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 feud of the century as two future Nobel laureates came to blows.
It was February 12, 1976, and Poniatowska wound up seated next to Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his wife Mercedes to watch 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 screening.
"I was sitting next to Gabriel Garcia Marquez by chance," Poniatowska, 92, told AFP on Monday, the day after Vargas Llosa's death.
Smiling, Garcia Marquez went to greet his fellow writer, "but Vargas Llosa punched him in the face," Poniatowska said of the incident that made headlines and was immortalised in a pair of black and white photographs.
As a shocked Garcia Marquez sank to the floor bleeding, Poniatowska famously rushed to fetch a steak for his eye.
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 is 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.
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, photojournalist Rodrigo Moya finally published his pictures of the Colombian novelist's shiner from the fight.
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
