{"product_id":"memories-of-my-melancholy-whores-isbn-9781400095940","title":"Memories of My Melancholy Whores","description":"A \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e Notable Book\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit–he has purchased hundreds of women–he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTender, knowing, and slyly comic, \u003ci\u003eMemories of My Melancholy Whores\u003c\/i\u003e is an exquisite addition to the master’s work.\"Unforgettable. . . . Classic Márquez. \" –\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e“García Marquez has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying light.” –John Updike, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e“Luminous. . . . The cunning of \u003ci\u003eMemories\u003c\/i\u003e lies in the utter–and utterly unexpected-- reliability of its narrator” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e he cunning of Memories of My Melancholy Whores lies in the utter--and utterly unexpected--reliability of its narrator.“Masterful. Erotic. As hypnotizing as it is disturbing.” –\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e“As accomplished a piece of storytelling as you are likely to find on the shelves today.”–\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e“Profoundly haunting. . . . Fiction of the very highest order.\" \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e–\u003ci\u003eThe Times Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003eGabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 near Aracataca, Colombia. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eOne Hundred Years of Solitude\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLove in the Time of Cholera\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLiving to Tell the Tale\u003c\/i\u003e, among other works of fiction and nonfiction. This book is translated by Edith Grossman, widely recognized as the preeminent Spanish to English translator of our time.1      The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of  wild love with an adolescent virgin. I thought of Rosa Cabarcas, the owner  of an illicit house who would inform her good clients when she had a new  girl available. I never succumbed to that or to any of her many other lewd  temptations, but she did not believe in the purity of my principles.  Morality, too, is a question of time, she would say with a malevolent  smile, you’ll see. She was a little younger than I, and I hadn’t heard  anything about her for so many years that she very well might have died.  But after the first ring I recognized the voice on the phone, and with no  preambles I fired   at her:    “Today’s the day.”    She sighed: Ah, my sad scholar, you disappear for twenty years and come  back only to ask for the impossible. She regained mastery of her art at  once and offered me half a dozen delectable options, but all of them, to  be frank, were used. I said no, insisting the girl had to be a virgin and  available that very night. She asked in alarm: What are you trying to  prove? Nothing, I replied, wounded to the core, I know very well what I  can and cannot do. Unmoved, she said that scholars may know it all, but  they don’t know everything: The only Virgos left in the world are people  like you who were born in August. Why didn’t you give me more time?  Inspiration gives no warnings, I said. But perhaps it can wait, she said,  always more knowledgeable than any man, and she asked for just two days to  make a thorough investigation of the market. I replied in all seriousness  that   in an affair such as this, at my age, each hour is like   a year. Then it can’t be done, she said without the slightest doubt, but  it doesn’t matter, it’s more exciting this way, what the hell, I’ll call  you in an hour.    I don’t have to say it because people can see it from leagues away: I’m  ugly, shy, and anachronistic. But by dint of not wanting to be those  things I have pretended to be just the opposite. Until today, when I have  resolved to tell of my own free will just what I’m like, if only to ease  my conscience. I have begun with my unusual call to Rosa Cabarcas because,  seen from the vantage point of today, that was the beginning of a new life  at an age when most mortals have already died.    I live in a colonial house, on the sunny side of San Nicolás Park, where I  have spent all the days of my life without wife or fortune, where my  parents lived and died, and where I have proposed to die alone, in the  same bed in which I was born and on a day that I hope will be distant and  painless. My father bought the house at public auction at the end of the  nineteenth century, rented the ground floor for luxury shops to a  consortium of Italians, and reserved for himself the second floor, where  he would live in happiness with one of their daughters, Florina de Dios  Cargamantos, a notable interpreter of Mozart, a multilingual Garibaldian,  and the most beautiful and talented woman who ever lived in the city: my  mother.    The house is spacious and bright, with stucco arches and floors tiled in  Florentine mosaics, and four glass doors leading to a wraparound balcony  where my mother would sit on March nights to sing love arias with other  girls, her cousins. From there you can see San Nicolás Park, the  cathedral, and the statue   of Christopher Columbus, and beyond that the warehouses on the river wharf  and the vast horizon of the Great Magdalena River twenty leagues distant  from its estuary. The only unpleasant aspect of the house is that the sun  keeps changing windows in the course of the day, and all of them have to  be closed when you try to take a siesta in the torrid half-light. When I  was left on my own, at the age of thirty-two, I moved into what had been  my parents’ bedroom, opened a doorway between that room and the library,  and began   to auction off whatever I didn’t need to live, which turned out to be  almost everything but the books and the Pianola rolls.    For forty years I was the cable editor at El Diario de La Paz, which meant  reconstructing and completing in indigenous prose the news of the world  that we caught as it flew through sidereal space on shortwaves or in Morse  code. Today I scrape by on my pension from that extinct profession, get by  even less on the one I receive for having taught Spanish and Latin  grammar, earn almost nothing from the Sunday column I’ve written without  flagging for more than half a century, and nothing at all from the music  and theater pieces published as a favor to me on the many occasions when  notable performers come to town. I have never done anything except write,  but I don’t possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no  knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have  embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by  how much I have read in my life. In plain language, I am the end of a  line, without merit or brilliance, who would have nothing to leave his  descendants if not for the events I am prepared to recount, to the best of  my ability, in these memories of my great love.    On my ninetieth birthday I woke, as always, at five in the morning. Since  it was Friday, my only obli-  gation was to write the signed column published on Sundays in El Diario de  La Paz. My symptoms at dawn were perfect for not feeling happy: my bones  had been aching since the small hours, my asshole burned, and thunder  threatened a storm after three months of drought. I bathed while the  coffee was brewing, drank a large cup sweetened with honey, had two pieces  of cassava bread, and put on the linen coverall I wear in the house.    The subject of that day’s column, of course, was my ninetieth birthday. I  never have thought about age as a leak in the roof indicating the quantity  of life one has left to live. When I was very young I heard someone say  that when people die the lice nesting in their hair escape in terror onto  the pillows, to the shame of the family. That was so harsh a warning to me  that I let my hair be shorn for school, and the few strands   I have left I still wash with the soap you would use   on a grateful fleabitten dog. This means, I tell myself now, that ever  since I was little my sense of social decency has been more developed than  my sense of death.    For months I had anticipated that my birthday column would not be the  usual lament for the years that were gone, but just the opposite: a  glorification of old age. I began by wondering when I had become aware of  being old, and I believe it was only a short time before that day. At the  age of forty-two I had gone to see the doctor about a pain in my back that  interfered with my breathing. He attributed no importance to it: That kind  of pain is natural at your age, he said.    “In that case,” I said, “what isn’t natural is my age.”    The doctor gave me a pitying smile. I see that you’re a philosopher, he  said. It was the first time   I thought about my age in terms of being old, but   it didn’t take me long to forget about it. I became accustomed to waking  every day with a different pain that kept changing location and form as  the years passed. At times it seemed to be the clawing of death, and the  next day it would disappear. This was when   I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble  your father. I must be condemned to eternal youth, I thought, because my  equine profile will never look like my father’s raw Caribbean features or  my mother’s imperial Roman ones. The truth is that the first changes are  so slow they pass almost unnoticed, and you go on seeing yourself as you  always were, from the inside, but others observe   you from the outside.    In my fifth decade I had begun to imagine what   old age was like when I noticed the first lapses of memory. I would turn  the house upside down looking for my glasses until I discovered that I had  them on, or I’d wear them into the shower, or I’d put on my reading  glasses over the ones I used for distance. One day I had breakfast twice  because I forgot about the first time, and I learned to recognize the  alarm in my friends when they didn’t have the courage to tell me I was  recounting the same story I had told them a week earlier. By then I had a  mental list of faces I knew and another list of the names that went with  each one, but at the moment of greeting I didn’t always succeed in  matching the faces to the names.    My sexual age never worried me because my powers did not depend so much on  me as on women, and they know the how and the why when they want to. Today  I laugh at the eighty-year-old youngsters who consult the doctor, alarmed  by these sudden shocks, not knowing that in your nineties they’re worse  but don’t matter anymore: they are the risks of being alive. On the other  hand, it is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of  inessential things, though memory does not often fail with regard to  things that are of real interest to us. Cicero illustrated this with the  stroke of a pen: No old man forgets where he has hidden his treasure.    With these reflections, and several others, I had finished a first draft  of my column when the August sun exploded among the almond trees in the  park, and the riverboat that carried the mail, a week late because of the  drought, came bellowing into the port canal. I thought: My ninetieth  birthday is arriving. I’ll never know why, and don’t pretend to, but it  was under the magical effect of that devastating evocation that I decided  to call Rosa Cabarcas for help in celebrating my birthday with a libertine  night. I’d spent years at holy peace with my body, devoting my time to the  erratic rereading of my classics and to my private programs of concert  music, but my desire that day was so urgent it seemed like a message from  God. After the call I couldn’t go on writing. I hung the hammock in a  corner of the library where the sun doesn’t shine in the morning, and I  lay down in it, my chest heavy with the anxiety of waiting.A Novel","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304764264677,"sku":"NP9781400095940","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400095940.jpg?v=1767732548","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/memories-of-my-melancholy-whores-isbn-9781400095940","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}