Walid Garcia Marquez
Walid Garcia Marquez
Walid Garcia Marquez
Miracle! In stead of having sex, our old man finds love. The 90 years old man deeply
embedded in failure and shame, finally finds love. From a thirsty, clandestine pleasure
seeker, he turns into a fragile-hearted lover who discovers love for the first time in his life. At
the age of 90, few steps away from grave, Marquezs old man finally understands the
meaning of love, the word which he deleted from his dictionaries as he wrote later: I used to
think that dying through love is a poetic metaphor; I have wasted more than fifteen years trying to
translate Leopardis Canti and only that night I understood the meaning of Leopardis poetic verses:
Ah, if this is love, how it torments me!
It seems that when Marquez wrote this text, he must have been influenced by Yasunari
Kawabata, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner in literature; In his 1926 novel, The House of
Sleeping Beauties, Kawabata describes an old man being entranced by the beauty of a young
girl, and who was also happy just to look at her sleeping, while he recalls the importance of
love and passion for him throughout his life.
The reader might also recall a significant Balzacs phrase in Letters of Two Brides: you have no
other choice in life; you either die of love or die of boredom, and instead of dying of boredom, our
old man whose sickness and loneliness are increased by age, chooses to march slowly
towards his death escorted with love.
This very late love is unattainable of course; if we to assume that desire is a continuous
blazing fire and soul is a never-ending water fall, how could we ignore that body is a machine
that obeys the logic of time, it rusts and gets weird, and this is the main dilemma which
dwells in Memories of My Melancholy Whores, despite the writers attempt to invoke the power
of love to defy age and time. No wonder then that the old man becomes entrenched in an
obscure, unclear hallucination-like status, something between reality and imagination,
awakening and sleep.
The novelette, with its impossible love story, looks different from Marquezs previous works,
but we can still smell in it the same sad and legendary smell which we usually find in
Marquezs giant novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Chronicle of a Death Foretold to
Love in the Time of Cholera; the same narrow roads inhabited by poverty and misery, the dark
brothels, the tropical humid climate, the smells of sweat, corruption and rumours, add to all
of this the Marquezian touch which fills the reader with a mysterious longing for a lost
paradise and leaves him sinking happily in a strange delicious sadness.