…he celebrates by going for a walk with old pal Fidel Castro, while the rest of the world finally gets the story behind his feud with former friend Mario Vargas Llosa.
From The Independent story:
“..But Mario strayed. He fell in love with a beautiful Swedish air stewardess whom he met while travelling. He left his wife and moved to Stockholm.
Distraught, his wife Patricia went to see her husband’s best friend, Gabriel. After discussing the matter with his wife, Mercedes, he advised Patricia to divorce Mario. And then he consoled her. No one else quite knows what form this consolation took…”
Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez met a few months later, which was when Llosa socked Gabo:
“As the cinema house-lights rose, Garcia Marquez saw Vargas Llosa a few rows behind. He moved to embrace his old friend, as is the Latin American way. But as he neared, he received a tremendous blow to the left eye.
“How you dare to want to embrace to me – after what you did to Patricia in Barcelona,” the white-faced Peruvian said.”
And not entirely unrelated: a primatologist speculates that humans gossip as a way of replacing the primate grooming function. In other words, if we weren’t gossiping, we’d be picking lice out of each other’s hair (an excellent definition of gossip, btw).
nilanjana s roy 
Leave a Reply