María Kodama, widow of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, He died on Sunday in Buenos Aires, at the age of 86, as a result of cancer, the family reported to the local media.

Kodama was a writer, translator, collaborator and universal inheritor of Borges’ work, whom academic literary criticism considers one of the greatest poets, essayists and short story writers of his time.

Kodama was born in Buenos Aires in 1937 as the daughter of Maria Antonia Schweizer, of Swiss-German, English and Spanish descent, and Japanese chemist Yosabur Kodama.

The famous author of “Fiction” also died at the age of 86, in June 1986. in the Swiss city of Geneva, two months after marrying Kodama.

His passion for letters never waned. Even when she was ill, she managed to write her last work, “La divisa punzó”, in which she follows the history of the controversial 19th century federal leader Juan Manuel de Rosas, in collaboration with the writer Claudia Farías Gómez.

His relationship with Borges began when they discovered a mutual love of the English language and even old Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic.

She met him when she was only 16 years old and was a literature student. Her father took her to listen to a lecture by the author of “The Brodie Report”, “Universal History of Infamy” and “The Book of Sand”.

“I miss Borges and the fun we had. My friends used to tell me ‘how you date an old man from a labyrinth (a frequent image in Borges’s essays), it’s terrifying’. But come and meet him: he is a funny person and labyrinths fascinate me. I had a (great) time with him. I’m not a masochist; He was a very nice person,” he once said in a speech invited to the Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico.

From the time Borges appeared every year as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kodama remembers that “everyone would stop him on the street and say, ‘I hope he gets it.’ He could never be rewarded.

Almost 40 years difference

The relationship was not easy for her: “My mother told me that Borges could be my grandfather and she was right. Due to the age difference (he was 54 and I was 16) she was ahead of the game”.

“But on the other hand,” Kodama recalled, “when we were teenagers, my friends talked about family and children, and I didn’t want to start a family because my parents were separated and I was under the care of my grandmother.”

His definition of a relationship was clear: I have never felt a man as something that dominates me or that I am inferior.

The inseparable companion of the author of “Inquisition” and “El Aleph” was the creator of the Jorge Luis Borges Foundation in 1988.