“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent
virgin. I thought of Rosa Cadarcas, the owner of an illicit house who would inform her good clients when she had a new girl available. I never succumbed to that or to any of her many other lewd temptations, but she did not believe in the purity of my principles. Morality, too, is a question of time, she would say with a malevolent smile, you’ll see.” “Memory of my Melancholy Whores”(2004), the erotic but inspiring novel produced by Marquez after a long gap of ten years since he wrote “Of love and other Demons” in 1994, starts with the above lines. The protagonist, an aged journalist who is at the fag end of his life thinks of spending a night with the virgin on his ninetieth birthday. In order to materialize his desire, he contacts his old madam and opens up his mind for deflowering a 15 years old virgin, who happens to be a working girl. The scene of the girl who is asleep naked in the whorehouse reminds us of “The House of Sleeping Beauties” by Yasunari Kawabata, the great Japanese Writer who was a weaver of magic tales of beautiful sleeping nudes. In Kawabata's novel, old Eguchi sleeps with a different girl each time ,whereas the aging journalist of Marquez madly falls in love with Delgadina and is never satisfied with any other girl . The naked girl sleeps through out the night under the effect of sedation. The man just watches her and touches her afterwards. He confesses, "Trying not to wake her, I sat on the bed, naked, my eyes accustomed by now to the deceptions of the red light, and I scrutinized her inch by inch. I ran the tip of my index finger along the damp nape of her neck, and she shivered inside, along the length of her body … " And later, "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” Although the condition of his house and the old cat he receives as birthday gift, and his frantic efforts to protect his few remaining possessions suggest his hopeless condition, his ability to manage with the old and outdated technology of news paper publishing is projected as one of his many qualifications, for which he still retains his job. Among the things he prides himself in, he has never enjoyed sex with a woman with out paying her for the pleasure. The novel tells the story of love and sex between a mediocre ugly aging journalist and a working-class girl, who compromises with her virginity for her family’s livelihood in a highly imaginative manner. It is the story of a new-found love on the part of this aging scribe who had never been married. Although he could not enjoy sex with the virgin as per his designs, the girl has been able to give a new dimension to his life by kindling memories in him and inspiring his imagination. He is charmed and enamoured with this sleeping beauty - "I preferred her asleep", he acknowledges. This unforeseen experience thrills him, enlivens him. Those who have read his magnum opus "One Hundred Years of Solitude," or "The Autumn of the Patriarch," have reasons to raise their eyebrows over the narration and style of Memories of My melancholy Whores . But they should appreciate that this is not a work of magical realism, for which Márquez is so famous. It rather stands with his shorter masterpieces like "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," or "Of Love and Other Demons," with which it shares lot of similarities, like the crush of an old man for an adolescent girl. The time of the plot of “
Memories of My Melancholy Whores” is the early 1960s, i.e., the decade of possibilities. It is not the story of a dirty perverted old haggard, it is rather an inspiring tale of celebration of life by coming to terms with life. It does not ll of memories only, it speaks of pleasant possibilities as well !