• Literature Maria Kodama, widow and universal heiress of Jorge Luis Borges, dies
  • Interview María Kodama: "Borges was jealous, I wanted me to leave my job"

To the surprise of the respectable, Jorge Luis Borges and María Kodama were married on April 26, 1986 in Geneva (Switzerland). They did it by proxy before the Paraguayan Justice and Borges declared her his universal heir, in a fact not without controversy, since her detractors accused her of having forced him to do so. Malice is like that. He was 87. She, 48. He always treated her about you.

Months later the Argentine writer died in the city he designated as one of his homelands. It was not the first marriage of the author of The Aleph. Borges had married in September 1967, at age 68, to Elsa Astete Milán. That lasted 36 months, by unilateral decision of the writer. So it was Kodama, in truth, who stayed closest and longer to Borges, who read more in his ear. Who knew him best. Who knew well of the dominant condition of the mother of the genius, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, who kept Borges in her womb until she left this dog world at the turn of the century; And it was to whom he most dictated when blindness went from metaphor to reality.

Maria Kodama was born in Buenos Aires. Daughter of María Antonia Schweizer, of Swiss-German, English and Spanish descent, and the Japanese chemist Yosaburo Kodama. The birth certificate marks the 37th year of the last century. The marriage certificate houses a coquetry in this sense: it establishes its first vagido in 41. The first time they saw each other (although Borges was already gaining gloom in his eyes) was in 1953, in a bookstore on Florida Street in Buenos Aires. She was 16, he was 54. She told him that she was going to study literature and he invited her to study Old English together.

Some time later Kodama graduated in literature and enrolled in a course taught by the writer. And since then they stayed together for everything, also in some exploits of an expeditionary nature. They studied Icelandic, traveled halfway around the world, visited the most remote zoos, were portrayed with tigers. Borges had left behind his dark condition as librarian, and the darkest humiliation of being condemned to act as inspector of birds in markets by the work and grace of Perón. When he took flight with his young companion he already had an odd god base.

María Kodama was the pole to fully live the designs of that destiny crossed between a vast culture, a mythical man's end and that penultimate certainty that tormented the poet Borges, and that she quoted in these verses: "I have committed the worst of sins / that a man can commit. I haven't been/happy." Since the death of the writer, Kodama acted as a sentinel alert of any matter that occurred linked to her husband. He surrounded himself with lawyers, an unwavering clan of friends. There was no Borgian paper that I did not know, that I did not control. He became the demon of unscrupulous editors. And also in the guillotine of the most patient. It was proposed that Borges should not be forgotten. And he succeeded. Not only because the readers are loyal to this man, but because she has handled the work as if there was never a goal.

He shielded the legacy of the author of Ficciones through the foundation he created in 1988, where part of the library, manuscripts and personal artifacts of the author of 'Funes, el memorioso' are exhibited. "People tell me my biggest job is to make people feel like they're alive and that's been my job for 30 years. That is, it is to give your life for something, and you give your life only for something you love madly; If not, you don't. Because I love him madly, otherwise I wouldn't," she explained.

Together with Borges he translated some works such as Atlas and Breve antología anglosajona. He wrote a book of short stories entitled, explicitly, Stories. And in 2016 his Homage to Borges, where he says: "Our decanted relationship went through time through different facets until culminating in the love that inhabited us (...) That love of which he left traces throughout his books without telling me, until he revealed it to me."

Almost every year he went around the world half to test how the fervor for Borges was going. And if she detected a drop in the pulses in admiration and rising value in her husband's publishing bag, she invented some strategy to place him back at the top of attention, accumulating enemies along the way and showing the occasional adversary head on a pike.

Among his many diatribes, opposing the creation of a Borges Museum in Buenos Aires is one of the best battled. On December 4, 2019, he officially rejected the proposal of the then president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández. The museum would have, among other merchandise, a set of manuscripts donated by the businessman Alejandro Roemmers. Kodama maintained that some of that material had been stolen from the writer's house by a maid and put the cauldron of controversy back on the fire.

He was clear about the role of executor, as he also maintained until the end of Borges' life a delicate attitude of bodyguard who never raised his fist or his voice, but knew how to keep everyone who approached at bay. "The best teaching that Borges has left me is to enjoy life, that life is wonderful. We traveled a lot, studied many languages... Everything was a lot of fun, we had a great time. Life was a game with him," he said. Cancer killed first the brilliant writer and now her. A breast cancer in your case. A disease that, like Borges, had confessed to very few, perhaps to almost no one, because when the disease is not announced it does not require responding to compliments, nor enduring premature compassions.

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