Them's Fightin' Words

While I was thinking what to write for today’s post, my mind dug up one of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The quote’s from one of his novellas called Memories of my Melancholy Whores. I read it about four years ago because my boss at the time bought it at a CNA before we boarded a flight to Cape Town.

The guy was really fucked up in a lot of ways, but was also a lot of fun. He basically only read books that had some kind of smutty angle and so bought the Marquez book based purely on its title.

We used to work out of a small house in a complex on Grayston Drive in a team of three people, and so I was often left totally alone in the house while my two bosses were out ‘interviewing’ people for the ‘report’ we were working on for an esteemed in-flight magazine.

It took me three or four days to read Memories of my Melancholy Whores, but that novella has had a profound effect on my life.

The story is about a 90 year old man who has only ever slept with whores his whole life. The guy is hung like a mule, but unfortunately is really, really ugly and so finds it impossible to bed normal women.

Obviously as he gets older his appetite for sex decreases and when the novella starts, he hasn’t been with a prozzy for at least a decade.

However, on his 90th birthday he decides to contact his friend, the mistress of his favourite whore house, and ask her a favour. As a birthday present to himself he wants to sleep with a virgin.

Miraculously the old man can still get it up and so, after much debate, the mistress decides to help the old man out and actually finds a 13 year old girl who needs the money desperately and so sets everything up.

Because it’s the girl’s first time, the mistress gives her a powerful kind of sedative to relax her, but gets the dose completely wrong and so when the old man enters the bedroom to deflower his prize, he finds her naked on the bed and fast asleep.

Watching her lying there like that, something miraculous happens. The old man falls completely in love with her. She looks so innocent and so pure, this young girl poised at the brink of becoming a woman, that he doesn’t even touch her that first night, he just watches her sleeping until it starts becoming light outside, then quietly leaves.

There’s a lot more to the story, but you’ll have to read it to find out the rest and I strongly recommend that you do, but the line that really stuck with me goes like this:

‘The invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.’

It’s weird that my mind dug up that quote because it’s been years since I last experienced the all-consuming feeling that is unrequited love.

And yet, it’s not something you forget easily. Even as I write this at least three or four girls spring to mind that at different times in my life, I was completely in love with and either too afraid to admit it, or even worse, they knew how I felt and just weren’t that into me.

The weirdest case was a blonde girl who used to hang out in our circle of friends post-varsity, we’ll call her Jacqui.

I’d met her a few times, I thought she was smoking hot but that was about it. Then this one night at The Doors in Edenvale we were all sitting on the upstairs balcony and the weirdest thing happened.

I was talking about how varsity sets you up nicely for life because of the simple fact that it teaches you how to digest and understand massive amounts of information. It was a really boring topic of conversation, but the next thing I knew sweet, blue-eyed, blonde-haired little Jacqui sprang to life and spent the next 15 minutes passionately agreeing with me.

I have no idea how the fuck she did it, but during those 15 minutes I fell completely in love with her. To this day I still can’t explain it, but I fell for her so hard and fast that I remember standing by the bar moments later, my heart racing, knocking back as much booze as I could stomach to try and calm down and think straight.

Peggles was with me that night and I remember cornering him at one stage and trying to explain what this girl was doing to me while intermittently punching the wall and eating the ice out of my empty drink.

I felt ill. I drank some more. I don’t think I spoke another word to her the whole night but I so badly wanted to. I watched her dancing for a long time, trying desperately to think up some way to approach her, but… how?

I collapsed in bed that night, drunk and alone, but couldn’t sleep and when I eventually did, I swear I dreamed of her.

But the weirdest thing is I saw her about a week later and felt nothing.

I felt nothing. I mean, had she initiated anything, I would have happily reciprocated, but she didn’t and I just got this feeling like even if I made a move, she wouldn’t be interested and so just as quickly as I fell completely in love with her, I fell completely out of love with her.

Most of the girls I’ve fallen for don’t know I fell for them, well, to my knowledge at least and I wouldn’t change that if I could go back and do it all over again.

Even though it tore me up a lot of the time that some of the girls I was into felt rocks for me, I was also keenly aware of the fact that in many cases, love moves in circles ie. the person you’re chasing is chasing someone else who is chasing someone else and so on.

Also, it felt good to move the world.

It’s all part of one system, it’s all energy being transferred from one form into another into another into another. Love is a powerful form of energy and yes, I might have poured a lot of it out there needlessly, but I guess what I want to say is this: it comes back.

-ST