This Owl has two legendary figures of universal literature as his favorite writers, even before they obtained the glory of winning the Nobel Prize: the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Now, the journalist and writer Jaime Bayly already has a novel about their relationship ready to publish in March, which already has a title: ‘Two geniuses’.
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The work will focus on their initial and unbreakable friendship, like that meeting on the morning of September 1967, when the two participated in a conference on ‘Gabo’ in a packed auditorium at the National Engineering University. And, of course, the savage way in which these two ‘geniuses’, who called each other ‘brothers’, ended their friendship, broken by a furious right-wing ‘cross’ from Mario to Gabriel in 1976, in Mexico. Coup inflicted before those attending the ‘avant premiere’ of the film ‘Surviving in the Andes’.
This rivalry caused Vargas Llosa to call García Márquez ‘Fidel Castro’s courtier’, considering that he supported the communist dictatorship in Cuba. But of the incident in Mexico, neither of them said a word about the reasons. It was a ‘tacit pact’, as the Peruvian defined it on the death of ‘Gabo’, which he faithfully complied with. And the arequipeño, apparently, will also comply. ‘That we will leave to our biographers,’ he said. As proof of the admiration that he had for the Colombian one day, a few years before the famous punch, Mario wrote an essay considered “the best book that a writer can write about another writer”, entitled “García Márquez: History of a deicide’, where he talks about his work and his person.
The writer from Aracataca now deceased, as a result of the celebrations for the half century of the publication of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, Vargas Llosa agreed to attend the Complutense University to undergo an interview with the Colombian essayist Carlos Granés. There he revealed unknown details of his friendship with the writer. Everyone thought they met at the Caracas airport in August 1967, where the Colombian went to receive the Peruvian, who was arriving to collect the ‘Rómulo Gallegos’ literary award. But that was the first meeting of flesh and blood, the first physical embrace.
‘I discovered Gabriel García Márquez earlier, in the early sixties, when I was working on French Radio Television, on a literary program. That’s how I met him. Someone put us in contact and we began to have a very intense correspondence, through which we became friends without seeing each other’, revealed ‘Varguitas’. The friendship was so intense that after meeting in Caracas they traveled to Lima and gave the remembered conference at UNI. The mistiano baptized his second son Gonzalo and named ‘Gabo’ godparents and his wife Mercedes. Then the author of ‘The City and the Dogs’ moved with his family to Barcelona, where he lived a few blocks from Gabriel’s house.
The families of both writers continued to be great neighbors in Barcelona
At least until 1976, ten years after that hug at the Maiquetía airport in Caracas, until the friendship ended with a punch. ‘Gabo’ never expected it, as he went to meet him, extending his arms with a wide smile. What he received was a furious blow that sent him falling flat on his face. The photo of him with the black eye was left for posterity. There are two versions of what he told her when he punched her, although similar, they differ in one small but important word: “because of what you SAID to Patricia” and “because of what you DID to Patricia.” The Colombian Fernando Jaramillo, a student of the life and work of his countryman, published a version of the events.
He maintained that in those days the Peruvian writer was “with a hot head” for “a showgirl” and had “escaped” to New York – another version says that “Marito” “escaped” but with a Swedish flight attendant. A troubled Patricia found in the marriage of Gabriel and Mercedes her ‘cloth of tears’, since she was alone in Barcelona with her two little children. In those circumstances, Gabriel García Márquez would have advised him that the best thing was to divorce her. But other more malevolent versions affirm that before the writer’s betrayal of his young and beautiful wife, the Colombian wanted not only to be ‘his teardrop’, but also to ‘throw corn’ with the well-known Caribbean fieryness. Hence the fury of the Arequipeño. Now that Vargas Llosa “is in the ointment” due to his separation from Isabel Preysler, “Terrible Uncle” Bayly threatens, according to him, to reveal “the truth” of the legendary episode. As her neighbor Cristina Saralegui would say: Is that sooooo true? I turn off the TV.
