The story of Mario Vargas Llosa's punch to Gabriel García Márquez

"That book will be a bunch of lies," Mario Vargas Llosa told this newspaper a few weeks ago when asked about the imminent publication of

(Galaxia Gutenberg), by the writer Jaime Bayly (Lima, 58 years old).

This Wednesday, in the aristocratic Wellington Hotel in Madrid, its author corroborated it: "Yes, it is full of lies, like every novel, but not capricious or whimsical lies, but credible, credible ones."

The work begins, before beginning, with a warning written by himself: “This book is not a historical text or a journalistic investigation.

It is a novel, a work of fiction, which mixes real, historical events with fictitious events that come from the author's inventiveness.

Bayly now adds: “Let me make a caveat: it is not a historical text but it is a historical novel;

and it is not a journalistic chronicle but it is a novel that I have investigated from journalistic curiosity, let's say from my condition as a journalist”.

"Something that is learned, trying to reconstruct an event based on testimonies, is precisely that all stories are stories, that they are made of truths and lies."

Then, yeah, start:

"This is because of what you did to Patricia," Vargas Llosa shouted.

"He said 'because of what you did to him', not 'because of what you said to him' as some have said," says Bayly, who claims to have contrasted it with a person who was there.

There it is 1976 in a cinema in Mexico City the day that Vargas Llosa knocked out Gabriel García Márquez with a punch.

and the book is the novel about the end of their friendship.

It has never been known what happened.

If García Márquez did or said something to Patricia Llosa.

The Colombian Nobel Prize winner died in 2014 without revealing it.

The Peruvian Nobel Prize winner, at 86, has not and will not do so either.

Manuel Jabois, in a recent interview in EL PAÍS, asked him again what could have broken their relationship.

The writer replied: "Women, simply."

Bayly asked the two.

To García Márquez, in Washington in the nineties.

“He told me: 'I didn't fight with him, he fought with me.

And I'm not going to tell you anything else, he talks to my friends ”.

To Vargas Llosa, in Lima aboard Mario's golden BMW.

“He told me: 'I'm never going to talk about that subject', very seriously.

And immediately: 'García Márquez has cancer'.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

It was in the year 1985. Gabo still lived 30 more years”.

The secrecy around the mythical punch – reflected in the mythical photo with the black eye that García Márquez had his pussy taken – always seemed to Bayly “very literary” and motivated him to go through it with his cross between fable and facts.

Jaime Bayly, this Thursday at the Wellington hotel in Madrid.

samuel sanchez

“When two geniuses refuse to talk about something like that, man, are they piqued your literary curiosity!

Because I understand literature as opening the closet to see what skeletons there are.

He affirms that the work is based on a work of documentation and collection of testimonies that dates back to the nineties.

From bibliography he cites biographies of García Márquez and above all the encyclopedic

by Xavi Ayén.

From testimonies, writers such as Jorge Edwards, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Tomás Eloy Martínez or Álvaro Mutis.

And to the legendary Carmen Balcells, agent of the two Nobel Prize winners and years later of Bayly, who in the book describes her as more intelligent than the two of them together: "A supernatural creature, a hurricane of noble winds, inventor and tamer of all geniuses”.

The accumulated knowledge allows him to carry out a rich psychological and contextual profile of Mario and Gabriel in the nine years that their friendship lasted, and more specifically in the phase that interests him the most, the two years prior to the punch, in which, according to what he recounts, In the book and asserts in the interview, Vargas Llosa left Patricia for another woman.

“What happens between Patricia and Gabo at that moment, therein lies the secret of the novel;

What's more, what happens between Patricia and

[Gabriel and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, who died in 2020], what

what approaches Don Gabriel made to Patricia, if anything, and what happened between them.

In the novel, Bayly proposes a denouement.

We will not gut him, we will only say that he is moderate compared to what could be expected from the author,

of the Lima elite, with a very sharp intelligence, once wild and today more distilled.

Cover of the Mexican newspaper 'La Jornada' of March 6, 2007, with the photograph in which Gabriel García Márquez is seen with a black eye after the punch he received from Mario Vargas Llosa, taken 30 years ago by Rodrigo Moya.Mario Guzman ((EPA) EFE)

But the important thing about the book is not how it resolves gossip.

The value of this historical novel is how it illuminates that event that will transcend everything and that is the brotherly friendship -and its ruin- between two literary giants.

In that the book offers valuable information and carefully edited from the same cover photo.

Bayly found it in the archives of the Peruvian magazine

and bought it.

Its yours.

And it is unique.

A few weeks ago they met in Caracas.

They are in Lima after giving a conference.

Both in suits and ties.

Mario holds a cigarette and from his greatest height, smiling, looks at Gabriel out of the corner of his eye, comfortable but not yet comfortable enough to pick up the Nobel in a guayabera.

It had just come out

His tremendous sales success would soon arrive.

“In this photo, Gabo wanted to be as successful as Mario was already.

A year later the roles had already changed, ”says Bayly, dressed in the Wellington and with his characteristic straight bangs.

By then they had been read and admired literary.

In the following years a relationship of great affection and intimacy developed.

They were neighbors in Barcelona from 1970 to 1974, Mercedes and Gabriel, Mario and Patricia.

Bayly counted the steps between doorways.

He didn't get to a hundred.

He says that García Márquez called Vargas Llosa “hermanazo”.

The Peruvian admired him, he says, "because of his prodigious imagination," and the Colombian esteemed "his intellectual head."

They were not, however, times of special creative fertility for both.

“Vargas Llosa only published one minor novel,

and García Márquez did not publish anything again until 1975,

I think the success of

he grabbed them both.

To Gabo because he didn't know what to do to live up to what he had done and to Mario because he didn't know what he was going to do to beat him like he beat him before, if not in sales at least in terms of criticism”.

The fistfight ended their friendship, since they never spoke or saw each other again, but in light of Bayly's work and the creative chronology of both, it would be said that it was an excellent literary decision, since later the masterpieces returned and the Nobel Prize winners arrived (Gabo in 1982, Mario in 2010).

At least it helped them to unlock.

Balcells, says the author of

tried to reconcile them and Gabo was willing.

"In the last decade of his life, García Márquez was waiting for him twice, once in Barcelona and another in Cartagena, but Mario in the end aborted the matches."

Why does he think he would have done that?

"Because I think he is a man who is very loyal to his friends and even more loyal to his enemies."

Each one followed his glorious path by his side.

Gabo with Mercedes, his highest authority.

Mario with Patricia, his wife and his first cousin, who in the novel forgives him for his infidelity and returns to him.

"You have to have a lot of character, intelligence and wisdom for that," says Jaime Bayly.

"In

she's the underrated genius."

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