From ‘Memories of my Melancholy Whores’

‘Memories of my Melancholy Whores’ is rightfully a controversial book. There are undoubtedly elements in the story that need to be looked over to enjoy the true message of the book, one of which includes the fact that the ninety year old narrator falls in love with a teenage virgin girl and pursues it. But on reaching the final page, this is truly a book that advocates love, of the purest kind for the youngest hearts, love that wouldn’t care what the world thinks, and love that inspires. Written by Gabriel García Márquez, it is a short masterpiece, and a thought provoking eyebrow raising story about a man of ninety finding love for the first time in his life.

Below are short highlights from the book.
“Morality, too, is a question if time, she said with a malevolent smile, you’ll see.”

“For the first time in my long life, I was capable of killing someone. I returned home tormented by the little demon who whispers it I our ear the devastating replied we didn’t give at the right time.”

“Now you know, Delgadina, that fame is a very fat lady who doesn’t sleep with you. But when you wake, she’s always at the foot of the bed, looking at us.”

“Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love”

“Peaceful madmen are ahead of the future”

“Whores left me no time to be married”.

His thoughts on summing up music.
“There is still a great deal left for us to say about music”

“Age isn’t how old you are but how old you feel.”

Following are some of the longer highlights.

“I became a man of easy tears. Any emotion that had anything to do with tenderness brought a lump to my throat that I could not always control, and I thought about renouncing the solitary pleasure of watching over Delgadina’s sleep, less for the uncertainty of my death than for the sorrow of imagining her without me for the rest of her life.”

“From then on I began to measure my life not by years but by decades. The decade of my fifties had been decisive because I became aware that almost everybody was younger than I. The decade of my sixties was the most intense because of the suspicion that I no longer had the time to make mistakes. My seventies were frightening because of a certain possibility that the decade might be the last. Still, when I woke alive on the first morning of my nineties in the happy bed of Delgadina, I was transfixed by the agreeable idea that life was not something that passes by like Heraclitus’ ever-changing river but a unique opportunity to turn over on the grill and keep broiling on the other side for another ninety years.”

“I could not bear it any more. She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had. The truth is I’m getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don’t feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.”
In continuation with that:
“Do whatever you want, but don’t lose that child,” she said. “There’s no greater misfortune than dying alone.”… “So you go and find that poor creature right now even if what your jealousy tells you is true, no matter what, nobody can take away the dances you’ve already had. But one thing, no grandfather’s romanticism. Wake her, fuck her brains out with that burro’s cock the devil gave you as a reward for cowardice and stinginess. I’m serious, she concluded, speaking from the heart: Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.”

I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license. That afternoon, back home again without the cat and without her, I proved that it was not only possible but that I myself, an old man without anyone, was dying of love. But I also realized that the contrary was true as well: I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world. I had spent more than fifteen years trying to translate the poems of Leopardi, and only on that afternoon did I have a profound sense of them: Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments.”

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