Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet and philosopher who, through deeply religious writings that he laced with a love for nature and for his land, brokered a mutual understanding between India and the Western world. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, after which his work was diffused internationally. Knighted by King George V in 1915, Tagore renounced this title following the 1919 massacre at Amritsar, when British troops killed 400 Indian protesters.

Victoria first read Tagore’s Gitanjali in the 1914 translation by André Gide and would describe this reading as her first real encounter with the poet. The poetry of Tagore conjured in her an intense emotional experience, as if “the poems were an offering to the god of tears.”

Year later in 1924, Tagore arrived in Argentina after visiting Peru, where he had been invited to attend the festivities for the centennial of independence in that country. What Victoria would later dub “a treacherous flu” forced the poet to remain a few extra days in Buenos Aires in order to regain strength. Soon, the doctors returned a still more dismal diagnosis: a crossing by train of the Andes could prove fatal for his weak heart. Victoria met Tagore in the Hotel Plaza with the proposal that he recover instead at the Miralrío, an estate a stone’s throw from the Villa Ocampo in San Isidro. The initial plan was for a week-long stay; in the end, Tagore remained two months in San Isidro –November and December of 1924—and never made it back to Peru.

The poet regained his health on those banks, where the air was perfumed by flowers and mangos and roses. Victoria would say that “it was the only gift I could give him, the smell of rain on earth, the shadows formed by a certain yellow flower, the immensity of this matchless river, and shreds of clouds pressed onward by the wind.” During Tagore’s stay Victoria had given him a chair with a tall, firm back; when he departed she insisted that he keep it (Today the chair is exhibited in Rabindra Bhavana in Santiniketan, India). It was on the long sea-voyage home from South America that Tagore composed the series of four poems entitled Purabi.

In 1930 Victoria traveled to France and, fascinated by the poet’s drawings, organized an exhibition of his work. The two never saw one another again. Yet it is possible that the woman with an oval face and penetrating eyes that appears in many of the drawings was inspired by Victoria. Shortly before his death Tagore would write: “I did not know her language but the words spoken by her eyes will endure forever, so eloquent in their anguish.”