Also at that conference was the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. During the next two days the three of us made two discoveries about one another.
The first was that each of us had attacked at least one of the others in print. I had dissed Eco’s book. Umberto had criticized Mario for being too right-wing. Mario had criticized me for being too left-wing.
The second discovery was that we all got on like a house on fire.
It was Umberto who suggested we should now call ourselves The Three Musketeers. (This, remember, was the time of the Three Tenors, Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras.) I remember asking, “Why Musketeers? Why not, for example, The Three Stooges?”
“No,” Umberto insisted. “It has to be Musketeers, because first we were enemies and now we are friends.”