Borges made Geneva his second home

Jorge Luis Borges regarded Geneva as a place of happiness and chose to spend his final days there, SRF reports, 40 years after his death.

“Of all the cities in the world, of the many homes a person seeks and earns through travel, Geneva seems to me the one most conducive to happiness,” Borges wrote about a year and a half before he died. The city, he said, was a place where he could find peace.

Borges died at Grande Rue 28 in Geneva’s old town. Argentinian Borges guide Marcos Liyo says it was the writer’s final wish to spend his last days in the city. After being diagnosed with cancer at the age of 86, Borges decided to return to the place where he had been happiest.

His affection for Geneva was shaped by his years at Collège Calvin, a renowned school. Borges’s family moved from Argentina to Geneva before the First World War and was unable to return because of the conflict. At 15, after being taught by his grandmother in Buenos Aires, he began attending the school and found the experience deeply fulfilling.

He made lifelong friends there and studied French, German and Latin, in addition to Spanish and English. The language lessons opened new worlds for him, while he spent his free time reading. After returning to Buenos Aires, Borges became director of the National Library and an acclaimed writer, though he never received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Geneva remained a second home he visited regularly.

Borges is buried at Cimetière des Rois, Geneva’s Cemetery of Kings. Visitors have pushed pens into the ground at his grave as a tribute. The grave of John Calvin, whom the article describes as perhaps Geneva’s most significant figure, is nearby. Liyo considers Borges the cemetery’s most important figure because of his connection to the city and his international influence.

Geneva has no Borges archive or memorial, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau Literature House director Donatella Bernardi says this does not mean the city has forgotten him. In Argentina, Borges was a public figure whose admirers offered him coffee and taxi rides. In Geneva, people refrained out of respect, Bernardi says. Borges valued that reserve and pledged lasting loyalty to the city.

He once wrote: “Geneva hardly knows that it is Geneva. The great shadows of Calvin, Rousseau, Amiel and Ferdinand Hodler are present here. Yet no one reminds the traveller of them. I know I will return to Geneva again and again. Perhaps even after the death of my body.”