Memories of my Melancholy Whores Read Online Free PDF Page B

young who were not afraid of aging. Then the column returned to the editorial section and, on special occasions, to the front page.
    Whenever someone asks I always answer with the truth: whores left me no time to be married. Still, I should acknowledge that I did not come up with this explanation until the day of my ninetieth birthday, when I left Rosa Cabarcas’s house determined never again to provoke fate. I felt like a different man. My mood was upset by the disreputable mob I saw leaning against the metal railings around the park. I found Damiana washing the floor, on all fours in the living room, and the youthfulness of her thighs at her age revive in me a tremor from another time. She must have sensed it because she covered herself with her skirt. I could not resist the temptation to ask: Tell me something, Damiana: what do you recall? I wasn’t recalling anything, she said, but your question makes me remember, I felt a weight in my chest. I’ve never fallen in love, I told her. She replied without hesitation: I have. And she concluded, not interrupting her work: I cried over you for twenty-two years. My heart skipped a beat. Looking for a dignified way out, I said: We would have made a good team. Well, it’s wrong of you to say so now, she said, because you’re no good to me anymore even as a consolation. As she was leaving the house, she said in the most natural way: You won’t believe me but thanks be to God, I’m still a virgin.
    A short while later i discovered that she had left vases filled with red roses all over the house, and a card on my pillow:
I hope you reach a hunnert
. With this bad taste in my mouth i sat down to continue the column i had left half-finished the day before. I completed it without stopping less than two hours and had to “twist the neck of the swan,” as the Mexican poet said, to write from my heart and not have anyone noticed my tears. In a belated moment of inspiration, i decided to finish it with the announcement that with this column i was bringing to a happy conclusion a long and worthy life without the sad necesity of having to die.
    My intension was to leave it with reception at the paper and return home. But i couldn’t. The entire staff was waiting for me in order to celebrate my birthday. The building was being renovated, and scaffolding and rubble were everywhere, but they had stopped work for the party. On a carpenter’s table were drinks for the toast and birthday presents wrapped in gift paper. Dazed by flashing cameras, I was included in every photograph taken as a memento.
    I was glad to see radio newscasters and reporters from other papers in the city:
La Prensa
, the conservative morning paper,
El Heraldo
, the liberal morning paper, and
El Nacional
, the evening sensationalist tabloid that always tried to relieve tensions in the public order with serialized stories of passion. It wasn’t strange that they were together, for in the spirit of the city it was always considered good form to maintain friendships among the troops while the officers waged editorial war.
    Also present, though not at his regular hours, was the official censor, Don Jeronimo Ortega, whom we called the Abominable No-Man because he would arrive with his reactionary satrap’s blood-red pencil at nine sharp every night and stay until he was certain no letter in the morning edition went unpunished. He had a personal aversion to me, either because of my grammarian’s airs or because I would use Italian words without quotation marks or italics when they seemed more expressive than Spanish, which ought to be legitimate practice between Siamese languages. After enduring him for four years, we had come to accept him in the end as our bad conscience.
    The secretaries brought in a cake with ninety lit candles that confronted me for the first time with the number of my years. I had to swallow tears when they sang the birthday song, and for no reason I thought about the girl. It wasn’t a flash of