Marquez

“Memories of My Melancholy Whores” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A journalist and lifelong bachelor decide to give himself “the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin”. The author lived in a world of fantasy and hallucinations. His life is has been isolated, sad and sexual adventures. For the first time he falls in love with a 14

adolescent virgin in his ninety’s. The author describes how in fall in love without touching her. In this book is describing the melancholy of aging, the memory of past joys, sadness and lost opportunities.

He has never married and has never gone to bed with a woman he didn’t pay. He had kept record of all his women and at 50 he had 513 women in his journal. He contacts was Rosa Cabarcas, who runs an illicit house. This is the beginning of a new life at an age when most mortals have already died. Rosa fixes for him a girl of fourteen, who goes for sewing buttons the whole day so the man has to go only after ten in the night. He goes and finds the girl blessedly sleeping without a stitch of cloth on her. Early morning he notices that in the middle of the night some time the girl had got up. He leaves her some money and leaves. There is another night and he has still not touched the girl whom he begins to call Delgadina. Even Rosa is surprised how he could do this to the girl next time when he meets the girl, she has cough and fever. He has now started giving her gifts so that she could make herself more presentable. The two begin to know each other, in their own strange way. One night when the man is visiting Delgadina, suddenly there is a commotion. An important man is murdered in the adjacent room and all, including Rosa have to flee. The illicit house is closed down by the police. The 90-year old man tries hard to find and meet the girl but does not succeed. He is miserable.

Gabriel Marquez was a journalist that will write books related to his life such as “El Diario de La Paz” which means reconstructing and...