"The most painful thing in life is waking up from a dream and having nowhere to go."
--Lu Xun
A year before the "21st century," García Márquez, who has been in the shadow of familial hereditary Alzheimer's disease, was relieved in the face of a sudden diagnosis of lymphoma.
Before he is sure whether he will go to death in the muddled nightmare, the countdown to life seems like some kind of gift to him, not to mention that at this time Márquez is over seventy years old, he has won the Nobel Prize in Literature in world literature, and his works are also famous in the world, and for him, if his life is over, although it is not perfect, it is also perfect.
So Márquez officially wrote a farewell letter to his beloved readers, ending himself.
Unexpectedly, year after year, he still failed to get his own ending, but because in the continuous round-trip chemotherapy, he felt more and more clearly that he was "unbearable", and what frightened him even more was that more and more omens in life told him that the cycle of fate did not spare him as a family member, and "forgetting" was his final destination.
Probably because of his premonition in the dark, at the age of 77, taking advantage of the little clarity left in this life, he wrote this somewhat autobiographical "Memoirs of a Prostitute", trying to use an extreme fantasy (dream) - the "sexual struggle" of a 90-year-old man to uncover the aging, love and loneliness of human beings at the end of their lives.
I want to give myself a gift for my 90th birthday, and that's to spend the night with crazy love and a pure girl.
What does a man think when he is dying of old age and his life is coming to an end?
Remembering the most glorious days of your life?
Just like this ending written at the beginning, Márquez's most brilliant moment was the birth of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", so at the beginning of this book, he used such a distant and echoing sentence.
Perhaps with a premonition that his life has officially entered the countdown, this nearly 90-year-old reporter, although he has had a "paid" dew affair with many women in his life, has never been married, has no money and career, and can only hide in the old house left by his parents, decided to carry out a crazy indulgence.
"Just today."
On his 90th birthday, he continued to endure the pain of his bones in the early hours of the morning, and then was forced to wake up at five o'clock, and began to live without knowing what life would be like in the next moment.
But when he found that he still needed to complete an article to sustain his life, he was shocked to find that he did not want to write as the reader expected, but instead wrote a piece contrary to his own inner thoughts: praise for old age.
Why?
Apparently, 90 years old was like the "countdown" of his life, and the moment he woke up that day, he felt old. It is not that at the age of 42, the doctor comforted his illness only because of the "natural phenomenon of aging", but really felt the boundless loneliness and love impotence brought about by aging.
In order to feel his existence, he chose one of the craziest but most existential "gifts"—to spend the night with a pure girl.
Because in his view "sex is the comfort that a person gives himself when he can't get love." So he wants to use this to save the passing of life and fight against the loneliness of the future.
An hour later, Mrs. Rosa sent him a "sleeping beauty"—to earn an extra penny at night to subsidize the family's 14-year-old girl.
Only this young girl, who needs to take care of her younger siblings during the day, so that even if she works hard, she cannot pay the expensive medical expenses of her seriously ill father, can not hesitate to agree to this strange "job".
Yes, after she had agreed, she knew nothing about drinking the water that Madame Rosa had handed her.
And this is also in line with his desire for "sex" to the need to return to peace after finding himself "incompetent", after a struggle, it turns out that what he longs for is to have a young, fresh, beautiful girl's ketone body at his mercy, it does not matter whether there is a beautiful appearance, there is no need to hear "mediocre voice", just like "she who is asleep".
At first, he thought it was a long-lost or "love" he had never felt before.
Because he didn't need to do anything that night, just lying quietly beside her, he felt extremely satisfied, and the feeling that his heart was "filled" was even better than the "deal" he had felt countless times before, as if he had received a wonderful love that was late but destined.
So he went on wonderful dates with her again and again:
Or to her asleep, full of joy to tell her past, sing a song of his love for her, and then leave a gift of love on the pillow - carefully selected jewelry that feels like she is the only one;
Or for her to write a deep love letter in the newspaper that she didn't know, feeling a throbbing called "crush";
Or carefully protect her careful thoughts, pretend not to know, tell her funny stories of the year, sing songs that she will feel like, and then fall asleep calmly, allowing her to wake up later and surprise him the next morning.
He thought it was "love," a love so pure that it still seemed alive even when life came to an end.
Unfortunately, the world is unpredictable, and fate is always unpredictable.
This 14-year-old girl who has tasted the cold and warmth of the world can not empathize with the 90-year-old who longs for "love" when she is about to die after a thousand sails.
So that day, when she made up her mind to use her most beautiful self, to seize this opportunity to get herself out of the sea of suffering, to paint a beautiful makeup, put on a beautiful dress and expensive jewelry, and to see him during the day, she was shocked to see his face like a dream mixed with anger, pain and despair.
He felt that the moment he saw her, he instantly lost the only "love" in his life.
After deciding never to see her again, he felt more and more attached to her in the passage of time, but unfortunately it was difficult to harvest, and his body, which was firmly occupied by aging and loneliness, no longer had the ability to "love".
At the end of the story, Márquez can't bear to be too cruel to himself (humans), so he gives her the perfect ending - to get his property.
She also gave him a dream—Madame Rosa conveyed to him that the maiden had loved him madly.
18 years later, since the release of Márquez's "sex" as the theme of "memoirs of a prostitute", the controversy has always been lingering on the relationship between the protagonist of the story, the 90-year-old man and the 14-year-old pure girl.
Love is written between the lines, so the world also understands it according to the expression of "love"?
No, no, just like "One Hundred Years of Solitude", which is still being interpreted differently by the world, Márquez's pen, in his heart, has never been more than "loneliness, death and love", although his works have always been written around these three themes, but when he has a premonition that he is about to die spiritually, the attachment to life is a dissection that he cannot give up.
Whether it is "sex" on the surface, lust and love, it is actually talking about self-realization that covers the eyes.
And only with the common human, extreme but instinctive "sex" can puncture the world's fear of aging and despair of loneliness that the world still does not want to admit, identify with and confide at the end of life.
In the story, he says that he "prefers to fall asleep with her".
So we can feel that what he craves is not the ketone body of the 14-year-old pure girl, but this ketone body represents "something"—a attachment to the past, someone, something, a certain time, or a certain feeling. Or to put it another way, he wanted to regain what he wanted most at this time through the body that belonged only to him for a while.
This kind of expression, in the implicit East, will use a flower and a thing, etc., so as to allude to the unrestrained and straightforward West, and will use the most beautiful things in his heart at the moment to talk about the symbol.
For a 90-year-old man, what makes him feel the exuberance of life more than a 14-year-old pure girl?
The child is too fragile to touch, just need to use "need help" to remind him of his old age;
The young man is full of vitality but impulsive, he was once young, and he does not want to face his own rebellion, annoyance and trouble again;
Mature men and women are full of unknowns, close to the white moonlight will also become rice grains, far away although mosquito blood will become red roses, but the feeling of uncertainty, let him, a ninety-year-old man, dare not bet.
So, "she who is asleep" is the best.
At the time of writing this story, Márquez was 77 years old, and judging from the fact that he did not escape after a year and was diagnosed with family-inherited Alzheimer's disease, perhaps he really had a hunch or perhaps, or from a scientific point of view, chemotherapy damaged his brain cells, so it accelerated the "target" in his family's genes.
It is conceivable that when he conceived this story, he almost brought most of his feelings into it unconsciously. It is said that writers write "themselves" all their lives.
So how will an old man who is on the verge of "forgetting" and may have entered the "fog" show the world?
Probably "she's asleep"!
A "she" to him who seems to be frozen forever, or flowing slowly, is the most beautiful "she" that can be imagined in his heart.
When feeling the fear of aging, the best resistance is to still feel the youthful vitality, and the most effective way to prove this is "sex", but the reality of him found that it is not ok, so he turned to tell himself that it is better to use sublimated "love".
So in the story, in order to prove his "love", he will do a lot of imaginary things that should be done in love - there are endless days of chatting with her, sending her jewelry for Bo Meiren's smile, writing her love letters, and accompanying her to run around and hang out, etc., all of which in reality is completely beyond the limit of a 90-year-old man's physical strength, but for him who still has the ability to "love", he is full of strength just thinking of her beloved.
If "love" can fight the fear of aging, what about the loneliness that makes people feel hopeless?
Probably the "time" that has passed.
In the story, he is actually a brilliant writer, and his column articles can become a big writer for many people to buy this newspaper, but in his "memory", he thinks that he is a poor worm who needs to write articles every week until he is 90 years old to maintain his next life.
Obviously, he is deeply respected by his colleagues, full of prestige in the industry, every year there are several articles that can cause a sensation among readers, even the newspaper has always held a grand birthday party for him in the building every year, but he often has a sense of "absence" alienation.
Some people say that in the downtown area, people can feel their loneliness the most.
Maybe we can't understand this feeling, but perhaps these feelings in the story are the truest portrayal of Márquez's heart in his late 77-year-old age at the time—a kind of bitter and desperate loneliness.
And this feeling is brought about by the passage of "time".
In fact, as early as the creation of "The Colonel Who No One Wrote to Him", he showed the world the aging of people and the passage of time that he observed.
But at that time, he could only observe, and could not feel exactly, and when he could really feel it physically and mentally, the fear and despair that exuded were more than an indescribable bitterness.
If human beings at the end of their lives will always regret that their lives have been trampled, they will struggle madly because of the fear of the demise of the old and decaying body, and they will continue to find a sense of existence because they do not want to feel the loneliness of despair.
Then, let this feeling be given to the paper, and Márquez will use this story to reveal everything.