Two sorts of ending up
Raymond Carr
BLIND RIDER by Juan Goytisolo Serpent’s Tail, £8.99, pp. 112, ISBN 1852428635 ✆ £7.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES by Gabriel García Márquez, Cape, £10, pp. 128, ISBN 0224077643 ✆ £8 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 By a fortunate coincidence these books treat the same subject: old age at the mercy of time, the ‘blind rider’ of Goytisolo’s title. Ageing is a matter of temporary victories and final defeats. At 75, you can succeed in getting on your horse by using a mounting block and shortening your nearside stirrup leather; at 81, you can’t hold your horse out hunting. You give up. What is the point of it all? Goytisolo and García Márquez chronicle the defeats. You eat a second breakfast forgetting you’ve already had one breakfast. You can’t fix a name to a familiar face; finally, you can’t even recognise the face. Then comes the final catastrophe. The wife whose fragile shoulders you have burdened with your failures and frustrations dies; for Goytisolo’s old man ‘after this abrupt blow of destiny ... there was nothing left to hold on to’.
If Goytisolo and García Márquez treat the same subject — for both, the ruin of the family house is the image of a corrupt, decaying society — they are poles apart as writers. Goytisolo is a politically committed intellectual made in the Paris of the 1950s; this book ends with a quotation from Proust. García Márquez is no intellectual. A bosom friend of Fidel Castro, to the distress of Goytisolo and the leftist liberal mafia, he refuses to use that friendship to save homosexuals and political dissidents — for Castro the terms are synonymous — from prison and torture at the hands of the dictator’s apparatchiks. The ‘magic realism’ of García Márquez, like that of our own great magic realist, Dickens — think of Great Expectations — has no explicit political content.
Goytisolo emerged in the 1950s, he writes in his memoirs, ‘as the official standardbearer of progressive causes in the Hispanic world’, with his violent attacks on Francoism as an obscenity; the Caudillo’s faithful drink his urine in a parody of the Catholic mass. By the 1970s, Goytisolo’s target is wider: the obscenities of Western bourgeois capitalism in a world dominated by giant US corporations; while ‘fat bourgeois’ loll about in Mercedes limousines, the underdeveloped world starves. What he calls ‘the basic axis of my life’ has become his ‘personal relation with the Arab world’. His hero is Lawrence of Arabia, and he now lives in Morocco. That the developed capitalist world feels no guilt for the sufferings it has inflicted on Africa enrages him. He is the intellectual’s Bob Geldof.
With García Márquez you get what you expect from reading A Hundred Years of Solitude: wonderfully evocative descriptions of life in a Colombian river port; the world of golden-hearted tarts that people his autobiography. (Perhaps such generous ladies of the night exist in Latin countries. A Colombian friend of mine, now alas dead, complained that an encounter with an English prostitute was like posting a letter.) García Márquez’s oldie is a lonely bachelor, so ugly that he is the delight of cartoonists, a fine Latinist who ends up as a hack journalist on a provincial newspaper. Funking a conventional marriage, by his 40s he has paid 514 women for sex. ‘Sex is the consolation one has for not finding love.’ On his 90th birthday — there is a splendid setpiece on his office party where he is given the present of an irascible cat — he asks the local madame to provide him with a virgin for the night. He kisses her sleeping body and leaves before she wakes up. He is ‘mad with love’ for his silent mistress and fills his Sunday column with stories of his love, becoming a widely read local celebrity. After a complicated series of accidents all turns out happily. Even the irascible cat ends up winding its tail round his legs.
Happy endings are not characteristic of Goytisolo’s bleak pessimism. His oldie suffers the usual pains of old age: ‘the irrational fear of travel, of falling down in the street, of climbing stairs [a mistake; the old fear going down stairs], of suffering a ridiculous traffic accident’. More terrible, ‘he witnessed once more history’s repetitious obtuse cruelty’. The last pages are a dream of a dialogue with God, who confesses that He only exists because human beings have invented him as an omnipotent being. He complains that once his ‘audience’ vanishes He will cease to exist. What was the point, the old man asks God, of saving Noah from the flood only to plunge him into a world ‘of oppression, crime, war and the corrosive lust after power and wealth’?
García Márquez, as probably the bestselling author in the world, is an easy read as he celebrates the joys of being in love. Goytisolo is, in the eyes of his friend the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, ‘outstandingly the greatest living Spanish novelist’, but his book is neither an easy nor a comforting read. The reader must work out for himself the message, girding his loins to tackle what will be, Goytisolo says, his last book.
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