Skip to main content

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 90th 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 90th 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.




Comments

  1. Perhaps the story is all about youth versus aging. Just a guess.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Perhaps its all about finding youth in aging. Just a guess.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

Are You Sane?

Illustration by Gemini AI A few months back, a clinical psychiatrist asked me whether anyone in my family ever suffered from insanity. “All of us are insane to some degree,” I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t because there was another family member with me. We had taken a youngster of the family for counselling. I had forgotten the above episode until something happened the other day which led me to write last post . The incident that prompted me to write that post brought down an elder of my family from the pedestal on which I had placed him simply because he is a very devout religious person who prays a lot and moves about in the society like the gentlest soul that ever lived in these not-so-gentle terrains. I also think that the severe flu which descended on me that night was partly a product of my disillusionment. The realisation that one’s religion and devotion that guided one for seven decades hadn’t touched one’s heart even a little bit was a rude shock to me. What does re...

Loving God and Hating People

Illustration by Gemini AI There are too many people, including in my extended family. who love God so much that other people have no place in their hearts. God fills their hearts. They go to church or other similar places every day and meet their God. I guess they do. But they return home from the place of worship only to pour out the venom in their hearts on those around them. When I’m vexed by such ‘religious’ people I consult Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in which there are some characters who are acutely vexed by spiritual questions. Let me leave Ivan Karamazov to himself, as he has been discussed too much already. In Book II, Chapter 4 [ A lady of Little Faith ], a troubled woman comes to Father Zosima, the wise monk, and confesses her spiritual struggle. “I long to love God,” she says. She knows that she cannot love God without loving her fellow human beings, or at least doing some service to them. The truth is, she says, “I cannot bear people. The closer they ...