Editing Jorge Luis Borges (section)

===Later personal life===
[[File:Maria Kodama.jpg|thumb|upright=1|right|[[María Kodama]] at the 2010 [[Frankfurt Book Fair]]]]

In the mid-1960s, Borges became acquainted with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future [[Pope Francis]], who was at the time a young Jesuit priest. In 1979, Borges spoke appreciatively and at some length about Bergoglio to the Argentine poet and essayist Roberto Alifano.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Borges y Bergoglio, crónica de una entrañable amistad |url=https://www.infobae.com/opinion/2022/09/17/borges-y-bergoglio-cronica-de-una-entranable-amistad/ |access-date=2023-07-04 |website=infobae |date=17 September 2022 |language=es-ES}}</ref>

In 1967, Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. Friends believed that his mother, who was 90 and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. The marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at age 99.<ref>Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, ''The Lessons of the Master''.<!-- page number? publication data? --></ref> Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades.<ref>"Fanny", ''El Señor Borges''<!-- page number? publication data? --></ref>

From 1975 until the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally. He was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant [[María Kodama]], an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry. In April 1986, a few months before his death, he married her via an attorney in [[Paraguay]], in what was then a common practice among Argentines wishing to circumvent the Argentine laws of the time regarding divorce. According to Kodama, Borges drank as a young man, but eventually gave up alcohol as he aged and "felt more secure."<ref>{{cite news|last=Escribano|first=Pedro|title=María Kodama: "Borges no necesitó de vino ni alcohol"|work=La República|language=Spanish|date=20 July 2006|url=http://larepublica.pe/20-07-2006/maria-kodama-borges-no-necesito-de-vino-ni-alcohol|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170516043319/http://larepublica.pe/20-07-2006/maria-kodama-borges-no-necesito-de-vino-ni-alcohol|archive-date=16 May 2017}}</ref> On his religious views, Borges declared himself an agnostic, clarifying: "Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen."<ref>{{cite news|newspaper=New York Times|title=Borges, a Blind Writer With Insight|author=Israel Shenker|url=https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/31/reviews/borges-insight.html|date=31 August 1997|access-date=30 April 2013|quote=Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.}}</ref> Borges was taught to read the Bible by his English Protestant grandmother and he prayed the Our Father each night because of a promise he made to his mother. He also died in the presence of a priest.<ref>Ivereigh, Austen (2014). ''The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope''. New York: Henry Holt and Company. p. 82.</ref>