He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was
not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort." ---
Yasunari Kawabata, House of the Sleeping Beauties

THE YEAR I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an
adolescent virgin. I thought of Rosa Cabarcas, the owner of an illicit house who would inform her
good clients when she had a new girl available. I never succumbed to that or to any of her many
other lewd temptations, but she did not believe in the purity of my principles, Morality, too, is a
question of time, she would say with a malevolent smile, you'll see. She was a little younger than
I, and I hadn't heard anything about her for so many years that she very well might have died. But
after the first ring I recognized the voice on the phone, and with no preambles I fired at her:

"Today's the day."

（高晓松译自英译本）

日子翻回我九张儿那年，那时我打算送给自己一份生日好礼--找个雏儿，过个夜，撒点儿野。我想起了罗莎.卡巴卡斯同志，一个有了好果儿就立马发给熟客的地下老鸨。我之前从没中过伊的淫招儿，但伊也从没相信我是个脱离了低级趣味的清教徒。我拨电话时猜想伊肯定会一脸坏笑地对我说：清教徒也会被如梭岁月打败嘿嘿。

鉴于这位老太太只比我小一点点并且好多年没了消息，我猜伊八成已经死了。没想到电话只响了一声就接通了，这嗓音我太熟了，于是我开门见山：

到日子了！

She sighed: Ah, my sad scholar, you disappear for twenty years, and come back only to ask for
the impossible. She regained mastery of her art at once and offered me half a dozen delectable
options, but all of them, to be frank, were used. I said no, insisting the girl had to be a virgin and
available that very night. She asked in alarm: What are you trying to prove? Nothing, I replied,
wounded to the core, I know very well what I can and cannot do. Unmoved, she said that scholars
may know it all, but they don't know everything: The only Virgos left in the world are people like
you who were born in August. Why didn't you give me more time? Inspiration gives no warnings, I
said. But perhaps it can wait, she said, always more knowledgeable than any man, and she
asked for just two days to make a thoroughinvestigation of the market. I replied in all seriousness
that in an affair such as this, at my age, each hour is like a year. Then it can't be done, she said
without the slightest doubt, but it doesn't matter, it's more exciting this way, what the hell, I'll call
you in an hour.

I don't have to say so because people can see it from leagues away: I'm ugly, shy and
anachronistic. But by dint of not wanting to be those things I have pretended to be just the
opposite. Until today, when I have resolved to tell of my own free will just what I'm like, if only to
ease my conscience. I have begun with my unusual call to Rosa Cabarcas because, seen from
the vantage point of today, that was the beginning of a new life at an age when most mortals
have already died.

I live in a colonial house, on the sunny side of San Nicolás Park, where I have spent all the
days of my life without wife or fortune, where my parents lived and died, and where I have
proposed to die alone, in the same bed in which I was born and on a day that I hope will be
distant and painless. My father bought the house at public auction at he end of the nineteenth
century, rented the ground floor for luxury shops to a consortium of Italians, and reserved for
himself the second floor, where he would live in happiness with one their daughters, Florina de
Dios Cargamantos, a notableinterpreter of Mozart, a multilingual Garibaldian, and the most
beautiful and talented woman who ever lived in the city: my mother.

The house is spacious and bright, with stucco arches and floors tiled in Florentine mosaics,
and four glass doors leading to a wraparound balcony where my mother would sit on March
nights to sing love arias with other girls, her cousins. From there you can see San Nicolás Park,
the cathedral, and the statue of Christopher Columbus, and beyond that the warehouses on the
river wharf and the vast horizon of the Great Magdalena River twenty leagues distant from its
estuary. The only unpleasantaspect of the house is that the sun keeps changing windows in the

course of the day, and all of them have to be closed when you try to take a siesta in the torrid
half-light. When I was left on my own, at the age of thirty-two, I moved into what had been my
parents' bedroom, opened a doorway between that room and the library, and began to auction off
whatever I didn't need to live, which turned out to be almost everything but the books and the
Pianola rolls.

For forth years I was the cable editor at El Diario de La Paz, which meant reconstructing and
completing in indigenous prose the news of the world that we caught as it flew through sidereal
space on shortwaves or in Morse code. Today I scrape byon my pension from that extinct
profession, get by even less on the one I receive for having taught Spanish and Latin grammar,
earn almost nothing from the Sunday column I've written without flagging for more than half a
century, and nothing at all from the music and theater pieces published as a favor to me on the
many occasions when notable performers come to town. I have never done anything except
write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the
laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in
the light shed how much I have read in my life. In plain language, I am the end of a line, without
merit or brilliance, who would have nothing to leave his descendants if not for the events I am
prepared to recount, to the best of my ability, in these memories of my great love.

On my ninetieth birthday I woke, as always, at five in the morning. Since it was Friday, my only
obligation was to write the signed column published on Sundays in El Diario de La Paz. My
symptoms at dawn were perfect for not feeling happy: my bones had been aching since the small
hours, my asshole burned, and thunder threatened a storm after three months of drought. I
bathed while the coffee was brewing, drank a large cup sweetened with honey, had two pieces of
cassava bread, and put on the linen coverall I wear in the house.

The subject of that day's column, of course, was my ninetieth birthday. I never have thought
about age as a leak in the roof indicating the quantity fo life one has left to live. When I was very
young I heard someone say that when people die the lice nesting in their hair escape in terror
onto the pillows, to the shame of the family. That was so harsh a warning to me that I let my hair
be shorn for school, and the few strands I have left I still wash with the soap you would use on a
grateful fleabitten dog. This means, I tell myself now, that ever since I was little my sense of
social decency has been more developed than my sense of death.

For months I had anticipated that my birthday column would not be the usual lament for the
years that were gone, but just the opposite: a glorification of old age. I began by wondering when
I had become aware of being old, and I believe it was only a short time before that day. At the
age of forty-two I had gone to see the doctor about a pain in my back that interfered with my
breathing. He attributed no importance to it: That kind of pain is natural at your age, he said.

The doctor gave me a pitying smile. I see that you're a philosopher, he said. It was the first
time I thought about my age in terms of being old, but it didn't take me long to forget about it. I
became accustomed to waking every day with a different pain that kept changing location and
form as the years passed. At times it seemed to be the clawing of death, and the next day it
would disappear. This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to
resemble you father. I must be condemned to eternal youth, I thought, because my equine profile
will never look like my father's raw Caribean features or my mother's imperial Roman ones. The
truth is that the first changes are so slow they pass almost unnoticed, and you go on seeing
yourself as you always were, from the inside, but others observe you from the outside.

In my fifth decade I had begun to imagine what old age was like when I noticed the first lapses
of memory. I would turn the house upside down looking for my glasses until I discovered that I
had them on, or I'd wear them into the shower, or I'd put on my reading glasses over the ones I
used for distance. One day I had breakfast twice because I forgot about the first time, and I
learned to recognize the alarm in my friends when they didn't have the courage to tell me I was

recounting the same story I had told them a week earlier. By then I had a mental list of faces I
knew and another list of the names that went with each one, but at the moment of greeting I didn't
always succeed in matching the faces to the names.

My sexual age never worried me because my powers did not depend so much on me as on
women, and they know the how and the why when they want to. Today I laugh at the eighty-yearold
youngsters who consult the doctor, alarmed by these sudden shocks, not knowing that in your
nineties they're worse but don't matter anymore: they are the risks of being alive. On the other
hand, it is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things, though
memory does not often fail with regard to things that are of real interest to us. Cicero illustrated
this with the stroke of a pen: No old man forgets where he has hidden his treasure.

With these reflections, and several others, I had finished a first draft of my column when the
August sun exploded among the almond trees in the park, and the riverboat that carried the mail,
a week late because of the drought, came bellowing into the port canal. I thought: My ninetieth
birthday is arriving. I'll never know why, and don't pretend to, but it was under the magical effect
of that devastating evocation that I decided to call Rosa Cabarcas for help in celebrating my
birthday with a libertine night. I'd spent years at holy peace with my body, devoting my time to the
erratic rereading of my classics and to my private programs of concert music, but my desire that
day was so urgent it seemed like a mesage from God. After the call I couldn't go on writing. I
hung the hammock in a corner of the library where the sun doesn't shine in the morning, and I lay
down in it, my chest heavy with the anxiety of waiting.

I had been pampered child, with a mother of many talents who died of consumption at the age
of fifty and a formalistic father who never acknowledged an error and died in his widower's bed on
the day the Treaty fo Neerlandia was signed, putting an end to the War of the Thousand Days the
countless civil wars of the previous century. Peace changed the city in a way that had not been
foreseen or desired. A crowd of free women enriched to the point of delirium the old taverns along
Calle Anche, which later was known as Camellón Abello, and now is called Paseo Colón, in this
city of my soul loved so much by both natives and outsiders for the good character of its people
and purity of its light.

I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay, and the few who weren't in the profession I
persuaded, by argument or by force, to take money even if they threw it in the trash. When I was
twenty I began to keep a record listing name, age, place, and a brief notation on the
circumstances and style of lovemaking. By the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I
had been at least once. I stopped making the list when my body no longer allowed me to have so
many and I could keep track of them without paper. I had my own ethics. I never took part in
orgies or in public encounters, and I did not share secrets or recount and adventure of the body
or the soul, because from the time I was young I realized that none goes unpunished.

The only unusualrelationship was the one I maintained for years with the faithful Damiana.
She was almost a girl, Indianlike, strong, rustic, her words few and brusque, who went barefoot
so as not to disturb me while I was writing. I remember I was reading La lozana andaluza --- The
Hanghty Andalusian Girl --- in the hammock in the hallway, when I happened to see her bending
over in the laundry room wearing a skirt so short it bared her succulent curves. Overcome by
irresistible excitement, I pulled her skirt up in back, pulled her underwear down to her knees, and
charged her from behind. Oh, Se.or, she said, with a mournful lament, that wasn't made for
coming in but for going out. A profound tremor shook her body but she stood firm. Humiliated at
having humiliated her, I wanted to pay her twice what the most expensive women cost at the
time, but she would not take a cent, and I had to raise her salary calculated on the basis of one
mounting a month, always while she was doing the laundry, and always from the back.

At one time I thought these bed-inspired accounts would serve as a good foundation for a
narration of the miseries of my misguided life, and the title came to me out of the blue: Memories

of My Melancholy Whores. My public life, on the other hand, was lacking in interest: both parents
dead, a bachelor without a future, a mediocre journalist who had been a finalist four times in the
Poetic Competition, the Juegos Florales, of Cartagena de Indias, and a favorite of caricaturists
because of my exemplary ugliness. In short, a wasted life off to a bad start beginning on the
afternoon my mother led me by the hand when I was nineteen years old to see if El Diario de La
Paz would publish a chronicle of school life that I had written in my Spanish and rhetoric class. It
was published on Sunday with an encouraging introduction by the editor. Years later, when I
learned that my mother had paid for its publication and for the seven that followed, it was too late
for me to be embarrasseed, because my weeklycolumn was flying on its own wings and I was a
cable editor and music critic as well.

After I obtained my bachillerato with a diploma ranked excellent, I began teaching classes in
Spanish and Latin at three different public secondary schools at the same time. I was a poor
teacher, with no training, no vocation, and no pity at all for those poor children who attended