New Ways to Kill Your Mother

by Colm Toibin

  By the late 1950s, Borges was blind. Doña Leonor became, Williamson writes, ‘her son’s secretary and business manager, his general guide and protector, and she had gathered about her a circle of well-bred ladies who fussed over Georgie and acted as an admiring chorus to his every success and distinction’. One visitor remembered the maid asking Doña Leonor if she should pour some wine for Borges and the mother answering: ‘El niño no toma vino’ (‘niño here can mean both ‘boy’ and ‘heir’). By this time Borges’s work was winning attention in Europe, and he was being invited to lecture at universities in the United States. Some of the time his mother, now almost ninety, accompanied him.

  Borges dreamed of marriage, of getting away from her. She helped him by suggesting a woman whom he had known years earlier, now widowed. She was called Elsa Astete. While Borges’s mother liked her for her deference, nobody else did. She was not smart or high enough on the social scale for Bioy or his wife. Other friends of Borges thought her ‘frumpish, provincial and rather plain’. They were married in 1967. The marriage was not a success.

  Once more, Borges was luckier in his friendships than in his loves. In 1967, in the United States, he met the translator and writer Norman Thomas di Giovanni, then in his mid-thirties. Over the next few years, having moved to Buenos Aires, di Giovanni co-ordinated the translation of Borges’s poetry into English, using some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair Reid, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander. He also worked with Borges on translating his prose works into English, and coaxed him into producing new stories and a long autobiographical piece for the New Yorker. All of this is vividly described in The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His Work, which di Giovanni published in 2003.

  When Borges wanted to leave his wife, di Giovanni masterminded his departure. Since there was no divorce in Argentina in 1970, they had to move with care. Elsa had no clue that he was going to leave her. ‘That chill grey winter’s morning,’ di Giovanni wrote,

  I lay in wait for Borges in the doorway of the National Library, and the moment he arrived I leaped into his taxi and off we sped for the intown airport. Borges, a trembling leaf and utterly exhausted after a sleepless night, confessed that his greatest fear had been that he might blurt the whole thing out to Elsa at any moment.

  Elsa was at home making puchero, a stew. She had asked Borges as he went out the door what he wanted for lunch. ‘What pained me most,’ she said in an interview in 1993, ‘was that when Borges asked for puchero, he already knew that he would not be coming back.’

  In the early years of the twenty-first century, Jorge Luis Borges and Bioy Casares joined Marcel Proust and Lillian Hellman to become a distinguished band of writers whose maids wrote books about them. Bioy’s maid Jovina got in first; her book, Los Bioy, which is a wonderful account of half a century of service, appeared in 2002. It is clear that she felt affection for Bioy and his wife; despite her best intentions, however, she managed to portray them as capricious and mad and permanently horny, a wealthy pair of monsters, like two figures in an early Polanski film. Then in 2004 came Epifanía Uveda de Robledo, or Fanny, Borges’s maid. She had revenge on her mind, for the slights inflicted on her by Borges’s mother and the injuries, real or imaginary, inflicted by Maria Kodama, whom Borges married some months before his death. Fanny managed also in El Señor Borges to make her master seem like a saint and herself a reticent and faithful maid for whom one could, in all conscience, write a glowing reference.

  In 1939 Bioy Casares married Silvina Ocampo, the sister of Victoria Ocampo. Silvina was twelve years older than him. Jovina came to work for them ten years later and stayed with them until the death of Bioy in 1999. Bioy loved women. He told Jovina: ‘I have a defect, Jovina, a great weakness. I love women so much that if a broomstick dressed up as a woman, I would follow that broomstick.’ Jovina realized that his marriage did not prevent him from broomsticking to his heart’s content on a daily basis, usually in the afternoon: he played tennis in the morning, and in the evening wrote his books and had supper with his wife and Borges. When, after supper, he and Borges collaborated on their books, Jovina noticed that they roared with laughter.

  Bioy made no bones about his affairs. One day, for example, he arrived home with a baby, who was thereafter brought up in his household as his daughter. Later, other fruits of his great sexual energy would emerge. Silvina believed that Jovina had powers and every time she sent one of her manuscripts or a manuscript by Bioy to the publishers she would make Jovina touch the pages to give them luck. Silvina depended on Jovina for the smallest things and demanded that her food be personally served by Jovina or she would not eat it. (Similarly, Borges’s mother would ring for the maid in the middle of the night and explain that she merely wanted to see her.) When Bioy was in hospital he insisted that his meals be cooked and carried to the hospital by Jovina. He was, however, embarrassed at leaving the food the hospital provided, and suggested to Jovina that she could solve the problem by eating this food herself on her visits.

  Jovina had to keep at bay the many women who wished to sleep with Bioy, including at times Elena, the wife of Octavio Paz, who had a long affair with him.

  While Jovina wrote with relish and love and understanding of her employers’ madnesses and foibles, Fanny, Borges’s maid, wrote in some bitterness. Having worked for the family for more than thirty-five years, she was left homeless and almost penniless on Borges’s death. Compared to the Bioys’ household, where it was all go, Leonor Borges maintained a very respectable and stolid home life for herself and her son. The Borges’ apartment was tiny – the Bioys’ had twenty-two rooms – yet Fanny was forced to wear a uniform and cut her hair short; there was never a radio or a television in the apartment. Borges, she notes, was an obedient son. Every time he came home from somewhere he would go to his mother’s bedroom and tell her what he had done. Then he would undress for bed and find Fanny and put out his hand and receive two sweets. He did this, according to Fanny, all his life.

  Borges was much tortured, according to Fanny, by the possibility of winning the Nobel Prize. On the day of the announcement journalists would queue outside his door. This would happen year after year.

  Fanny’s book really comes into its own when Borges gets married. Borges the bachelor was dressed by Fanny every morning. ‘I dressed him entirely, including learning to make the knot of his tie. I put on his clothes, his socks, his shoes, his trousers, everything. Absolutely everything.’ The wife, however, told Fanny that every morning she opened a drawer and told Borges to dress himself. One day, as a result, he appeared with two odd shoes. The wife also forbade his old nightgown that went down to his ankles and made him wear pyjamas.

  Fanny blames his mother for the wedding: ‘Doña Leonor was a good woman, but very authoritarian. It was the mother and the sister who arranged the wedding because he never said anything, never knew anything … They bought the furniture, they bought the apartment.’ The son, however, now sixty-eight years old, did not want to sleep with his new wife, and demanded that his old single bed be brought to the new apartment. On the wedding night his mother suggested that he and Elsa go to a hotel, but Borges wanted to sleep in his own bed and his mother had to accompany Elsa to the bus stop and send her home. In the morning when Fanny woke Borges she asked him how he had slept on his wedding night. He looked at her and smiled and said: ‘I dreamed all night that I was hanging out of a tram.’

  Maria Kodama, who features in the second half of Fanny’s book, was born in 1937, the daughter of a German mother and a Japanese father. She appeared first in Borges’s circle in the mid-1960s, attending his classes on Anglo-Saxon at the National Library in Buenos Aires. She gave off an aura of reticence, mystery and self-possession. Fanny remembered her coming to the Borges apartment with other students:

  One day Maria stayed behind when the other students left and began to chat with Doña Leonor. Señor Borges’s mother … asked her: ‘Are you in love with Georgie?’ Kodama, perhaps a little
surprised by the question, replied that no, she was in love with Borges’s writing, but not with the man. When Maria had gone Doña Leonor said in a loud voice, but as though she were talking to herself: ‘That one with the yellow skin is going to end up with everything.’

  In 1971, after the break-up of his marriage, Borges travelled to Iceland, where he found Kodama waiting for him. It was here, it seems, that they became lovers. Back home, however, Borges returned to live with his mother, now ninety-five, and Fanny. Leonor did not die until 1975, when she was ninety-nine. She was buried with the rest of her ancestors in the family vault in the Recoleta cemetery, where Borges himself would be expected to lie when his time came.

  After his mother’s death, Borges travelled with Kodama, but in Buenos Aires he did not let his sister or the maid or his closest friends know the truth of their relationship. Much that is cruel and unusual has been written about Kodama, but Williamson in his biography is not keen to add to these comments. He recognizes that for the last fifteen years of Borges’s life, this was his closest and happiest relationship.

  On 28 August 1979 Borges changed his will. Previously, he had left his estate to his sister and his two nephews; now, he left it to Kodama. He also left Fanny half of whatever money he had in his bank accounts, but later, in 1985, deleted this clause, leaving her very little. This obviously reflected his irritation at Fanny’s disapproval of Kodama.

  In the years between the death of his mother and his own death, Borges and Kodama seemed to be on a permanent book tour and appeared to derive nothing but pleasure from it. By the end of 1985, however, it was clear to Borges that he was dying. He wished to go back to Europe, but kept this a secret from many friends and from his sister. In the middle of December, he and Kodama arrived in Geneva. Kodama, in an interview in 1999, told Williamson:

  He told me that we would be going to Italy and then we would stop over in Switzerland. I thought it was logical that he should wish to say his farewells, but when we arrived in Geneva, he said: ‘We’re not going back, we’re staying.’ It was clear to me that he had decided this beforehand, when he learned that he was going to die.

  Works of genius come from strange sources. It is unimaginable that Borges or Bioy or Silvina Ocampo could have produced social realism in which domestic life would appear as a feature. All three created work that was playful, self-referential, that invented its own world partly because the world outside was not of much interest to them. It could be argued that Borges’s fiction and poetry were essentially apolitical, that he was more interested in literature than life and that his work is all the better for this. But it is difficult for any writer in an unstable, emerging or peripheral country, no matter how enigmatic or strange the work, to remain outside politics.

  It is also possible to argue that Borges’s writing was indeed political, that he himself was a political activist all his life, that his lack of interest as an artist in the world outside the book arose from his and his mother’s dislike of the dominant elements in Argentine society, that his style and his system developed not despite Argentine society but because of it.

  Yet Borges’s politics were not simple. In 1928, for example, he supported Hipólito Irigoyen of the Radical Party for the presidency, not merely because Borges’s grandfather had been a friend of the party’s founder, but because Irigoyen was more moderate in his nationalism and more open to democracy than his opponents. Borges wrote a manifesto in favour of Irigoyen, and signed a letter to the newspaper supporting him. Two years after Irigoyen’s victory, when the military took over, Borges wrote to a friend in Brazil: ‘We have sacrificed Myth for the sake of realism … Now we have independence under martial law, a sycophantic press, the perpetual wrangling of the left-wingers, and the fiction that the former dotty administration was “cruel and tyrannical”.’

  The fact that his hero had been deserted by the people of Buenos Aires, who had ransacked Irigoyen’s house, helped Borges to get over his idealization of the city. In 1931 he wrote a savage attack on his country in an essay, ‘Our Inabilities’. He attacked the ‘pompous self-valorisation of the place our country occupies among the other nations’ and ‘the unrestrainable delight in failure’. Finally, he wrote, ‘a poverty of imagination defines our place in death.’ The old world of the criollo, so longed for by Borges’s mother, could only be found, he said, in the northern provinces of Uruguay.

  In 1934 Borges wrote the preface to a poem celebrating a failed armed uprising, which he called ‘a patriotic uprising’, by militant members of the Radical Party. Yet, while some of his friends supported the reduction of Argentina’s economic dependence on Britain, Borges understood that this would move them slowly towards a sort of Argentine nationalism bordering on fascism. His own views on what Argentina might become were outlined in 1928 and reiterated in a radio broadcast in 1936:

  This is a confederacy without precedent: a generous adventure by men of different bloodlines whose aim is not to preserve their lineages but to forget those lineages in the end; these are bloodlines that seek the night. The criollo is one of the confederates. The criollo, who was responsible for creating the nation as such, has now chosen to be one among many.

  In this speech, Borges wrote the death sentence for his family’s sense of power and entitlement in Argentina.

  As the 1930s went on and writers took sides, Borges moved sideways. There is no evidence that he even attended the PEN International Congress in Buenos Aires in September 1936, in which political division was the main feature. Instead, Borges and Bioy set up a magazine called Destiempo, whose title indicated, Bioy said, ‘our wish to have nothing to do with the superstitions of the age’.

  Borges felt a very deep attachment to an old and unsullied Argentina, but understood, as the 1930s went on, that such an attachment could lead easily to a native fascism. He wrote a number of trenchant attacks on Hitler’s regime in Germany. He wrote in support of a cultural openness, an Argentine cosmopolitanism, but grew to believe, with some justification, that he and a few friends carried this banner alone. He ceased to believe in the city or its people, he believed that the pampas and the gauchos were sour jokes, he hated the government and he grew at times to distrust history, including his own. The way was open for him to write a fiction that would be distinguished by its pure determination to leave most things out.

  The possibility that Borges would have a quiet life, writing his stories, seeing his women, pleasing and annoying his mother, supping with Bioy and working in the library, came to an end in February 1946 with the election of Perón, whom Borges had vehemently opposed. Borges’s name was on a list of 2,000 state employees who, for one reason or another, were to be dismissed. In his ‘Autobiographical Essay’, Borges wrote about what happened: ‘I was honoured with the news that I had been “promoted” out of the library to the inspectorship of poultry and rabbits in the public markets.’ When he asked why, he was told (he claims): ‘You were on the side of the Allies – what do you expect?’

  Williamson rightly deals with Borges’s version of this story with suspicion. He argues convincingly that Perón himself would not have even known about such a low-level dismissal, that the job inspecting the ‘poultry and rabbits’ was probably invented by Borges. He writes that Borges’s being moved rather than completely dismissed was done as a favour to him, and that he was probably, in fact, appointed an inspector at the Department of Beekeeping: that is, apiculture rather than aviculture (poultry). But the latter job was too good a story even for the Peronist press, who gloated.

  A crowded dinner was given in Borges’s honour by his supporters. His speech against Perón was read out: ‘Dictatorships breed oppression; dictatorships breed servility; dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy … Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the many duties of a writer. Need I remind readers of Martín Fierro … that individualism is an old Argentine virtue?’ One of the younger writers at the dinner recalled that Borges at this time was regarded �
��as a sort of anti-Perón’.

  After a few months out of a job, Borges began to work as a teacher of literature, travelling through Argentina to give lectures:

  At 47 I found a new and exciting life opening up for me. I travelled up and down Argentina and Uruguay, lecturing on Swedenborg, Blake, the Persian and Chinese mystics, Buddhism, gauchesco poetry, the Icelandic sagas, Heine, Dante, expressionism and Cervantes. Sometimes my mother or a friend accompanied me. Not only did I end up making far more money than at the library, but I enjoyed the work and felt that it justified me.

  While Borges gave lectures, his mother, at the thought of Perón in the Casa Rosada, the president’s house, went mad. ‘The Peronist threat to the constitution,’ Williamson writes, ‘brought out a latent, ancestral heroism in this formidable woman.’ In September 1948, at the age of seventy-two, she joined a demonstration against Perón. When the police came, a few ladies, including Doña Leonor and her daughter, stood their ground and were arrested. They were sentenced to thirty days in jail; Leonor, because of her age, was allowed to spend a month under house arrest, but Norah spent a month in jail in the company of prostitutes.

  In 1950, when Perón had effectively made himself president for life, Borges agreed reluctantly to become president of the Argentine Society of Writers. ‘I tried to think as little as possible about politics,’ he wrote.

  All the same, just as a person who has toothache thinks about that toothache the moment he wakes up, or a man who has been left by a woman thinks about her the moment he opens his eyes, I used to say to myself every morning, ‘That man is in the Casa Rosada,’ and I would feel upset, and in a way, guilty too, because I thought of the fact of not doing anything or doing so little – but what could I do?