Gabriel Marquez - Memories of my Melancholy Whores

“Whore!” I shouted.

For the devil breathed a sinister thought into my ear. And that was: on the night of the crime, Rosa Cabarcas could not have had the time or composure to warn the girl, and the police found her in the room, alone, a minor, with no alibi. Nobody like Rosa Cabarcas in a situation like that: she sold the girl’s virginity to one of her big-shot clients in exchange for being cleared of the crime. The first thing, of course, was to disappear until the scandal died down. How marvelous! A honeymoon for three, the two of them in bed, and Rosa Cabarcas on a deluxe terrace enjoying her happy impunity. Blind with senseless fury, I began smashing everything in the room against the wall: lamps, radio, fan, mirrors, pitchers, glasses. I did it without haste but also without pause, with great crashes and a methodical intoxication that saved my life. The girl gave a start at the first explosion of noise but did not look at me; instead, she turned her back and remained that way, showing intermittents spasms, until the thrashing ended. The chickens in the courtyard and the late-night dogs added to the uproar. With the blinding lucidity of rage I had a final inspiration to set fire to the house when the impassive figure of Rosa Cabarcas, dressed in a nightgown, appeared in the door. She said nothing. She made a visual inventory of the disaster and confirmed that the girl was curled up like a snail, her head hidden between her arms: terrified but intact.

“My God!” Rosa Cabarcas exclaimed. “What I wouldn’t give for a love like this!”

She looked at me from head to toe with a compassionate glance and commanded: Let’s go. I followed her to the house, she poured me a glass of water in silence, gestured for me to sit down across from her, and prepared to hear my confession. All right, she said, now behave like an adult and tell me what’s wrong.

I told her what I considered my revealed truth. Rosa Cabarcas listened to me in silence, without surprise, and at last she seemed enlightened. How wonderful, she said. I’ve always said that jealousy knows more than truth does. And then, without reticence, she told me the reality. In effect, she said, in her confusion on the night of the crime she had forgotten about the girl sleeping in the room. One of her clients, who was also the dead man’s lawyer, distributed benefits and bribes with a free hand and invited Rosa Cabarcas to stay at a quiet hotel in Cartagena de Indias until the scandal died down. Believe me, said Rosa Cabarcas, in all this time I never stopped thinking about you and the girl. I came back the day before yesterday and the first thing I did was call you, but there was no answer. On the other hand, the girl came right away, in such bad shape that I bathed her for you, dressed her for you, sent her to the hairdresser for you, and told them to make her as pretty as a queen. You saw how she looked: perfect. Her luxury clothes? One of the dresses I rent to my poorest girls when they have to go dancing with their clients. The jewels? They’re mine, she said: All you have to do is touch them to see that the stones are glass and the precious metals tin. So stop fucking around, she concluded: Go on, wake her, beg her pardon, and take charge of her once and for all. Nbody deserves to be happier than you two.

I made a superhuman effort to believe her, but love was stronger than reason. Whores! I said, tormented by the living flame burning in my belly. That’s what you are! I shouted: Damned whores! I don’t want to know any more about you, or about any other slut in this world, least of all her. From the door I made a gesture: goodbye forever. Rosa Cabarcas did not doubt it.

“Go with God,” she said, grimacing with sorrow, and she returned to her real life. “Anyway, I’ll send you a bill for the mess you made in my room.”

As I was reading The Ides of March , I ran across an ominous sentence that the author attributes to Julius Caesar: In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are . I could not confirm its real origin in the writing of Julius Caesar himself or in the works of his biographers, from Suetonius to Carcopinus, but it was worth knowing. Its fatalism, applied to the course of my life in the months that followed, gave me the determination I needed not only to write these memories but to begin them without diffidence, with the love of Delgadina.

I did not have a moment’s peace, I almost stopped eating, and lost so much weight my trousers were loose around my waist. I had erratic pains in my bones, my mood would change for no reason, I spent my nights in a dazzled state that did not allow me to read or listen to music, while I wasted the days nodding in a stupefied somnolence that did not lead to sleep.

Relief came from out of the blue. On the crowded Loma Fresca bus, a woman sitting next to me, whom I didn’t see get on, whispered in my ear: Are you still fucking? It was Casilda Armenta, an old love-for-hire who had put up with me as an assiduous client from the time she was a haughty adolescent. When she retired, ailing and without a cent, she married a Chinese vegetable farmer who gave her his name and support, and perhaps a little love. At the age of seventy-three she weighed what she always had, was still beautiful, had a strong character, and maintained intact the audacious speech of her trade.

She took me to her house, on a farm of Chinese laborers on a hill along the highway to the ocean. We sat on beach chairs on the shaded terrace, surrounded by ferns and the foliage of alstroemerias, and birdcages hanging from the eaves. On the side of the hill one could see the Chinese farmers in cone-shaped hats planting vegetables in the blazing sun, and the gray waters of the Bocas de Ceniza with the two dikes made of rocks that channel the river for several leagues into the sea. As we talked we saw a white ocean liner enter the outlet, and we followed it in silence until we heard its doleful bull’s bellow at the river port. She sighed. Do you know something? In more than half a century, this is the first time I haven’t received you in bed. We’re not who we were, I said. She continued without hearing me: Every time they say things about you on the radio, applaud you for the affection people feel for you, call you the maestro of love, just imagine, I think that nobody knew your charms and your manias as well as I did. I’m serious, she said, nobody could have put up with you better.

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.

It was impossible not to open my heart to her, and so I told her the complete story burning deep inside me, from my first call to Rosa Cabarcas on the eve of my ninetieth birthday to the tragic night when I smashed up the room and never went back. She listened to me unburden myself as if she were living through it herself, pondered it without haste, and at last she smiled.

“Do whatever you want, but don’t lose that child,” she said. “There’s no greater misfortune than dying alone.”

We went to Puerto Columbia in the little toy train as slow as a horse. We had lunch across from the worm-eaten wooden dock where everyone had entered the country before the Bocas de Ceniza was dredged. We sat under a roof of palm where large black matrons served fried red snapper with coconut rice and slices of green plantain. We dozed in the dense torpor of two o’clock and continued talking until the immense fiery sun sank into the ocean. Reality seemed fantastic to me. Look where our honeymoon has ended up, she mocked. But then she was serious: Today I look back, I see the line of thousands of men who passed through my beds, and I’d give my soul to have stayed with even the worst of them. Thank God I found my Chinaman in time. It’s like being married to your little finger, but he’s all mine.