You could almost miss the turn-off to ”Los Alamos”, a gracious family estate tucked among the vines and fruit trees of western Argentina. A small white sign directs you off the main highway, and from there an unpaved road takes you past tree-fringed fields before curving into the grounds of the well-kept estate. Nothing suggests that just beyond the charming colonial house, dating from 1830, an enigmatic tribute to one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most prized writers has been painstakingly brought to life.
Los Alamos - named for the poplar trees reaching into the blue skies that stretch out over the Andes - is home to a football pitch-sized maze planted in honour of Jorge Luis Borges, the creator of playful, intellectual literary labyrinths in works such as Fictions, El Aleph and, indeed, Labyrinths. Its presence, in the form of an open book, inviting visitors to wander down forking paths that spell out the author’s name and some of his favourite symbols, is a fitting tribute to a writer who saw labyrinths as a metaphor for life, and books and mazes as one and the same thing.
”Borges wanted to be an invisible and secret man,” says his widow, Maria Kodama, on her first visit to the labyrinth, a crisp day in late April. She had spent more than a decade lobbying for the maze to be built in Buenos Aires, where Borges was born in 1899. But this site, in the province of Mendoza, 625 miles from the capital on the estate of Susana Bombal, a poet and close friend of Borges, has sentimental value of its own - and an air of mystery. The labyrinth’s criss-crossing curves can only be deciphered when viewed from above, making the gargantuan garden both visible and hidden. ”How Borges would have been delighted,” Kodama says.
The labyrinth was the brainchild of the late British maze mastermind, Randoll Coate, who met Borges through Susana Bombal in the late 1950s while posted to Buenos Aires as a diplomat. Coate called the meeting ”a watershed in my creative life”. A distinguished veteran of the second world war and prisoner interrogator while in London, Coate threw himself into his passion for puzzles after retiring from the foreign service. He created more than 20 celebrated labyrinths around the world, including at Blenheim Palace and Longleat, as well as a pyramid labyrinth in Belgium and the Creation maze, one of his most famous works, in Sweden before his death in 2005, aged 96.
In the early 1980s, Coate wrote to Bombal, with whom he had become close friends, about a vivid dream he had had some years before Borges’ death in 1986. In it, she was wearing mourning clothes, and the two ”exchanged fears that a disgracious statue of [Borges] might be erected, and we simultaneously came to the idea that I should design a memorial maze symbolising the great symbolist”.
It would be a fitting tribute. Borges, who died in 1986, had liked to play hide and seek in the Byzantine basement of Argentina’s National Library, where he had been named director in 1955 - despite diminishing eyesight that would leave him completely blind. He also visited mazes at Hampton Court and the Palace of Knossos in Crete, legendary home to the mythical labyrinth built by Daedalus to house the Minotaur. And although Coate’s Memorial Maze was not planted until well after the writer’s death, Borges saw - or felt, rather - plans for it on show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. ”I traced it on his hand,” Kodama recalls. Coate’s vision for the maze foresees the addition of plaques in Braille only along the route, so that blind people will be the only ones truly able to ”see” their way.
Coate took his inspiration for the multilayered maze - by far his favourite of all the labyrinths he built, according to longtime collaborator Jenny Graham - from Borges’ short story ”The Garden of Forking Paths”. In it, the narrator, who is advised at every crossroads to turn left, a traditional route to the heart of a maze, makes the now-famous statement: ”To no one did it occur that book and labyrinth were one and the same.” The Borges maze is laid out like an open book, inviting people to get literally lost in it. It illustrates the pun ”Je suis Borges” (the French because Borges was educated in Switzerland), meaning both ”I am Borges” and ”I follow Borges.” In addition to the letters of the author’s name, the design contains images of the writer’s walking stick, of a giant question mark, of the face of a tiger - an animal that fascinated him - and of two hourglasses, one in the shape of a figure eight, the other a six. They mark Borges’ age when he died.
Coate eventually donated the designs to the International Jorge Luis Borges Foundation, run by Kodama, but it wasn’t until more than a decade later that the plan came to life. Bombal’s great-nephew, Camilo Aldao, who as a boy had led the blind Borges on his walks around the streets of the city, discovered the letter from Coate to Bombal among his great-aunt’s papers after her death. Camilo - known by the diminutive Cami, or KMY - decided the project must go ahead. He teamed up with Kodama and Carlos Thays, great-grandson of the French-born landscape designer of the same name. The elder Thays had fallen in love with Buenos Aires in the late 19th century and left a Parisian imprint all over the city’s public spaces and parks.
But attempts to try to get the maze built in front of the National Library in Buenos Aires or on another site in the capital foundered. And after more than a decade without progress, they reluctantly gave up. Then, Kodama recalls, ”Camilo gave me the surprise”: he proposed they build it on the family estate in San Rafael, in the province of Mendoza, which his aunt had owned and Borges had visited.
Word spread and Borges aficionados raised money for the project by ”sponsoring” the white stakes used to trace the design on to the ground. Friends helped plant more than 7,159 box shrubs - chosen for their resistance to Mendoza’s fierce hailstorms - on the 2.5 acre site. Planting was finished in October 2003; three months later, Camilo died. His ashes were scattered inside the labyrinth and a stone placed in tribute to him just beside the symbol of an hourglass representing the end of Borges’ own life.
Kodama - his second wife and now guardian of his legacy - is honoured in the maze with the initials MK, in the bottom lefthand corner. The pair first met after he gave a lecture she attended aged 12; they met again a few years later and she began to teach him Anglo-Saxon. After years of partnership, they married a few months before Borges’ death. That converted her into a controversial figure, but she dismisses her critics as cheap publicity seekers. ”He is half of my soul... I miss him terribly,” she said. She is now overseeing plans for the labyrinth to be repeated on the island of San Giorgio in Venice and in Iceland. That her life should revolve around her famous husband’s memory ”doesn’t feel like a burden... Borges will never be the past for me”.
