For thirty years the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), Nobel Prize for literature 1982, hid a “sacred secret”, jealously guarded with the complicity of those close to him: he was the father of a daughter natural born out of wedlock. The revelation comes from The universal, based in Cartagena de Indias, in northern Colombia, eight years after his death and almost two years after the disappearance of his wife. Married for almost fifty years to Mercedes Bacha (children Rodrigo and Gonzalo were born from their marriage), García Márquez had an affair with a Mexican journalist 33 years his junior, Susana Cato. From this relationship was born a daughter, Indira, now 31, a film producer and screenwriter, who does not bear the surname of her famous father, specifies The universal but that of the birth mother. The author of One hundred years of solitude met Susana Cato for the first time in Cuba. The baby girl was given the name of the Indian Prime Minister who was assassinated in 1984, Indira Gandhi, who the author of Love in the time of cholera he had met in 1983 in New Delhi.
With his lover he edited several screenplays
García Márquez collaborated with Susana Cato on several film scripts, always writes the Colombian newspaper The universal. In the article signed by Gustavo Tatis Guerra, a great expert on García Márquez, he assures that he has received confirmation of the information from the writer’s relatives and that the news has been kept secret for years out of respect for Mercedes Barcha, who died on August 15, 2020. ” Shortly before Gabriel García Marquez died, the voice of a secret daughter reached my ears and during these eight years it disturbed me a lot: so I wanted to check if the information was true “, said the author of the article. Gustavo Tatis Guerra interviewed by a Colombian local radio. In his long article entitled “A Girl: Gabriel García Marquez’s Best Kept Secret”, the author explains that he confirmed “the information” with the writer’s family and one of the best friends. And he specified that he had kept secrecy out of respect for his wife Mercedes: “We waited for her to die to divulge the information.” The existence of this hidden daughter was Garcia Marquez’s “most sacred and intimate secret”.
The intuition of the wife
Gustavo Tatis Guerra did not specify whether his wife knew of Indira’s existence: «It is very likely that Mercedes had an intuition of what had happened between Susana and Gabriel, but until the end of her life she maintained discretion and silence. However, the revelation of Indira’s existence was a family cataclysm. Until the end Garcia Marquez kept an eye on his natural daughter »assures the journalist. In the 1990s, the Nobel Prize leader of magical realism said that “every writer has three lives: one public, one private and one secret”. In her case, “in each of her three lives, women have played a key role,” he commented The universal. Guillermo Angulo, one of Gabo’s best friends, said that although García Márquez did not recognize this daughter, he always looked after her and “gave her a house in a very nice area and a car” in Mexico City.
The mother of the birth daughter
The mother of her natural daughter, Susana Cato, born in 1960 in Mexico City, wrote the screenplay for the film with García Márquez and Eliseo Alberto Diego in 1991. You don’t play with love and with the writer the script of the short film The mirror of two moons. Cato has also written radio programs, short stories and theater. He worked as a reporter and film critic for the magazine Process and interviewed García Márquez in 1996 for the magazine Change. Indira Cato today is a film producer who has won numerous awards for documentary film Take my loves directed by Arturo González Villaseñor, of which she was also the screenwriter. He also directed the short film How great are you, magazo! (2019), about the illusionist and magician Julio Ulises Hijuelos Cervera. He studied dramatic literature and theater at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and also served as a film critic for the site Wide Armchair and participated in the book Cine político en México (1968-2017) “, published by Peter Lang.