98. Memories of My Melancholy Whores - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The first line of this book shows how absolutely bizarre it is:

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

Wow. The unnamed protagonist has never been married or been in love, and has had a relatively sad, lonely, and unexciting life in Colombia. In fact, when he was twenty, he started keeping a record listing the name, age, place, and "a brief notation of the circumstances and style of lovemaking": by the time he was fifty, there were 514 women with whom he had been at least once. (I was amazed at how similar this was to what Florentino Ariza did in Love in the Time of Cholera by the same author). He approaches Rosa Cabarcas, the "madame" at the city's best brothel, to help him with his wish. He meets a fourteen year old girl with whom he becomes infatuated, and ultimately makes arrangements with Rosa to continue seeing her outside of the brothel.

As frightening and pedophile-ish as this all sounds, the old man really ends up seeming more like a tender voyeur than a sex-starved nonagenarian. He meets with the girl ... and watches her sleep. He says:

This was something new for me. I was ignorant of the arts of seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night at random, more for their price than their charms, and we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and
always in the dark, so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were ... That night I discovered the improbably pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of modesty.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is such an amazing writer. I loved this part:

I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about people's time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

Ultimately, this seems to be a twisted story of love - and also of the old man finally finding himself at ninety years of age.

[whew. two more books to go! ...]