Mará Kodama pictured during an exhibition in honor of Jorge Luis Borges in Malaga, Spain in 2018. Carlos Diaz (EFE)
María Kodama lived zealously for the work of Jorge Luis Borges for the last 27 years and died on March 26 without leaving a will. This was confirmed this Monday by the lawyer who has accompanied her in her countless court cases, Fernando Soto, who has filed a request for disclosure of the inheritance. Therefore, Soto hopes that the Argentine judiciary will appoint a curator of the writer’s work and assets of the Borges International Foundation, who headed Kodama from 1988 until his death.
As the universal heir to the legacy of one of the most important writers of the 20th century, Kodama even feuded with Argentina’s president over having the final say on her husband’s legacy. In recent years he has assured that he has reached an agreement to hand over his authority to two universities outside Argentina, one in the United States and one in Japan, but he has not kept it in writing.
“María didn’t like to talk about her illnesses, her death was a topic she didn’t want to raise,” Soto told a group of journalists gathered in his office. “I had the idea of establishing continuity so that Borges’ work would be duly defended; that foreign universities intervene to ensure the objectivity of the treatment, which here did not give her security for political, ideological reasons and the environment of Borges who attacked her.
Kodama passed away last week from cancer, which she went through with the discretion that has shaped her entire life. He was 86, the same age that Borges died in June 1986, two months after marrying her and making her his heir. Struck by blindness and liver cancer, Borges had decided to move to Switzerland with Kodama in late 1985 and they married by proxy at the Argentine consulate in Asunción in Paraguay the following year. In 1988, two years after the writer’s death, Kodama established a foundation to administer his legacy and has since been the only one responsible for the dissemination of his work. So he traveled the world. Along the way he confronted writers, biographers and editors about the power over what could be published and how Borges was spoken about. Power played a trick on him: everything was in his name and now he has no heir. According to the lawyer, the foundation relies on his pocket, and without a clear line of succession he has enough money “for three months”.
Kodama and Borges in Mexico, in a picture from the archives of the author María Kodama
“She left everything in order, it’s reported,” the attorney said on March 26, hours after Kodama’s death was confirmed. This Monday afternoon, after a week of speculation about the legacy of the country’s most important writer, Soto summoned journalists to “disclose what will be the continuity of the legacy of María Kodama and the fortune and work of Jorge Luis Borges”. Continuity is in the air for now.
“He didn’t leave a will,” Soto asserted emphatically and later put it into perspective: At least Kodama’s trustworthy notary public doesn’t have a written will and nobody in his close circle knows if one exists. The lawyer, who was his legal representative from 2001 until his death and is part of the management of the Borges Foundation, has asked the court to declare the estate vacant in order to appoint a curator to protect the writer’s legacy and an administrator of the Collect rights and payment of obligations arising from your work.
Kodama, who, as the lawyer has discovered, had only one brother who died without issue in 2017, leaves behind two apartments in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires and the Borges family home in the Palermo neighborhood, where the foundation works. But the most important thing is in the priceless archive scattered between these properties and two apartments he rented in Geneva and Paris: manuscripts, first editions, dozens of decorations and locked boxes whose contents are unknown. Since no one can claim the inheritance, after 10 years the Borges legacy will pass as a public good to the Buenos Aires City Government, which will have the power to auction it.
In a letter accessed by EL PAÍS, Soto urges the judiciary to open probate proceedings to find a possible heir, to take stock of the couple’s assets and place the assets under the protection of Banco de la City Buenos Aires, which has a room for artistic objects. “To honor our friendship, out of admiration for him, and to protect the work of Borges and of María Kodama himself, I am making this presentation to the court,” writes Soto, who is also a participant.
The attorney was Kodama’s legal representative in a plagiarism trial that began in 2015 against writer Pablo Katchadjian, who in 2009 published an expanded version of one of Borges’ best-known stories, El Aleph. Katchadjian was released two years later and Kodama had to pay the court costs. According to the document Soto submitted to the judiciary, the fees he collects then give him “greater procedural legitimacy to activate the vacant probate process.” Today, after that setback, he returns to the front lines for the legacy of one of the most important writers of the 20th century.
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