Do you know about the most famous punch in the history of world literature? It was thrown by the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa—who died at 89 on April 13—squarely onto the face of fellow Nobel winner Gabriel García Márquez, nearly fifty years ago.

The incident took place in 1976 in full public glare at a cinema in Mexico City, where both writers, then in their forties, had come to attend a film premiere. The Peruvian and the Columbian had once been close friends—two titans of the Latin American Boom—now reunited after a long gap. Márquez, spotting Llosa, beamed and opened his arms: “Mario!” he called out, moving in for a hug. But instead of a greeting, he received a thunderous right hook. Márquez dropped to the floor, his face bloodied, his glasses shattered. As he struggled to his feet, Llosa is said to have barked, “That’s for what you did to my wife!”

Neither man ever publicly explained the rupture. But the story—kept alive through friends’ accounts—goes like this: Some time earlier, Vargas Llosa had taken a sea voyage with his wife Patricia—also his cousin—and during the trip, became infatuated with a Swedish woman on board. A longtime ladies’ man, he spent the journey with his new companion. An angry and humiliated Patricia disembarked in Chile and returned alone to their home in Barcelona.

Enter García Márquez and his wife, Mercedes. As close friends of the Llosa couple, they visited Patricia to console her. During the conversation, Márquez reportedly encouraged her to leave Vargas Llosa and promised she could always count on their friendship and company. Patricia—perhaps still reeling, perhaps needing reassurance—took this as a romantic overture.

Later, when she reconciled with Vargas Llosa, she told him about the conversation—possibly to remind him not to take her for granted. She is said to have hinted that even his closest friends found her attractive. That revelation smoldered in Vargas Llosa’s memory until the moment he saw Márquez again—and acted.

Though Márquez took the punch, it was Mercedes who landed the sharper blow. Without missing a beat, she snapped at Vargas Llosa:

“What you’re saying can’t be true—because my husband likes women, but only very good-looking women!”. Immediately after the punch, Márquez went to his photographer friend and took a picture of his face with the black eye. The photograph came to light only decades later.

The incident brought the curtains down on the long friendship of the two maestros who wrote in Spanish and were among the four pivots of the great Latin American literary Boom of the second half of the 20th........

© Mathrubhumi English