A Morning with Maria Kodama1

It was a brisk spring morning, the 25th of September in 2007. The three of us are waiting in front of a tall black door at the end of an 8-foot-high stone wall. The building behind is an imposing house in the fashionable Recoleta District of Buenos Aires. I can see only its upper stories. In the wall of the house immediately to the right of this one, a bronze plaque reads:

It seems to me that no writer since Borges, or before him, is free of Borges’ influence. Borges’ ficciones constitute a literary genre in which the center of the universe is at every place in the universe; in which all humans are one human, and each human is all humans; in which every story is realistic save one fantastical element, which makes reality fantastical and the fantastical real; in which the author creates the literary work, and the literary work creates the author; in which each reader writes the story he is reading, and the story writes the reader; in which every task is labyrinthine, and the perfect labyrinth is a straight line; in which any given time is all of time, and all of time is in any given moment.

David Rosenfeld invited my wife, Sandra, and me to join him in visiting Maria Kodama, Borges’ widow. He has not told me how he arranged this meeting. What he says is vague. He knows Maria Kodama, or knows people who know her, but she does not know him, though they may have briefly crossed paths; perhaps she will remember him.

We were told to arrive at 10 minutes to 10:00, which led me to think that we would have 10 minutes with Maria Kodama. A short, thick woman, graying hair pulled back tightly in a bun, opens the door to the street at a little after 10:00. She gives us a dutiful smile. Seeming to know who we are, or not caring who we are, she leads

us along a brick path that bisects