup when she laughed, the color of light when she was annoyed. I dressed her according to the age and condition that suited my changes of mood: a novice in love at 20, a parlor whore at 40, the queen of Babylon at 70, a saint at 100."
The narrator imagines that Delgadina has been to his house and prepared him breakfast. Later he flies into a jealous rage, convinced -- with hardly any evidence -- that she has been sleeping with other men. He assiduously courts her with flowers and presents, and reads books like The Little Prince to her as she sleeps. "We continued," he says, "with Perrault's Tales, Sacred History, the Arabian Nights in a version sanitized for children, and because of the differences among them I realized that her sleep had various levels of profundity depending on her interest in the readings."
The relationship between the narrator and his virgin is really a relationship that exists inside the narrator's head, and since Garcia Marquez makes little effort to make this man remotely interesting it's hard for the reader to care really about what happens. Moreover, the trajectory of this narrative turns out to be highly predictable, leading to a banal ending to a banal story that's quite unworthy of the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez's prodigious talents.
Publication Notes
Memories of my Melancholy Whores
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
115 Pages
Alfred a Knopf
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