“Getting into someone's closet is something so intimate,” actress Emilia García Elizondo, granddaughter of Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez and his wife Mercedes Barcha, told EL PAÍS, after two and a half months of dusting off, exploring , and classify your grandparents' closet. García Elizondo speaks Wednesday morning in the internal garden of the house where 'Los Gabos' lived for decades in the Jardines del Pedregal neighborhood of Mexico City. On a terrace there, the granddaughter has put up for sale more than 400 pieces of the couple – coats, dresses, bags, shoes, boots, ties or scarves. “The Gabos left a lot of clothes, and we didn't know what to do with them,” he admits.
The Gabos house was left without its two guests last year, after Mercedes Barcha died in August -García Márquez died in 2014-, and since then the family has been working to transform it into a new cultural space. It is not a museum but a space dedicated to art called the 'Gabriel García Márquez House of Literature'. The first event open to the public to get to know the iconic house of Gabo and Mercedes is this sale of their closet in Mexico – a semi-public event because to attend you must make an appointment through the Instagram account in the coming days. But on Wednesday morning some close friends of the couple were invited to start looking at what the García Márquez closet has.
The granddaughter, in charge of the initiative, says that they selected for sale what was in good condition or what they considered iconic. “The thing that reminds me of Gabo the most, definitely, are the tweed jackets,” she says. There are about thirty of those emblematic coats that Gabo wore on cold mornings in Bogotá or rainy afternoons in Mexico City for sale. One of the most valuable, with black and white stripes, keeps inside a black stain that was left when one of the Nobel pens exploded in his pocket. “It also happened to us that we would open a sack and find a pen from him to sign his books,” said the granddaughter, showing the sharpie marker left abandoned by the Nobel Prize winner in a coat.
There was something from Calvin Klein, Armani or Hugo Boss in Gabriel García Márquez's closet. But his, rather, were the tailors. “A lot of what is in the closet are things sent to do. Some shirts were ordered to be made that had long pockets for glasses or pens,” says the granddaughter. In Gabo's huge library there is a table where some of these shirts are displayed with the names of the tailors he liked to frequent. 'Raúl González: Camisario', say several of these. 'La Camisería' say others without naming the name of the tailor. "He also had a [tailor] named José Mejía, who we believe is Colombian, and of his shirts he has some made in France, others in Colombia, others in Italy," adds García Elizondo. The granddaughter decided not to put up for sale a custom-made coat for her grandfather by the tailor Emilio Velarde Rodríguez in which the Nobel Prize winner signed his name in blue ink on an internally woven patch, in addition to putting the date he acquired it, March 30, 1983, as if marking a book. “I can't do this one,” says her granddaughter as she affectionately looks at the coat on display in the house.
García Márquez was not a fashion icon but he was not someone who looked down on it. When it was announced that she had won the Nobel Prize in 1982, one of the first things she said publicly was that she hoped to go in an iconic costume from her land. "I hope to be there in a guayabera," he said then. “The obligatory dress is the tailcoat, but they accept that the Hindus go in their national dress. I am willing to show that the guayabera is the national costume of the Caribbean and that I have the right to dress like that. As long as I don't wear a tailcoat, I am able to endure the cold”. Finally, he went with a liquilique, the traditional dress of the Llanos, the plains that unite Colombia and Venezuela, and a tribute to his grandfather (a colonel who was much closer to the Nobel Prize than his father). "His war clothes and white civilian colonel linens resembled him as if he were still alive inside them," Gabo wrote of his grandfather's clothing in Vivir Para Contarla.
The famous white linen suit from 1982 isn't for sale in Mexico City: it's a well-kept gem at the Museo Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. Nor are his iconic ruanas for sale – like virgin wool ponchos – that stayed in his house in Colombia. But it is in Mexico, instead, what Mercedes Barcha wore to the Nobel ceremony: a beautiful emerald green dress with black leaves of thick fabric falling to her feet. That one, however, is not for sale either. It is only on display alongside dozens of dresses that Mercedes kept for decades.
“From the beginning it was possible to see all the eras that Mercedes went through,” says her granddaughter, referring to the dresses and the change in tonality she noticed in them. "She goes from her most colorful dresses to her most sober jackets at the end [of her life]." Mercedes, in the exposed closet, kept dozens of long indigenous dresses that she collected in different parts of Mexico, as well as several typical backpacks of the Wayúu peoples in Colombia. Next to these, she also kept several Louis Vuitton bags and dresses from an Italian fashion house: Marina Rinaldi. "Mercedes I think he had a great obsession with Marina Rinaldi," says the granddaughter. A dozen of them are on display at the sale, from light to dark colors, in addition to the silk stockings that she used and cataloged in her closet. 'Dior 1988 brilliants: brown-black', she wrote on the box of one of these. Thirty-three years worth of Dior tights that Mercedes never opened and are now on sale to lovers of literary fashion.
Proceeds from stockings, coats and dresses will not go to the Gabriel García Márquez House of Literature but to the FISANIM Foundation, directed by Mexican actress Ofelia Medina and which focuses on combating malnutrition among indigenous children in states like Chiapas and Warrior. "I was about 17 years old when I met Gabo," says Medina to EL PAÍS, one of the special guests this opening Wednesday. “He wrote about 1967 the first plot of my first movie, Patsy, My Love,” and around that time he finished One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was one of the first people to read the novel.” Medina remained close to the family and one day this year she received a call from her granddaughter telling her about the donation that would come from selling the coats with Gabo's ink or her shirts marked by different tailors. “And for me it was like yellow butterflies were fluttering everywhere,” he says. There are not many yellow butterflies in the García Márquez closet, but they did remain there, among their coats, the spots of those feathers that half a century ago the Nobel Prize winner used to draw them.
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