Love makes all the difference

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is about an old man who wishes to gift himself “a night of wild love” with an adolescent virgin on his 90^th birthday. The nameless narrator never found time to marry because whores kept him too busy all his life. He never loved anyone, in fact. “Sex is the consolation one has for not finding enough love,” he says. He is a mediocre writer until his perverse desire on his 90^th birthday changes him radically.

The madam of a brothel offers him a 14 year-old girl who is a virgin. Poverty leads her into this venture. She has been drugged by the madam because she is terribly scared of what may happen to her. One of her friends died of bleeding after having sex with a man from Gayra with whom she had run away. The “men from Gayra are famous for making she-mules sing,” says the madam. The narrator’s sexual prowess is well-known to the madam.

The narrator sees the girl sleeping under the effect of the valerian she was made to drink. He watches her naked body and leaves her untouched. He calls her Delgadina, the name of a girl in a song which he sings for her though she is sleeping. The girl is sleeping every time he meets her with the intention of making love to her. Eventually he falls in love with her.

The love brought about a miraculous change in him. He starts writing love poems in his newspaper columns and the poems make him famous. He discovers a new joy in his life, a new passion to live. He never has sex with the girl. He loves her. Interestingly, the girl loves him too. The “colours of a joyous dawn” envelope his house now.  And his heart is full of a “joyful agony.” He hopes to live on to the age of hundred in order to enjoy the pleasures of love that he has discovered for the first time in his life.

The novel is not as great as the other works of Marquez. His writing has the usual magical touch with all its lyrical beauty. But the theme is disturbing with what may be described as paedophilia though that is not what it really is. None of the characters other than the narrator comes alive like Marquez’s characters usually do. The heroine sleeps most of the time.

Yet the love that the narrator discovers at the age of 90 is magical indeed. Love is what actually works wonders in life. Love is a wizard.

As I read the last lines of the novella, I was left with a question that nagged me for most of the time I spent with the short book: Why did the girl have to be so young?  I have no answer yet.