‘Let me check I understand…You have breakfast every day with a homeless woman in the park?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why?’
‘For the company.’
After lunch, we went on to the Japanese garden in Palermo, where she asked me to take her picture under the cherry trees. A few brave blossoms were still resisting the June cold, but the branches were mostly bare. We held hands on the curved red bridge, watching orange carp with dead eyes stare up at us from the green water.
‘My boyfriend left me last month after four years.’
Beyond the tranquil boundary of the garden, street vendors were hawking newspapers, hot corn, sandwiches, raincoats.
‘Aren’t you going to say something?’ she said.
‘I guess there are worse things than loneliness.’
On the first sunny morning in weeks, I took a proper breakfast of two hot coffees and half-a-dozen medialunas to the park. Corina was calm again, but ate little as I told her my news.
‘I think I’ve found a job at a public school in the provinces. Sixteen teaching hours a week. No salary, just food and board. It’s perfect.’
She refused my offer of fruit and yoghurt.
‘Do you want to play chess?’
‘No.’ She spat on the ground. ‘It isn’t fair.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘I’ve been looking for a job for three years.’
The cruelty of my announcement hadn’t even occurred to me. I’d expected her to be pleased.
Margarita sent me a text message that afternoon.
‘Changed 2 hotel with heating round corner. Come visit.’
A few other young foreigners were staying there: a scruffy Frenchman who’d been on the road for five years, funding his travel by winning at poker in youth hostels; a dour Danish anthropologist studying the lesbian tango community in Buenos Aires. Margarita demonstrated her mathematical prowess by trouncing us all at cards, even the Frenchman.
‘It must be time for me to go home,’ he said.
At a noisy bar, we drank until I was brave enough to kiss Margarita.
We spent the night in my room, but she told me she was on her period.
‘Anyway, it’s much too cold to make love,’ she said. We held each other for warmth without undressing.
Corina didn’t reappear in the park for three days, so I ate breakfast for both of us. At our previous meeting, we’d written her résumé on the back of a crumpled napkin. Today I’d brought a dozen typed and printed copies she could distribute. But it looked like she wasn’t coming. It was too cold to concentrate on studying Spanish or reading with a dictionary. The wind tore leaves from the treetops. Even under three layers of second-hand clothes, I found myself shivering. I walked a brisk circuit of the park to warm up and noticed for the first time that the statue of the Roman Capitoline Wolf was suckling only one baby. Thieves had stolen Remus.
A message arrived from Margarita.
‘Have met a very special boy and will not b able to c u again. Thanx 4 being a good listener. Send me ur email.’
I erased it instantly. I erased the other dozen or so messages she’d sent me and deleted her number from my phone. My head sank onto the chessboard. Sitting in the amphitheatre, I read over Corina’s résumé: an incomplete high-school diploma, seven years in one job with no reference, three years out of work, no fixed address. Printing copies of it was not going to help; nothing I could do was going to help. I felt as useless as Margarita trying to light the stove. I didn’t even know how to care for myself.
Corina arrived mid-afternoon, later than she’d ever come before. But it was the Corina with bulging eyes and spit dangling from her lips.
‘Take this,’ she said, thrusting a scrap of paper at me. I only had a chance to glance at it before she snatched the manila folder I was holding and flung it to the ground in front of me, spilling the printed copies of her résumé. She struggled to speak between explosive bursts of coughing.
‘¡Hijo de puta! I have cancer. I’m going to die. Why won’t you fuck me before I die?’
‘Corina. I’m going to go now.’
‘¡Hijo de puta! There is a job for you, but there’s no job for me.’
On the bus trip south to San Miguel del Monte, the town on the edge of the pampa where I would be teaching, I kept thinking about Corina and Margarita, the two women I’d met in Buenos Aires. I couldn’t tell if I was the one who was leaving or the one who’d been left. The note Corina had given me seemed to be an extract from an Argentine self-help book. I’ve lost it now. I can only remember one line:
‘Forget past mistakes. Keep moving forward.’
Such Loneliness in That Gold
I have also wondered if most women…are not, by necessity, the great and unacknowledged storytellers of this country.1
– Delia Falconer
In 1976, Jorge Luis Borges dedicated a poem called ‘The Moon’ to María Kodama, a shy, beautiful, Japanese-Argentine woman, 37 years younger than him:
There is such loneliness in that gold.
The moon of the nights is not the moon
Whom the first Adam saw. The long centuries
Of human vigil have filled her
With ancient lament. Look at her. She is your mirror.2
Their story is well known in Argentina. They met in 1953 in a bookstore on the calle Florida in downtown Buenos Aires.
‘Excuse me. I heard you give a lecture when I was a little girl.’
‘Ah, did you? And now you’re all grown up?’
‘No, I’m in high school. In my fourth year.’3
She was 16 and he was 54 – already famous in Argentina, but not yet abroad. He was about to lose what was left of his sight. ‘He only saw light and shadow. But from my voice he would have known I was very young.’4 Borges invited Kodama to join his Saturday morning Anglo-Saxon study group at the National Library, where he was director.
‘Old English? Like Shakespeare?’
‘No, much older. Tenth century.’
‘It must be very difficult.’
‘Yes, but I don’t know it either. I am proposing that we study it together.’5
They married in 1986, two months before he died.
I met María Kodama at the Persicco, a cafe in the upscale Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Recoleta, on a grey Sunday morning in May 2016. Outside, the Avenida Corrientes was slick from the previous night’s storm, strewn with yellow and orange leaves. A homeless man playing chess at the table by the entrance was shouting at his invisible opponent. As Kodama pushed through the glass doors, looking for me, I felt a surge of nervousness. We’d arranged to meet earlier in the day but had rescheduled because of a mix-up about the location. She could be prickly, my Argentine friends had warned. ‘You’re meeting the FIFA of Argentine literature,’ one young Buenos Aires poet said. ‘Watch out she doesn’t sue you.’
She was a slender woman, a little shorter than I expected. Dressed smartly but simply in a cream-coloured jacket and grey scarf, she wore a silver bangle on her right wrist, and large, square rings on the first and third fingers of her left hand. Though the Argentine press delight in printing unflattering photographs of her, Kodama never wears makeup; entering her eighties she isn’t about to change. As in nearly all the pictures I’d seen, she wore light colours – a carefully considered choice, I suspect, from someone well aware the word ‘widow’ will appear prominently beneath every image. She smiled as I rose to greet her. When she kissed my cheek, I forgot, in my relief, to call her señora: ‘María, perdón. I’m sorry for the confusion. I’m an academic not a journalist.’
‘No te preocupes. It’s better you’re not a journalist.’
The Persicco is a noisy, modern place with white and yellow checked tiles and shiny brass fixtures. Some of the other customers stared at her, whispering among themselves, as we sat down together. Kodama gave me the best part of three hours of her time, describing her life with Borges and discussing his work.
Her generosity and warmth were at odds with everything I’d ever read or heard about her.
Relatively little is known about María Kodama’s early life. Her father, Yosaburo Kodama, was born in Japan in 1905, and was raised by his grandmother, his only relative. When she died, he left his homeland for good. Kodama doesn’t know the exact year of his departure or his reasons for emigrating. He was one of thousands of young Japanese who left for the Americas between the 1868 Meiji Restoration and the Second World War. Better economic prospects and avoiding conscription into the imperial military were common motives. As restrictions on Asian immigration were introduced in the north, increasing numbers settled in Latin America.
Yosaburo planned to go to the USA, with a stopover in Argentina to visit a friend of a friend. But in Buenos Aires, he met and fell in love with a 17-year-old Argentine-German pianist named María Antonia Schweizer. Kodama says María saw Yosaburo as ‘an exotic prince from faraway lands’. He was nine years older than her. Though he soon found work with a pharmaceutical company in Buenos Aires, the marriage was unhappy, and the couple separated when their daughter was only three years old. María Kodama won’t talk about her brother, Jorge: ‘Let’s just say I’m an only child.’6
Born on 10 March 1937, Kodama grew into a shy, solitary girl, with few friends of her own age, and certainly no boyfriends. She lived with her staunchly Catholic mother and grandmother but spent weekends with her Japanese father: ‘I was brought up between two cultures. My grandmother was all about God, the Fatherland, and the family home; my father was a Shintoist. One would say white and the other would say black…I had to choose or I would have gone mad.’7
Kodama chose Japan. Until she met Borges, Yosaburo Kodama was the most important person in her life. Kodama remembers him teaching her the basics of the Japanese language and telling her stories of the country’s history and culture. He also contributed to her aesthetic education: ‘My father liked art very much. From a very young age, he gave me books of paintings and took me to exhibitions.’8 On one of their weekend excursions she asked him to define beauty. The next week, by way of an answer, he gave her an art book containing an image of a sculpture in the Louvre, the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
‘But it doesn’t have a head.’
‘Who told you that beauty is about the head? Look at the folds of the tunic. They’re being blown by the wind off the sea. To capture the sea breeze for eternity, that’s beauty.’9 Kodama often says she was drawn to Borges because his ethical and aesthetic outlook reminded her of her father. ‘Borges always joked that my father had educated me for him, because thanks to all that training in my younger days, I could later describe for him the reality he could no longer see.’10 The two men met on several occasions but were not close.
Kodama has told the story of her first encounter with Borges’s writing in dozens of interviews and public speeches. When she was five years old her private English tutor read her Borges’s ‘Two English Poems’, which he dedicated to Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich, one of many respectable Buenos Aires society ladies he unsuccessfully courted in the 1930s. She repeated this favourite anecdote to me: ‘In these poems, which are in English because it was the language he spoke with that señora, he lists all the things he can offer her, and they are the opposite of what one might expect. He offers her his solitude, his sadness, his failure and ‘the hunger of my heart’. When she [the tutor] translated this for me, I asked her, ‘What is hunger of the heart?’ because obviously for a five-year-old child, hunger is only the need to eat. She told me I would understand when I grew up.’
María Kodama has never remarried and has never had children. She has dedicated her life to promoting Borges’s work through the foundation she runs in his name. I thought that by pushing her to talk a little less about him, and a little more about herself, I might steer her away from the official narrative. But I found her reluctant to emerge from his shadow.
‘Can you describe an ordinary week in your life?’
‘I travel a good deal to talk about Borges’s work overseas. When I am at home in Buenos Aires, I spend a lot of time at home reading. Many people ask me to comment on theses or academic studies about Borges.’
‘But for fun?’
‘I don’t have a television set or an email account. I go to a live show nearly every night: music, theatre or dance. Last night I saw the Shen Yun dance troupe from China. They are very interested in Borges in China nowadays. The complete works have been translated into Mandarin.’
Since her answers kept spiralling back to Borges, I tried another angle. I knew she had studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires and had noticed she always made a point of being introduced in public as a writer, translator and teacher, though most people know her as Borges’s wife. So, I asked her what she had written and whether any of her work had been published. She laughed: ‘I have never published anything because I am always writing prologues for other people’s books. I write for pleasure. Borges adored the short stories I used to write and wanted me to publish them. He wanted to write the prologue, but I never let him do that.’11
Kodama didn’t even mention her forthcoming book, which was published a few months after we spoke. Homenaje a Borges is a collection of 20 serious-minded lectures about Borges’s work that Kodama has delivered at various universities around the world since his death. Its one unguarded moment is the dedication: ‘To Borges, my love for ever and ever and a day.’12 The only piece of creative writing I managed to find published in her name was a brief memoir that appeared in the New York Times in 2011, in which she described the view from her apartment. Her window looks onto Borges’s old library, a building full of ‘books once touched by his hands’.13
By the late 1960s, the bond between Borges and Kodama had evolved beyond friendship. The biographies are unanimous that it lacked any physical dimension; I was too polite to ask. Aside from their regular language studies, they took to meeting at the patisserie La Fragata, and at his home, where she would assist him with translations, transcribe new work and read aloud for him from his favourite books. In those years, Kodama studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires, where Borges was a professor, and she earned a living teaching Spanish to Japanese businessmen. She had worked hard to establish financial independence from her family, who disapproved of the professor’s frequent telephone calls and gifts of books. It was Borges, blind and unmarried in his sixties, who continued to live with his mother. Under the watchful eye of Leonor Acevedo de Borges, the professor and his protégé exercised an almost Victorian level of propriety in the decade of free love. Kodama dressed modestly in white blouses and plaid skirts, and the two always addressed each other with the formal ‘usted’ in place of the familiar ‘tu’.
‘She liked me, and we respected each other,’ Kodama says of Doña Leonor.14 For most of Borges’s adult life, the writer’s mother acted as his carer, literary secretary and travelling companion. As Doña Leonor’s health declined and her son’s fame increased, the bachelor sought a wife. Between 1967 and 1970, during Borges’s short-lived, unhappy first marriage to Elsa Astete Millán – a widow, and an old flame from the 1940s – Kodama was apparently the only woman allowed to visit him at home. She was considered too young to be a threat.
Around 1970, as Borges and Astete Millán were separating, Kodama ceased being his student, assistant and companion and became his confidant, carer, collaborator and muse. The writer moved back in with his aging mother, now bedbound and unable to speak, for the last three years of her life. According to the official version of the story, Doña Leonor one day brought Kodama’s and Borges’s hands together over her body.15
I was in Argentina to attend a two-week seminar at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and to visit the Buenos Aires International Book Fair. During a panel at the latter, I heard Roberto Alifano and Alejandro Vaccaro, Borges’s old acquaintances from the Argentine Society of Authors, give their view of Kodama: ‘María Kodama es alguien qu
e vive de viuda,’ said Alifano. ‘María Kodama is someone who earns a living as a widow.’16
Kodama has had long battles with both these men in the Argentine courts and the media. ‘Alifano is a rat,’ Kodama told me across the table. But she reserved her strongest criticism for her husband’s best friend, the writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, who spent much of the 1990s working on a 1600-page compilation of his diary entries about Borges from across their 40-year friendship – to be published only after both men were dead. The book infuriated María Kodama when it finally appeared in 2006. ‘María was his love,’ Bioy Casares admits, but he expresses doubts that Borges’s feelings were reciprocated. He also says the writer ‘lived in fear of making her angry’.17 Kodama is depicted as a jealous, dominating figure who isolated Borges from his old friends and may even have pressured him to remain in Europe at the end of his life rather than return home.
Speaking to me, her anger focused on the book’s alleged inaccuracy and its betrayal of trust: ‘I ask you: if a man writes a book in which he invents and distorts your words or puts words in your mouth he doesn’t have the courage to say, and he publishes it after you’ve both died (which is already an act of cowardice, because he doesn’t want to take responsibility), if the two of you met in the next world, would you still think that man was your friend?’
I asked her to respond to a few other influential names linked with Borges, starting with the Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo, a friend in their university days, who has suggested in recent years that Borges’s texts will never be properly edited while Kodama is alive: ‘That is not an academic judgement, but a personal one that affects my work. I brought a lawsuit against her because we are academic colleagues, and she ought to know the damage that can be caused by unfounded words about someone.’
When I asked her view of leading US Borges scholar Daniel Balderston, she zeroed in on the small fraction of his work that deals with queer themes in Borges’s writing. ‘Borges was not a homosexual.’ Before I could mention any more names, she leaned confidentially across the table, lifting her fringe to show me her slightly swollen and discoloured right eyebrow. ‘I keep my hair long to hide it.’ Without naming the condition, she told me she has been living with chronic pain for some years, treating it with strong medication. As far as I know she hasn’t discussed her ill health publicly. But she brought it up openly with me, knowing I was going to write about our meeting. Kodama insisted her health has not affected her work as director of the Borges Foundation, but admitted it has affected her sleep and her moods. She has said and done some things she regretted and has lost many friends. About the court cases, however, she was unrepentant: ‘I have been treated like the wicked witch for defending my husband’s legacy…I gave Borges my word that I would take care of his work.’ Her soft voice became steely: ‘I have been through thirty years of hell. I have been defamed.’
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Page 15