Mercedes Barcha in Havana
By Rosa Miriam Elizalde – Aug 22, 2020
Mercedes Barcha died on August 15, in Mexico City, at the age of 87. The pandemic has not allowed for the farewell she deserved, and the obituaries look too much like each other. They are records of the visible; the widow of Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquez; the efficient administrator; the wife, mother and grandmother; the âserene and severeâ queen who honored her Egyptian ancestors; the one who took her appliances to a pawn shop to pay for the mailing of the original of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Itâs not enough. At least not for those who knew her in Havana, where the couple lived intermittently for half a century. Mercedes, the Gaba, the first and last love of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner, was more than a prop in the shadow of the man she married in Barranquilla. Fidel Castro called her âmy best friendâ, something he never told Gabo, although he acknowledged that the affection for the marriage âwas the fruit of a relationship cultivated over many years in which the number of conversations, always pleasing for me, added up to hundredsâ.
If you trace it back to the many interviews Garcia Marquez gave, every time he talks about his friendship with Fidel Castro or about Cuba, he mentions his wife. In 1996, when he spoke with American filmmaker Estela Bravo for the documentary Fidel: The Untold Story, the Colombian Nobel Laureate said that âFidel trusts Mercedes even more than he trusts me,â and he recalls that the leader of the Revolution liked to be treated naturally, without circumlocution, and there was no one to match his wife in that respect.
Once, says GarcĂa MĂĄrquez, âFidel got into Mercedesâ kitchen and tried to correct her (donât cut the onion like that, donât do thatâŠ) She looked at him and said, âLook, Fidel, you may be in charge of your island, but I am in charge of my kitchen. The Cuban leader reacted with a âyou are absolutely rightâ.
In Cuba, the three of them shared a secret code. If the light was on in the house of the Reparto Siboney, in Havana, where the Gaboâs lived, it meant that the family was up and Fidel, in his nightly habits, could arrive and finish the evening. He did so many times. âTalking to GarcĂa MĂĄrquez and Mercedes whenever they came to Cuba â and it was more than once a year â became a recipe against the strong tensions in which, unconsciously but constantly, a Cuban revolutionary leader lived,â Fidel wrote on July 9, 2008, referring to an encounter with the couple. It was the first social lunch called by the former president, after two years of a break due to the serious illness that led him to resign from his official posts.
In that note, he called Mercedes âthe Olympic champion of dataâ, because only she could remember exactly the facts that marked the special relationship of the three of them. The complicity between Gabo and Fidel was mediated over decades by literature, advice on how to use a guayabera, regional conflicts and even a couple of secret letters to Bill Clinton, in addition to creating in Cuba the New Latin American Film Foundation, of which GarcĂa MĂĄrquez was its president.
With the Foundation, the International Film and Television School (EICTV) was born in San Antonio de los Baños, 35 kilometers from Havana. GarcĂa MĂĄrquez gave his memorable screenwriting workshops there, which were called âHow a Story is Toldâ. The Cubans who accompanied these adventures and have left multiple testimonies about them remember Mercedes as the practical woman who landed Garcia Marquezâs excessive dreams, as sharp as her partner and a little more implacable when she put her irony on those who tried to disqualify her husband for his work and affections on the island.
Gabo was almost all the time the great conversationalist and Mercedes the most silent, but together they gathered a singular strength, which can only confer a common life full of meaning and complicities, like this âbrazen and stubborn relationship with Cubaâ.
Casa de las Americas Magazine, on the 20th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, conducted a survey among several writers on the meaning of that event. For GarcĂa MĂĄrquez it was like asking him about an idyll, that is, about Mercedes: âOnly fools dare explain love,â he replied
