Ashes of “La Gaba” rest next to those of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez

Ricardo Maldonado Rozo Cartagena (Colombia), 25 Mar The ashes of Mercedes Barcha, who died on August 15, 2020 in Mexico City, will rest from this Friday in Cartagena de Indias next to those of her husband, the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, Gabriel García Márquez. The urn with the ashes of “La Gaba”, as her closest friends told Barcha, had not been transferred to Colombia to be buried with those of the award-winning writer, to whom she was married for 56 years, due to restrictions imposed by the covid-19 pandemic. García Márquez also died in Mexico City, on April 17, 2014, and his ashes were deposited on May 23, 2016 in a memorial built in his honor in the Cloister of La Merced, of the University of Cartagena, the city where he lived as a young man, where he began in the profession of journalism and which was the source of inspiration for his work. The ceremony for the final disposal of Barcha's ashes in the cloister will be “a private event, not a small one, because they had a very big world of friends,” explained Rodrigo García Barcha, the eldest of his children. “Friends come from Mexico, from Bogotá, from the United States, from Spain,” García Barcha said during a meeting with journalists in Barranquilla where he is the central guest of the 16th International Festival of the Arts. THE FAREWELL García Barcha, who has dedicated his life to cinema and who came to present his film “The Last Days in the Desert” (2015), said that at the ceremony they will “say a few words, say goodbye to 'La Gaba', for now and place the ashes next to those of Gabo”. The memorial, which contains the ashes of the Colombian Nobel Prize and from today also those of his wife, includes a bust of the writer that was sculpted by the British artist Katie Murray and installed on a floating platform built in the central courtyard of the Cloister of La Merced, a Spanish construction from the times of the Colony. García Márquez met Mercedes in 1941, when she was nine and he was 13, in Sucre, a small town nestled between swamps and rivers in the homonymous department of Sucre, in northern Colombia, which was also the inspiration and setting for some of the writer's novels. The couple married in 1958 and two years later they settled in Mexico City where García Márquez wrote “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” whose publication would not have been possible without Mercedes Barcha, who pawned everything she could from home to raise the money needed to send the work to the Buenos Aires publishing house, Gabo said. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE ON NETFLIX In his participation in the Carnival of the Arts in Barranquilla, García Barcha also referred to the Netflix adaptation of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” of which he said is going very well with the Puerto Rican-American screenwriter José Rivera. “I have read some of the scripts and adapted them very well,” he said, praising Rivera's work. García Barcha added: “It's an ambitious project, but I think it was inevitable that sooner or later someone would want to try it” and explained that Netflix was given “certain good conditions” before approving the novel being brought to the screen. He explained that among the conditions was that the series “would last as long as it had to last, that it was filmed in Colombia and that it would be filmed in Spanish.” “So I think (production) was undertaken under good auspices,” he said. Finally, he said that he hopes that “it will work, but since every literary work brought to the cinema will have fans and detractors, it is impossible that that will not happen”. CHIEF ric/joc/rrt (photo)