MEDITATIONS ON PROFESSOR GLOOMY HILLS (G. G. MARQUEZ)

 “I wrote,” the ninety year old professor told me, “in my Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Marquez), that among the charms of old age are the provocations our young themselves because they think we are out of commission.”   

 Sì, risposi. Ricordo di aver baciato M sulle rive del fiume Red Cedar; mi baciò appassionatamente e poi disse: "Perché succede sempre a me?" Più tardi, la sorprese di nuovo quando mi staccai dalla sua bocca e venni sulla sua spalla. Allo stesso modo, ho sorpreso una Tigre,scopandola da dietro per ore finché finalmente si voltò verso di me e disse "Basta". Poi si sdraiò a pancia in giù e si finì mentre io ero sopra di lei.

Then he told me about the madam and the young girl she presented him with.  “Nothing happened, in fact it showed me I’m in no condition for this kind of chasing around....I can’t anymore.”  That’s what he told the madam over the phone.  Then he hung up the phone, “filled with a sense of liberation I hadn’t known in my life, and free at last of a servitude that had kept me enslaved since the age of thirteen.”   

How lucky you are, I said.  My servitude began when I was five years old.  

When the cathedral bells struck seven, there was a single, limpid star in the rose-colored sky, a ship called out a disconsolate farewell, and in my throat I felt the Gordian knot of all loves that might have been and weren’t.

Ogni notte, appena mi corico e chiudo gli occhi, sento questo nodo Gordiano per la signora Landry, Tess, Diane, Sharly, la moglie della coppia chesi occupava delle cose a Trumble Hill, e le ragazze e le donne sui treni e sugli autobus con cui avrei potuto partire se non fossi stato sposato e con figli.

Early in July I felt my true distance from death. My heart skipped beats and I began to see and feel all around me unmistakeable presentiments of the end. The clearest occurred at a Bellas Artes concert....At the end, with the Allegretto poco mosso, I was shaken by the stunning revelation that I was listening to the last concert fate would afford me before I died.  I did not feel sorrow or fear buy an overwhelming emotion at having lived long enough to experience it

 The certainty of being mortal...had taken me by surprise a short while before my fiftieth birthday...a night during carnival when I danced an apache tango with a phenomenal woman whose face I never saw....when I was shaken for the first time and almost knocked to the ground by the roar  of death.  It was like a brutal oracle in my ear.  No matter what you do, this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever...From then on I began to measure my life not by years but by decades. 

 For me, this happened before my tenth birthday.  Perhaps this is because by that age I had already been vaccinated against "magical realism."  Memories of My Melancholy Whores is not written in the framework of the literal magical realism that characterizes Marquez's works in general but something more like the metaphorical magical realism of love and romance...

Here I discovered perhaps the most moving properly named if the grammarians have it right “indirect metaphor:” “ Versaillellsque bow.” 

It is one thing to be 14 years old and know you are going to die.  It is quite another thing to be 85 years old and know you are going to die.  I feel like I'm living on a cusp, not quite alive, and not quite dead (something like what Schrodinger's cat must be feeling).  I  wonder if that will be the last roll of toilet paper I use, the last tube of toothpaste.  Lately, I find it hard not to be haunted by regrets, regrets that inevitably involve lost sexual opportunites.  What if L hadn't interrupted me and E?  What if when as teenagers Annette said: "You make me nervous."  Pause.  "You have no idea what I'm talking about do you?" I'd known what she was talking about?  What if I in fact DID know but was paralyzed into in-action?  What if I'd ignored how tired was at 2am in Gent, Belgium after touring the red light district with Ann and worried that I wouldn't "perform" and stupidly said after a passionate kiss on the stairs to our rooms at the St. George hotel, "Let's try this another time."  Why didn't I ask all the women and girls I made out with on buses and trains for their phone numbers?   How is it possible that Diane Valentine and I didn't even kiss let alone have sex the night our. spouses left us alone in my apartment and we were all cuddled up together for hours?