BOOKS

A new book by septuagenarian Gabriel Garcia Marquez. With his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, Marquez has written a love letter to the dying light.

A review by John Updike:

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

The works of Gabriel García Márquez contain a great deal of love, depicted as a doom, a demonic possession, a disease that, once contracted, cannot be easily cured. Not infrequently the afflicted are an older man and a younger woman, hardly more than a child. In “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967; English translation 1970), Aureliano Buendía visits a very young whore:

The adolescent mulatto girl, with her small bitch’s teats, was naked on the bed. Before Aureliano sixty-three men had passed through the room that night. From being used so much, kneaded with sweat and sighs, the air in the room had begun to turn to mud. The girl took off the soaked sheet and asked Aureliano to hold it by one side. It was as heavy as a piece of canvas. They squeezed it, twisting it at the ends until it regained its natural weight. They turned over the mat and the sweat came out of the other side. Aureliano was anxious for that operation never to end.

Her condition is pitiable:

Her back was raw. Her skin was stuck to her ribs and her breathing was forced because of an immeasurable exhaustion. Two years before, far away from there, she had fallen asleep without putting out the candle and had awakened surrounded by flames. The house where she lived with the grandmother who had raised her was reduced to ashes. Since then her grandmother carried her from town to town, putting her to bed for twenty cents in order to make up the value of the burned house. According to the girl’s calculations, she still had ten years of seventy men per night, because she also had to pay the expenses of the trip and food for both of them.


Aureliano does not take advantage of her overexploited charms, and leaves the room “troubled by a desire to weep.” He has—you guessed it—fallen in love:

He felt an irresistible need to love her and protect her. At dawn, worn out by insomnia and fever, he made the calm decision to marry her in order to free her from the despotism of her grandmother and to enjoy all the nights of satisfaction that she would give the seventy men.


This curious blend of the squalid and the enchanted—perhaps not so curious in the social context of the author’s native Colombia in the years of his youth—returns, five years later, in the long short story “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother” (translated 1978), which was made into a movie from a script by the author. The situation has become more fabulous, with its Catholic subtext—whoredom as the martyrdom of an innocent—underlined; Eréndira’s would-be rescuer is Ulises, “a gilded adolescent with lonely maritime eyes and with the appearance of a furtive angel,” and her grandmother is fully demonic, huge in bulk, with “mercilessly tattooed” shoulders and, it turns out, green blood, “oily blood, shiny and green, just like mint honey.”

Eréndira, when we first meet her, has “just turned fourteen,” whereas Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles, the heroine of García Márquez’s uncanny short historical novel “Of Love and Other Demons” (1994; translated 1995), turns twelve as the book opens. Her mother is “an untamed mestiza of the so-called shopkeeper aristocracy: seductive, rapacious, brazen, with a hunger in her womb that could have satisfied an entire barracks.” Her father, the second Marquis de Casalduero, is a “funereal, effeminate man, as pale as a lily because the bats drained his blood while he slept.” Neither parent has any energy or affection to spare the child, so she is reared by the decaying household’s contingent of slaves, and learns their languages, dances, religion, and diet—a goat’s eyes and testicles are her favorite meal, “cooked in lard and seasoned with burning spices.” Her most striking physical feature is her radiant copper hair; it has never been cut and is braided into loops so as not to interfere with her walking.

On her birthday, she is bitten by a rabid dog, and though she never develops symptoms, the medical precautions, and her own charisma, prove to be fatal. Her father, roused to notice her existence, falls in love with her, suddenly “knowing he loved her as he had never loved in this world,” and so does the devout and learned thirty-six-year-old priest, Cayetano Delaura, who is placed in charge of the exorcism that the Church has deemed necessary, in view of her willful and feral behavior. Delaura at last proclaims his love to her: “He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her.” Denis de Rougemont’s analysis of romantic love as a Catholic heresy could scarcely be better illustrated. As García Márquez frames these cases, an element of whoredom is necessary to the, in Stendhal’s term, “crystallization” of love.

Sordid imputations swirl about the pre-teen Sierva María. Condemned to a convent, she shows up in a hat, found in an old chest and gaily decorated with ribbons; the abbess, in her perpetual puritan fury, calls it “the hat of a slut.” Rumors of Delaura’s attentions in her convent cell cause the child to be called “his pregnant whore.” The pair do embrace, and even begin to experience, through daily exposure, “the tedium of everyday love,” but she remains a virgin, in hopes of an eventual marriage. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that she has the talent that the physician and seer Abrenuncio names when he says, “Sex is a talent, and I do not have it.” For all of Delaura’s vows, it is Sierva María who stops eating and dies for love. Her hair tells the tale: the nuns shave it off, but when she is found dead “strands of hair gushed like bubbles as they grew back on her shaved head,” and two hundred years later “a stream of living hair the intense color of copper” flows from her crypt, to the length of twenty-two metres. The miracle was witnessed, it is explained in a foreword, by the twenty-one-year-old journalist Gabriel García Márquez.

His new novel, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” (translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman; Knopf; $20), is his first work of fiction in ten years, and a mere hundred and fifteen pages long. It revisits the figure of a young whore, “just turned fourteen,” stretched naked on a soaked bed. The moisture, this time, is her own “phosphorescent perspiration,” and her lover, our unnamed protagonist and narrator, is all of ninety years old. García Márquez, a master of the arresting first sentence, begins his little book, “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Though the author was born in 1927 and is thus still shy of eighty, many homey details seem lifted from within his own study. The hero is a writer, having for fifty years composed a column, “El Diario de La Paz,” for the local newspaper; he reads and cites books, favoring the Roman classics, and keeps a collection of dictionaries; he listens carefully to classical music, and supplies the titles of his selections. The city he lives in is, as he is, unnamed, but its location, “twenty leagues distant” from the estuary of the Great Magdalena River, puts it in the neighborhood of García Márquez’s native town of Aracataca. As for the time of the action, the narrator gives his age as thirty-two when his father dies, “on the day the treaty of Neerlandia was signed, putting an end to the War of the Thousand Days”; that would be 1902, so our hero would have been born in 1870 and aged ninety in 1960. He tells us that he is “ugly, shy, and anachronistic,” and has “never gone to bed with a woman I didn’t pay.” A retired prostitute whom he meets on a bus refers to, perhaps in a reflex of professional flattery, “that burro’s cock the devil gave you as a reward for cowardice and stinginess.” He has never married and keeps no pets; a faithful servant, the “Indianlike, strong, rustic” Damiana, tends to his modest needs, moving about barefoot so as not to disturb his writing. Though impecunious, he attends many cultural events and knows the trials of fame: strangers approach him “with a frightening look of pitiless admiration.” His prose displays, in Edith Grossman’s expert translation, the chiselled stateliness and colorful felicities that distinguish everything García Márquez composes. “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” reminiscent in its terseness of such stoic fellow-Latins as the Brazilian Machado de Assis and the Colombia-born Álvaro Mutis, is a velvety pleasure to read, though somewhat disagreeable to contemplate; it has the necrophiliac tendencies of the precocious short stories, obsessed with living death, that García Márquez published in his early twenties.

The virgin whom the veteran brothel madam Rosa Cabarcas provides for her old client is a poor girl who lives with her crippled mother and feeds her brothers and sisters by a daily stint of sewing on buttons in a clothing factory. She is, Rosa Cabarcas confides, “dying of fear,” because a friend of hers bled to death in losing her virginity. To quiet her nerves, she has been given a mixture of bromide and valerian that relaxes her so soundly that our hero’s night with her consists of his watching her sleep:

Her newborn breasts still seemed like a boy’s, but they appeared full to bursting with a secret energy that was ready to explode. The best part of her body were her large, silent-stepping feet with toes as long and sensitive as fingers. . . . The adornments and cosmetics could not hide her character: the haughty nose, heavy eyebrows, intense lips. I thought: A tender young fighting bull.


His subsequent visits follow the same pattern: she, drugged and exhausted by overwork, sleeps while the ninety-year-old lies beside her, eavesdropping upon her breathing, at one point so faint that he takes her pulse to reassure himself that she is still alive. He imagines her blood as it circulates “through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love.” Whose love? Presumably his, directed toward an inert love object. He reads and sings to her, all in her sleep. Not once do we see her wake, or hear her talk, though the happy ending reports that she has feelings and awareness. His relationship, insofar as the action holds any, is with Rosa Cabarcas and those others who witnessed his whore-crazy prime, when he “was twice crowned client of the year.” Sleeping Beauty needs only to keep sleeping; her beauty under the male gaze is her raison d’être, and what she does when kissed awake is off the record, as is the cruelty of the economic system that turns young females into fair game for sexual predators. The narrator does not deplore the grim underpinnings of whoredom, or consider the atavistic barbarism of buying girls in order to crack their hymens. Such moral concerns are irrelevant to the rapture that is his basic subject—the rebirth of love and its torments in a body that he had thought was “free at last of a servitude that had kept me enslaved since the age of thirteen.” He reassures the reader, “I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.” He is, at ninety, alive, with love’s pain to prove it.

“Memories of My Melancholy Whores” feels less about love than about age and illness. Furtively vivid images give us whiffs of the underlying distress: “My heart filled with an acidic foam that interfered with my breathing”; “I’d rather die first, I said, my saliva icy.” The narrator’s asshole, we are told more than once, burns. His sense of reality keeps slipping, as it does with old people, sometimes into a startling loveliness: “The full moon was climbing to the middle of the sky and the world looked as if it were submerged in green water.” Magic realism has always depended on the subaqueous refractions of memory. So does love: “From then on I had her in my memory with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with her. . . . Seeing and touching her in the flesh, she seemed less real to me than in my memory.” As both de Rougemont and Freud (in 1912’s essay “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life”) suggest, the woman present in the flesh, the wife or surrogate mother with her complicated, obdurate reality and pressing needs, is less aphrodisiac than the woman, imagined or hired, whose will is our own. In “Of Love and Other Demons,” this phantom appears as a forlorn little princess, a wild and enigmatic waif. In “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” she is a working-class cipher who surrenders in her sleep, and whose speechless body represents the marvel of life. The instinct to memorialize one’s loves is not peculiar to nonagenarian rakes; in the slow ruin of life, such memory reverses the current for a moment and silences the voice that murmurs in our narrator’s ear, “No matter what you do, this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.” The septuagenarian Gabriel García Márquez, while he is still alive, has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying light.



FILM

Jarhead

“Jarhead,” which is based on Anthony Swofford’s 2003 memoir of the Gulf War, gets under way with a standard scene of boot-camp training. Tony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), a young Marine recruit, screams “Sir! Yes, sir!” as a drill instructor curses him out and slams him around. That noisy tyrant is an old acquaintance. In American movies, the drill instructor—unreasonable, unfathomable, louder than a public-address system—has become a comic staple, a licensed foulmouth who would probably disappoint moviegoers if he weren’t so hammily outrageous. Tony survives, and passes into the hands of his next tormentor, Staff Sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx), the head of the special sniper unit that Tony has been assigned to. More terrific cussing follows, which Foxx delivers with a comic’s practiced rhythm and speed. Tony, his ears ringing, also gets hazed by the other recruits in his squad, who handcuff him to a bed and threaten to brand him with the letters “USMC.” The branding, however, turns out to be a put-on—the iron is cold. Tony is not yet enough of a marine to be branded by his friends.

At first, “Jarhead” seems to be the latest version of a traditional American narrative: a young man enters the military, undergoes bewildering ordeals, ships off to war, and finds out who he is. The writer, William Broyles, Jr., who adapted Swofford’s book, and the director, Sam Mendes, clearly want to remind us of the story’s cinematic lineage. That boot-camp sequence feels like a reduced version of the head-bashing training episode in Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.” Later in the movie, the trainees, before going overseas, assemble to watch Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” and when Robert Duvall and his men come roaring over the water in their helicopters and attack a small village, the trainees shout along with the “Ride of the Valkyries” on the soundtrack, stomping and cheering. The combat scenes in Vietnam War movies are like porn for them, a part of the way they rev up. They don’t know, or don’t care, that Coppola’s sequence is meant sardonically, as an example of pointless overkill; they want to be terrifying, too.

The movie, it appears, is celebrating a barbarian warrior caste, a group of testosterone-drunk daredevils. The word “jarhead” refers not only to the Marine haircut—Tony’s hair is clipped high and tight—but to an empty vessel that gets filled with fighting instincts and Marine lore. When Tony arrives at camp, he is amused by the brutality and then frightened by it, but he quickly gets caught up in Corps manners—a process of manhandling every recruit into his proper function, which the recruits, in bursts of prideful masochism, accept as the only way anything can be done. As Tony gets pounded into shape, however, we don’t get a firm grip on his identity. Jake Gyllenhaal’s shorn skull has the effect of making his eyes look enormous and his mouth a clown’s grimace, and he responds openly to everything; his face is a mask of pleasure and suffering. But, even as we’re reading Tony’s immediate emotions, the filmmakers don’t tell us what’s going on inside him. He brings very little temperament or history with him, and, if he has a self that’s being enlarged or violated by what he’s going through, we don’t know what it is. But we expect to find out as he proceeds toward war.

Muscled, primed, and ready to go, the Marines arrive in Saudi Arabia in the fall of 1990—and there they wait. The coalition forces build up slowly, over months, and, as the screen time passes, Sam Mendes has a serious problem on his hands: how do you make something interesting out of endless sitting around? Mendes, the director of “American Beauty” and “Road to Perdition,” suffers perhaps more than another director would from this peculiar situation—he has a strong feeling for visual patterning but a faltering dramatic sense. “American Beauty,” his best movie, was shot in exquisitely designed jigsaw pieces that just barely fit together. “Road to Perdition” was almost decadently luscious—a glistening illustrated gangster saga—but dramatically ineffective. “Jarhead” isn’t luscious, but it has been designed for painterly effect. Mendes and his cinematographer, Roger Deakins, establish both dominant and subordinate colors for a given sequence, and they produce some hallucinatory moments: the pale-brown desert seeps so far into the men’s skin that they begin to look like sand crabs; red flames illuminate a dark night sky as hot oil rains down on the men, and we seem to be at the edge not of the desert but of Dante’s fiery lake.

Stunning as an experience of hellish dislocation, the movie nevertheless comes to a stop in the sand and never really gets moving again. The heat is ferocious, and the men are instructed to drink bottles of water; they “hydrate” and then stand in a row, on a berm, pissing; they train in clumsy gas-protection suits, complete with masks, and horse their way through a football game in the stifling equipment; they undergo bizarre punishments, get into brawls and threaten to kill one another. For them, sadism and masochism are not two sides of the same coin; they’re all that the coin is made of. A marine without a battle gives and receives pain in an endless cycle of frustration and nullity.

It gradually dawns on us that these young warriors aren’t going to have their war. Tanks and fighter planes are handling the Iraqi Army, and Tony’s unit turns out to be useless. Stymied, the men fall into a state of adolescent egocentricity: We’re just jarheads, a tough, crazy bunch of guys, and nobody gives a damn about us, especially the women back home who are supposed to remain loyal but who betray us, and so on. Swofford’s book gives way to self-glorification and maudlin sorrow, too, but you can enjoy the grit and flourish of his prose. In the movie, the men’s manic disillusion becomes so violent and surreally unpleasant that we are put in the position of longing for them to saddle up and kill someone just so the picture can go somewhere. Only the test of combat can absolve all the screwing around and self-pity of its inherent infantilism.

“Jarhead” has an oddly amorphous and inconclusive feeling to it. We never do find out who Tony is, and his best friend, Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), who shifts back and forth between sanity and hysteria, is a mystery, too. The old war-story narrative may have run aground in the Gulf War, but since questions of courage and character are left up in the air, you wonder why the material wasn’t played differently—with a greater sense of irony, say, or as absurdist comedy, in something like the style of David O. Russell’s Gulf War movie, “Three Kings.” What’s left instead of laughter is a rather sour implication. Underneath all the roughhousing, there’s a persistent sexual menace—towel-snapping in the shower and mock rapes and insults that depend on feminizing the victim of the joke. Broyles and Mendes are saying, I think, that men who are this casually abusive of one another’s bodies could slip, without much provocation, into sexually humiliating detained prisoners. “Jarhead” is an inglorious portrait of military life which points to the next Gulf War and the degrading japes of Abu Ghraib and other prisons.



POLITICS

from The Economist

Harry Reid has not impressed too many people in his short tenure so far as the leader of America’s Democrats in the Senate. But on the evening of Sunday October 30th night, his prescience was striking. He predicted on CNN television, as George Bush was reeling from a series of political calamities, that the president might choose to use a Supreme Court nomination to pick a fight with the left and rally his conservative base. “If he wants to divert attention from all of his many problems, he can send us somebody that is going to create a lot of problems.” He referred to Samuel Alito, a conservative appeal-court judge, as just such a nominee. Mr Bush, rarely one to back down from a fight, nominated Mr Alito on Monday morning.

Both left and right have learned the value of defining a nominee quickly—first impressions stick. When Mr Bush picked John Roberts to sit on the Supreme Court in July, the impression of him as eminently well-qualified, conservative but not ideological, and a calm family man, stuck from day one. And when the president nominated Harriet Miers in early October, the initial negative impression of her as being an under-qualified Bush crony stuck as well, despite the White House’s repeated efforts to rebrand her. Ms Miers duly withdrew late last week. Mr Alito is her replacement.

E-mailed press releases and blog postings began flying as soon as the nomination was announced. Is Mr Alito really “Scalito”, a clone of Antonin Scalia, the firebrand conservative on the Supreme Court who believes that the constitution must mean only what its framers intended in the 1780s? The left will portray him as out of the mainstream, in favour of weakening the ability of women and minorities to seek protection in America’s civil-rights laws—and, of course, chipping away at a woman’s right to an abortion. The case that will receive the most scrutiny is Planned Parenthood v Casey, in which Mr Alito voted to uphold a requirement that would have forced women to notify their husbands (in most cases) before getting an abortion. That requirement was later struck down by the Supreme Court. Sandra Day O’Connor, the centrist whom Mr Alito would replace on the court—who was often seen as the swing vote on issues that divided right and left—wrote an opinion on Casey that explicitly disagreed with Mr Alito. Abortion-rights supporters have good reason to worry about Mr Alito replacing her.

On the other hand, conservatives are also working overtime to define the new nominee. Unlike Ms Miers, he comes with impressive credentials: Princeton and Yale, years of service in the Justice Department, and 15 years as a judge. Conservatives are also noting that the Senate confirmed Mr Alito unanimously in his current job in 1990, with compliments handed out by Democrats as well as Republicans.

The nomination raises, once again, the spectre of the “nuclear option”. Under the present rules, it takes just 41 senators (out of 100) to prolong debate indefinitely, killing a bill or blocking a presidential nominee to an important job—a tactic known as a filibuster. Earlier this year, Republicans sought to use their 55-to-45 majority to change Senate rules so that a simple majority of votes would be enough to confirm a judicial nominee. Eventually, a group of 14 senators from both sides of the house agreed on a compromise that would keep the filibuster, but only for “extreme” circumstances. Whether Mr Alito’s nomination is such a circumstance may now be the subject of a bitter partisan fight.

Grim times in the White House
Mr Bush might hope for such a fight, if it distracted Americans from his many troubles. The most notable and recent of these was the indictment last Friday of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the chief-of-staff to Dick Cheney, the vice-president. Mr Libby is accused of lying to the FBI and a grand jury in an investigation into the outing of a CIA agent. He has resigned to fight the charges.

The case is a long and twisted one. In early 2002, the Bush administration got word from a foreign intelligence service—thought to be Italy’s—that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Niger. Mr Cheney’s office took an interest, seeking to consolidate the case for war. It asked the CIA to follow up, and Joseph Wilson, a retired diplomat, was sent to Africa. He found no evidence for the claim, and after the war wrote as much, angrily, in the New York Times. In the ensuing flap, two “senior administration officials” talked to Bob Novak, a columnist. He wrote that Mr Wilson was sent at the request of his wife, Valerie (née Plame), a CIA “operative” working on weapons of mass destruction. Ms Plame had been an undercover spy. Though by the time of Mr Novak's column she had been based safely in Virginia for several years, the article nonetheless blew her cover. The resulting investigation sought to determine whether someone broke the law in outing her.

Patrick Fitzgerald, a specially appointed prosecutor, has spent two years investigating the case. He forced several journalists to testify to a grand jury as to who from the administration had told them about Ms Plame’s job. One, Judy Miller of the New York Times, refused to talk about off-the-record sources and spent almost three months in jail before ultimately co-operating with the prosecutor. It turned out that she had spoken to Mr Libby. Other reporters had talked to Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s top political adviser.

The core issues of the indictment were how Mr Libby knew Ms Plame’s status, what he said to reporters, and how he described these facts to the grand jury. According to Mr Fitzgerald’s summation, Mr Libby claimed, to the FBI and under oath to the grand jury, to be at the end of a gossip chain, passing what he heard from reporters on to other reporters without substantiation. But in fact, the indictment alleges, Mr Libby learned what he knew from Mr Cheney and other administration officials. The indictment details seven alleged discussions Mr Libby had with officials about Ms Plame. The nub is this: Mr Libby claimed to be “taken aback” to learn, from reporters, that Ms Plame worked for the CIA. In fact, he was the first to put that information to the media.

Mr Libby now faces the prospect of a trial. What of others involved? After all, it was not Mr Libby who first told Mr Novak, the columnist who outed Ms Plame. Who was Mr Novak’s source? Mr Fitzgerald refused to say. Is Mr Rove off the hook? Again, Mr Fitzgerald demurred, talking only about the indictment he had just delivered, and saying that it was “standard procedure” to keep a grand jury open in case other matters come up. The prosecutor was so diligently neutral, despite repeated questions, that no one now knows whether he has merely some cleaning up to do or plans to pursue charges against Mr Rove or others.

Desperate move or brilliant counter-punch?
In nominating Mr Alito so soon after the indictment was announced, the president is seeking to seize the headlines back from Mr Fitzgerald. He certainly needs to do something. Last week saw not only the Miers withdrawal and Mr Libby’s indictment, but the number of American troops killed in Iraq cross the 2,000 mark. Mr Bush’s poll ratings lurk at the lowest levels of his presidency. Conservatives, including his evangelical base, had begun to get uneasy even before the nomination of the not-right-enough Ms Miers.

Rather than reaching across the aisle with his latest Supreme Court pick, it seems that Mr Bush has now put repairing his conservative base first. If he can succeed in getting Mr Alito confirmed, he will have won his first big victory for some time. But the Democrats, sensing a weak administration, will do what they can to make the process as painful as possible.



MUSIC

Your Fall Mix CD:

Kentucky Woman - Sun kil moon
O Sailor - Fiona Apple
The Greatest - Cat Power
Wind and the Mountain - Liz Phair
Will he be Waiting for me? - Sarah Harmer
He lays in the reins - Iron & Wine/Calexico
Shadows and Lights - Joni Mitchell
Drifters - Ron Sexsmith
Secret Heart - Feist
Under a Stormy Sky - Daniel Lanois
Where to Begin - My Morning Jacket
(and from Bryce's wedding on Saturday) Goldigger - Kanye