When one Nobel Laureate punches another in the face, it is bigger news than a Hollywood actor slapping a stand-up comic on stage. It is doubtful if anyone will be talking about the Will Smith-Chris Rock incident in the year 2068, but here we are discussing something that happened in 1976.
Neither Gabriel Garcia Marquez nor his then best friend and one-time roommate Mario Vargas Llosa had won the Nobel yet. Now 46 years later, we know one thing for certain: that punch too involved a woman.
Books have been written about less: about the philosopher Wittgenstein waving a poker at the philosopher Karl Popper, for instance. Or the historian of science Thomas Kuhn throwing an ashtray at the filmmaker Errol Morris. But so far as I know, no one has written a book on the Llosa punch which carried the weight of friendship, betrayal, sexual tension, political rivalry and perhaps literary jealousy.
Marquez, always recording important events of his life, went to a photographer friend’s place to immortalise his black eye. A picture of a smiling Marquez with a shiner later appeared in a newspaper.
“I have some pictures,” said the photographer Rodrigo Moya, “in which he looks like he was really beaten up, like by the Mexican police.” But Moya was keen that Marquez appeared to be laughing it off, refusing to give Llosa the satisfaction of knowing he had been hurt.
The two met in a theatre in Mexico City. The popular version of the story has Marquez approaching Llosa, arms outstretched and with a ringing ‘Mario’ on his lips. Llosa’s reaction is immediate and violent. He says, “For what you did to my wife,” and delivers a right hook. Marquez falls, and spills blood as his glasses break. The two friends, one Colombian and the other Peruvian, responsible for the flowering of Latin American literature never spoke to each other again.
Llosa was married to Patricia, Marquez to Mercedes and the four were good friends. When Llosa, a notorious womaniser, left his wife for a Swedish woman, Patricia leaned on Marquez for support. What form the support took is in the realms of speculation, but the Llosas reconciled soon, and Patricia told her husband, “Don’t think I’m not attractive. Friends of yours like Gabo (Marquez) were after me ... ”
Marquez had, according to one version, merely encouraged Patricia to leave her husband. She, in turn was probably trying to score a point off Llosa. If Llosa had any suspicions, Marquez’s wife reassured him with, “What you’re saying can’t be true because my husband likes women, but only very good-looking women.”
It was a mess. Two dear friends, two couples who got along well were torn apart. In his biography of Marquez, Gerald Martin wrote that the element of surprise served Llosa well, adding, “one imagines a forewarned Marquez, running around him like Charlie Chaplin, and kicking him repeatedly in the rear.”
There are a couple of books in there. And even a movie or two.
