Márquez and the Illusion

"I discovered that I am not disciplined by virtue, but only in reaction to my own negligence; that I appear generous to mask my meanness, that I am overly prudent from suspicion, that I am conciliatory to avoid succumbing to my repressed anger, that I am punctual only to conceal how little I care for other people’s time. In short, I discovered that love is not a state of the soul but a sign of the zodiac." — from Memories of My Melancholy Whores, by Gabriel García Márquez.

I read Memories of My Melancholy Whores without the enchantment I had expected from Márquez. The book felt gentle, almost self-forgetting, as if it were speaking already from a place of decline. At its core, there is no love story, only its idealisation. The old man invents an absolute love, yet one-sided. Delgadina never speaks to him, never returns his affection, never exists beyond silence. She is merely a sleeping body, material for his fantasy.

I now realise that the novel is more about the illusion of loving than love itself. It stages a shared imagination of Márquez’s generation — the male myth of pure love experienced without reciprocity, as if simply beholding female innocence could render one saved. There is no otherness, only projection. A love without reality, yet one that offers consolation at life’s end.

Perhaps this is why the book strikes me as so profoundly melancholic. It is not a celebration of love, but the portrait of a man who has never truly lived it, who, at the brink of death, invents it for himself. I underline the paragraph above, for at least the character saw and acknowledged the shadows. Even those of love.