2023-04-30 00:40:00
Jaime Bayly and his most ambitious novel: The geniuswhich addresses one of the greatest myths of world literature of the 20th century: Mario Vargas Llosa’s punch to Gabriel García Márquez in 1976.
About The geniusCARETAS talks with Bayly, exclusively for the Peruvian press.
—Unlike other occasions, you are getting chain reviews, some good, others not. Did you expect something like that or the silence?
I didn’t expect the silence. I expected some commotion. The ridicule, the censorship and the moral tremblings of the fawning and flatterers of the genius Vargas Llosa awaited me. It is my riskiest, most dangerous novel. It has been very hard to make geniuses talk, make them think, make them fight. It has been very difficult to enter into the intimacy of geniuses, but otherwise the story of the punch could not be told well.
—But the novel is also a tribute to their lives and especially to their poetry.
Of course. It is a tribute to geniuses. It is not, however, a solemn homage, a reverential tribute. It’s an insolent homage, if such a thing is possible. The novel tries to show artistic geniuses in their most human and vulnerable dimension. And not only Vargas Llosa and García Márquez: also Neruda and Cortázar, Sabina and Ribeyro, Picasso and Edwards. There are a lot of older geniuses in the novel because the plot recreates a glorious era, it is the fresco of a decade populated by geniuses of enormous talent. Because if two mediocre writers come to blows, who the fuck cares? But we are talking about the most formidable genius in the history of Peru and the most fabulous genius in the history of Colombia. We are talking about two Nobel prizes. You don’t expect a future Nobel to throw a withering right hand at another Nobel and leave him knocked out. It would be unthinkable in two Nobel Prizes in Economics, or in Physics, or in Chemistry, right? But these two literary geniuses, years before deservedly winning the Nobel Prize, ended up punching each other. That fruitful friendship of neighbors and compadres should not have ended like this. Mario shouldn’t have punched Gabo that way. Mario had written a book saying that Gabo was God. And then he punched God, he blackened God, he knocked out God. And all because God presumably flirted with his wife, Patricia Llosa! But if God flirts with your woman, that’s an honor, man, don’t fuck with me!
—Everyone agrees on one point: your hearing, which enriches the dialogues.
It has been very difficult to recreate the dialogues of the major geniuses and minor geniuses. I don’t know where the dialogues come from. When I write a novel that has haunted me for as many years as The genius, I enter a kind of schizophrenic trance and I hear unruly voices in my head and I encourage those voices to express themselves with a libertine, mighty, torrential spirit. I see the geniuses conspiring, I hear them talk, and then I just take note, I am a typist of what those characters are dictating to me. Having said that, the most difficult thing has not been the dialogues of the geniuses, of their wives, of the inventor of geniuses that is Carmen Balcells. The hardest thing has been to recreate or relive the night when Carmen organizes a farewell party for Patricia Llosa in a disco in Barcelona. It is the crater of the novel, the black box. What happens that night at the disco, and then when Gabo takes Patricia to the airport so she can take an early morning flight to America, and on the way Gabo gets lost or loses his way, and Patricia misses the flight, and later spends the What happens between the two, is what has cost me the most work to fable, because the origin of the punch is in that tremendous, Caribbean night, partying until the end of time.
—For you: is writing losing everything or being willing to lose everything?
An enlightened critic has said that I am a suicidal writer. It’s true. I have been a suicidal writer since my first novel. I gambled my whole life on that novel. My family told me: you’re a shame, you won’t be able to come to Peru anymore, no one will give you a job on television, you’ll die of AIDS like a stray dog. I was terrified of publishing the novel, but I jumped into the void. I have always believed that the artist has to risk everything for his work: honor, love, decency, reputations, bourgeois comfort, profitable publishing alliances, everything, absolutely everything. Faulkner put it this way: “The artist is responsible only to his own work. If he is a good artist, he will be completely ruthless. I have thrown it all overboard since my first novel. I’m not interested in writing otherwise. And besides being suicidal, I am a parricide. In my first novel I literally killed my biological father. Thirty years later, I have killed my literary father. It was my destiny.
—Although Vargas Llosa and García Márquez are the axes of the novel, women are empowered, even Patricia herself.
Patricia is a great character. She is an underrated genius. I know her, I have interviewed her on television, I admire her. Because she, Patricia, has always lived in the shadows, discreetly, with no desire for notoriety. She has had the greatness to postpone her artistic dreams to encourage those of her husband for fifty years. And she has had the extraordinary genius of forgiving Mario over and over again. It happens in my novel, it happened in recent times: unlike the artistic genius Vargas Llosa, who is spiteful and vengeful, and who settles his troubles with a clean punch, Patricia knows how to listen, knows how to understand, knows how to forgive. Too bad Mario didn’t give Gabo the opportunity to tell him his version of the events in dispute. Because I think Vargas Llosa became feverish with jealousy and, when he knocked Gabo down with an unexpected blow, it was for a moment his father, the bully and unfortunate Mr. Ernesto Vargas. The punch was an ethical mistake, an aesthetic mistake, a literary mistake. What Vargas Llosa did to García Márquez was a bad-tempered bastard. And then not to forgive him until he died, when Carmen and Gabo wanted a reunion! Too much rancor, too much vanity.
—Between Vargas Llosa and you, there are points in common in that field of eternal divisions: politics.
I started fighting with the Vargas Llosa when they supported the scoundrel from Toledo and I fought him on television. Mario was very unfair to me. He called me snobbish, gossipy, conniving. Then we finished fighting when they supported the unpresentable Humala and I fought him on television. In both cases, I am proud that I did not vote for that pair of rascals. In Castillo’s election two years ago, I publicly supported Hernando de Soto, but the Vargas Llosas, because they were petty, continued to belittle and insult Hernando, calling him “Peluca” for example. Then, in the second round, it was frankly ridiculous to see Álvaro Vargas Llosa doing political tourism, donning the national team’s jersey and speaking like a lunatic and enraged preacher at a Keiko Fujimori rally. That image brought me other memorable ones: Álvaro in a yellow shirt, riding in a truck, shouting praises and praises to Toledo when he won the first round, denying his daughter; Álvaro becoming a page or amanuensis of the chavista thief Humala; Álvaro and his father supporting the closure of Congress perpetrated by Vizcarra’s felon, applauding Vizcarra’s coup just because Congress was Fujimori. And all to end with Álvaro perched on a Keiko rally, screaming for her to vote for her and almost carrying her on his shoulders, damn it! I don’t know which of the two love affairs was more improbable: Mario’s for the Queen of Hearts Isabel Preysler, appearing on the covers of Hola! magazine, or his son Álvaro’s, drooling with love for Keiko Fujimori at a televised meeting.
—Politics is a theme present in several passages of The genius.
Politics is a poison that contaminates, corrupts, and debases the artist. When an artist gets involved in professional politics, he always loses, he almost always regrets it. I don’t want to have political, powerful friends, presidents. I prefer my friends to be artists. Beauty is in art, not in politics. The wisest artists do not get involved in professional politics nor are they careerists or climbers, they do not go around the world cultivating the friendship of politicians and heads of state. I want to say: Borges was not a candidate for president of Argentina, he was too wise to fall into that trap of vanity. García Márquez conspired politically in the shadows, but he was never a presidential candidate and he was offered it a hundred times. If Sabina ran for deputy, she would think that he has gone crazy, that he should not stop singing. If Almodóvar accepted to be Minister of Culture, I would be very sorry because I would be wasting my time and I would stop making his great films. When an artist runs for public office, when he finds himself salivating with desire for political power, when he is more friendly with politicians than with other artists, then he has committed artistic suicide.
—After posting The geniusWhat sensations/impressions do you have of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa?
García Márquez was born a genius. Vargas Llosa became a genius. As Carmen Balcells, who was my agent and my friend, used to say, Mario is the top of the class, but Gabo is the genius. Both are already classics, immortal. But artistic geniuses aren’t always great in their private lives. That’s what my novel is about: how geniuses can do horrible things in their private lives. That is why I wanted Picasso to also appear in the novel.
(Gabriel Ruiz Ortega).
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