Geneve Mexico City Hotel’s Mario Vargas Llosa in Mexico City

Mario Vargas Llosa

On February 12, 1976, a day like any other; Mario Vargas Llosa left his key on the counter of the Hotel Geneve without knowing what would happen, or if he knew, perhaps he had premeditated it. It came already preceded by his literary successes: The City and the Dogs, The Puppies, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral. He was in Mexico to see, with a group of friends in a private room of the National Chamber of the Cinematographic Industry, located in Oaxaca and Monterrey, the film directed by Alvaro Covacevich that he wrote: The Odyssey of the Andes. It was the story of the survivors of a team of young people who maintained their lives in desperate conditions in the heights of the Andes, which in Mexico had already been made into a film by René Cardona.


Vargas Llosa was giving an interview for the newspaper Excélsior, when the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez appeared. "Feline and furious, Vargas Llosa approached Gabriel who was waiting with open arms. Not a word, not a sound, not a nothing. Only the accurate right hand. Gabo went backwards with his hands on his face and his eyes towards the lamps".


According to witnesses, the incident was due to the fact that Gabo decided to intervene to settle the Vargas Llosa couple's marital disputes when they were living in Paris.

In the evening of that February 12, Vargas Llosa may have had to have a drink in the bar of the Hotel Geneve before he could reconcile with himself and sleep soundly in his room.