English
“On my 90th birthday, I wanted to treat myself to a night of wild passion with a teenage virgin.” This is how “Memories of my sad whores” by Nobel Prize winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez starts. An elderly man who has resolved to arrange a sexual encounter with a teenage virgin is an idea which could have alarmed the morals of literature – but in fact, it is just the starting point for an interesting approach to the understanding of sex, love, life and death.
Looking through the novels which take sex as their main theme, here I find a book which though I struggled with initially, I found in the end that the world constructed by Garcia Marquez captivated me with its sincerity, and the cadence of the prose of the narrator; a narrator with a great sense of knowledge.
I won´t get carried away – lets get straight to the point:
The old man falls in love with the girl. Each night, he pays the madame of the brothel to be able to see her, always in the same bedroom, which he starts to decorate so that the girl feels more comfortable. But the thing which could have been shocking (an old man having sex with a poor adolescent who has resorted to prostitution) becomes strangely more and more like a love story.
He doesn´t touch her – at least not with desire: he never explores her naked body. Is it possible to feel pleasure, sexual feeling without any physical contact? It seems so. The old man falls in love – just by lying next to her, and with the help of his imagination, which is a world of happiness at being 90 years old; a world of wanting to feel alive, which is full of gratitude to the young girl.
He loves the girl (who is called Delgadina), and he keeps from touching her, or seeing her outside of her room in the brothel for over a year, until it is raided and there is a murder.
Then, apart from her, he starts thinking of her again, filling his writing (he is a journalist) with words on love, in the hope that some reader, or even the girl herself, will get in touch.
But it is not a story about an old man suffering from senile dementia who is in love with a teenager from a brothel – but a strange kind of love story, in which she herself end up feeling loved, and protected by the old man, a man full of affection and respect, who does not in the end want to “reclaim his right” and have the sex he has paid for. He wants things to be different between them; and it certainly turns out that way.
Miruton
Find apartments in Barcelona and read Memories of my sad whores. I recommend it – it´s a really enjoyable novel about love, and an example of good sex writing in literature.
Translated by: Poppy
