Gentlemen's Agreement
"It must be horrible to be buried in October."
- "No One Writes to the Colonel" (1961)
There was only one black-and-white image of Gabriel García Márquez, with a shiner, grinning. Robert Moya, a friend of the novelist, took that photograph, which would be most remembered after his death on April 17. It had something to do with his feud with Mario Vargas Llosa.
Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa were part of the Latin American Boom, a flourishing of literature, poetry, and criticism in South America, Middle America, and the Caribbean during the 1960s and 1970s. Both experienced what was it like to be a struggling writer in Paris, a rite of passage for artists. Both became Nobel laureates later in life. But they took different paths. Vargas Llosa was more of an adventurer, having traveled around the world. He even ventured into politics, running for president in 1990. García Márquez, on the other hand, kept in touch with the less privileged and oppressed. This was evident in "No One Writes to the Colonel", one of his few works sans magic realism, which would be his trademark.
"He had no regrets. For a long time the town had lain in a sort of stupor, ravaged by ten years of history. That afternoon - another Friday without a letter - the people had awakened. The colonel remembered another era. He saw himself with his wife and his son watching under an umbrella a show which was not interrupted despite the rain. He remembered the party's leaders, scrupulously groomed, fanning themselves in the beat of the music in the patio of his house. He almost lived the painful resonance of the bass drum in his intestines."
The ideological difference may be one of the reasons why the two became distanced, as the Peruvian writer put it. Another reason could be personal, which happened in a Mexican cinema in 1976. It was there where Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez. It was about Patricia, the former's wife. It happened in Barcelona, where the two were neighbors for two years. The rest of the details were sketchy, which those in literary circles could only guess. Neither García Márquez nor Vargas Llosa talked about it for three decades. Was there any animosity between the two? Or was the silence a sign of respect? It could be the latter, as a special edition of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", García Márquez's masterpiece, was published in 2007. It was significant for many reasons. The fortieth anniversary of the novel's first publication. The Colombian turned 80. It was also forty years since these two literary giants first met. Vargas Llosa wrote the prologue.
"Both men are in agreement over this," a spokesman for Spain's Royal Academy, which published the edition, said.
It was a sign of a thaw. Neither men wanted to shed light on this, which would be for the better. The family of García Márquez, meanwhile, may consider publishing the author's final novel, entitled "We Will Meet in August". His friends thought he was done with it, until García Márquez tried to fiddle with the ending. There were two endings, which his widow and their two sons couldn't decide. Eventually, fans will get a copy of the book.
Mario Vargas Llosa on Gabriel García Marquez: "The history of a novelist is, according to Roland Barthes, that of a single subject and its variations...That is García Marquez's case: an obsessive, recurring, central desire embraces his work, a unique ambition that evolves through his works of fiction in forward leaps and backward steps, from varying perspectives and with different methods...his stories and novels can be read as fragments of one vast and diverse, yet rigorous, creative project - within which each one finds its full meaning. This unifying will is to construct a closed reality, an autonomous universe, whose references basically come from the world of García Marquez's childhood."
