With a fist left from the right hand, an epochal friendship ended between two of the most famous South American writers. In a cinema of Mexico City on February 13, 1976, Mario Vargas Llosa, probably without premeditation, will launch a punch to the face of the then inseparable companion, the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquezto which he made a black eye and also procured a bruise on the nose. For three decades, the circumstances of that foaming epic have remained inaccurate and the mystery is hovered on that episode.
Of that dispute, one has always spoken in a rather vague way, until the spring of 2007, when it was precisely revealed what happened in that cinema room was the publication of two black and white photographs, accompanied by new details, which offered clarifications on that shot of anger that brought Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday 13 April at 89 years old, to resort to strong manners.
The fist was launched out of jealousy: the Mexican photographer Rodrigo Moya, witness of the fist, told it. It was Moya, in fact, taking the photos in Marquez on February 14, 1976, that is, the day after the fact. It was Garcia Marquez himself who showed up in the photographer’s study in Mexico City. And this because the author of ‘one hundred years of solitude’ believed it necessary to document the end of that friendship with an image. Which had ended not for political reasons, as had always suspected, but for apparently more trivial reasons: for a woman, out of jealousy.
What happened
The photos of the dispute between the two former friends saw the light on the occasion of the eightieth birthday of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and in fact on the eve of an announced reconciliation between the two great writers. There was no need for any public act of contrition for the illustrious South American intellectuals and not even a punctilious explanation on the real reasons that led them to clash in that Mexican cinema in 1976. Their rapprochement was symbolically marked by the publication of a special edition of ‘one hundred years of solitude’, made to celebrate the forty -year of its appearance (1967), Vargas Llosa. ‘
‘The editorial initiative had the consent of the two writers”, declared in 2007 a spokesman for the Royal Academy of Spain who sponsored the publication. For that volume-homage, Vargas Llosa gave authorization to publish in the special edition of the novel by Garcia Marquez his famous 1971 essay dedicated to the work of the former friend, entitled “History of a deicide”. After the 1976 dispute, the Peruvian writer had always refused authorization to republish that praised text towards the Colombian colleague.
More recent times, in 2017, three years after the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which took place in 2014, the Peruvian writer wanted to pay publicly paying homage to the great Colombian writer one with a conference at the Complutense University of Madrid. “More than an intellectual”, Marquez was “a true artist, a poet. He was unable to explain his talent and worked through intuition, instinct, not through an intellectual, conceptual reflection, because he had an extraordinary will to surprise with adjectives, adverbs and plot”, said Vargas Llosa on that occasion.
“I was dazzled,” he added, for ‘a hundred years of solitude’, which is “a wonderful, extraordinary novel”. “We realize an extraordinary intellectual complexity when studying Gabo’s books – he added – but I’m not sure he was aware of the magical things he wrote”.