“This book is going to be a bunch of lies,” Mario Vargas Llosa told this newspaper a few weeks ago when asked about the upcoming release of Los Genios (Galaxia Gutenberg) by writer Jaime Bayly (Lima, age 58). This Wednesday at the aristocratic Wellington Hotel in Madrid, its author confirmed it: “Yes, it is full of lies, like any novel, but not capricious or whimsical lies, but credible, credible ones.” The work begins, before it begins, with a warning he wrote: “This book is not a historical text or a journalistic inquiry. It is a novel, a fiction that mixes real, historical events with fictional events that spring from the author’s inventiveness. Bayly now adds: “Let me make a caveat: it’s not a historical text, but it’s a historical novel; and it is not a journalistic chronicle, but a novel that I researched out of journalistic curiosity, let’s say from my state as a journalist”. As if the aforementioned notarial belief were not enough, he legitimized his genre even before the novel begins by quoting Vargas Llosa himself in Historia de Mayta: “Something that is learned attempts to reconstruct an event on the basis of testimonies, is precisely that all stories are fairy tales, that they consist of truths and lies”. Then, yes, start:
“It’s because of what you did to Patricia,” Vargas Llosa yelled.
“He said ‘because of what you did to him,’ not ‘because of what you told him,’ like some have said,” says Bayly, who claims to have compared it to a person who was there. It was there in 1976 in a cinema in Mexico City that Vargas Llosa knocked out Gabriel García Márquez with one punch. They are the geniuses and the book is the novel about the end of their friendship.
It is never known what happened. If García Márquez did or said something to Patricia Llosa. The Colombian Nobel laureate died in 2014 without revealing it. The Peruvian Nobel laureate, at 86, has not and will not do so. In a recent interview in EL PAÍS, Manuel Jabois asked him again what could have destroyed their relationship. The writer replied, “Women, easy.” Bayly asked the two. To García Márquez in Washington in the 1990s. “He told me, ‘I didn’t fight him, he fought me. And I won’t tell you anything else, talk to my friends.” To Vargas Llosa in Lima aboard Mario’s gold BMW. “He told me, ‘I’m never going to talk about this subject,’ very seriously. And immediately: “García Márquez has cancer”. I remember it like it was yesterday. That was in 1985. Gabo lived another 30 years”.
The secrecy surrounding the mythical punch — reflected in the mythical black-eyed photo that García Márquez had his pussy taken — always struck Bayly as “very literary,” motivating him to pull it off with his cross between fable and fact.
Jaime Bayly, this Thursday at the Wellington Hotel in Madrid. Samuel Sanchez
“When two geniuses refuse to talk about something like that, man, they’ve piqued your literary curiosity! Because by literature I mean opening the closet to see what kind of skeletons there are. He assures that the work is based on documentary work and a collection of testimonies going back to the 1990s. From the bibliography he quotes biographies by García Márquez and, in particular, the encyclopedia Aquelos años del boom by Xavi Ayén. From testimonies of 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, whom she describes in the book as more intelligent than the two of them together: “A supernatural being, a whirlwind of noble winds, inventor and tamer of all geniuses”.
The accumulated knowledge allows him to construct a rich psychological and contextual profile of Mario and Gabriel over the nine years of their friendship, particularly in the phase that interests him most, the two years before the blow where, after, what he says, claims in the book and in the interview, Vargas Llosa left Patricia for another woman. “What is happening between Patricia and Gabo at that moment is the secret of the novel; also what happened between Patricia and the gabos [Gabriel y su esposa, Mercedes Barcha, fallecida en 2020]what did the Gabos say to him, what approaches, if any, did Don Gabriel make to Patricia, and what happened between them?
In the novel, Bayly proposes a resolution. We won’t exempt it, we’ll just say that it’s moderate compared to what one might expect from the author, an enfant terrible of the Lima elite, with a very sharp intelligence, once fierce and now more distilled.
Front page of the Mexican newspaper La Jornada from March 6, 2007 with the photo showing Gabriel García Márquez with a black eye after being punched by Mario Vargas Llosa, taken 30 years ago by Rodrigo Moya.Mario Guzman ( (EPA ) EFE)
But what’s important about the book isn’t how it resolves gossip. The value of this historical novel lies in how it illuminates the event that will transcend all, and that is the brotherly friendship – and its demise – between two literary giants. As such, the book provides valuable information and is carefully edited from the same cover photo. Bayly found it in the archives of the Peruvian magazine Caretas and bought it. It is yours. And it’s unique. A few weeks ago they met in Caracas. You are in Lima after a conference. Both in a suit and with a tie. Mario holds a cigarette and, from his tallest height, smiles out of the corner of his eye at Gabriel, comfortable but not yet comfortable enough to pick up the Nobel Prize in a guayabera. It had just come out One Hundred Years of Solitude. His tremendous sales success would soon come. “In this photo, Gabo wanted to be as successful as Mario already was. A year later, the roles had already changed,” says Bayly, dressed in wellies and sporting his signature straight bangs.
Until then they had been read and admired in literary terms. In the years that followed, 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 the doors. It didn’t reach a hundred. He says García Márquez called Vargas Llosa “big brother”. The Peruvian admired him, he says, “for his immense imagination,” and the Colombian valued “his intellectual head.” However, these were not times of particularly creative fruitfulness for either of them. “Vargas Llosa published only a small novel, Pantaleon and the Visitors, and García Márquez published nothing more until 1975, The Autumn of the Patriarch. I think the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude grabbed them both. To Gabo for not knowing what to do to do justice to what he had done and to Mario for not knowing what to do to hit him the way he had hit him before , if not in sales, at least in terms of criticism”. The fistfight ended their friendship as they never spoke or saw each other again, but given Bayly’s work and the creative chronology of both, one would say that it was an excellent literary decision, given that later came the masterpieces and the Nobel Prize winners (Gabo 1982, Mario 2010). At least it helped them unlock.
Balcells, says the author of The Geniuses, tried to reconcile them and Gabo was ready. “In the last decade of his life, García Márquez waited for him twice, once in Barcelona and again in Cartagena, but Mario ended up abandoning the games.” Why do you think he would have done that? “Because I think he’s a man who’s very loyal to his friends and even more loyal to his enemies.”
Each walked his glorious path at his side. Gabo with Mercedes, his highest authority. Mario with Patricia, his wife and first cousin, who in the novel forgives his infidelity and returns to him. “It takes a lot of character, intelligence and wisdom to do that,” says Jaime Bayly. “In The Geniuses, she is the underrated genius.”
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