Mará Kodama, pictured in 2018 during an exhibition in honor of Jorge Luis Borges in Malaga, Spain.Carlos Diaz (EFE)
María Kodama lived the last 27 years zealously caring for the work of Jorge Luis Borges and died on March 26 without leaving a will.
This was confirmed this Monday by the lawyer who accompanied her in her countless litigations, Fernando Soto, who has initiated a request to declare her inheritance vacant.
Thus, Soto hopes that the Argentine Justice appoints a curator for the writer's work and the assets of the Borges International Foundation, which Kodama presided over from 1988 until her death.
Universal heir to the legacy of one of the fundamental writers of the 20th century, Kodama even fought with the Argentine president for having the last word on her husband's inheritance.
In recent years, she had assured that she had an agreement to hand over her authority to two universities outside of Argentina, one in the United States and one in Japan, but she did not put it in writing.
"María did not like to talk about her illnesses, her death was a subject she did not want to address," Soto told a group of journalists gathered in his office.
“I had the idea of establishing continuity so that Borges's work is duly defended;
that foreign universities intervene to ensure the objectivity of the treatment that here, for political, ideological reasons and the environment of Borges who attacked her, did not give her security.
Kodama passed away last week from cancer that she went through with the discretion that characterized her entire life.
She was 86 years old, the same age at which Borges died in June 1986, two months after marrying her and designating her his heir.
Attacked by blindness and liver cancer, Borges had decided to move with Kodama to Switzerland at the end of 1985 and they were married the following year by proxy at the Argentine consulate in Asunción, in Paraguay.
In 1988, two years after the writer's death, Kodama created a foundation to manage her legacy and, since then, she was the only one in charge of disseminating his work.
She thus traveled the world.
Along the way, she confronted writers, biographers and editors for the power over what could be published and how Borges was talked about.
Her power played a trick on him:
everything was in his name and now he has no heir.
According to the lawyer, the Foundation depended on his pocket and, without a clear succession, he has enough money "for three months."
Kodama and Borges in Mexico, in an image from the writer's archive. María Kodama
"She left everything arranged, it will be reported," the lawyer had said on March 26, a few hours after confirming Kodama's death.
This Monday at noon, after a week of speculation about the legacy of the most important writer in the country, Soto summoned journalists to "expose what the continuity of María Kodama's heritage and the assets and work of Jorge Luis Borges will be like."
Continuity, for now, is up in the air.
"He did not leave a will," Soto asserted emphatically, and later qualified: at least Kodama's trusted notary public does not have a written will and no one 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 designate a curator to protect the writer's heritage and an administrator to take charge of the collection of rights and payments of obligations derived from your work.
Kodama, who, as the lawyer has found out, had only one brother who died in 2017 without issue, leaves two apartments in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires and the Borges family house in the Palermo neighborhood, where the Foundation works.
But the important thing is in the invaluable archive scattered between those properties and two apartments that he rented in Geneva and Paris: manuscripts, first editions, dozens of decorations and closed boxes whose contents are unknown.
With no one to claim the inheritance, after 10 years the Borges legacy will pass as a public good to the Government of the city of Buenos Aires, which will have the power to auction it off.
In a letter to which EL PAÍS has had access, Soto asks the Justice to open the succession trial to find a possible heir, that an inventory of the couple's assets be made and that the assets go to the protection of the Banco de la City of Buenos Aires, which has a room designated for artistic objects.
"In honor of our friendship, out of admiration for his person and in order to protect the work of Borges and of María Kodama herself, I am making this presentation before the Court," writes Soto, who also appears as an interested party.
The lawyer was Kodama's legal representative in a plagiarism trial that began in 2015 against the writer Pablo Katchadjian, who in 2009 published an extended version of one of Borges' best-known stories,
El Aleph
.
Katchadjian was dismissed two years later and Kodama was forced to pay the costs of the trial.
According to the document that Soto has presented before the Justice, the fees that he collected then give him "greater legal standing to activate" the vacant inheritance process.
After that setback, today he returns to the front lines for the legacy of one of the most important writers of the 20th century.
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