Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), a magical realism novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, follows an unnamed narrator who treats himself to a night with an adolescent virgin on his ninetieth birthday, and as a result, finds himself falling in love for the first time. Garcia Marquez is one of the most significant authors of the twentieth century. Known as "Gabo" in his native country of Colombia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 and is credited with helping to popularize the magical realism genre.

To celebrate his ninetieth birthday, a lifelong bachelor decides that he wants to take the virginity of a beautiful adolescent girl. Used to paying for sex (which he says he must do because he's ugly), he had slept with 514 women by the time he turned fifty. In contrast to his extensive list of partners, when it comes to the sex act itself, he prefers familiar locations and sexual positions.

To fulfill his birthday wishes, he calls Rosa Carbacas, a madam that he has done business with before, and asks her to accommodate his request. Rosa owns a high-class brothel that services top city officials, so she is not concerned about the legal consequences of trafficking minors. Rather, she complains about the difficulty of finding such a girl who is willing to sell herself on such short notice. When the narrator offers to pay extra for her troubles, however, she agrees. This is no small thing for the narrator to do; he makes little money, and what he does have is usually spent on prostitutes.

Soon after, the madam calls the narrator and says that she has found a fourteen-year-old girl who needs money to help her family. The narrator dresses in his best clothes and goes to the brothel. First, he has a drink with the madam, who explains that she's given the girl a sleeping tonic to spare her the trauma of the night. She advises him to take her virginity without waking her, as it will be kinder for the girl.

When he gets to the room and sees the sleeping girl, however, he cannot bring himself to take advantage of her while she's asleep. Instead, he simply spends the night sleeping next to her and enjoying the feeling of being close to someone. In the morning, he leaves without saying anything. Rosa is initially angry, feeling that he insulted both her and the girl, but her anger subsides when she learns that he acted out of kindness.

The events at the brothel cause the narrator to reminisce about the many women he has paid for sex during his lifetime. One of these is still employed as his housekeeper, and in addition to her cleaning duties, once per month, she also has sex with him. Feeling guilty for this, he increases her wages.

Afterward, the narrator goes to the offices of El Diario de La Paz, the local newspaper where he has worked as a columnist for the past forty years. Because it's scheduled to be his final day at the paper before retirement, his co-workers throw him a party. He's touched by the gesture and becomes conflicted: he wants to retire but not to leave the camaraderie he feels there. He turns in his final column and leaves, but a few days later, the editor calls and persuades him to return to writing his column, which the narrator does reluctantly.

Since his night at the brothel, the narrator cannot stop thinking about the fourteen-year-old girl, even though he doesn't know her name. He calls Rosa and arranges another night with her, then another, and another. Though he never does anything more than sleep next to her, he is soon spending nearly every night with the girl and inventing an imaginary relationship between them.

The narrator believes that he has fallen in love for the first time in his life. He reveals that he was once engaged to a woman that he had nothing in common with, and so when the day of the wedding came, he simply left her at the altar. In his younger years, he had promised his mother that he would get married so that he could have a daughter to name after her, but he never fulfilled this promise.

One night, a man is murdered at the brothel, and the girl goes into hiding for several months. During this time, the narrator nearly goes crazy with being unable to see her. Rosa feels sorry for him and eventually arranges a meeting with the girl. Overjoyed, he goes to the meeting and finds her dressed in fine clothes. Believing her to have become a prostitute, he flies into a rage and destroys the room where they have spent all their nights. He then vows that he will never see her again, and she goes back into hiding.

As time passes, however, his resolve weakens, and he finds himself missing his unnamed love. He apologizes to Rosa but feels that it is too late to make amends with the girl. By chance, he encounters a woman he slept with many years earlier, and she encourages him to pursue a relationship with the girl, but one in which he takes care of her. He meets up with Rosa, and they both arrange for their property to pass to the girl when they die. Finally, he schedules another night with her, this time on his ninety-first birthday.