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: ‘Dona 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 Dona Leonor. Senor 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 Dona 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 Hipolito 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
