Jaime Bayly's new novel, Los genios (Galaxia Gutenberg), is going to cause people to talk. It narrates (with all the proper names as they are in real life) the causes of the distance between Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Covered in fiction, the author delves into the details of the story. Today, at a press conference in Madrid, Bayly has revealed, among other things, that Vargas Llosa also gave his own son, Álvaro, a black eye because he dropped out of Princeton University.
"Of all the novels I have published, this is the most risky, the most dangerous," acknowledged the author, author of titles such as La noche es virgen (1997, Herralde Award), I love my mommy (1998), The hurricane It bears your name (2004), And suddenly, an angel (2005, finalist for the Planet) or La lluvia del tiempo (2014), and currently the host of a television program in Miami.
The Colombian and the Peruvian met at the Caracas airport in 1967. "At that time, Vargas Llosa was the most acclaimed author, while for García Márquez literary luck had been elusive, and he had just published One Hundred Years of Solitude, that in a few months it will be a worldwide success". As Bayly recalled, "Gabo intends to convince Mario to move to Barcelona, where he is going to live immediately."
The opening scene is that of the punch that, in a Mexican cinema, in February 1976, Vargas Llosa gave García Máqruez. In Bayly's fiction, it becomes more defined, as Gabo's glasses break and blood oozes. "Mario learned to hit at the military school, he knocks him out while he tells him 'this is because of what you did to Patricia in Barcelona'". Hence, "knowing what García Márquez did to Patricia is the big question."
"Gabo's friends (Mutis, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza) told me that Gabo didn't do anything to Patricia, that it was a misunderstanding by Mario who was dying of jealousy. Mario's friends didn't tell me anything, only his son Álvaro told me 'Gabo did a very ugly thing', without further details". For Bayly, "it was not likely that Mario gave him that blow without anything having happened", so his novel "assaults the privacy of geniuses, because maybe not everything Mario imagined happened, but maybe it did ".
Bayly reconstructs the night in Barcelona when Patricia Llosa, García Márquez and his wife Mercedes, the agent Carmen Balcells and the writer Jorge Edwards ended up at the Bocaccio nightclub, taking place the events that irritated Vargas Llosa.
Bayly has been, for years, a close friend of Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Mario's eldest son, whom he met in the editorial office of the conservative newspaper La Prensa and from whom he distanced himself over time. Bayly has explained today how, when in a park in Miraflores, Mario tried to convince his son Álvaro to return to study at the Princeton University that he had abandoned, when he failed, "he hit him and left him with a black eye. I know it because I saw him immediately after with his face like that and he told me: 'My father hit me'". Also "Mario had once hit his father, who was a violent man who hit him and his mother. Mario learned to defend himself. You have to understand his family history to see why he sometimes succumbed to the temptation of punch. Those were other times".
"Patricia Llosa leaves everything, sacrifices everything, so that Mario is a writer -continued the author-, and has the great generosity of knowing how to forgive, not judging him in a sour way. Knowing how to understand and forgive are symptoms of great intelligence ".
The work, beyond gossip (its main attraction), also covers the political differences between the two, since the Peruvian distanced himself from the Cuban Revolution, "which Gabo, like Cortázar, supported until the end of his days."
"Novels are always a bunch of lies -Bayly admitted-. But they are not lies invented in a whimsical way. The dialogues, yes, I have invented them all. In intimate circumstances, I have had to choose who I believed in" .
