So I always love that little item because I’m sure it’s true: how to cook huachinango.
García Márquez with a black eye.
* General Omar Torrijos ruled Panama from 1968 to 1981. He is best known for negotiating the 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaties, which ended the US hold on the Panama Canal in 1999. García Márquez, an activist for Latin American sovereignty, showed an interest in meeting the general, who also counted Graham Greene among his friends.
31
Knockout
In which we finally talk about how Mario Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in 1976
RODRIGO MOYA: It was about eleven or twelve in the morning and I was in my house in Colonia Nápoles, where I had an office, a big house with an editorial office in one part, and in the other part I lived with my girlfriend and my two children. There’s a knock at the door and it’s Gabo and Mercedes. I was very happy and very surprised to see him. Gabo was already a friend of mine, but there are hierarchies in friendships. It was a friendship of guarded proportions. I was a newspaper photographer and he was what he is. Back then I didn’t presume to call him Gabo. Calling him Gabito was for me like calling Cervantes Miguelito. For me, he’s Gabriel García Márquez. They came for the photographs. He told me: “I want you to take some pictures of my black eye.” They came to my house because they trust me.
He wore a jacket. It wasn’t the plaid one. It was another one. And she was in black with large sunglasses. And I said to him: “What happened?” He made a joke, like: “I was boxing and I lost.” The one who spoke up was Mercedes. She said that Vargas Llosa had sucker-punched him. “And why was that?” “I don’t know. I went up to him with my arms wide open to greet him. We hadn’t seen each other for some time.” I already knew they had been very good friends in Barcelona and everything, and the two couples got along because he had talked about that with our mutual friend Guillermo Angulo. I mean, it was something everybody knew; when I found out it was Mario Vargas Llosa who had hit him, I was very surprised. They sat down in the living room and began to talk to me.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: I know the truth about that fight. I’ll tell you. Look: Mario has been a great womanizer and he’s a very good-looking man. Women die for Mario. So Mario, on a trip he made by ship from Barcelona to El Callao, met a very beautiful woman. They fell in love. He left his wife and went off with her. And the marriage was over and all that. His wife went back to pack up the house and, of course, she began to see friends. Then they got back together and his wife told Vargas Llosa: “Don’t think I’m not attractive. Friends of yours like Gabo were after me . . .” One day they met in a theater in Mexico City, and Gabo went toward him with open arms. Vargas Llosa made a fist and said: “For what you tried to do to my wife,” and knocked him to the ground. Then Ms. Gaba said: “What you’re saying can’t be true because my husband likes women, but only very good-looking women.”
RODRIGO MOYA: It had happened two days earlier. The day before he was sick. The punch happened at night. You know the story, don’t you? It was at a film preview, the one about the survivors in the Andes. So Gabo arrived and said “Mario” and Mario turned and wham!, he hit him with a right and knocked him to the floor, he was bleeding when he fell because the lens in his glasses broke right on the bridge of his nose and the bruise was pretty bad. First aid helped alleviate that, which is what they talk about, I don’t know whether it was China Mendoza or Elena Poniatowska who went to buy meat to put on his eye. And that’s really true. I boxed a little since I was a kid, and you put steak on a black eye. I don’t know how, but it takes away the bruise. Now they use arnica.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Well, my secret is this: Gabo told me what had happened before the fight. I mean, if he had told me afterward it would be worthless. He said: “No, look, she’s coming on to me but I’m so fond of Mario that, even though they’re separated . . .” So imagine, I couldn’t tell Mario that, I’m a friend of his too, but I’d destroy the marriage. That was one of her tricks to tell him: “I have my own public,” right? And she knows she lied. Besides, afterward I was finding out how things had happened when she was in Barcelona. If they saw each other it was with all their friends, they were always together. There were always two or three friends with them. See? They were never alone when they saw each other.
RODRIGO MOYA: What I do remember very well is that Mercedes interrupted twice and said: “The fact is that Mario is a jealous fool. He’s a jealous fool.”
GREGORY RABASSA: The story I heard is that Mario was seeing someone else and Patricia went to Gabo, a good friend, and he told her: “Leave him.” And Mario found out and hit Gabo.
RODRIGO MOYA: Everybody sees a sexual or erotic issue, and that may or may not have been true. But the three of them are the only ones who know that. More than a political dispute they had a separation. Vargas Llosa had already moved surprisingly to the right. I think the clash must have been because there was that separation, and certainly there must have been other things as well that made Vargas Llosa explode. The punch was certainly violent. I know about punches. It was a right. He was in the row in front of him. It seems he came from the side and Vargas Llosa stood up and hit him. I don’t know from what angle, but it was a hard punch.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Patricia was on the ship with Mario when he falls in love. When they get to Chile, Patricia has to go back to Barcelona and pack up the house. Gabo and Mercedes were with her the whole time. They were very close. I know this because Gabo told me about it. When Patricia has to go back, Gabo takes her to the airport, but they were running late, and Gabo told her in an offhand way: “If the plane takes off without you, great, we’ll have a party.” Gabo’s Caribbean and it was in that spirit that he said it, and she misunderstood.
RODRIGO MOYA: But what worried me was that he was pretending to be in good humor, but the photos tell you that he was depressed. I took half a roll. When he arrived, I didn’t have any film in my house. I was doing a piece for an international magazine on fishing. So I ran to the office that I had in my house. It was quick. There was a small garden. I ran out and said to the technician: “Chino, don’t you have any film?” And he said, “No, I don’t have any, but there’s a little tail end in the camera.” So I said to him: “Make me a roll right away.”
I was concerned about his melodramatic face, and I thought about it very quickly. It would satisfy Vargas Llosa to see his victim wounded, destroyed. What I wanted was to make him laugh, and he wouldn’t give me a damn laugh even at a joke. He wasn’t laughing at all, and I played the fool and said to him: “Listen, that was some kick he gave you. How does it feel?” And he answered, but very dry. Then suddenly something happened, I said something and he laughed and I took two photographs. One is the one I circulate because, since I really love him, I didn’t want to pass that photo off as tragic. Now, whenever they ask me for that photograph, I send the one where he’s laughing so that the reaction is, “He hit me but it’s nothing. I don’t give a damn,” as we say in Mexico, right?
GUILLERMO ANGULO: History of a Deicide* is not available because Mario doesn’t want it printed. My copy of the book was signed by Mario, and with thanks, besides, because I helped him with the research. Then, yes, the idea of the book is that the writer is a god because he gives life to the characters, kills them, and everything. That’s History of a Deicide. The writer ends up killing God and taking his place. That’s the real story.
GREGORY RABASSA: I have it in Spanish. Mario didn’t allow it to be translated. Cass Canfield had already talked to the two of us. Harper was publishing both of them but he said no.
RODRIGO MOYA: That photo wasn’t circulated because he said to me . . . and I’ve been very loyal about that. He said to me: “Send me a set and keep the negatives.” So I made him a set and sent it to him and in a few days, I don’t know whether with Angulo or somebody else, he returned it to me with his notes. Not this one. This one. Two copies of this. And then I sent him the printed photos, all of them eight-by-ten. A select
set, fifteen or sixteen photos, whatever was on the roll. He must have sent me some money, I don’t remember. I sent him the photographs and the curious thing is that I kept them in the file and no one saw them. He told me it was for documentation and Mercedes agreed and told me: “Gabo has his files of everything important that happens to him.” And at bottom there’s a touch of vanity in liking the photo. I have it, I have something fairly complicated that’s called the “ego-brary.”
I always had a small photo from that shoot tacked up in my lab because he really revolutionized my concept of literature and of America when One Hundred Years came out, and I’ve read it four times. And I lived with that tiny photo that I had. Every time I sat at my desk to work I saw it. Then a friend of mine saw it about the time Gabo was going to turn eighty, and he said to me: “Listen, I want that photograph. I’ll buy it from you.” I said: “No, I can’t sell that photo or anything.” And I told him the story of how that photo came about. Gabo said to send him a set and to keep them. That was in ’76, but when Gabo turned eighty my friend who knew the story told a reporter: “Listen, Rodrigo Moya has an incredible photograph of Gabo with a black eye.” And so the magazines wanted to talk to me. So I thought: They’re publishing photos of Gabo, who’s going to turn eighty. I can break the promise that really wasn’t a promise. It was an assignment to keep them. I kept them and now I’m going to bring them out. I’ve never made so much money from a photograph.
JAIME ABELLO BANFI: He’s always been very loyal, but at the same time implacable when he breaks with you. There are people he’s broken with and never spoken to again. Obviously, that was the case with Vargas Llosa.
* As a student, Mario Vargas Llosa was so taken with One Hundred Years of Solitude when it came out that he wrote his doctoral thesis from Madrid’s Complutense University about it. It was published by Barral Editores in Spain in 1971 as History of a Deicide—my translation, as the book was never translated into English. Vargas Llosa claims that writers are God-like: a writer can change the course of reality. By having the absolute power to recount things, the writer is killing God and assuming his power. The two writers were best of friends until 1976. They had a fight and never spoke after that. Vargas Llosa is said to have stopped the book from being published. It is, in fact, a very hard book to find.
32
Cod-Liver Oil
In which everybody lucubrates on the brilliance of García Márquez
ROSE STYRON: He’s a wonderful storyteller and talks about how his grandmother was the great storyteller in his family, and he learned from her. He lived with her when he was a boy. And he said that his mother became a storyteller as she aged but wasn’t one earlier. It was having lived with his grandmother. He also says that knowing how to tell stories is something congenital and hereditary. That is, that it’s natural that many of us think our grandmothers are the ones who told us stories and turned us into the storytellers we are.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: He told me one day: “Do you know what it means to be a good writer?” I said no. “A writer is someone who writes a line and makes the reader want to read the one that follows.” Because Gabo, even in the bad things he has, has that thing of controlling the prose so that you say: “How marvelous! How did he say that?”
ELIGIO “YIYO” GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: My mother says that Gabito turned out so intelligent because when she was pregnant with Gabito, she took a lot of Scott’s Emulsion. It was the only one of her twelve pregnancies when she took that cod-liver oil. And Gabito came out so intelligent because of the pure cod-liver oil. She says that he was born smelling of Scott’s Emulsion.
RAFAEL ULLOA: I really believe what the old man Gabriel Eligio says. That Gabo is bicephalic. That he has two brains.
ROSE STYRON: I don’t know whether it was true for the rest of the world or not. But the fact is that Macondo was so real for me that it influenced my vision of Latin America. But of course I had another Latin American political experience, I mean, I could see it from the outside, perhaps because of my experience in Argentina, Chile, or Uruguay. The fact that I had been a human rights activist allowed me to see it from the outside, from another perspective, in the same way I saw Central America. So then I wouldn’t say that Macondo turned into all of Latin America for me, but it certainly did for those who had not been in Latin America. But when Bill and I were in Cartagena, during the film festival, to my surprise and delight, I walked along the streets and realized that I already knew them through Gabo’s books . . . even the jars filled with sweets in the market. It’s all so detailed. He had depicted it as a reality. It was a reality. It wasn’t a surprise.
I’m from Baltimore. Not so far south. I mean, southern intensity and lightness are there. I can see that Gabo had read Faulkner. It’s interesting, but for me, Gabo’s town, his city, is much more vivid than the one Faulkner had created.
PATRICIA CASTAÑO: There’s something very interesting that has to be looked at. Do you remember that there’s a story by Gabo when he was writing in El Espectador? He says there, speaking of the magic that surrounds him, that one day he was with a Catalan writer or editor who came to visit him in Cartagena. He recounts everything that happened in those two days, and that the gentleman said to him: “No, well, excuse me, but you don’t even have an imagination. What one experiences in these countries is madness.” Then he narrates everything that happened to that gentleman. But the most impressive thing is that they were having lunch one Sunday in his mother’s house in Cartagena, and suddenly a lady in a Guajiran tunic rang the doorbell. She comes in and says she’s cousin so-and-so and that she came to die. She dreamed she was going to die, and so she came to say goodbye.
ROSE STYRON: When you read Gabo it’s like reading all of Latin America. Or, suddenly you understand it all. Or you think you understand it.
EDMUNDO PAZ SOLDÁN: When you talk about García Márquez, he’s the one who has narrated the continent for us. This is Latin America. And I didn’t feel it was the Latin America where I grew up. My world has been very urban, for better and for worse. So I always saw the world of the tropics from a distance. That wasn’t the Latin America where I grew up.
ILAN STAVANS: Our generation has had to define itself in opposition to García Márquez.
ALBERTO FUGUET: I’ve been in literary workshops and all my classmates, except me, were infected by the García Márquez virus. I mean, it’s not only admiration, but they cling to the story. So I feel that reading García Márquez at a certain age can do you a lot of harm. In other words, I’d prohibit it. As a Latin American. It can affect you very badly and you’re damaged forever.
The other day, in a talk in Lima, Ignacio Padilla wrote a story by García Márquez. I mean, a page. Before coming up onstage, he went to the last seat and wrote for ten minutes, read it aloud, and it was incredible. It was like . . . The captain, his name like Evaristo So-and-so, and it went on and on and on. And you said: “But . . . it was magical realism.” And it totally was. It’s almost like a software you install and it takes off.
ILAN STAVANS: There’s a formula. But also poor García Márquez. It’s not his fault. It’s been pinned on him. Earlier it was Kafka and Sinclair Lewis as magical realists. It comes from Carpentier. I believe García Márquez changed Latin American culture, totally. He changed how Latin America is viewed in the rest of the world. I believe not always beneficially. Like the number of tourists who go to Latin America looking for butterflies, prostitutes. But it isn’t his fault.
ALBERTO FUGUET: I read García Márquez years before I wanted to be a writer. I read him because—and this always annoyed me a little—because it was official reading. And I felt a little more rebellious. It was what we had to read in secondary school. It was literature that was already official, that came from the Ministry of Education. For me it was associated with the establishment. For me, García Márquez was always establishment. Soon afterward he won the Nobel. It was a little adolescent of me, but it was how I felt.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: There’s somet
hing very important about Gabo, and it must be said because it’s useful to everybody. Gabo has something that doesn’t exist in Colombia: discipline. Fernando Botero has it, too. Rogelio Salmona has it, the man who designed these buildings. And Gabo has it. There must be more people, but I know only these three. And I can give you in more graphic form what Gabo’s discipline is, which is incredible in a Latin American. Before he was married, I had an unlucky night. I was with two women. It’s the worst thing that can happen to you. You can’t do anything. So then I said: “No, my solution is Gabo. Two men and two women, now that’s another kettle of fish.” I went to Gabo: “Brother, this is my situation.” This is a nice story. He says to me: “I have to correct the third chapter of In Evil Hour.” “And do you have a contract or what?” “I gave myself the assignment that I would correct that third chapter tonight.” There was no way. No way. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say: “I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll do it later.” There was no way.
JOSÉ SALGAR: I remember that with Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabo would start to work from five in the morning until not very late because he would always stop writing and start to drink with his friends and talk, but they were very intense and productive working days.
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