MEXICO CITY, April 16 — When journalist and novelist Elena Poniatowska headed to a film premiere in Mexico City, she had no idea she was about to witness the literary fight of the century as two future Nobel laureates came to blows.
It was February 12, 1976, and Poniatowska found herself standing next to Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his wife Mercedes Barcha at a screening of the documentary La odisea de los Andes (The Andes’s Odyssey).
Garcia Marquez’s friend, Peruvian literary sensation Mario Vargas Llosa, was also attending the event.
Smiling, Garcia Marquez went to greet his fellow writer, “but Vargas Llosa punched him in the face,” Poniatowska, 92, told AFP on Monday, the day after Vargas Llosa’s death aged 89.
A portrait of late Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa is displayed at the Magic Water Circuit of the Reserve Park during a tribute in Lima on April 14, 2025. — AFP pic
As a shocked Garcia Marquez — known to his friends as Gabo — sank to the floor bleeding, Poniatowska famously rushed to fetch a steak for his eye.
“Gabo said he didn’t understand. Everyone was very surprised,” Poniatowska said at her home in the Mexican capital.
The incident made headlines and was immortalised in a pair of black and white photographs.
According to press reports at the time, Vargas Llosa had shouted that the punch was for “what you did to Patricia,” referring to his wife, who was also his first cousin.
The exact offense has never been revealed, and the two men tried to keep their cinema altercation quiet, even as it fuelled rumours about affairs.
Rodrigo Moya, a Mexican-Colombian photographer, recalled how Garcia Marquez showed up at his house two days after the incident with a “tremendous bruise on his left eye and a wound on his nose.”
Portraits of late writer Mario Vargas Llosa are seen on the book ‘Palabras en el mundo’ (Words in the World), by Alonso Cueto, at El Virrey bookstore in Miraflores, Lima April 14, 2025. — AFP pic
Mexican journalist Julio Scherer later revealed in a book that Vargas Llosa had asked him not to write about the famous bust-up.
The writers reportedly stopped speaking and drifted apart for decades.
More than 30 years later, Vargas Llosa penned the prologue to the 40th-anniversary edition of Garcia Marquez’s classic work, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and the men were seen in public together again.
At the time, which coincided with Garcia Marquez’s 80th birthday, Moya finally published his pictures of the Colombian novelist’s shiner from the fight.
Books written by the late writer Mario Vargas Llosa and biographies dedicated to the Nobel Prize in Literature are seen on the shelves of El Virrey bookstore, in Miraflores, Lima on April 14, 2025. ‘Titan of literature’ and ‘monster of letters’ were some of the adjectives with which Peruvian readers defined with sadness on Monday the figure of Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday in Lima at the age of 89. — AFP pic
Translator Gregory Rabassa, who worked on books by both Latin American giants, told the Paris Review in 2019 that the incident occurred after Garcia Marquez advised Patricia to leave Vargas Llosa over an affair — an allegation Poniatowska could not confirm.
“I never knew anything, nor did I want to check,” she said. “It’s not my role.” — AFP
