Inner Workings
Page 25
Chabruma tries to comfort the sorrowing Roberta. Racist talk was ‘their tradition’, he says; she does not have to carry the blame for it. (p. 65) But this puts her in a quandary: if she is to be relieved of the burden of the past on the grounds that history is just history, how can she reject Chabruma’s argument that custom is just custom, that his own tradition entitles him to two wives? The story ends with Roberta in deep unease. If she were to accept Chabruma’s proposal, might it not merely be out of a wish to atone for the past; and if she were to refuse, might that not merely be out of a Western woman’s pride in what is owed to her?
Loot contains too many slight, forgettable pieces to measure up to the standard of such earlier collections as Livingstone’s Companions (1972), Something Out There (1980), or A Soldier’s Embrace (1984). One of the shorter pieces, ‘The Diamond Mine’, ought however to be singled out. It is a marvellously deft and confident treatment of a girl’s sexual awakening, and a reminder of how well Gordimer has always written of sex.
Since early in her career Gordimer has been exercised by the question of her own place, present and future, in history. The question has two forks: What will the verdict of history be on Europe’s project of colonising sub-Saharan Africa, of which she has willynilly been part; and what historical role is available to a writer like her born into a late colonial community?
The ethical framework for her own life’s work was laid in the 1950s, as the iron curtain of apartheid was descending, when she first read Jean-Paul Sartre and the Algerian-born Albert Camus. Under the influence of that reading she adopted the role of witness to the fate of South Africa. ‘The function of the writer,’ wrote Sartre, ‘is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it is all about.’5 The stories and novels Gordimer wrote in the next three decades are populated with characters, mainly white South Africans, living in Sartrean bad faith, pretending to themselves that they do not know what it is all about; her self-ordained task was to bring to bear on them the evidence of the real in order to crack their lie.
At the heart of the novel of realism is the theme of disillusionment. At the end of Don Quixote, Alonso Quixana, who had set out to right the wrongs of the world, comes home sadly aware not only that he is no hero but that in the world as it has become there can be no more heroes. As stripper-away of convenient illusions and unmasker of colonial bad faith, Gordimer is an heir of the tradition of realism that Cervantes inaugurates. Within that tradition she was able to work quite satisfactorily until the late 1970s, when she was made to realise that to black South Africans, the people to whose struggle she bore historical witness, the name Zola, to say nothing of the name Proust, carried no resonance – that she was too European to matter to the people who mattered most to her. Her essays of the period show her struggling inconclusively in the toils of the question of what it means to write for a people – to write for their sake and on their behalf, as well as to be read by them.6
With the end of apartheid and the relaxation of the ideological imperatives that under apartheid had overshadowed all cultural affairs, Gordimer was liberated from such self-laceration. The fiction she has published in the new century shows a welcome readiness to pursue new avenues and a new sense of the world. If the writing tends to be somewhat bodiless, somewhat sketchy by comparison with the writing of her major period, if the devotion to the texture of the real that characterises her best work is now only intermittent, if she is sometimes content to gesture toward what she means rather than pinning it down exactly in words, that is, one senses, because she feels she has already proved herself, does not need to perform those Herculean labours anew.
(2003)
20 Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ’S novel Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) ends with Florentino Ariza, at last united with the woman he has loved from afar all his life, cruising up and down the Magdalena River in a steamboat flying the yellow flag of cholera. The couple are seventy-six and seventy-two respectively.
In order to give unfettered attention to his beloved Fermina, Florentino has had to break off his current affair, a liaison with a fourteen-year-old ward of his, whom he has initiated into the mysteries of sex during Sunday-afternoon trysts in his bachelor apartment (she proves a quick learner). He gives her the brushoff over a sundae in an ice-cream parlour. Bewildered and in despair, the girl commits unobtrusive suicide, taking her secret with her to the grave. Florentino sheds a private tear and feels intermittent pangs of grief over her loss, but that is all.
América Vicuña, the child seduced and abandoned by an older man, is a character straight out of Dostoevsky. The moral frame of Love in the Time of Cholera, a work of considerable emotional range but a comedy nonetheless, of an autumnal variety, is simply not large enough to contain her. In his determination to treat América as a minor character, one in the line of Florentino’s many mistresses, and to leave unexplored the consequences for Florentino of his offence against her, García Márquez drifts into morally unsettling territory. Indeed, there are signs that he is unsure of how to handle her story. Usually his verbal style is brisk, energetic, inventive, and uniquely his own, yet in the Sunday-afternoon scenes between Florentino and América we pick up arch echoes of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: Florentino undresses the girl ‘one article of clothing at a time, with little baby games: first these little shoes for the little baby bear . . . next these little flowered panties for the little bunny rabbit, and a little kiss on her papa’s delicious little dickey-bird’.1
Florentino is a lifelong bachelor, an amateur poet, a writer of love letters on behalf of the verbally challenged, a devoted concertgoer, somewhat miserly in his habits, and timid with women. Yet despite his timidity and physical unattractiveness, he has during half a century of surreptitious womanising brought off 622 conquests, on which he keeps aides-memoires in a set of notebooks.
In all of these respects Florentino resembles the unnamed narrator of García Márquez’s new novella. Like his predecessor, this man keeps a list of his conquests as an aid to a book he plans to write. In fact he has a title ready in advance: Memoria de mis putas tristes, memoir (or memorial) of my sad whores, rendered by Edith Grossman as Memories of My Melancholy Whores. His list reaches 514 before he gives up counting. Then, at an advanced age, he finds true love, in the person not of woman of his own generation but of a fourteen-year-old girl.2
The parallels between the books, published two decades apart, are too striking to ignore. They suggest that in Memories of My Melancholy Whores García Márquez may be having another go at the artistically and morally unsatisfactory story of Florentino and América in Love in the Time of Cholera.
The hero, narrator, and putative author of Memories of My Melancholy Whores is born in the port city of Barranquilla, Colombia, around 1870. His parents belong to the cultivated bourgeoisie; nearly a century later he still lives in the decaying parental home. He used to make a living as a journalist and teacher of Spanish and Latin; now he subsists on his pension and the weekly column he writes for a newspaper.
The record he bequeaths us, covering the stormy ninety-first year of his life, belongs to a specific subspecies of memoir: the confession. As typified in the Confessions of Saint Augustine, the confession tells the story of a squandered life culminating in an inner crisis and a conversion experience, followed by spiritual rebirth into a new and richer existence. In the Christian tradition the confession has a strongly didactic purpose. Behold my example, it says: behold how through the mysterious agency of the Holy Spirit even so worthless a being as I can be saved.
The first ninety years of our hero’s life have certainly been squandered. Not only has he wasted his inheritance and his talents, but his emotional life has been remarkably arid too. He has never married (he was engaged long ago, but walked out on his bride at the last minute). He has never been to bed with a woman whom he has not paid: even when the woman
has not wanted money he has forced it on her, turning her into another of his whores. The only enduring relationship he has had has been with his house servant, whom he mounts ritually once a month while she does the laundry, always en sentido contrario, a euphemism which Grossman translates as ‘from the back’, thus making it possible for her to claim, as an old woman, that she is still virgo intacta. (p. 13)
For his ninetieth birthday, he promises himself a treat: sex with a young virgin. A procuress named Rosa, with whom he has long had dealings, ushers him into a room in her brothel where a fourteen-year-old girl lies ready for him, naked and drugged.
She was dark and warm. She had been subjected to a regimen of hygiene and beautification that did not overlook even the incipient down on her pubis. Her hair had been curled, and she wore natural polish on the nails of her fingers and toes, but her molasses-colored skin looked rough and mistreated. Her newborn breasts still seemed like a boy’s, but they appeared full to bursting with a secret energy that was ready to explode. The best part of her body were her large, silent-stepping feet with toes as long and sensitive as fingers. She was drenched in phosphorescent perspiration despite the fan . . . It was impossible to imagine what her face was like under the paint . . . but the adornments and cosmetics could not hide her character: the haughty nose, heavy eyebrows, intense lips. I thought: A tender young fighting bull. (pp. 25–6)
The first response of the experienced roué to the sight of the girl is unexpected: terror and confusion, an urge to run away. However, he joins her in bed and halfheartedly tries to explore between her legs. She moves away in her sleep. Drained of lust, he begins to sing to her: ‘Angels surround the bed of Delgadina.’ Soon he finds himself praying for her too. Then he falls asleep. When he awakes at five in the morning, the girl is lying with her arms opened in the form of a cross, ‘absolute mistress of her virginity’. God bless you, he thinks, and takes his leave. (pp. 28, 29–30)
The procuress telephones to jeer at him for his pusillanimity and offer him a second chance to prove his manhood. He declines. ‘I can’t anymore,’ he says, and at once feels relieved, ‘free at last of a servitude’ – servitude to sex, narrowly understood – ‘that had kept me enslaved since the age of thirteen.’ (p. 45)
But Rosa persists until he gives in and revisits the brothel. Again the girl is sleeping, again he does no more than wipe the perspiration off her body and sing: ‘Delgadina, Delgadina, you will be my darling love.’ (His song is not without dark undertones: in the fairy story Delgadina is a princess who has to flee the amorous advances of her father.) (p. 56)
He makes his way home in the midst of a mighty storm. A newly acquired cat seems to have turned into a satanic presence in the house. Rain pours through holes in the roof, a steam pipe bursts, the wind smashes the window panes. As he struggles to save his beloved books, he becomes aware of the ghostly figure of Delgadina beside him, helping him. He is certain now that he has found true love, ‘the first love of my life at the age of ninety’. (p. 60) A moral revolution takes place within him. He confronts the shabbiness, meanness, and obsessiveness of his past life and repudiates it. He becomes, he says, ‘another man’. It is love that moves the world, he begins to realise – not love consummated so much as love in its multiple unrequited forms. His column in the newspaper becomes a paean to the powers of love, and the reading public responds with adulation. (p. 65)
By day – though we never witness it – Delgadina, like a true fairy-tale heroine, goes off to the factory to sew buttonholes. Nightly she returns to her room in the brothel, now adorned by her lover with paintings and books (he has vague ambitions to improve her mind), to sleep chastely beside him. He reads stories to her aloud; now and again she utters words in her sleep. But on the whole he does not like her voice, which sounds like the voice of a stranger speaking from within her. He prefers her unconscious.
On the night of her birthday an erotic consummation sans penetration takes place between them.
I kissed her all over her body until I was breathless . . . As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance. She responded with new vibrations along every inch of her skin, and on each one I found a distinctive heat, a unique taste, a different moan, and her entire body resonated inside with an arpeggio, and her nipples opened and flowered without being touched. (pp. 72–3)
Then misfortune strikes. One of the clients in the brothel is stabbed, the police pay a visit, scandal threatens, Delgadina has to be spirited away. Though her lover scours the city for her, she cannot be found. When at last she re-emerges in the brothel, she seems years older and has lost her look of innocence. He flies into a jealous rage and storms off.
Months pass, his rage dwindles. An old girlfriend offers wise advice: ‘Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.’ His ninety-first birthday comes and goes. He makes peace with Rosa. The two agree they will jointly bequeath their worldly goods to the girl, who, Rosa claims, has in the meantime fallen head over heels in love with him. Joy in his heart, the sprightly swain looks forward to ‘at last, real life’. (pp. 100, 115)
The confessions of this reborn soul may indeed have been penned, as he says, to ease his conscience, but the message they preach is by no means that we should abjure fleshly desires. The god whom he has ignored all his life is indeed the god by whose grace the wicked are saved, but he is at the same time a god of love, one who can send an old sinner out in quest for ‘wild love’ (amor loco, literally ‘crazy love’) with a virgin – ‘my desire that day was so urgent that it seemed like a message from God’ – then breathe awe and terror into his heart when he first lays eyes on his prey. Through his divine agency the old man is turned in no time at all from a frequenter of whores into a virgin-worshipper venerating the girl’s dormant body much as a simple believer might venerate a statue or icon, tending it, bringing it flowers, laying tribute before it, singing to it, praying before it. (pp. 3, 11)
There is always something unmotivated about conversion experiences: it is of their essence that the sinner should be so blinded by lust or greed or pride that the psychic logic leading to the turning point in his life becomes visible to him only in retrospect, when his eyes have been opened. So there is a degree of inbuilt incompatibility between the conversion narrative and the modern novel, as perfected in the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on character rather than on soul and its brief to show step by step, without wild leaps and supernatural interventions, how the one who used to be called the hero or heroine but is now more appropriately called the central character travels his or her road from beginning to end.
Despite having the tag ‘magic realist’ attached to him, García Márquez works very much in the tradition of psychological realism, with its premise that the operations of the individual psyche have a logic that is capable of being tracked. He himself has remarked that his so-called magic realism is simply a matter of telling hard-to-believe stories with a straight face, a trick he learned from his grandmother in Cartegena; furthermore that what outsiders find hard to believe in his stories is often commonplace Latin American reality. Whether we find this plea disingenuous or not, the fact is that the mixing of the fantastical and the real – or, to be more precise, the elision of the either-or holding ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ apart – that caused such a stir when One HundredYears of Solitude came out in 1967 has become commonplace in the novel well beyond the borders of Latin America. Is the cat in Memories of My Melancholy Whores just a cat or is it a visitor from the underworld? Does Delgadina come to her lover’s aid on the night of the storm, or does he, under the spell of love, merely imagine her visit? Is this sleeping beauty just a working-class girl earning a few pesos on the side, or is she a creature from another realm where princesses dance all night and fairy helpers perform superhuman labours and maidens are put to sleep by enchantresses? To demand unequivocal answers to questions like these is to mistake the nature of the storyteller’s art. Roman Jakobson like
d to remind us of the formula used by traditional storytellers in Majorca as a preamble to their performances: It was and it was not so.3
What is harder to accept for readers of a secular bent, since it has no apparent psychological basis, is that the mere spectacle of a naked girl can cause a spiritual somersault in a depraved old man. The old man’s ripeness for conversion may make better psychological sense if we take it that he has an existence stretching back beyond the beginning of his memoir, into the body of García Márquez’s earlier fiction, and specifically into Love in the Time of Cholera.
Measured by the highest standards, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is not a major achievement. Nor is its slightness just a consequence of its brevity. Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), for instance, though of much the same length, is a significant addition to the García Márquez canon: a tightly knit, enthralling narrative and at the same time a dizzying masterclass in how multiple histories – multiple truths – can be constructed to cover the same events. Yet the goal of Memories is a brave one: to speak on behalf of the desire of older men for underage girls, that is, to speak on behalf of paedophilia, or at least show that paedophilia need not be a dead end for either lover or beloved. The conceptual strategy García Márquez employs toward this end is to break down the wall between erotic passion and the passion of veneration, as manifested particularly in the cults of the virgin that are such a force in southern Europe and Latin America, with their strong archaic underlay, preChristian in the first case, pre-Columbian in the second. (As her lover’s description of her makes clear, Delgadina has something of the fierce quality of an archaic virgin goddess about her:‘the haughty nose, heavy eyebrows, intense lips . . . a tender young fighting bull.’)