Requiem with Yellow Butterflies

by James Halford

  In 1975, journalists photographed Borges weeping at his mother’s funeral. His sonnet ‘Remorse’, written two days later and published in the national newspaper, La Nación, remains perhaps his most quoted work in Argentina:

  I have committed the worst sin of all

  That a man can commit. I have not been

  Happy…

  My parents bred and bore me for a higher

  Faith in the human game…

  I let them down. I wasn’t happy.18

  He would later say to Kodama: ‘Please don’t write anything two days after I die because it is bound to be sentimental and weepy and it will pursue you all your life.’19

  María Kodama regularly points out that while Borges’s complete works from 1923 to 1975 were dedicated to Doña Leonor – ‘mother, my very voice. Here we are the two of us, talking’20 – the texts of his final years were written for her. From around 1973, she began to accompany him abroad on his lecture tours. Invitations from foreign universities, governments and publishers flowed throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Borges’s lectures – delivered in a hesitant, stuttering, oracular style – became a significant new strand of his creative output after he lost his sight in 1955. With his blindness he found it impossible to write tightly plotted and densely allusive narratives like those found in the collections Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949). Increasingly, he focused on poetry, short prose and public lectures.

  Kodama and Borges’s journeys together through the Americas, Western Europe, Egypt, Turkey, Iceland and Japan are documented in Atlas (1984), a travel book pairing Borges’s short texts with Kodama’s photographs. In 2016, the Borges Foundation put together a travelling exhibition of these photos to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Borges’s death: the couple placing incense at a Shinto shrine; in sombreros at the base of a Mayan pyramid; in the basket of a hot air balloon about to soar over the Napa Valley vineyards. During their travels, Kodama became his eyes. She discovered he had an enormous visual memory with very clear and detailed recollections of artworks he had seen in European museums as a teenager, and she took to describing the places they visited for his benefit. ‘He would always remember a poem related to every place. It was a magical, marvellous relationship.’21

  In other ways, they were an unusual couple. The two never cohabited and always slept in separate hotel rooms when travelling. In the evenings, she would fold his clothes for the next day and leave them on the end of the bed. Kodama has told journalists that Borges pestered her to marry him throughout the 1970s, but she always refused, citing the trauma of her parents’ separation. She was fearful of being taken over by Borges’s ‘monstrous fame’. In 1979 – apparently without her knowledge – he made her the primary benefactor of his will. ‘If I had known, I would have left him.’22

  When Borges was diagnosed with liver cancer in late 1984, he refused chemotherapy. To avoid media attention, he elected to keep his condition secret from everyone but María Kodama and his doctor. Not even his sister or his old friend Bioy Casares were told. ‘Borges told me he didn’t want his death turned into a spectacle and his last breath sold on cassette tape,’ Kodama told me. The writer revised the terms of his earlier will, again, Kodama says, without her knowledge. Borges’s new will kept her as sole heir to his literary estate, but significantly reduced the cash payout to Epifanía Uveda de Robledo (Fanny), his live-in housekeeper of more than three decades, and the minor provisions made for his sister’s children.

  On 28 November 1985 Borges and Kodama left Argentina for Europe with permission from the writer’s doctor. Kodama believed the purpose of the tour was to say their goodbyes in Italy and Switzerland. But when they arrived in Geneva, Borges said he wanted to stay. ‘It was clear to me that he had decided this beforehand, when he learned that he was going to die.’23 In late December, the couple installed themselves in rooms 308 and 309 of the Hotel l’Arbalète. ‘I am a free man,’ Borges announced in a statement to the suspicious press. ‘I have decided to stay in Geneva, because I associate Geneva with the happiest days of my life.’24 He had lived in Switzerland with his family during the First World War. For him, it was a place that represented neutrality, privacy and peace. ‘The Confederates’, the final text in his final collection, takes the creation of the old Swiss confederacy in 1291 as a symbol of his hopes for a world order based on ‘forgetting differences and accentuating affinities’.25 In Geneva, according to Kodama, Borges continued to pressure her on the question of marriage. They had kept their relationship secret for 15 years and he wanted to acknowledge it publicly before he died. He asked his friend Franco Maria Ricci, an Italian editor, to intervene: ‘Franco, convince María to marry me; I want to die knowing she’s my wife.’

  ‘María, you’ve been with him since you were young,’ the editor said to Kodama. ‘It’s the only thing that will give him happiness.’26

  She insisted she was not prepared to become financially dependent on him and compromise her personal freedom. ‘You are a prisoner of freedom,’ Borges said. In March 1986, she finally relented. Borges ordered his Argentine lawyer to begin the process of seeking a marriage licence in Paraguay – a legal workaround that was necessary because he had separated from but never divorced his first wife. ‘My marriage was like the legion of other marriages registered overseas when divorce was not possible in Argentina,’ said Kodama. ‘It was meant to be a secret between the two of us to make him happy.’27

  But in May the same year, shortly after the paperwork came through, the news leaked and made headlines in Buenos Aires. Borges died peacefully in his sleep on Saturday 14 June, with Kodama holding his hand. Argentina’s most famous agnostic was buried a few plots from John Calvin in Geneva’s Plainpalais cemetery. It was not until after Borges was dead, Kodama says, that his lawyers at home called her in Switzerland and told her she was her husband’s heir and literary executor.

  The period Kodama calls her ‘thirty years of hell’ began when Borges died. The writer had left his affairs in a mess. The new widow not only had to contend with the grievances of Borges’s housekeeper, nephews and the Argentine media, but also the unique editorial difficulties posed by a fragmented oeuvre consisting of hundreds of very short texts.

  First came challenges to the validity of the marriage and of Borges’s final testament. Borges’s housekeeper, Fanny Uveda, and his three nephews claimed Kodama had influenced the elderly writer to change his will. The Argentine courts, however, found that Borges entered willingly into the marriage, and that the union was not even necessary for Kodama to become both the chief beneficiary and the executor of his literary estate.

  The widow then embarked on a long series of legal battles of her own, aimed at consolidating her control over all author rights in all languages and combating attacks on her reputation. One target was the North American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, with whom Borges had collaborated on some of the best English versions of his work, between 1967 and 1972. After the writer’s death, the Borges and di Giovanni versions – for which the translator was receiving a generous 50 per cent of the royalties – were allowed to go out of print. In the 1990s, Penguin commissioned new English versions of Borges’s collected works in three hefty volumes. The collected nonfictions are a vital addition to the Borges corpus in English. But most reviewers, myself included, found the new translations of the poetry and fiction inferior to their predecessors. The Penguin editions are now the most widely available version of Borges for English speakers. Kodama also succeeded in blocking di Giovanni from republishing the earlier translations online (though you can still find them if you know where to look). The best English translations of Borges still widely available are those in Yates and Irby’s anthology, Labyrinths,28 but the volume contains only a tiny fraction of his total output.

  Much of the odium directed towards María Kodama over the years seems really to be aimed at Borges himself. The writer was far from universally admired in Argentina during his lifetime. His stance against the Perón r
egime, and his opposition to the Cuban Revolution, alienated the left, while his publicly voiced doubts about the Argentine people’s readiness for democracy, and his support for military dictatorships at home and in Chile (later retracted) probably cost him the Nobel Prize. Borges’s decision to die abroad only reinforced the image some of his countrymen have of him as a reactionary snob. Even today, everyone in Argentina has an opinion about Borges. ‘Why are you foreigners so obsessed with him?’ scolded the chatty manager of my hotel. ‘He wasn’t even an Argentine writer. He was a European writer.’

  Kodama has tried to combat this perception by emphasising the importance of the writer’s hometown to his creative output during the commemorations of the thirtieth anniversary of his death. ‘Borges, like the ancient Greeks, belonged to his city…He was born in Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires was his very being.’29

  Borges’s Buenos Aires, however, was the expanding port city of the 1880s and 1890s reimagined from the vantage point of the 1920s and 1930s. It’s hard to find any trace of it today. The house at 994 on the calle Maipu, where the writer was born in 1899, is an apartment complex now, with a small commemorative plaque beside the door. Though the Palermo street where Borges spent most of his childhood, the old calle Serrano, has been renamed in his honour, the house where the family lived in those years – a few blocks south of the Plaza Italia – has been demolished and replaced by a rundown bar. The old national library in San Telmo, where Borges was director between 1955 and 1973, is in urgent need of renovation, though it still hosts the national institutes of contemporary dance and musicology.

  Meanwhile, the Borges Museum at 1660 on the calle Anchorena in Recoleta, which doubles as the headquarters of Kodama’s international foundation, has only a tenuous connection to the writer’s life (Borges and his mother lived next door for a few years in the 1940s). One of Kodama’s assistants told me that the foundation has been trying to buy the adjacent building back from the neighbours for years: ‘But the señora doesn’t want to sell.’

  The regionalist ‘Borges of Buenos Aires’ exists in tension with the cosmopolitan fabulist who is read around the world in dozens of languages. In 2016, in addition to the commemorations in Argentina, María Kodama presided over similar ceremonies in Switzerland, Spain and New York. ‘All of these events demonstrate that his work remains alive,’ she says.30 The process of monumentalising Borges in brass, stone and deluxe editions, now 30 years advanced, contrasts markedly with the writer’s own sly prediction of his place in literary history. The epilogue to the original 1974 Emecé edition of his Spanish Obras Completas takes the form of an apocryphal 2074 encyclopedia entry. The ‘author and autodidact’ ‘José Borges’, we are told, is mainly remembered for never having written a novel.31

  Among scholars, the most serious complaint about the way the foundation has managed the writer’s legacy is that there is no proper critical edition of Borges in his own language. I asked Kodama whether such an edition will ever appear. ‘I have heard that question many times and I ask you who is the person capable of editing a critical edition of Borges? I am willing to review people’s qualifications.’ Ultimately, Kodama says, she does not know of anyone she would trust with the job. For the time being, the scholarly apparatus in the Spanish editions of Borges compares badly with what is available for most classic twentieth-century authors.

  This needn’t have been the case. The publisher Sudamericana, owned by Penguin Random House, outbid Borges’s old publisher Emecé for the worldwide rights to his work at the 2010 Frankfurt Bookfair. News reports suggest they paid close to 2 million euros.32 But the 2011 Sudamericana edition, the version I own, was a missed opportunity to produce a quality, integral Borges for the twenty-first century. It simultaneously respects and ignores the author’s wishes. Many of the early texts have been extensively rewritten by the older Borges, who grew to dislike his youthful style, but there are no notes to indicate the changes. In the same edition, three early books of essays the writer suppressed entirely during his lifetime are republished in their original form. It is almost impossible to trace the development of Borges’s style and ideas using this or any other edition because none of them offer even the most minimal explanation of the chaotic, unchronological sequencing of the collected texts. Kodama herself acknowledges that the other main Spanish-language option on the market, the 2009 Emecé critical edition, is really only an annotated edition. The notes are manifestly inadequate for the purpose of scholarship.

  Unfortunately for English and Spanish speakers, the best version of Borges in any language is the French Oeuvres Complètes published by Gallimard. The second edition was delayed for ten years as Kodama sued Borges’s old friend, the editor Jean-Pierre Bernés. She eventually succeeded in forcing him to hand over copies of recordings he had made while collaborating with Borges in 1986 on the notes for the first edition. As a result of this falling out, non-French speakers are unlikely to be able to access Borges and Bernés’s extensive notes any time soon.

  More recently, Kodama has used the financial resources and institutional power of the estate to pursue young experimental writers, such as the Spaniard Agustín Fernández Mallo and the Argentine Pablo Katchadjian, who have creatively appropriated Borges’s writing. Katchadjian faced the possibility of up to six years of jail time and a US$80,000 fine for publishing 150 copies of El Aleph Engordado (The Fattened Aleph), his novella-length expansion of Borges’s famous story, through a tiny Argentine independent publisher.33 Legitimate artistic practice or a violation of intellectual property? Either way, the case more or less destroyed whatever goodwill was left towards Kodama among the younger generation of Spanish-speaking writers and intellectuals.

  From the window of the cafe, a slab of blue sky was visible between the roofs of the grey and brown apartment towers of Recoleta. As lunchtime approached, I was coming to the end of my three-page list of questions. But Kodama showed no signs of impatience or boredom.

  ‘What do you miss about Borges?’

  ‘He is inside me. I feel he accompanies me spiritually and that he has given me the strength to fight for all these years. Yes, I miss the way we had fun together.’

  ‘As you grow older, what motivates you to keep promoting Borges’s work so energetically through the foundation?’

  ‘This has been my job for thirty years. You only give your life to something if you love it madly. If I didn’t love him madly, I wouldn’t do it.’

  Others have asked Kodama what will happen to the estate when she dies. Her answer rarely changes – ‘Why would you ask me that? I plan to live for two hundred years’34 – so I didn’t ask. Though the conversation often drifted back to Borges, I had learned many things about her over the last three hours: that she cannot cook; that she used to like horseriding and dancing flamenco, but nowadays prefers to meditate and read; that she sleeps only five hours a night; that she is so dispirited by Argentine politics that she has not opened a newspaper since the year 2000. She hasn’t been able to face them since she read about the great Argentine cardiologist René Favaloro – one of the pioneers of coronary bypass surgery – at the time of the Argentine financial crisis. With his research foundation in financial trouble, and the country itself about to default on its foreign debt, Favaloro had shot himself in the heart.

  ‘He could have gone anywhere, this man. But he chose to stay in this country…’ She shook her head. She was expressing the sense of frustration and wasted potential one routinely encounters talking to Argentines of all social classes about their country. Hearing her speak this way, I thought she was every bit as much a product of this place as the exhausted-looking waiter and the chess-playing hobo.

  We continued chatting for ten minutes after my questions ran out. Leaving the café, we discussed the pleasure of reading aloud for someone you love – a habit we had in common. I told her my wife and I were reading Fortunata y Jacinta by the great nineteenth-century Spanish realist Benito Pérez Galdós, in a beautiful hand-me-down edition her parents
had brought us from Mexico as a wedding present. The book had belonged to R’s blind aunt, whose mother helped her complete her literature thesis by reading aloud for her. It was full of mysterious page separators with notes written in braille. María Kodama liked the sound of that.

  I asked her, before we parted, which of the books she used to read aloud for Borges she most enjoyed sharing with him. ‘I liked to read for him in Greek,’ she said. Kodama studied ancient Greek at university; Borges never had. ‘He always said he envied the fact I could read Greek. And I would say, “Borges, let me have this one thing.”’ The Iliad was their favourite. He knew many passages from Homer so well he could follow the gist though he didn’t speak the language. Kodama quoted a passage to me in Greek, there on the sunny corner of Corrientes and Juncal – a scene that was often in her thoughts in Geneva while Borges was dying. A brief Spanish gloss, another kiss on the cheek, and she was gone.

  It wasn’t until several weeks later, back in Australia, that I had a chance to look up the passage. I found it in book six of The Iliad, in my copy of Fagles’s translation. When Andromache follows Hector to the gates of Troy, with their baby son in her arms, she begs him not to return to the battlefield because she has already lost her mother, father and seven brothers, and he is her only surviving family. This was the passage María Kodama recited to me as we parted: