Memories of My Melancholy Whores Book Summary
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600
Published: April 17, 2008
As read on BBC Radio
4, this novella begins on a day a newspaper columnist turns 90 and, to celebrate
the occasion, decides to give himself a gift of a night of mad love with a
virgin adolescent. He has never married and has never gone to bed with a woman
he didn’t pay. He had kept record of all his women and at 50 he had 513 women in
his journal. He contacts Rosa Cabarcas, who runs an illicit house. This is the
beginning of a new life at an age when most mortals have already died. Rosa fixes for him a girl of fourteen, who goes for
sewing buttons the whole day so the man has to go only after ten in the night.
He goes and finds the girl blessedly sleeping without a stitch of cloth on her.
Enamoured by her naïve simplicity he doesn’t have a heart to wake her up. Early
morning he notices that in the middle of the night some time the girl had got
up. He leaves her some money and leaves. As the man reminisces about the woman
who almost became his wife and about his column which the youth looked upon as
ancient mummy’s, and as the newspaper celebrates his 90th birthday,
he decides to stop writing his column. There is another night and he has still
not touched the girl whom he begins to call Delgadina. Even Rosa
is surprised how he could do this to the girl Next time when he meets the girl,
she has cough and fever. He has now started giving her gifts so that she could
make herself more presentable. The two begin to know each other, in their own
strange way. One night when the man is visiting Delgadina, suddenly there is a
commotion. An important man is murdered in the adjacent room and all, including
Rosa have to flee. The illicit house is closed
down by the police. The 90-year old man tries hard to find and meet the girl
but does not succeed. He is miserable. His columns are full of love which even
the younger readers recognise. He determines and goes to the button-sewing
centre where Delgadina sewed buttons for hours together. He sees there 300
girls in uniform, all looking alike. He returns. When a crime reporter mentions
about a refugee girl on a cycle meeting an accident and dying, he rushes to the
morgue. One look at the dead body’s feet and he knows she is not Delgadina.Then,
one day, he catches Rosa on the phone. She
arranges for the two to meet. This time he finds Delalgdina changed. Matured.
She is also with expensive possessions. Whore - the man shouts and breaks and
destroys things in the room. “My God!” Rosa Cabarcas exclaims, “What I wouldn’t
have given for a love like this!” He bares his heart to Rosa
and leaves. Rosa tells him that she would send
him the bill for the damages caused. But he is unable to forget his young
whore. He continues to look out for her and Rosa
once again brings good tidings that she has been found. When he meets Delgadina
his first thought is that he would buy Rosa’s
establishment and the two along with Delagdina could live together. Jocularly
they also agree that the last one to survive would get the entire property and
money. Then, a heart wrenching doubt raises its head. Will Delagdina agree to
this arrangement? Rosa, laughs and says, “That
poor creature’s head over heels in love with you. The man has now turned
ninety-one.
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