Victoria’s life-long association with Jorge Luis Borges, an author ranked among Latin America’s most brilliant and most polemic, was beset with run-ins and rows, yet in the end a mutual respect prevailed. Borges, who had befriended Sur’s editor Bioy Casares at the Villa Ocampo, held opinions on the proposed direction of the publication that often conflicted with Victoria’s. But Victoria proved an unconditional friend for the author, and Sur offered an outlet well-suited to Borges’s writing through the magazine as well as through the publishing house. When the Peronist government later dismissed him from a position at a municipal library, Victoria, without Borges’s knowledge, helped in his candidacy for head of the National Library. She was a regular patron of his lectures, and even took care of the operations he had to undergo for his eyes.

Borges, who had nicknamed Victoria ‘Ayesha’ after a character of Ridder Haggard’s whose name meant “she who must be obeyed,” would often quip sarcastically that twenty-six days in jail under the watch of the Good Pastor Victoria had made him a new, changed man. Yet in spite of all of their differences, upon Victoria’s death Borges wrote: “We can see her now. Before she was cast into shadow by circumstances, chance occurrences, each day. But one moment in 1979 allows that magic distance of death to unmask her with a gesture that is still, eternal, singular… she was one of Ibsen’s women. She lived with valor and decorum, her own life. Her vast oeuvre, in which protest abounds, never condescends to mere complaint. She possessed, in sum, ‘the grace that heaven didn’t deign offer me,’ the gift of the intimate but always discreet confidant, which is the inviting quintessence of her Testimonios.”