The widow of the “most universal of Argentine writers” delighted the public at the Guadalajara International Book Fair. “I miss Borges and how we had fun. My friends told me ‘how do you go out with the old man from the labyrinths, he is horrible’. But come and meet him: he is a hilarious person and mazes fascinate me. I had a blast with him. I’m not a masochist; he was a very lovable person, ”confessed María Kodama in a talk with the public, accompanied by Magdalena Faillace, director of Cultural Affairs of the Foreign Ministry. In a room full of young people, in the front row were the Brazilian writer Nélida Piñon, the translator Pilar del Río, widow of the Portuguese writer José Saramago, and Carles Alvarez Garriga, Cortázar’s editor in Spain, among others. “FIL has a beautiful girl who is the Julio Cortázar chair, but Borges had to have a very important place. Beyond personal tastes, I understand that there is a before and after Borges in Argentine literature”, pondered Faillace.
“The book is an extension of man’s memory and imagination”, stressed Kodama, paraphrasing what the author of El Aleph proposes. “One of his passions was rereading; In his books we almost always see his signature and the date he read it for the first time or the dates of rereading. It is exciting to see how the notes in a book are the blueprint of his intelligence as a reader.” Borges established a relationship of admiration and gratitude with the writer Alfonso Reyes –who was Mexico’s ambassador to Argentina. He was also a friend of Juan Rulfo and Juan José Arreola, “a character he liked because he was very theatrical.” When he met him, she was 16 years old and they began studying Anglo-Saxon together. “Borges told me that we should study Icelandic because it was like the Latin of the Romance languages. He admired Iceland because it was the first country to have a democracy and he said that he did not want to be an empire or impose his culture and his way of being. That impressed him; hence his great love for Icelandic literature. ”
Every time they were about to announce the Nobel Prize for Literature, everyone would stop him on the street and say: “I hope he wins it.” Kodama recounted the behind the scenes of what the Honoris Causa doctorate that the Catholic University of Chile awarded him in 1976 implied. A journalist called him from Stockholm so that he would not receive the distinction that the dictator Augusto Pinochet would give him. “He told me not to get my hopes up. I heard what he was saying and I deduced that the other was telling him that if he continued with that way of being, he was going to lose him forever. Borges appreciated the advice not to go to Chile and told him that there are two things that a man cannot do: bribe and be bribed, ”he recalled. “He knew that they were never going to give it to him and at that moment he wanted it even more. I realized that he was never going to betray his ideas.” Kodama narrated another juicy anecdote. “A man stops him on the street: ‘Oh, teacher, I’m going to pray so that they give you the prize.’ Borges tells him: ‘God help us, if I have the Nobel Prize I am one more on a list, in this way I am the Scandinavian myth’.”
A Guadalajara-born reader from Guadalajara wanted to know if something of her personality appears in her books. “Borges’s personality is in his works,” said Kodama. “He never wrote things that he didn’t feel deeply. In his stories, a story is apparently told, but underneath is all the philosophy, everything he read and felt throughout his life. Another subject was the novel that she never wrote. “Borges did not like the novel because suddenly little pillows, armchairs, tea cups and ladies’ hats appeared to reach 1,500 pages. He liked stories and poetry because it was like a shot arrow: he has to have the tension of the bow, the direction that the archer gives it and hit the target. He knew that he was never going to write a novel, ”confirmed the president of the Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation.
Borges’ first discovery was made by a teacher who was supposed to teach him English and read Borges’ “Los dos poemas ingleses”, dedicated to Beatriz Bibiloni Webster, with whom the writer was in love. In one of those poems, he offers that woman her failure, her loneliness and “the hunger of my heart.” “I asked him what ‘the hunger of the heart’ was. She told me that when she grew up, she would realize that it was love, ”commented Kodama. The second moment was when a friend of her father took her to listen to a lecture on time by the author of Fictions. “The shy recognize themselves as animals in the jungle. This gentleman is shyer than me. If that man can, I will be able to teach; That gave me a huge calm,” Kodama admitted. She would have been 10 or 11 years old when she read “The Circular Ruins”, his favorite story. “No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night…”, she quoted. “I read it and I didn’t understand anything, but I was fascinated. In an interview, Borges said that he wanted to get to the house on Anchorena street to write ‘Las ruinas circularas’, and that he wrote it with an intensity that he had never achieved before. I felt that intensity”, acknowledged the widow and specified that the foundation is next to the house where Borges wrote the story.
A reader had a T-shirt made with the legend: “If Borges is God, I am his seraph.” Although the anecdote is well known, Kodama recounted the meeting between the most universal writer and a rock star. “In Madrid, at the Hotel Palace, we were waiting for someone to pick us up to go to dinner when suddenly Mick Jagger kneels next to Borges and says: ‘Maestro, I admire you! I read all of his work!’ ‘Who are you?’ Borges replied. ‘My name is Mick Jagger.’ ‘Ahh! One of the Rolling Stones!’ said the writer. Jagger almost faints and asks, ‘How, master, do you know me?’ ‘Yes, thanks to María I know all of her production,’ ”the widow recalled and mentioned that in the first scene of the film Performance Jagger is reading Borges. “The Lord of the Books”, as Kodama called him, considered one of his homelands to be Geneva. “In Switzerland nobody knows the name of the president; that is why he loved that country, because he had a love for freedom, ”he concluded.
