Before the anonymous Maestro learns of his solitary vocation, he has a youthful flutter with matrimony. During the protracted engagement, his fianc?and he sit in silence - having nothing to converse about - he knitting blue and she pink bootees for the future offspring they are not to have. But then the writing rambles: "I began to measure my life not by years but by decades, transfixed by the agreeable idea that life was not something that passes by like Heraclitus' river but a unique opportunity to turn over on the grill and keep broiling on the other side"; and "..a short while before my fiftieth birthday... Just as well, since the amorous encounters are coy and squeamish enough to make the reader wince.
He is a master of minute observations: looking at a photograph, "I confirmed with horror that one ages more and more with intensity in pictures than in reality", and, for Rosa Cabarcas, "death was a mere kitchen matter". An assassinated client is "an enormous corpse, naked but with shoes on, [which] had the pallor of steamed chicken in the blood-soaked bed". We are thus presented with a Chinese box in which no secrets are concealed: since we already have the autobiography and, much more important still, a whole library of novels and short stories that are paeans to human love in its manifold varieties, by the same hand this story-within-a-story functions as a fable in which the plot is irrelevant.For Gabo is not so much addressing love as death in this novella. As with Gabo in his earlier years, he is a newspaper columnist, who still writes by hand ("with a quill and ink"), weaving tales based on local observations and vehement opposition to government corruption. She presents him with a 14-year-old seamstress who desperately needs additional funds to support her impoverished family, so exhausted by the factory day job that she slumbers throughout their innocuous nocturnal encounters.Like the author himself - known throughout Latin America by the avuncular abbreviation of Gabo - the protagonist is a literary Grand Old Man, clasped to the collective heart of the nation for his writing.
The main character is approaching his 90th birthday and awards himself a night of bliss with a young virgin at Rosa Camarcas' famous cathouse. La Camarcas is an old companion and confidant and reckons on knowing precisely her most famous client's true desires. Here The Guardian ran excerpts from this fictionalised autobiography, selecting episodes that took place in the small-town brothels where the whores numbered nursing and counselling, cookery and housekeeping, alongside their skills in sexual initiation and experimentation. These Memories draw heavily on the earlier accounts in a romance of old age. The Los Angeles Times ran a cartoon of a Hispanic hawker opening his jacket as he accosts a passerby: "Do you want to buy a book?" runs the caption. In California, the Spanish edition was top of the bestseller lists until the English edition replaced it. The load was of pirated copies of Memoria de mis putas tristes, and its author responded furiously and inventively, altering the ending before the official version was published. In Colombia, a lorry was hijacked and the load was clandestinely sold, piece by piece, in a matter of hours.