Once we accept a continuity between the passion of sexual desire and the passion of veneration, then what originates as ‘bad’ desire of the kind practised by Florentino Ariza upon his ward can without changing its essence mutate into ‘good’ desire of the kind felt by Delgadina’s lover, and thus constitute the germ of a new life for him. Memories of My Melancholy Whores makes most sense, in other words, as a kind of supplement to Love in the Time of Cholera in which the violator of the trust of the virgin child becomes her faithful worshipper.
When Rosa hears her fourteen-year-old employee referred to as Delgadina (from la delgadez, delicacy, shapeliness) she is taken aback and tries to tell her client the girl’s humdrum real name. But he does not want to listen, just as he prefers that the girl herself should not speak. When, after her long absence from the brothel, Delgadina reappears wearing unfamiliar make-up and jewellery, he is outraged: she has betrayed not only him but her own nature. In both incidents we see him willing upon the girl an unchanging identity, the identity of a virgin princess.
The old man’s inflexibility, his insistence that his beloved adhere to the form in which he has idealised her, has a looming precedent in Hispanic literature. Obeying the rule that every knight errant must have a lady to whom to dedicate his feats of arms, the old man who calls himself Don Quixote declares himself servitor to the Lady Dulcinea of Toboso. The Lady Dulcinea has some tenuous relation to a peasant girl from the village of Toboso on whom Quixote has had an eye in the past, but essentially she is a fantasy figure he has invented, as he has invented himself.
Cervantes’ book begins as a send-up of the chivalric romance but turns into something more interesting: an exploration of the mysterious power of the ideal to resist disillusioning confrontations with the real. Quixote’s return to sanity at the end of the book, his abandonment of the ideal world he has tried so valiantly to inhabit in favour of the real world of his detractors, strikes everyone around him, and the reader too, with dismay. Is this what we really want: to give up the world of the imagination and settle back into the tedium of life in a rural backwater in Castile?
The reader of Don Quixote can never be sure whether Cervantes’ hero is a madman under the spell of a delusion, whether on the contrary he is consciously playing out a role – living his life as fiction – or whether his mind flickers unpredictably between states of delusion and self-awareness. There are certainly moments when Quixote seems to claim that dedicating oneself to a life of service can make one a better person, regardless of whether that service is to an illusion. ‘Since I became a knight errant,’ he says, ‘I have been valiant, well-mannered, liberal, polite, generous, courteous, bold, gentle, patient, [and] long-suffering.’ While one may have reservations about whether he has been quite as valiant, well-mannered, etc., as he claims, one cannot ignore the quite sophisticated assertion he makes about the power a dream may have to anchor our moral life, or deny that since the day Alonso Quixana took on his chivalric identity the world has been a better place; or, if not better, then at least more interesting, more lively.4
Quixote seems a bizarre fellow at first acquaintance, but most of those who come into contact with him end up half converted to his way of thinking, and therefore half quixotic themselves. If there is any lesson he teaches, it is that in the interest of a better, more lively world it might not be a bad idea to cultivate in oneself a capacity for dissociation, not necessarily under conscious control, even though this might lead outsiders to conclude that one suffers from intermittent delusions.
The exchanges between Quixote and the Duke and Duchess in the second half of Cervantes’ book explore in depth what it means to pour one’s energies into living an ideal and therefore perhaps unreal (fantastic, fictive) life. The Duchess poses the key question politely but firmly: Is it not true that Dulcinea ‘does not exist in the world but is an imaginary lady and that your grace [i.e. Quixote] engendered and gave birth to her in your mind?’
‘God knows if Dulcinea exists in the world or not,’ replies Quixote, ‘or if she is imaginary or not imaginary; these are not the kinds of things whose verification can be carried through to the end. [But] I neither engendered nor gave birth to my lady . . .’ (Don Quixote, p. 672)
The exemplary cautiousness of Quixote’s reply is evidence of a more than passing acquaintance on his part with the long debate on the nature of being from the pre-Socratics through to Thomas Aquinas. Even allowing the possibility of authorial irony, Quixote does seem to be suggesting that if we accept the ethical superiority of a world in which people act in the name of ideals over a world in which people act in the name of interests, then uncomfortable ontological questions such as the Duchess’s might well be postponed or even brushed under the carpet.
The spirit of Cervantes runs deep in Spanish literature. It is not hard to see in the transformation of the nameless young factory hand into the virgin Delgadina the same process of idealisation by which the peasant girl of Toboso is transformed into the Lady Dulcinea; or, in the preference of García Márquez’s hero that the object of his love remain unconscious and wordless, the same distaste for the real world in all its stubborn complexity that keeps Quixote at a safe distance from his mistress. As Quixote can claim to have become a better person through serving a woman who is unaware of his existence, so the old man of the Memories can claim to have arrived on the doorstep of ‘at last, real life’ by learning to love a girl whom he does not in any real sense know and who certainly does not know him. (The most quintessentially Cervantean moment of the memoir occurs when its author gets to see the bicycle on which his beloved rides – or is claimed to ride – to work, and in the fact of a real-life bicycle finds ‘tangible proof’ that the girl with the fairy-tale name – whose bed he has shared night after night – ‘existed in real life’.) (pp. 115, 71)
In his autobiography Living to Tell the Tale, García Márquez tells the story of the composition of his first extended fiction, the novella ‘Leaf Storm’ (1955). Having – as he thought – finalised the manuscript, he showed it to his friend Gustavo Ibarra, who to his dismay pointed out that the dramatic situation – the struggle to get a man buried against the resistance of the authorities, civic and clerical – was lifted from Sophocles’ Antigone. García Márquez reread Antigone ‘with a strange mixture of pride at having coincided in good faith with so great a writer, and sorrow at the public embarrassment of plagiarism’. Before publishing, he revised the manuscript drastically and added an epigraph from Sophocles to signal his debt.5
Sophocles is not the only writer to have left a mark on García Márquez. His earlier fiction bears the imprint of William Faulkner to such an extent that he can justly be called Faulkner’s most devoted disciple.
In the case of Memories, the debt toYasunari Kawabata is conspicuous. In 1982 García Márquez wrote a story, ‘Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane’, in which Kawabata is specifically alluded to. Seated in the first-class cabin of a jet crossing the Atlantic beside a young woman of extraordinary beauty who sleeps throughout the flight, García Márquez’s narrator is reminded of a novel by Kawabata about ageing men who pay money to spend nights with drugged, sleeping girls. As a work of fiction the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ story is undeveloped, no more than a sketch. Perhaps for this reason, García Márquez feels free to re-use its basic situation – the no longer young admirer side by side with the sleeping girl – in Memories of My Melancholy Whores.6
In Kawabata’s ‘House of the Sleeping Beauties’ (1961) a man on the brink of old age, Yoshio Eguchi, resorts to a procuress who supplies drugged girls for men with specialised tastes. Over a period of time he spends nights with several of these girls. The house rules forbidding sexual penetration are mainly superfluous, since most of the clientele is old and impotent. But Eguchi – as he keeps telling himself – is neither. He flirts with the idea of breaking the rules, of raping one of the girls, impregnating her, even asphyxiating her, as a way of showing his manhood and his defiance of a world that treats old men like chi
ldren. At the same time he is attracted by the thought of overdosing and dying in the arms of a virgin.
Kawabata’s novella is a study of the activities of eros in the mind of a sensualist of an intensive and self-aware kind, acutely – perhaps morbidly – sensitive to odours and fragrances and nuances of touch, absorbed by the physical uniqueness of the women he is intimate with, prone to brood on images from his sexual past, not afraid to confront the possibility that his attraction toward young women may screen desire for his own daughters, or that his obsession with women’s breasts may originate in infantile memories.
Above all, the isolated room containing only a bed and a living body to be handled or mishandled, within limits, as he pleases, unwitnessed and therefore at no risk of being shamed, constitutes a theatre in which Eguchi can confront himself as he really is, old and ugly and soon to die. His nights with the nameless girls are filled with melancholy rather than joy, with regret and anguish rather than physical pleasure.
The ugly senility of the sad men who came to this house was not many years away for Eguchi himself. The immeasurable expanse of sex, its bottomless depth – what part of it had Eguchi known in his sixty-seven years? And around the old men, new flesh, young flesh, beautiful flesh was forever being born. Were not the longing of the sad old men for the unfinished dream, the regret for days lost without ever being had, concealed in the secret of this house?7
García Márquez does not so much imitate Kawabata as respond to him. His hero is very different in temperament from Eguchi, less complex in his sensualism, less inward-looking, less of an explorer, less of a poet too. But it is in what goes on in bed in the respective secret houses that the true distance between García Márquez and Kawabata must be measured. In bed with Delgadina, García Márquez’s old man finds a new and elevating joy. To Eguchi, on the other hand, it remains an endlessly frustrating mystery that unconscious female bodies, whose use can be bought by the hour and whose floppy, mannequin-like limbs can be disposed as the client wishes, should have such power over him that they bring him back to the house again and again.
The question regarding all sleeping beauties is of course what will happen when they awake. In Kawabata’s book there is, symbolically speaking, no awakening: the sixth and last of Eguchi’s girls dies at his side, poisoned by the drug that sent her to sleep. In García Márquez, on the other hand, Delgadina seems to have absorbed through her skin all the attentions that have been poured on her, and to be on the point of waking, ready to love her worshipper in return.
García Márquez’s version of the tale of the sleeping beauty is thus much sunnier than Kawabata’s. Indeed, in the abruptness of its ending it seems deliberately to close its eyes to the question of the future of any old man with a young love, once the beloved is permitted to step off her goddess pedestal. Cervantes has his hero visit the village of Toboso and present himself on his knees to a girl chosen almost at random to be the embodiment of Dulcinea. For his pains he is rewarded with an earful of pungent peasant abuse flavoured with raw onion, and quits the scene confused and discomfited.
It is not clear that García Márquez’s little fable of redemption would be sturdy enough to bear a conclusion of this kind. García Márquez might take a look too at the Merchant’s tale, the sardonic story of cross-generational marriage in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and in particular at its snapshot of the couple caught in the clear dawn light after the exertions of their bridal night, the old husband sitting up in bed in his nightcap, the slack skin of his neck quivering, the young wife beside him consumed in irritation and distaste.
(2005)
21 V. S. Naipaul: Half a Life
DURING THE 1930S the English writer W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) developed an interest in Indian spirituality. He visited Madras and was taken to an ashram to meet a man who, born Venkataraman, had retreated into a life of silence, self-mortification, and prayer, and was now known simply as the Maharshi. While waiting for his audience, Maugham fainted, perhaps because of the heat. When he came to, he found he could not speak (it must be mentioned that Maugham was a lifelong stammerer). The Maharshi comforted him by pronouncing that ‘Silence is also conversation.’1
News of his fainting fit, according to Maugham, spread across India. Through the powers of the Maharshi, the rumour went, a pilgrim from the West had briefly been translated into the realm of the infinite. Though Maugham had no recollection of any visit to the infinite, the encounter clearly left a mark on him: he describes it in A Writer’s Notebook (1949) and again in an essay in Points of View (1958); he also works it into The Razor’s Edge (1944), the novel with which he made his name in the United States.
The Razor’s Edge has as its hero an American who, having prepared himself by acquiring a deep tan and adopting Indian garb, visits the guru Shri Ganesha and under his guidance has an ecstatic spiritual experience, ‘an experience of the same order as the mystics have had all over the world through the centuries’. With Shri Ganesha’s blessing, this proto-hippie returns to Illinois, where he plans to practise ‘calmness, forbearance, compassion, selflessness and continence’ while making a living as a taxi-driver. ‘It’s a mistake to think that those holy men of India lead useless lives,’ he says. ‘They are a shining light in the darkness.’2
The story of the meeting between Venkataraman the holy man and Maugham the writer, and their happy collaboration, Venkataraman providing Maugham with a marketable version of Indian spirituality, Maugham providing Venkataraman with publicity and floods of business, is the germ of V. S. Naipaul’s 2001 novel Half a Life.3
In the novel Naipaul is concerned less with the question of whether Venkataraman and similar dispensers of gnomic wisdom are fakes – he takes that as read – than with the more general phenomenon of religious practice that centres on self-denial. Why do people – in India in particular – choose to pursue lives of fasting, celibacy, and silence? Why are they revered for it? What human consequences follow from their example of sanctity?
To understand the prestige of self-denial, Naipaul suggests, we need to see Indian asceticism historically. Once upon a time Hindu temples supported an entire priestly caste. Then, as a consequence of foreign invasions, first Muslim, later British, the temples lost their revenues. Temple priests became trapped in a vicious cycle: poverty led to loss of energy and desire, which led to passivity, which led to deeper poverty. The caste seemed to be in terminal decline. Instead of quitting the temples and finding some other source of support, however, priests came up with an ingenious transvaluation of values: going without food, and denial of the appetites in general, was propagated as admirable in itself, worthy of veneration and hence of tribute.
This, in summary, is Naipaul’s briskly materialist account of how a Brahmin ethos of self-denial and fatalism, an ethos that scorns individual enterprise and hard work, gained the high ground in India.
In Naipaul’s rewriting of the Venkataraman story, a nineteenth-century Brahmin named Chandran has the gumption to break out of the temple system. He saves his pennies, journeys to the nearest big town – the capital of one of the nominally independent backwater states in British India – and finds a job as a clerk in the maharajah’s palace. After him his son continues the climb of the family through the ranks of the civil service. All seems well: the Chandrans have found a safe niche for themselves where they can quietly prosper without any longer having to mortify their bodies.
But the grandson (we are now in the 1930s) is a rebel of a kind. Rumours of Gandhi and his nationalist movement abound. The Mahatma calls for a boycott of universities. The grandson (henceforth called simply Chandran) obeys the call by burning his Shelley and Hardy in the college yard (he does not like literature anyway) and waiting for a storm to break over his head. But no one, it appears, has noticed.
Gandhi proclaims that the caste system is wrong. How does a Brahmin fight the caste system? Answer: by marrying down. Chandran picks out an ugly, dark-skinned girl in his class belonging to a so-called backward c
aste – in everyday parlance, a ‘backward’ – and pays court to her in clumsy fashion. In no time at all, using lies and threats, the girl has compelled him to make good on his promises and marry her.
In disgrace with his family, Chandran is put to work in the maharajah’s tax office. There he indulges in surreptitious acts of what he tells himself is civil disobedience, though his true motives are simply idle and malicious. When his mischief-making is exposed and he is threatened with the law, he has a stroke of genius: he takes sanctuary in one of the temples, and there protects himself from what he chooses to call persecution by taking a vow of silence. His vow turns him into a local hero. People come to watch him being silent and to bring offerings.
It is into this morass of deceit and hypocrisy that the gullible Westerner William Somerset Maugham treads, come to find out the deeper truth that only India can tell. ‘Are you happy?’ Maugham asks the holy man Chandran. Using pencil and pad, Chandran replies: ‘Within my silence I feel quite free. That is happiness.’ (p. 30) What wisdom! thinks Maugham. The comedy is rich: the principal freedom Chandran enjoys is freedom from prosecution.
Maugham publishes a book about his visit, and Chandran is suddenly famous at home – famous for having been written about by a foreigner. (Chandran is not just famous in India: he joins a growing list of minor characters – one thinks of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or of Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre – who find themselves whipped out of their original literary environment and given grander roles in other books.) Visitors from abroad follow in Maugham’s footsteps. To them Chandran repeats his story of a glittering career in the civil service sacrificed for a life of prayer and self-sacrifice. Soon he comes to believe his own lies. Following in the footsteps of his Brahmin ancestors, he has found a way of repudiating the world yet prospering. He sees no irony in this. Instead he feels awe: a higher power must be guiding him.
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