April 6, 2023, 12:10pm
After creating several lifetimes’ worth of mythologies, Jorge Luis Borges saw his own end in 1986 (he died), and the entire surreal estate came to rest with his wife, Maria Kodama. You can picture it piled into her living room: the garden of forking paths, the library of Babel, the lot of it.
Kodama set up a foundation in Borges’ name, but “didn’t like to talk about” issues like making a will, her attorney told the Associated Press this week, after her recent death; i.e., in every possible universe of infinite texts, the one we don’t have is a legal document outlining whom’st should have ownership of this incredible legacy; the proverbial ink ribbon to the proverbial typewriter. And so the Borges estate becomes the default property of the state.
Kodama’s attorney, Fernando Soto, said the outcome is “amazing,” and told the AP that “she told me she had everything arranged and it would be ‘someone stricter than me’” who took charge of Borges’ estate. No comment on whether that was a personal ding on Soto’s legal standards (is it “amazing” that he didn’t check whether his client had a will?).
There are reportedly five nephews who could lay claim to the shape-shifting estate, which could be just sand in the winds tomorrow, such are the twists and turns of this life. In 1970, Borges wrote for the New Yorker that:
My father was very intelligent and, like all intelligent men, very kind. Once, he told me that I should take a good look at soldiers, uniforms, barracks, flags, churches, priests, and butcher shops, since all these things were about to disappear, and I could tell my children that I had actually seen them. The prophecy has not yet come true, unfortunately.
Read this blog post now, before it disappears!