Shared moments with Mary Kodama reveal a lifetime of friendship, long talks about books, and the habits that form when time and memory braid together. In Buenos Aires, Thursdays after lunch became a ritual: the same hour, the same place, the same kind of coffee at Recoleta, with small, evolving variations on familiar themes. He reread Greek tragedies each night and then answered calls from two to three in the morning, a quiet dedication to friends that felt almost ceremonial. He carried the weight and resilience of titanium: appearing cool and fragile at first glance, yet in reality surprisingly enduring with lightness that made him seem almost invincible. She stood upright and graceful, a determined mind governed by iron logic. Though some ideas sparked controversy, she remained a thoughtful, deeply engaged figure who refused to settle for easy comfort and kept a respectful memory of Jorge Luis Borges to the very end.
Jorge Luis Borges and María Kodama in Paris in 1983. JOEL ROBINE / AFP
There were projects he trusted them with. Together they helped establish the Jorge Luis Borges Chair in San Luis, and when invited, he joined the opening of the Law and Literature Chair at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fe. He was interviewed extensively for SureS, a publication directed in Tangier in recent years. Their last collaboration involved the Borges and Morocco conference at the Argentine Embassy in Rabat in 2021. Through this journey, he learned to see destiny as a kind of letter, shaping what is possible as work unfolds. When projects grew difficult and impatience tempted shutdowns, he offered patient advice, insisting that persistence could produce something meaningful, even if some outcomes remained uncertain. Memories of Borges—his travel anecdotes, such as meeting Mick Jagger in Madrid and Jagger’s surprised forgiveness of Borges’s reading habits—became vivid reminders of a world Borges perceived through his own distinctive, indelible eyes—the idea of a third eye that he called a Cyclopean insight.
For instance, when discussions turned to some of Borges’s texts, recollections of Arabian Nights would surface. The question arose: how could Borges imagine those tales with such depth without knowing Arabic? The answer, Borges implied, lay in a third eye that could see beyond ordinary sight. He described himself as closing his eyes during dictation, believing that simply not seeing was insufficient; one must dig deep within to coax the right words out. This image—of a third eye—resonated with the way he approached literature and life.
Argentine writer María Kodama, widow of Jorge Luis Borges, has died at the age of 86.
Another shared thread was a memory of a teacher in Egypt who taught Borges Arabic before his illness. While Borges and Kodama were in Geneva, Kodama saw an advertisement for an Arabic tutor and called without revealing for whom the lessons were meant. The slender, elderly professor from Alexandria, who had read Borges, chose not to blame him for not mastering the language. Borges admitted that the aim was not mastery but the pleasure of the pursuit. Like Kodama, he remained active and lucid to the end, a sign of a Borgesian impulse toward knowledge for its own sake. The idea of learning at eighty, the Japanese context that Kodama recalled, underscored a lifelong curiosity and a refusal to reduce learning to profit. The image of Socrates—teaching a flute tune to guards who did not understand the depth of the quest—remained a powerful motif in their conversations. The notion of learning for its own sake echoed through this period, a drive Kodama described as a kind of age-defying vow to stay engaged. In Japan, this spirit persisted.
He recalled helping search for the Egyptian professor after Borges’s passing, a man who vanished without leaving a name or contact, a mystery that lingered even when years later a note of gratitude finally arrived. An inquiry among Egyptian friends eventually revealed that a Borges professor, who had visited Switzerland and Egypt, had appeared briefly in the story but never left a traceable trace. It became another small tale in the broader archive of Borges and Kodama’s shared life.
Beauty and art lesson
The moment Borges wished to preserve was a day spent hours earlier at the Louvre. They had stood before the Samothrace Victory, moved by the sculpture’s drama. A story from Kodama’s father resurfaced: when Borges was five, he asked what beauty was. Kodama’s father answered with a quiet lesson, showing him a book and the sculpture, and explaining how the folds of the robe and the sea breeze conspired to capture beauty in motion. Borges carried that lesson with him, a memory he revisited to keep the aesthetic alive, a reminder of how art can fuse memory with longing. He later wrote that the only memory worth keeping is the memory of a verse, dedicating a line to Kodama: “For the Venice of glass and twilight…”.
Ulrica entered the Great Sea with Javier Otálora, and they faced the future unafraid. And what a castle they built—an image of life, art, and shared purpose standing as a quiet testament to their bond.