Memories of My Melancholy Whores

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

Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 near Aracataca, Colombia. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

Edith Grossman is widely recognized as the preeminent Spanish-to-English translator of our time.

Gabriel García Márquez's Living to Tell the Tale, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, News of a Kidnapping, and The General in His Labyrinth are available in Vintage paperback. Vivir para contarla, El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Crónica de una muerta anunciada, El general en su laberinto and Memorias de mis putas tristes are available in Vintage Español.

"Unforgettable. . . . Classic Márquez. " The Washington Post García Marquez has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying light. John Updike, The New Yorker Luminous. . . . The cunning of Memories lies in the utter and utterly unexpected-- reliability of its narrator The New York Times Book Review 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. Los Angeles Times As accomplished a piece of storytelling as you are likely to find on the shelves today. Chicago Tribune Profoundly haunting. . . . Fiction of the very highest order." The Times Literary Supplement