(Bogota) The Colombian writer and Nobel Prize for Literature Gabriel Garcia Marquez had a daughter hidden outside marriage, a secret jealously guarded by his relatives, but revealed Monday, eight years after his death, in a Colombian press article.
Posted at 3:27 p.m.
Married for nearly fifty years to Mercedes Bacha, Garcia Marquez had an extramarital relationship with a Mexican journalist, 33 years his junior, Susana Cato, according to an article in the daily. Universal, based in Cartagena.
From this affair was born a daughter, Indira, now 31 years old and a film producer, who does not bear the name of her famous father, details the article.
The author of A hundred years of loneliness met Susana Cato in Cuba. She interviewed him once for a Colombian publication, and they wrote screenplays together.
“Shortly before the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the rumor reached my ears, and throughout these eight years, it disturbed me, I wanted to check if the information was true,” said on a local radio the author of the article, Gustavo Tatis.
In his long paper entitled “A girl: the best kept secret of Gabriel Garcia Marquez”, Mr. Tatis explains that he confirmed “the information” with the biographer, family members and one of the best friends of the writer.
But he says he kept it confidential out of respect for his wife Mercedes. “We waited until she died to disclose the information.” The existence of this hidden girl was “the most sacred and intimate secret” of Garcia Marquez.
Leader of “magical realism”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez died on April 17, 2014 at the age of 87 in Mexico City where he lived part of his life. His wife died at the same age on August 15, 2020.
Article ofUniversal does not specify whether Mercedes knew of Indira’s existence.
“It is very likely that Mercedes had an intuition of what happened between Susana and Garcia Marquez, but until the end of her life she maintained discretion and silence. However, the revelation of Indira’s existence was a family cataclysm,” says the author.
“Until the end, Garcia Marquez kept an eye on” his daughter, assures Mr. Tatis.
In the 1990s, the 1982 Nobel laureate said that “every writer has three lives: a public, a private and a secret one”.
In his case, “in each of his three lives, women played a key role,” commented the journalist, author of these revelations.
Garcia Marquez and his wife had two sons, Gonzalo and Rodrigo, who published the book last year Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, dedicated to the last days of the monument of contemporary literature.