09/10/2010
Sitting on the flat roof of the house we were renting in the neighborhood of Cayma, with typically sunny blue skies and the towering Chachani and Misti volcanoes keeping watch over the varied houses below, I had a bottle of Arequipeña in one hand and copy of Pantaleón y las visitadoras in the other.
Short of reading that particular novel in Iquitos or somewhere else in the Peruvian Amazon, Arequipa—the birthplace of Mario Vargas Llosa, was as appropriate a place as any to delve into the canon of a man now rightfully recognized by the Nobel Committee as a literary giant.
At the time, though, I didn’t really get it.
It was a funny little novel—clever, satirical—but not the type of work that justified including his name with Gabriel García Marquez and Octavio Paz. It also didn’t help that the low budget b-movie production of the same name became hard to dissociate from the novel. Then again, I did see it around the time the embarrassingly bad film version of Love in the time of cholera was released, which reminded me how easily an amateur production can ruin a masterpiece.
Still, I needed something more to be sincerely enthusiastic about reading the two works I was told were crucial to appreciating Llosa: La Casa Verde and La Ciudad y los Perros.
That something more came in the form of a black eye and non-fiction too compelling to ignore.
I hadn’t known then, of course, that Llosa and Márquez had once been good friends—only to see that friendship take a thirty year hiatus when the Peruvian delivered what by most accounts was a sucker punch.
The reason, I assumed, must have been political.
Llosa is fairly right of centre in his politics, and if you read any of his son’s work—The Che Guevara Myth, for example, well, “de tal palo, tal astilla”—the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But though Márquez would become chummy with Castro while Llosa grew to admire Margaret Thatcher and eventually run for President— this was over… a woman.
The woman was Llosa’s wife, Patricia. And the story goes that Márquez and his wife suggested Patricia leave Llosa after her husband had a temporary lapse with a Swedish woman. The subsequent reconciliation of husband and wife led to the wife telling the husband everything that transpired—including the part about his buddy Gabo’s advice. Cue the punch outside a film premiere in Mexico City in 1976.
On the occasion of Márquez’s 80th birthday in 2007, the Colombian’s good friend Rodrigo Moya both wrote about the event and released the picture he had taken thirty years earlier. Moya’s piece is definitely worth a read, and though to my knowledge not available in English, does at least include the infamous photo of the black eye taken back in 1976:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/03/06/index.php?section=cultura&article=a05n1cul
The pride of my Peruvian friends would brim when they spoke of how their man beat up Márquez; it was something like what I felt when I first heard of Morley Callaghan knocking out Hemingway. Sure, the defeated in both cases might have more international recognition, but no man is completely immune to nationalistic schadenfreude, or at least good gossip.
That punch inspired me to read La Casa Verde—a novel as complex and worthy of praise as 100 Years of Solitude, then La Ciudad y los Perros, which in its portrayal of military school drew from Llosa’s own experiences, encouraged me to reread Pantaleón y las visitadoras, and to acknowledge how misguided my initial response had been.
I find it disingenuous to claim Saul Bellow as ours, so Canada is still waiting for its turn, with Atwood or Ondaatje the most likely candidates. And when that happens, our Prime Minister will certainly come up with a variation of President Alan García’s observation: “It’s a big day for Peru.” When that happens, I’ll likely start rereading.
No black eye will be necessary.
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