The muse and manager who inspired Gabriel García Márquez

In 1965, Gabriel García Márquez shut himself away in his Mexico City home and began work on his debut novel.

For the next 18 months, Mercedes Barcha made sure that her journalist husband wasn’t disturbed by bills or the outside world. When García Márquez finally emerged, Barcha asked, “Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.” She pawned her hair dryer and a blender so they could afford the postage to send the manuscript to García Márquez’s editor in Argentina. One Hundred Years of Solitude, a time-bending tale based on the history of the couple’s native Colombia, would go on to sell nearly 50 million copies and help García Márquez win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982. Being born a Pisces and marrying Barcha, García Márquez said in 1973, were the two most important events in his life. Thanks to them, “I have managed to survive as a writer.”

Born in northern Colombia, Barcha first met García Márquez when she was 9 and he was 13 while on a family vacation in the coastal town of Sucre, said BBC.com. The pair courted for years—the author wrote that he found her beautiful and mysterious, “with an illusionist’s talent for evading questions”—and married in 1958.

Barcha freed García Márquez from the “exigencies of everyday life,” said The New York Times. She took care of money matters, acted as a gatekeeper, and ensured their homes around the world were identically decorated, with the same white furniture and modern art. Many of the female characters who appeared in García Márquez’s stories were inspired by the “sharp-witted” Barcha. “Mercedes permeates all my books,” said the writer, who died in 2014. “There’s traces of her everywhere.”