Reading Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.
–– Robert Bresson

Once he made you see a storm of small yellow butterflies, then he made you see ice, mirror, and guava, it was he who made you see another facet of solitude, and much more than anything else he made you see love – standing inevitably amid a number of other demons you could swear you had never seen before. He will never show you a love that has familiar demons laying siege to it, he was so rich in images, such was the terror of his fecundity, that he could send you into months of silent staring out of the window. Once he also went so far as to show you a stethoscope that caught the sound of tears bubbling inside a lover’s heart. You too learnt to count the number of years, months and days you spent away from a love that was unbearable. He also made you see how great love was a punishment, and he showed you how you seek it all the time, much like the murdered man who was unable to stand being separated from his murderer in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

It became impossible for you to eat into a guava without thinking of the writer for whom it had become the metaphor of memory and writing. Each time the house filled with the fragrance of this fruit, it was Marquez who came rushing in like a blessed storm. He had put his signature on it, much as Cézanne put his on the apple.

Living to tell the tale, Marquez invites you now into the fragrance of Delgadina’s soul, the fourteen-year-old virgin sleeping in the ninety-year-old man’s bed, a journalist made famous, as the story advances, by his inspired column on the subject of love in the newspaper for which he works. He will live to be a hundred, made happy by love, at last, a love reciprocated by a girl whom he can’t recognize, so to speak, when she is awake.

As an epigraph, Marquez quotes from a sibling text by Yasunari Kawabata, The House of Sleeping Beauties. It is obvious that, as a writer, he still has high ambition, despite the illness and old age, and he is still in a mood to address in us the love we have for Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If one remembers correctly, here was a writer who wasn’t much given to making allusions to other texts, within the body of his own work.

This recent novel is an exception, however. The quoted texts are so poignant that they inevitably make us reflect on this present work in which they are embedded like precious stones. Kawabata reigns supreme, like the master he is, of beauty and sadness, and induces tremors of expectation, hope, and yes, love, as soon as you open the book.

If you are the reader of a Marquez book and not a consumer of Marquez, if you have been schooled in the art of love by the master, you can’t now begin to complain about the tattered rag of a novel he pulls out from his deathbed. It’s already too late in the day for you. However, the book shows to you that he still cares but that, under the circumstances, his writing can’t rise higher than the groaning of a man in pain. Or if we don’t want to generalize, then this is what Marquez will sing when he is in pain and this is the way the end will make him speak.

The book shows us almost nothing about death, old age, love. Least of all about memory. Marquez seems to be trying to belabour an obvious fact about old age… You are as old as you feel, while others observe you from the outside. About fame, it would have been wonderful to get something from one made so famous by his writing. But it turns out only to be a fat lady looking at you from the foot of the bed when you wake up. It won’t sleep with you. If this doesn’t enlighten you, well, perhaps, nor does fame, nor the fame of the writer you have followed all your life, faithful as a dog. There are metaphors, however, that he still supplies from within the book that are good enough for you to form an impression about the tapering-off of a genius faced with death. The cat in the novel has ‘meows that seemed on the verge of words’… If we reverse this anthropocentric but moving observation, could we say ‘these are words that seemed on the verge of being meows’? And perhaps they deserve a careful and passionate reading precisely because of that?

The lovelorn journalist in the novel goes to sell his ancestral jewels to a shop from which they had been purchased a few generations ago, only to be told by the jeweller that they are simply the bottoms of bottles. On further examination, he is informed that it was his mother who had sold them. He keeps them, all the same, with himself, for the sake of family honour. Here’s a lesson in morality for those who love their writers to the bitter end. Aren’t they too supposed to be, in Marquez’s own words, ‘the poor drunkards of the small hours who weep for their dead’?

In Solitude, the unforgettable images of memory loss were the images invented by a man whose memory was packed with power, like a glowing red pomegranate. Now amnesia, as it occurs in an ex-beloved’s gorgeous white-silk appearance in Melancholy Whores, shows us the fragrance of guavas in the process of fading away. It is for us to cling to what we have of it, if Delgadina’s soul remained untouched by it in the last novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.