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. AnonymousFebruary 7, 2023 at 9:35 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  2. vanderloostFebruary 7, 2023 at 9:35 PM

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

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...
28 comments
Read more