My relationship with the Melancholy Whore

 
Trying to describe Gabriel Garcia Marquez is way beyond the capacity of any living person. And I am firm in my belief of the same. And even if an intellectual with an inimitable prowess deciphers the code of love with which the poetic novel “Memories of My Melancholic Whores” is written, the exercise will amount to futility and he will cease to breathe one fine day with the realisation of his failure in elucidating the morse code to others, because sensing the spectral visions which resonates Garcia’s emotions throughout the entire sequence of magical words is beyond comprehension of the mortals. The only form of existence of the emotions emanated by the vibrant radiance of his novel is phantasm.

For many a people, who has already read or will read this novel, will think of it nothing more than a gibberish of a senile old man who has been rendered numb by years, oblivious to the ‘rationality’ imposed on his heart by the pinions of the society.

Only reading between the lines will it reveal to the readers that concealed behind the erotic poem of inanity is the sad story recited by a lonely man whose eccentricity has denied him the opportunity to live the ‘banal’ life of a common man. And falling in love with an adolescent virgin whore (I know! Paradox!) on his ninetieth birthday gradually breaks apart the glass case in which he had hidden his emotions furtively. The work vividly establishes the superiority of love to sex.

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

This is certainly not a book review but a description of the bond I have forged with the novel at the turn of every page. I consider myself to be someone of extremely dismal disposition to enunciate the criticism of this novel. This post pertains itself only to the relationship I have with the melancholy whore.

Somewhere deep down in my heart, I have always envisaged the lifestyle of the protagonist as my sad and ineluctable future because of my aversion to stability. But this novel has altered the preconceived notion I had about my reclusion. No longer do I fear the belligerence resulting out of separation from the established norms but I am ready to embrace the tranquillity of the unknown with an open heart.

“Thanks to her 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 a 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 other’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”