“Happy,” I responded, folding into his arms.
And yes, with the group, too.
Chapter Six
When I held my fortieth birthday party in Las Vegas, one of my closest friends arrived from Virginia looking dazed, even before the drinking started. In order to party with the girls, Susan had left her two small children for the first time since they’d been born. Periodically, in the midst of Vegas hijinks, I’d catch her with that faraway look. What are they doing right now? Will they get to bed on time? Did I leave enough juice? Do they miss me?
When Salvador and Soledad arrived at 9:45 p.m. for Group Number Two a few days after the first group, they were very sharply dressed—and had that same distracted air about them. This was the first evening Salvador Jr. and Juan were spending away from their attentive parents. We were starting up so late in the evening specifically because the couple wanted to put the boys to sleep then slip out, so as not to cause a panic.
“Everything’s okay with the kids?” Diego asked as we settled in around the table and I passed around plates for delivery pizza; I’d felt too tired to cook, and Diego had been working all day.
The couple exchanged nervous smiles. “They’re asleep. Everything will be fine,” Salvador said, as much to comfort Soledad as to answer Diego. Because there was very little beer in the house, I’d been about to make a run before they arrived, but Diego had assured me they didn’t drink.
But thank god there were two bottles left because tonight, Mom and Dad both needed a beer.
“So did you like the book?” I usually don’t start a discussion with such a subjective question since it puts people on the spot. For some reason, it just popped out that way, but what the heck, I was sure they’d liked it.
Dead silence from both.
Salvador cast a sideways glance at Soledad, who made a face, shook her head ruefully, and said, “Well, more or less.”
Salvador jumped in. “Yes,” he said firmly. “I really did like it. It was very interesting to learn something about the period when it was written, about a place that’s different. I liked the character development, too. And especially,” he added energetically, “I loved the way the plot unfolded, all the surprises. I was so glad when it worked out that Marianne will have the same happiness as Elinor, after all she went through.”
“Diego mentioned while you were reading it that you were upset about Marianne,” I nodded.
“I was so upset about what that guy, that—” Again, the pronunciation problem, and it finally came out sounding like an insult. “That Willoughby was very cruel. I almost wanted to stop reading, it was so depressing. She was so sad when he left her! And that letter, that terrible, cold letter he wrote. That was very bad.”
Salvador cast a glance at Soledad, to see if she wanted to comment. She took a sip of her beer, so he went on. “This whole problem of people not keeping their word was important throughout the book. Starting with John Dashwood. What an awful brother, not caring for his sisters. And the way he lets himself get talked out of his good intentions by his wife, that was just terrible.”
Diego had actually read this passage out loud to me in bed one evening, laughing uproariously at Fanny’s greedy machinations and John’s slow crumble. The brilliant handling in Ang Lee’s film brings out the vicious humor of the scene. But Salvador was not amused.
“Women do that here, too, talking their husbands out of their good intentions,” Diego chimed in, and I had to bite my lip. Only women do this? “It’s a problem, I think, because people only have so much money, and it’s basically a competition for resources. Sometimes the wife wants more money or attention for her own family, when he wants to share it with his. But that Fanny, she’s just shameless. She’s so greedy, she didn’t even want the mother and sisters to have some nice china!”
As Diego, Salvador, and I laughed over Austen’s eye for selecting the perfect detail to make a character ridiculous, Soledad finally spoke up.
“Well, I just kept reading and reading and reading,” she said somewhat impatiently. “I read and read, waiting for something to catch my interest. Finally, in the middle, it got more exciting when things started to go badly for Marianne.” I thought back to the question of the Bible and the lenses through which we read. Salvador was caught up immediately by the moral questions of the novel, such as John Dashwood’s treatment of his mother and sisters. Had Soledad’s time at the university influenced her reading habits? Could developing a taste for Juan Rulfo and similar writers make Austen’s ethical dilemmas seem flatfooted—especially in translation? I waited for her to continue, but that was it.
I hope the kids are still sleeping, I could practically hear her thinking.
While the first chapter can be a drag, most people are engaged quickly with the contrast between the sisters. “Have you got any sisters?” I asked, wondering if maybe this was the issue.
“Yes.” What if they wake up and we’re not there?
“Well, lots of my students in the United States have a preference right away for one sister or the other. Did you?” I asked, working to draw her mind back to Austen.
“Elinor.” Did I show Mom where I left their favorite toys in case they get up?
“Why?” I prompted.
“Because she didn’t let herself get carried away with her emotions, because she always tried to make life easier for her family,” she said, finally starting to warm to the subject and let go of concern for her sleeping sons, safe, after all, under the watchful eye of their abuela.
“I feel the same way,” Salvador seconded. “Actually, at first, I liked Marianne better for her sincerity, her openness. But after the first half I could see how giving in to her feelings was making things hard for her family, and I didn’t like that. And there’s something else, something I really didn’t like—how that Lady Middleton wasn’t taking care of her own children, how people liked to have someone else watching their kids all the time. Children need their own parents, not somebody paid to care for them. It’s no wonder some of those kids in the book behave badly.”
I did a quick mental scan, trying to remember if any of my U.S. students had ever commented on parenting in the book. But with the talk on parenting, suddenly Salvador and Soledad both had that are the kids really okay look, so I switched gears again.
“Are there things in this novel that wouldn’t happen in Mexico?”
Just as confidently as Josefa had several nights before, Soledad responded, “No, the book’s really relevant. I’d already thought about that. Things then, in her country, are just the same way here and now. Look at Willoughby, taking advantage of women. Men here do that all the time. And Marianne, marrying more for the sake of getting married than for being in love. Women here are afraid to be single. It’s very hard.”
“So you don’t think that’s a good match?” I asked.
“Well, maybe she’ll come to love him, like the book says, but she certainly doesn’t at first.”
“I think lots of marriages back then were more like contracts,” Diego said.
“Definitely,” Salvador agreed. “Think about Edward’s mother, Mrs. Ferrars. That marriage surely must have been some kind of arrangement between families. Imagine being married to her.” Another score for Salvador. With the father out of the picture, I’d never thought about Mrs. Ferrars as a wife, only as a mother.
“What was it she wanted Edward to do for a living?” Diego turned to me. “She didn’t want him to be a minister, right?”
“A soldier, a lawyer, something more grand, that’s what she wanted.”
“Well, if his father had been around, he would have gotten him to focus better. Not having a father is a problem. He would have given him better motivation, helped him be more successful.”
“It’s not just the fathers who want their children to be successful, you know,” Soledad said
firmly.
“But they’ve got more authority,” Salvador began, and Diego cut in.
“Fathers are more convincing, like when your mother says, ‘Just you wait until your father gets home!’”
So this familiar threat is alive and well in Mexico, too; we all shared a good laugh.
We talked on for a while about parents and parenting styles, about some of the other twists in the plot, like Lucy’s surprising but welcome defection to Robert and how furious Mrs. Ferrars must have been, thinking she was thwarting Edward, only to lose her favorite to Lucy! We got on to the subject of movie adaptations, too, and once again played with some Mexican casting choices.
Soledad, now definitely settled comfortably into the conversation, suddenly turned to her husband. “Was there somebody in the book you identified with?”
“Colonel Brandon,” he answered without hesitation. “He’s reserved; he’s serious; he’s got good intentions. He never wants to cause problems, but he understands his duty. Like with that scene about the picnic. He really didn’t want to leave, but he had to. He’s never selfish, but sometimes you’ve got to choose between two responsibilities.”
They exchanged a quiet smile, then she turned to me. “What about you? Who do you identify with?”
I was pleased to see her taking the initiative. “Elinor,” I said. “She’s always focused on other people, and she’s not selfish either. I can’t claim to be as good as Elinor, but of the two sisters, I’ve always liked her more. In all honestly, Marianne kind of irritates me.”
Nodding in agreement, she turned to Diego. “Who do you identify with?”
“Willoughby’s pointer,” he responded, setting us all laughing again. “No, really, I like that dog! She’s alert; she knows what’s going on around her. And she doesn’t cause any trouble, like all the humans are constantly doing. She enjoys nature, too—that’s big for me.”
We drifted into an entertaining sidetrack about all the places to go hiking in the area, and again it was Soledad who pulled us back to Austen. “Something I think is interesting is how many authors never were famous during their lifetime but become more famous later,” she commented. “Was that true with Austen?”
The Austen background I routinely share with students in the United States was harder to explain in Spanish, but I muddled through. They were all surprised to hear that Austen never put her name on any book in her lifetime, instead inscribing them “By a Lady.” But eventually word got out, and Austen drew the attention of the prince regent, poised to take the throne when his father George III finally got around to dying. The prince thought it would be lovely if Austen would write a historical romance about his family line, or so his personal secretary implied in a letter to Austen. Her wry response is priceless. She insisted she couldn’t do it “under any other motive than to save my life, and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.” Pretty bold for a humble subject! She did bend enough to dedicate Emma to the prince, but the dirty dog never even acknowledged the honor.
“So basically,” I wrapped up, “she had some success in her lifetime, but nothing like the cult fame she has now with Americans and the British.”
“And Canadians,” Diego added. “I had the novel in the taxi, and one of my clients was surprised to see it. She told me Austen is very popular in Canada, too.”
I brought out my laptop. “Here are some photos of a seaside village she visited,” I said, showing them Lyme Regis. I also pulled up shots of Chawton Cottage. “Here’s the house where she lived after her father died. It was officially a ‘cottage,’ just like what the family in Sense and Sensibility moved in to, because it’s the smaller property on a large estate. But you can see it’s not so small.” Salvador and Soledad nodded, impressed. Their own neat little house would fit into Chawton Cottage several times.
“Here’s Chawton House, where her brother Edward lived.” One of Austen’s brothers had been adopted by wealthy, childless relatives. When they died he hit the inheritance jackpot, landing, among other properties, the entire Chawton estate. I explained how the mansion is now open to the public for the first time ever, thanks to a generous philanthropist who is also a die-hard Austen fan. She took a lengthy lease on the property from Edward’s descendents, and now her pet Clydesdales, named after various Austen characters, graze the grounds. Officially, it’s a research library focusing on women’s literature with visiting hours for the public.
My photos were from the initial limited-invite opening, an academic conference in 2003 that drew Austen scholars from around the world. We roamed the buildings freely before the public descended; some eager beavers were, in fact, being turned away at the gates while the conference was still going on. At one point I had timidly asked a guard if I could pretty-please sit for a moment in the second story window seat overlooking the front drive, apparently a favorite reading spot of Austen’s. My nerdy wish was granted; it was a happy, quiet moment of communion.
“How many novels did Austen write?” Salvador asked. “She didn’t live very long, did she?”
“She’d been writing since she was young, but she didn’t actually publish until 1811. Since she died in 1817, her public career was short. She published four novels in her lifetime—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Mansfield Park—then Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published by her family after her death.”
“That’s a lot in a short time,” Salvador said with a look of respectful surprise.
“What about Mexican novels from the same period?” I asked. “Were there Mexican writers producing similar work?” I’d struck out on this question with Marisol at the bookstore and also got a unanimous no from Josefa and her family.
Salvador deferred to Soledad, who replied, “Austen’s writing about people, about families. All the writers I know about from this time were concerned about politics and war. And they were all men.”
“There’s Sor Juana,” Diego offered. “But she was writing much earlier.” Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz is the great anomaly of Mexican literature, a seventeenth-century nun who wrote spellbinding poetry, theological essays, and feminist arguments. She later renounced her work in a document signed in her own blood, under pressure from the church. If you’ve seen the portrait on a Mexican two hundred peso note, that’s her.
Despite starting this second group much later in the evening, we ended up talking longer. By midnight I was seriously fading, still not fully recovered from my illness, and I could see Soledad lapsing back into longer and longer silences. I hope we tired the kids out well enough during the day, her look was saying again. Salvador noticed as well.
“It took me a while to get into it, but I did like it, after all,” Soledad conceded with a smile as she and Salvador headed for the door. “It was fun to do something different like this!”
“Well, I’ve got a copy of Pride and Prejudice, and it’s yours to borrow whenever you want,” Diego offered. With his characteristic directness and sincerity, Salvador quickly thanked him. “Yes, I’d like that.”
As for Soledad—vamos a ver. We’ll see. I thought she was coming around, but I couldn’t be sure she was an Austen convert yet. At least she’d finished the book, so there was definitely hope!
***
To toast the success of the groups, Diego took me to the city’s annual celebration in honor of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. The main square was filled with dashing groups of mariachis, all performing at once, competing for attention. An especially clever group one-upped the others by bringing an adorable little girl dressed in a wee jet-black jacket identical to theirs and a skirt with the same gold froggings that ran down the legs of their mariachi trousers. Not more than two, the girl danced as if every single person were there just to see her.
Although a few tourists milled about, the crowd was mostly a mix of locals and Mexicans on vacation from other cities. “There’s a song I want you to hear,” Diego said as we worked our way through the press, pausing to enjoy the different style and handsome costuming of each group. “I’m sure some of them will do it.” But the hours passed and gradually, one group after another packed up, until only one group remained. Seeing how much it meant to Diego, I tried not to show him how exhausted I still felt from the illness.
“There,” Diego cried, just when I was afraid I’d finally have to confess or collapse. “That’s it! El Mariachi Loco!” “The Crazy Mariachi” was apparently everybody else’s favorite, too. The crowd swayed and sang along merrily. There were quite a few drinks circulating, but that communal pleasure wasn’t alcohol induced. It was about sharing something familiar, about being out with family and friends in a classic Mexican mix of the sacred and the secular. God bless the martyred saint—let’s dance!
Diego seized me around the waist and twirled me joyfully, laughing aloud, then pulled me up close against his side again to watch the musicians. I suddenly experienced an intense wave of travel schizophrenia: happy to be sharing the moment—above all, sharing it with him—but bluntly aware of being an outsider.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t know the song lyrics being belted out around me—I could learn those fast enough. It was about the layering of experiences that each person there had, all of the associations with the song, heard from childhood onward, sung at weddings, parties, other festivals, completely embedded in a rich network of shared memories. I could learn Spanish, but I’d never catch up. The second time I sang the song would be Diego’s forty-second; my fifth, his forty-fifth.
Diego smiled over at me. I sighed and smiled back.
***
My relationship with my sister Laurie blossomed when she finished high school and we no longer had to share a room, but growing up I was closest with my older brother Shawn. We logged many hours together watching Star Trek episodes and Planet of the Apes films; when he was feeling ornery, he’d chase me around to fart on me. As Laurie and our oldest brother David each hit eighteen, they got married, got jobs, and started families. Shawn, a book nerd like myself, got a PhD, became a teacher, and stayed single (and eventually stopped farting on me, although he still enjoys farting around me and exclaiming in a pirate voice, “Arrrr! Music to me ears!”).
All Roads Lead to Austen: A Year-long Journey with Jane Page 10