Love: ageless in its power

AT 76, Gabo, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known in the Spanish-speaking world, has written an erotic novella about an affair between an old man and a pubescent girl, set in a Colombian coastal town reminiscent of Barranquilla. The unnamed protagonist is a bachelor who for decades has lived alone (with the exception of a veteran maid) in his parents’ house and who makes his living as a second-rate newspaper columnist and by selling off family heirlooms.

He decides to celebrate his 90th birthday by spending the night in a brothel with a virgin and phones the matron, Rosa Cabarcas, asking her for the most beautiful “unused” woman around. After some negotiation, Cabarcas offers a 14-year-old virgin. When she announces the virgin’s age, he jokingly answers, “I don’t mind changing her diapers.” By 10 that night, the man finds himself in a room with the already sleeping girl.

In a little more than 100 pages, the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” proceeds to describe a series of encounters over a year that is as hypnotizing as it is disturbing. The epigraph is from a story by Yasunari Kawabata, “House of the Sleeping Beauties,” proscribing a mature man from touching the mouth of a slumbering woman. Gabo’s bachelor fails to remain immobile.

The first time they meet, he delicately touches his prey, surveying the surface of her body, from her incipient pubic hair to her unnaturally large toes. He lets his imagination stray but in the end resists the temptation to wake her up. What proceeds is a peaceful, succinct chronicle of the countless women he has paid to give him joy. Although he had stopped counting at age 50 -- by then he had accumulated 514 -- he never found the one to fall in love with. “Sex,” he says, “is the consolation one has for not finding enough love.”

Love has been Gabo’s constant obsession. In his fiction, love is often visualized as old age’s source of endurance, as in the case of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” loosely based on the lives of his parents. Prostitution too is a leitmotif. Think of “Innocent Erendira,” about a girl whose grandmother forces her to become a whore to pay a debt.

But “Memoria de mis putas tristes,” published in Spanish by Alfred A. Knopf, is different. (The English-language edition, “A Memory of My Melancholy Whores,” translated by Edith Grossman, will be published in September 2005.) Some readers will see it as a licentious literary exercise destined for the forbidden shelf that once included works by Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov.

If so, it is clear that those companions would make Gabo proud. For there is nothing shameful in the novella: The relationship between the nonagenarian and the virgin is about vigor, not sin.

In Spanish, the ubiquitous word “puta” is at once a noun and an expletive. By inserting it in his title, Gabo, I trust, openly embraces the sexual attraction between the old and the young. Is this then a defiant attack against rigid social conventions?

More libertine readers will approach the piece as a celebration of Eros. For this novella is erotic but not pornographic. And love, not sex, is at its core. The bachelor does everything in his power to not pierce the aura of mystery surrounding the virgin. The matron Cabarcas offers to tell him some aspects of the girl’s life, that she’s a seamstress in a factory who takes care of her younger siblings and her rheumatic mother.

But he wants to know nothing more. He’s the owner of a florid fantasy. He calls the virgin Delgadilla (the “little, thin one”). On subsequent visits, he showers her with presents, among them a bicycle. He also redecorates the private room Cabarcas allocates for him in the whorehouse to resemble his own house, hanging paintings and embellishing it with bouquets of flowers.

Although we never hear her speak, Delgadilla utterly revitalizes the man. He had decided to call it quits as a journalist but changes his mind, writing his columns now in the form of love letters. Soon the entire town is in love with his idea of love. His columns are mimeographed by the thousands. They are recited in street corners. Radio stations broadcast them. The protagonist becomes a local celebrity.

As the plot unravels, Gabo describes, sometimes in bestial detail, the protagonist’s sexual encounters, the lusty as well as the fruitless. He describes past carnal meetings with his maid, Damiana, and the crush she had on him. Fate, and not the randomness of life, might well be the central theme of “Memoria de mis putas tristes.”

At one point the old man discovers that “love isn’t a state of mind but a zodiac sign.” His attraction to the virgin, he convinces himself, is part of a pre-established universal order. This means, of course, that there is little he might do to stop it. If the liaison between the nonagenarian and the 14-year-old collapses, it isn’t because he runs out of stamina. His milieu is corrupt, even flaccid.

In truth, nobody cares about the nuts and bolts of his affair. It is someone else’s crime, and a political one at that, that brings down his erotic reveries.

People thought Gabo was keeping himself busy these years writing the second and third installments of his memoirs, the first of which, “Living to Tell the Tale,” was published last year. So is this also a memoria, a variation of his autobiography? I doubt it. I believe it’s what Graham Greene once called “an entertainment,” a side project whose function is to keep the writer amused. And surely amusing is this tropical piece on geriatric affection.

Gabo’s bachelor is a music aficionado who listens to Bach and Mozart, romantic boleros and the sad ballads of Tona la Negra. It isn’t only a celebration of late urges but also a hidden tribute to Lewis Carroll. The bachelor is a voracious reader, and we find him delving into Francisco Delicado’s “The Lusty Andalusian Woman.”

Although we learn little of Delgadilla’s feelings, the bachelor devotes long hours of storytelling to her, reading Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince” first, then Perrault’s fairy tales, the “Thousand and One Nights” and other children’s classics. She is his Alice in his Wonderland. He feels responsible for keeping her purity, both physical and spiritual, intact.

A masterful example of that extraordinary genre, the novella, that publishers fear embracing because it feels neither like a short story nor a full-fledged novel, “Memoria de mis putas tristes” is Gabo’s response to the age of Viagra. He convincingly proves that love doesn’t need the distraction of intercourse.

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Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His “Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature” will be published in January by Random House, and “Dictionary Days” will be published in April by Graywolf.