In which of my cities will I die?; Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Le cimetière des Rois, Plainpalais, Geneva

 

En cuál de mis ciudades moriré?

¿En Ginebra, donde recibí la revelación, no de Calvino ciertamente, sino de Virgilio y de Tácito? 

Jorge Luis Borges ‘Qué será del caminante fatigado’

I still know Geneva far better than I know Buenos Aires, which is easily explained by the fact that in Geneva no two street corners are alike, and one quickly learns the differences. Every day, I walked along that green and icy river, the Rhone, which runs through the very heart of the city, spanned by seven quite different-looking bridges. The Swiss are rather proud and standoffish.

J.L. Borges – Autobiographical Notes (1970) 

I don’t often do celebrity graves but when I was in Geneva in January I had make an exception to visit and pay my respects to Jorge Luis Borges the Argentinian writer as I have, with a fascination bordering on obsession, been reading, and re-reading, him now for the best part of 50 years.  A trip to his graveside is also a homage to another literary hero, John Berger, who made the trip in the early 2000's and wrote about it in the wonderful ‘Here Is Where We Meet’. Berger in his later years was a great haunter of cemeteries, and standing at the head of Borges grave, standing in Berger’s footsteps, I remembered a passage in ‘And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos’;

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

In his late story ‘El Otro’ (The Other – first published, of all places, amongst the bums and tits in Playboy) the 70 year old Borges describes an incident which he claims “occurred in February, 1969, in Cambridge, north of Boston”; resting whilst out on a stroll along the banks of the Charles River he meets a young man who he recognises as his younger self, who is sitting on the banks of the Rhone in Geneva. The older Borges concludes that the encounter, for him, is real but that for his younger self, it is only a dream. The city of Geneva was always hugely significant to the Argentinian writer. 

Borges lived in Geneva from 1914 until early 1919. It was where he wrote his first poems and where, in 1917, he almost lost his virginity. His father felt that that the time was right for his studious 18-year-old son to forget his books and learn about corporal pleasures, and so arranged an assignation with a prostitute. Unable to rid himself of the idea that his father had probably already been with the prostitute himself, the occasion was a complete disaster which left Borges with a marked aversion for all matters sexual. Ironic then that Geneva was the city in which Borges married for the second time (though the ceremony took place by proxy in Paraguay) to Maria Kodama. His first marriage, in 1967, when he was 68, was to a widow Elsa Astete Millán and only lasted three years before the couple legally separated. There were no divorce laws in Argentina and so when Borges married for the second time his civil status in his homeland became extremely complicated. Maria Kodama, who was 38 years younger than Borges, had been one of his students in the early 1970’s before becoming his assistant and secretary. The marriage, which took place just weeks before he died on 14 June 1986 caused major consternation in Argentina. Press speculation as to Kodama’s motives was so fevered and the newlyweds were so harassed by journalists that Borges wrote a letter to the EFE news agency protested at media intrusion and pleading to be left in peace “I feel strangely happy in Geneva,” he wrote, “this has nothing to do with the culture of my ancestors and the basic love of country. It seems strange, that someone doesn’t understand and respect this decision by a man who, like one of Wells’ characters, has determined to be an invisible man…” The death of the writer did not put an end to lurid press speculation; reports in the papers suggested that he might have killed himself. There were also rumours about millions of pesos and dollars stashed away in Swiss back accounts; reporters took to following Maria Kodama whenever she left her hotel hoping to see her visit the bank and withdraw large sums in cash.

Borges was buried on Wednesday 18 June 1986 under a yew tree in the Cimetière des Rois in Planpalais. Over 500 mourners crowded the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, overlooking the old city.  The funeral service was jointly conducted by a Catholic priest and a Protestant pastor because his lineage included ancestors from both sides of the post-reformation schism.  The funeral cortege then carried him the short distance down the hill to the Plainpalais cemetery, originally a graveyard for plague victims but now the elite final resting place for Swiss worthies. Maria Kodama selected the burial spot beneath the yew and a stones throw away from the grave of John Calvin, who was buried there in 1564. “It is a great honor to be buried there,” said city council spokesman Robert Vieux, to the UPI press agency “particularly for foreigners. In giving its approval, the town council recognized Borges great talent and his lifelong love of Geneva.”  At the same time as the funeral the city hospital took the unusual step of making an official announcement that the writer had died of liver cancer.  The hospital spokesman explained that they had taken this step at the request of the family because of the wild rumours being promulgated by the press in Latin America; 'the death of Borges caused considerable emotion in Argentina as well as in Europe and his great fame unfortunately provoked speculation about his illness and the cause of death,' the medical statement said. 'It was necessary to put an end to certain allegations.'  

Borges tombstone was made by the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Longato. Maria Kodama later said that she was not sure who had come up with the design and that it was probably mostly Longato’s work but the words and motif’s were so charged with meaning for Borges that it is difficult to believe that he did not either leave instructions for the stone mason or discuss it with him directly.   The memorial is in the shape of a runestone and contains inscriptions and designs on both faces. The front has Borges name inscribed above a design of seven Viking warriors brandishing weapons clearly based on the 9th-century grave marker found at Lindisfarne, known as the Viking Domesday stone. Below this are the words ‘And ne forhtedon na’, then below that, obscured by a shrub, the dates 1899 1986 and a small Celtic cross. The inscription is in Old English and means ‘Be not afraid.’ It is a quote from the poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’ which celebrated the doomed defence of the Essex coast by a group of Anglo-Saxon warriors against a Viking raid in 991. Borges translated the poem and the significance of the words when placed on a tomb are obvious.  

The obverse side of the stone depicts a Viking ship, the design based on various ships shown on Runestones from Gotland in Sweden.  A line from the Old Norse Volsunga Saga is inscribed above the ship, ‘Hann tekr sverðit Gram ok leggr i meðal þeira bert’, which translated means; he took the sword Gram and laid the naked metal between them. In the saga the hero Sigurd rides his horse through the flames that surround the sleeping Brynhild who has been cursed by Odin only to marry a man who is not afraid to rescue her from her flaming prison. Sigurd cuts off her coat of chain mail and wakes her. The couple fall in love but as Sigurd is already married and is only rescuing Brynhild so that she can wed another man, they spend three nights together but with Sigurd's naked, dragon slaying sword between them to prevent consummation of their passion. Presumably this is a reference to the unconsummated love between Jorge and Maria, no sword being necessary in the face of age, infirmity, terminal cancer and a lifelong aversion to sex. To underline the point the words ‘De Ulrica a Javier Otárola’ are inscribed below the ship.  Ulrica and Javier are characters in the story ‘Ulrikke’ from The Book of Sand which also used the translated quote from the Volsunga saga as an epigraph.   

Borges with Maria Kodama

In 2009 a Peronist politician, Maria Beatriz Lenz, proposed to the Argentine Congress that Borges remains should be repatriated and buried in the family vault at the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. The proposal was backed by the Borges biographer who also happened to be the then head of the Argentine Society of Writers, Alexander Vaccaro. The plan was to get his corpse back to Argentina in time for the 110th anniversary of Borges birth on the 24th August. The plan came to naught as Maria Kodama wanted nothing to do with it; “In a democracy, no one, no party, can take a person’s body, that is the most sacred thing,” she was reported as saying. Borges hit the news again in 2011 when a Chilean writer released a book whose cover showed him pissing on Borges tomb. Here is the story as reported in the Guardian;

Jorge Luis Borges was possibly the greatest Spanish-language writer of the 20th century, but the Chilean author Eduardo Labarca felt the best tribute a fellow writer could pay would be to urinate on his tomb. A photograph on the cover of 72-year-old Labarca's latest book appears to show him doing exactly that in the Geneva graveyard where Borges's well-tended, flower-adorned tomb lies. The photo has provoked outrage in Borges's native Argentina, even though Labarca admits the stream of water descending on the great man's grave actually came from a bottle of water hidden in his right hand. "This is in bad taste and is a violation," said the Argentine culture minister, Jorge Coscia. "You don't gain anything by urinating on a tomb." Labarca was unapologetic today about the cover to his book The Enigma of the Modules, saying it could best be understood by reading the work itself. "Peeing on that tomb was a legitimate artistic act," he told the Guardian. "The cover of the book is coherent with the contents and is best understood through that."

Labarca is a translator, writer and journalist who went into exile and worked for a Soviet radio station after the coup d'état that overthrew Salvador Allende and brought in the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. He went on to work as a translator for various United Nations organisations and currently splits his time between Vienna and Chile. "I am not just a person who goes around peeing on tombs, but a writer with a serious oeuvre," he said today. Labarca told Argentina's perfil.com that Borges's talent as a writer had not been matched by his behaviour outside literature. "Anyone who is offended by this is very short-sighted," he said. "Borges was a giant as a writer but I feel complete contempt for him as a citizen. As an old man, almost blind, he came to meet the dictator Pinochet in the days when he was busy killing." Borges was delighted with Pinochet. "He is an excellent person," he said afterwards. "The fact is that here, and in my country and in Uruguay, liberty and order are being saved."