The legacy of Borges, the unexpected soap opera of Argentine literature

Julio Cortázar and Aurora Bernárdez met in 1948 in Buenos Aires, married in 1953, and separated in 1968 while living in Paris.

They both started out as translators, went through the hard times of migration, and ended up traveling the world working for the United Nations.

During those two decades Cortázar published the stories

,

or

, and the novel

.

He later fell in love with the Latin American revolutions and with the agent Ugné Kurvelis, and lived with the photographer Carol Dunlop, whom he accompanied until her death in 1982. Cortázar would only live two more years.

In the last months of his life, alone and sick, Bernárdez returned to take care of Cortázar.

A writer who kept in a drawer so as not to overshadow the man of her life, translator of authors such as Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus or Simone de Beauvoir, Aurora Bernárdez will forever be the generous executor who ordered the publication of the writer's correspondence, his unpublished and his literature classes.

It was her last act of love with her deceased husband.

The first had been to bury him in 1984 next to Carol Dunlop in the Parisian cemetery of Montparnasse.

Aurora Bernárdez and Julio Cortázar, on a trip to India in 1956.

Adolfo Bioy Casares died in 1999 at the age of 85.

Precursor of today's very popular science fiction from the Río de La Plata and high representative of the Argentine upper class who grew up with one foot on the farm and the other in Europe, he lived his last years putting his life in order.

In December 1994, his wife, the writer Silvina Ocampo, had died, and three weeks later his daughter, Marta Bioy, whom Ocampo had adopted as her own, died in a traffic accident.

Marta was not his only extramarital daughter.

In 1998, a year before he died, the author of novels such as The

or

traveled to Paris to recognize another.

Fabián Ayerza Demaría had lived almost all his life in France, heir to other Argentine families of ancestry.

His meeting with his biological father was fruitful.

Fabián inherited the intellectual rights to Bioy's work and divided the rest of his estate with the children of Marta Bioy and Lidia Ramona Benítez, the nurse who took care of the writer in his last years.

It was just the beginning of a complicated inheritance.

The story is told by the publisher and bookseller Guillermo Schavelzon in his memoir: Fabián died in 2006 and Bioy's work fell into the hands of his mother, Sara Josefina Demaría, who had had an affair with Bioy decades ago and received the legacy when he was 90 years old.

The litigation for the succession took almost 10 years.

This year, finally, the complete works of Bioy Casares were published by Editorial Alfaguara;

but his diaries

The Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, photographed in Madrid. GORKA LEJARCEGI

The legacy of the great Argentine writers of the 20th century has had movie stories like you are.

There is more.

Some biographers of Roberto Arlt conjecture that his daughter and executor, Mirta Arlt, changed some words in the chronicler's unpublished work, considering them profane.

You will never know, Mirta Arlt died in 2014. The work of Roberto Fontanarrosa, the writer who united the literary passion of the country with more bookstores in the world with the only one that exceeds it, soccer, also had a decade-long dispute between his son and his last wife.

The only legacy that crossed seas and was read for decades without frights was that of Jorge Luis Borges.

María Kodama, her widow and executor, received that inheritance in 1986 and took care of her since then until her death, on March 26, at the age of 86.

Kodama tirelessly fought against any mention of her husband that she considered an affront –she even criticized Bioy Casares, already deceased at the time, for the publication of his friend's intimate portrait in 2006–, but she also ensured that the writer is the universal reference that is today.

Martín Hadis, a great Borges biographer, summed it up in a radio interview a day after his death: “Borges dazzles you by himself, but to be dazzled you have to get to him, read him.

And if you are in Mongolia, India or China and they don't let you know, it's very difficult for you to find out”.

The zeal and vigor with which Kodama took charge of her late husband's work set off alarm bells when, last Monday, her legal representative of almost 20 years claimed that she had not left a will.

Eight days after Kodama's death, lawyer Fernando Soto announced that he had asked the Argentine court to declare a vacant inheritance trial.

He legitimized outstanding fees for a trial in which he had represented Kodama against a writer whom he accused of plagiarizing a Borges short story.

Soto told reporters that he had searched for possible heirs, but considered that the news was public and that he had spent enough time looking for an estate administrator.

The following day, five of María Kodama's nephews appeared before the courts to resolve her succession.

Jorge Luis Borges and María Kodama, in a file image. María Kodama

María Kodama had declared in some interviews in recent years that she did not trust Argentine institutions, that she planned to leave the legacy to foreign universities where her husband's work was studied and where he had taught, and that she already had in mind to a possible executor who would be even more rigorous than her.

The change in the succession of the most important writer in the country generated the question of the week in the Argentine cultural circuit: How is it possible that an executor who dedicated almost 30 years to the care of that legacy has not left a will?

Attorney Soto's response is almost metaphysical.

“María was very careful about her privacy and she did not like to talk about her illnesses.

She did not talk about her future death, ”she told a group of journalists Monday in her office.

The lawyer, a friend of Kodama and a member of the foundation that the widow created in honor of Borges, stated that he had sought possible successors, including a brother, Jorge Kodama, who died in 2017, but it was not clear to him that he had descendants.

Nor that he had had a close relationship with his sister.

María Kodama's nephews, legally represented by the eldest of them, Victoria Kodama, have said that they will not speak to the press until the issue advances in court.

The inheritance at stake includes three properties in Buenos Aires, the archive of decorations, first editions and manuscripts of the couple,

Soto's announcement, in the analysis of Dr. Marcos Córdoba, professor of Family Law and Inheritance at the University of Buenos Aires, was "temporarily inopportune."

Córdoba explains that the deadlines established by Argentine law had not been met.

"Here a rule called the 'novenario de llanto y luto' applies, that is, the first nine days after the death of a person, nothing can be required of the heirs," Córdoba explained to EL PAÍS.

“He presents himself as creditor of the succession.

But the creditors, to intimate the heirs, must allow four months to pass from the death to be able to intimate the heirs to start the succession.

This lawyer did not intimidate the heirs because he claimed to be unaware of them, and he appeared at an inopportune time as a creditor ”.

It remains to be seen what will happen to the legacy of the author of

and

.

María Kodama was criticized for decades for her iron control over her husband's work, but Borges breathes in all the bookstores in the country. His first collection of poems,

celebrates its centenary this year and will be one of the highlights of the Buenos Aires Book Fair, which begins at the end of the month, while the future of all his work is defined in the courts.

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