Muse whose purse-keeping skills made One Hundred Years of Solitude possible
Before Gabriel Garcia Marquez sat down to write One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1965, he quit his job editing two magazines and assured his wife, Mercedes Barcha, he would be finished in a few months. In fact, it took him a year and a half to complete his masterpiece and by then the money he had set aside beforehand had long dried up.
So while Garcia Marquez sat in his smokefilled office conjuring a magical world of ghosts and glass cities, it fell to Barcha to deal with the real one. She arranged credit from the butcher and baker and dealt with the landlord, telling him: ‘‘Look, we’re not going to pay you these last three months, nor the next six.’’ When things got really tight she pawned their possessions, including the fridge, television and her jewellery.
When Garcia Marquez finally emerged with his manuscript, they headed to the post office in Mexico City where the clerk told them it would cost 82 pesos to mail it to the publisher in Buenos Aires. When Barcha rummaged in her purse she found they had only 50 pesos left. Garcia Marquez asked the clerk to split the package in two, posted the first portion and Barcha went off to pawn the last of their things.
As they left, she said to her husband: ‘‘Hey Gabo, all we need now is for this book to be a piece of s....’’ Since then it has been translated into 46 languages and sold more than 50 million copies worldwide.
Garcia Marquez repeatedly emphasised his reliance on his wife and her importance to his writing. ‘‘Without Mercedes, I would not have written the book,’’ he told an interviewer. ‘‘She took charge of the situation . . . When the money ran out, she didn’t tell me anything. I don’t know how she managed.’’
Mercedes Barcha Pardo, who has died aged 87 after a long illness, was born in Magangue, Colombia, the eldest of seven children. Her mother was a housewife and her father, a pharmacist, was descended from Egyptian immigrants. She recalled how her grandfather ‘‘used to bounce me on his knee and sing to me in Arabic’’. Her husband later referenced this heritage in One Hundred Years of Solitude, where the young Barcha makes a cameo as a pharmacist’s daughter who has ‘‘the stealthy beauty of a serpent of the Nile’’.
She first met Garcia Marquez when living in Sucre when she was 9 and he was 14. He later said that he knew immediately that he would marry her, and he would spend hours at the pharmacy making idle conversation with her father so he could catch glimpses of her. When friends teased Barcha about her admirer, she replied: ‘‘No, he’s got a crush on my dad, it’s him he talks to all the time. He doesn’t even say good evening to me.’’ The pair parted when Barcha was sent to study at a Catholic convent and Garcia Marquez found work as a journalist elsewhere in Colombia and then in Europe. However, he kept up his courtship by writing her hundreds of letters. When his newspaper folded, leaving him destitute in Paris, the only things he had in his shabby hotel room were his typewriter and her photograph.
They eventually married in 1958, when Barcha was 25. She told Gerald Martin, her husband’s biographer, that one day Garcia Marquez ‘‘just turned up’’ at her house. On her wedding day she wore an electric blue dress and arrived spectacularly late, just in case the groom did not show up. The reception was held at her father’s pharmacy.
Their marriage meant Barcha could fulfil her ambition to travel. The couple spent time living in Venezuela, the United States and Mexico while Garcia Marquez made a meagre living as a journalist and wrote unsuccessful short stories and novellas in his spare time. During a stint he spent in advertising, Barcha helped him to devise catchy product slogans that he could sell.
Though originally shy around her husband’s intellectual friends, she quickly grew into herself and was unfazed as her social circle grew. Fidel Castro’s Cuba was a regular stop. ‘‘Fidel trusts Mercedes even more than he trusts me,’’ Garcia Marquez told a journalist from The New Yorker. ‘‘She is the only person I know who can scold him.’’
Garcia Marquez always said his wife was the most interesting person he had ever met. Both were bon vivants who enjoyed long lunches that typically started with an aperitif. His drink was champagne; she would have a tequila. They had two sons together.
As her husband’s star rose, Barcha continued to manage the family finances. Garcia Marquez, who died in 2014, joked that ‘‘she gives me pocket money for sweets, like she does with the boys’’.
Friends saw her pragmatism reflected in his fictional women, many of whom are steady, dependable types whose men court disaster by pursuing hare-brained schemes. It was Barcha who reminded her husband of his Nobel prize money, which had been sitting forgotten in a bank account for 16 years.
Her husband saw this role as her vocation. ‘‘Mercedes is doing a job, a very important job,’’ he said. ‘‘This world we both have is a world that we have created together. And we have divided the work. When one of us is not doing our job well, we both fail.’’ – The Times
On her wedding day she wore an electric blue dress and arrived spectacularly late, just in case the groom did not show up.