newyork times

newyorktimes
Mercedes Barcha, Gabriel García Márquez’s Wife and Muse, Dies at 87

For nearly 60 years, she was the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s companion and inspiration, his sharp-witted foil and his chief of staff.
Mercedes Barcha, the widow, muse and gatekeeper of the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who played a crucial role in the publication of his breakthrough novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” died on Aug. 15 at her home in Mexico City. She was 87.

Her death was confirmed by her son Rodrigo García, who said she had suffered from respiratory problems for many years.

Mercedes and Gabo, as the couple were known, were living in Mexico City in 1965 when García Márquez began work on “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the hypnotic, time-bending tale of the mythical village of Macondo, based on the area of Colombia where they had both grown up.

For more than a decade, García Márquez had been eking out a living as a journalist — a passionate leftist, he spent a year in the New York office of Prensa Latina, the Cuban press agency — while banging out short stories and novellas. For 18 months, he had holed up in his office in their home while Ms. Barcha kept the landlord, and the world, at bay. When he emerged in late 1966, he later recalled, she asked: “Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.”