All Roads Lead to Austen: A Year-long Journey with Jane

by Amy Elizabeth Smith

  And a good thing, too, because Hugo handed me a pretty little present as soon as I sat down: an attractive 1945 hardcopy edition of La Abadía de Northanger.

  “I want you to have this,” he said with a smile. “I should read it in English anyway next time.”

  While some book dealers close by 7:00 p.m., many along Corrientes stay open as late as 10:00 p.m. or even 1:00 a.m. It was a pleasure to browse the stores with Hugo, block after block. There’s no city in the United States that I know of where stores stay open so late to accommodate the crowds of lingering, well-dressed people like one finds in Buenos Aires at night. Numerous theaters lined the street as well, contributing to the flow of noisy, animated pedestrians.

  Goodness knows I had enough editions of Austen already, but how could I turn down Orgullo y Prejuicio with a stylized painting of Lizzy and Darcy flying through the air in modern wedding clothes on the cover?

  “That publishing house does school editions, rewritten and abridged,” Hugo pointed out. “That won’t be useful for you.”

  “I like the cover,” I smiled as I paid for it.

  Next store. I also couldn’t turn down Persuasion with a photo of a sultry blond who could have passed for a 1970s Bond girl, set against a bright red background.

  “Oh please, no,” Hugo again attempted to intervene. “That publisher puts out appalling trash. That can’t be a good translation.” When I met his eye and smiled again, he sighed and shrugged. “I get it. You like the cover.”

  The only sour note in the evening hit when we got on to the subject of Dark Shadows yet again, and Hugo lamented that Jonathan Frid, who’d played Barnabas Collins, wasn’t alive to see the current revival of interest in the show. Panicked, I insisted that Frid had not died. Only a visit to the website Dead or Alive could settle this, and when we saw Internet proof that as of that moment, Barnabas lived, we heaved a simultaneous sigh of relief. What a pair of nerds! Then Hugo laughed—really laughed—for the first time since I’d met him, outside of the moments of merriment in the Austen group.

  But linger as we might, we eventually found ourselves at the door of my hotel once more.

  “Would you like to come up for a bit?” I asked before giving myself time to think about what I was doing. I wasn’t necessarily inviting him into my bed, but we’d never had a bit of real privacy since we’d met.

  He hesitated, then said, “Sure.”

  I showed him some of the special books I was packing in my carry-on, among them a first edition of Manuel Puig’s The Buenos Aires Affair and an early edition of Eva Perón’s strange autobiography, La Razón de mi Vida. We talked books then fell silent. Hugo, seated on my bed, studied me for a long moment, his dark gaze intense and his handsome features, strained. He leaned forward—would he finally try to kiss me? He looked so desperately like he wanted to share something. Maybe I should jump in and kiss him? Then I thought of Diego and again wondered what I was up to. According to the ladies over dinner—no ring, no problem. But that wasn’t my style. I assumed Diego was dating other people while waiting for me, but we did still have a plan see each other this fall, something I’d very much been looking forward to.

  While these thoughts were racing through my head, god only knows what Hugo was thinking—but finally, he made the first move.

  He told me how happy he’d been to meet me, how much he’d enjoyed being with me, and that he had my email address. Then he stood up and left.

  Yee—oooouch.

  Maybe…I just didn’t know the signals here? Perhaps Hugo was gay, and I’d misread his friendly overtures? As I heard the elevator doors open and close outside my room, whisking him street-ward, my addled brain careened into a Scrubs-style fantasy: my best buds from my fortieth birthday bash in Las Vegas suddenly appeared on the bed—in brightly colored PJs with their hair in slumber party pigtails—crowding the space where Hugo had just been sitting.

  Cheryl, who had visited in Chile, can be something of a pessimist. She was nodding, “Yep, he’s gay. Forget it. No dice.” Jaque, ever cautious, was giving an inscrutable “Who’s to say?” shrug, while Susan, the most adventurous, was winking, “Could still be interesting if he’s bi!”

  Then poof, they were gone, and I was alone again.

  Had I been Frank Churchilled, Clueless style, or had I simply Emma’d myself? Gay or straight, Hugo wasn’t interested. So much for my belief that as an Austen devotee, I had especially keen powers of observation. I’d felt so sure that Hugo had feelings for me. But hadn’t I proven repeatedly throughout the year of travels that if there was a way to make a misstep, I’d be there? I guess I’d believed, too easily, that because my feelings had tipped over from friendship into romance that Hugo’s had as well.

  Okay, so I screwed up again. But a lot had gone right in Argentina. Most things, in fact. Without knowing a soul in the city, I located fascinating, insightful readers for my group. I took in fun cultural events with Teresa, who taught me that there is no way to say “I am” or “I have” in Hebrew. I was welcomed into the JASBA fold and broke bread with a man who’d known Borges and Victoria Ocampo; I even found a SUR from 1963 with one of Mr. Dudgeon’s reviews. I saw tango dancers and lost track of happy hours wandering from one bookstore to another. I tormented an anti-Yankee embroidery teacher with my crassness and bad needle skills. I made friends with a proud, handsome, grumpy, nerdy porteño who never threw me out of his bookstore. I got to see how Emma held up across time and borders in a city that Austen’s snootiest heroine would have simply adored. How could anybody “handsome, clever, and rich” not love a city where, according to the Latin American grapevine, most people believe “handsome” and “clever” are their birthright?

  As for this last night—well, Emma’s ego takes a bruising when she realizes that she and Frank Churchill are never going to happen as a couple, but she holds up just fine. Better things awaited.

  I didn’t know what my own better things were yet. But I felt pretty sure, they awaited.

  The End and the Beginning

  “Did you have good seats for the flights?”

  Someone who didn’t know my mother would think she was welcoming me home from a weekend’s vacation. But I could hear the depths of relief and happiness in her voice at finally receiving a phone call from California, not from who-knows-where, plus-bats. It was all there in the undertones: Oh thank God, you didn’t die! Please don’t do something like this again anytime too soon. My heart can only take so much!

  Emma’s fretful father struggles to make gruel eaters out of everybody around him, never understanding their resistance. “One half of the world,” Emma tries to explain, “cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” I was lucky to have a mother who, while she didn’t always share my idea of what constitutes a good time, didn’t push porridge. I’d cut my return too close to the beginning of my teaching semester to make a Pennsylvania visit before classes started, but I would definitely get in that family Christmas I’d promised myself back in Ecuador during my dengue-fueled, most maudlin holiday ever.

  As for the return to California—damnation, it felt good. Yes, I’d loved the year in Latin America, but coming home was a world of comfort and familiarity. It was fabulous to reconnect with friends, move back into my own place, and pull all of my worldly goods out of storage. My chickens were another story, unfortunately…but some coyote mother and father did right by their own family when they’d found a weak spot in my friend’s security fence.

  Home at last, the reminders of my travels were everywhere, starting with the stacks of boxes in my office at the university plastered with colorful stamps from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina. Every box I’d sent to myself made it safely, although a few were a little battered around the edges. I was in nerd heaven hauling the books home, sorting them by country, then organizing them by publisher on my shelves (ha!—just kidding; I alphabet
ized them). Joining the house decorations I’d pulled from storage were various blankets and woven fabrics from every country I’d visited, along with Señor Guapo and a host of llamas, owls, alpacas, and pudgy clay birds.

  Travel now colored my relationship with language as well. Having struggled so long to make myself understood in Spanish, it was an intense pleasure not to feel like a dummy most of the time. Using English was like running again after gimping along on a bad ankle for a year. Subtlety returned to my verbal arsenal, and I could make jokes above the kindergarten level. I had a newfound patience with anybody struggling with English. Living in a new language is exhilarating but exhausting, and considering how often people had helped me during my travels, I could definitely keep the good karma moving.

  A new language opens doorways, too. I could now accost my latino and latina colleagues in Spanish, and they were entertained by the odd accent I’d acquired, an overlay of gringa with musical undertones of Chile and Argentina. Conversations in Spanish all around me—in the grocery store, at the bank, on campus—turned from pretty noise into speech. My ears were alert to finally hear the secret things people discuss in Spanish specifically because they don’t want others to understand. Here it is: “They’ve got good prices on almonds this week.” “Can you believe how long this line is?” “Jesus, my classes suck this semester.” Not so secret, after all.

  And what about Austen? Had I learned what I’d set out to learn—whether Latin American readers would connect with Austen the way people in the States do? The quick answer was most did, some didn’t. While certain readers were dubious about how well Austen’s characters might fare if transported into modern Guayaquil, Santiago, or Buenos Aires, discussions of her works had led seamlessly into conversations about the local culture, in one way or another, in every group. Austen’s world hadn’t felt like the fascinating but distant Planet of the Brontës to the readers. Mrs. Bennet was alive and well in Antigua, Emma could push people’s buttons in Asunción, and Elinor could break hearts in Santiago (or at least one heart, anyway—but Elinor never asked for much).

  For all of the emotion Austen’s characters generated, on the manhandling issue I’d only had one score: Oscar and Ignacio José in Ecuador had wanted to see Mr. Darcy beaten with a stick. If I left out Erna from Paraguay, who’d been born in the States, no one else invoked bodily harm during the reading groups—although verbal thrashings abounded. ¿Quién sabe?—maybe it was a commentary on violence in American culture that U.S. readers were more likely to want to knock around Miss Austen’s ladies and gents. A man in Ecuador once asked me, “What’s the challenge in American football if players can use their hands?” My reply: “What’s the challenge in soccer if players can’t get slammed to the ground legally?” Carmen Gloria in Chile was dumbfounded when I rattled off a list of names for the ritualized torment American kids routinely inflict on each other: wedgies, Indian rope burns, purple nurples, tittie twisters, wet willies, noogies, swirlies, and the super atomic wedgie, to name a few. She couldn’t think of a single equivalent term in Spanish, and neither could anybody else I’d asked (yes, I went around asking things like that). We are, it seems, a violent people.

  As I settled back into my routine at home and the university, I emailed readers and friends in the countries I’d visited to let them know I’d made it back safely.

  And then there was Diego, poised to visit me in the States. Ever since I’d met Hugo, I’d been conflicted about Diego. I knew I cared about him—he was handsome, smart, cheerful, patient, and loving. Despite the dengue, living in Puerto Vallarta had seemed like a wonderful dream. But even after Hugo’s tense, kissless exit from my Buenos Aires hotel, I could not get him out of my head.

  So I called Cindy, a friend and colleague. We carried cups of coffee out to a shady spot on campus, and I explained the dilemma. She put me straight with a single question: “Which one is Mr. Darcy?”

  Wow—I hadn’t seen that coming, but I guess I should have. I’d been so curious about whether people in Latin America would enter Austenland that I hadn’t realized I’d crossed the border myself.

  Which was Mr. Darcy? Well, neither was filthy rich. Neither was going to make me mistress of Pemberley or the equivalent thereof. But the more I thought about it, the more apt the question seemed. Who is Mr. Darcy, really? Is he Mr. Perfect? No. At his worst he’s proud, insensitive, demanding, and socially awkward—but he’s right for Lizzy Bennet, who at her worst is proud, judgmental, hasty, and flippant. It’s all about fit. It dawned on me what the unspoken half of Cindy’s question was, within the framework of Pride and Prejudice: “and which is Mr. Bingley?”

  Mr. Bingley is relentlessly cheerful. He looks for the best in everyone. He loves getting out and socializing with all sorts of people—and he loves to dance. Mr. Bingley is…Diego.

  The right fit for Mr. Bingley was sweet, good-natured, passive Jane. Was I sweet, good-natured, and passive? Hell no. I’d done my best to look on the bright side of things when I was with Diego, but I had a growing suspicion I’d stayed in Puerto Vallarta just the right amount of time. Anything more than three months, and Diego would have seen how nerdy, neurotic, judgmental, and cranky I can be, even without a raging tropical fever as an excuse. There was a reason my visit to Puerto Vallarta had felt like a dream: it kind of had been. I’d made a temporary home there, but I was still just a tourist in the land of sunshine. Anything more than three months, and Diego’s perpetually bright temperament would have burned me out, I’m sorry to say, as I would have struggled, against my nature, to be sunshine-y myself.

  I never felt that I would shock Hugo if I described somebody as a jerk or showed how impatient I still got at times, despite my best attempts at cultural adaptation, with slow restaurant service. Fact is, I did those things, and he wasn’t shocked. I always felt comfortable with him, even functioning in a second language, because I could be my neurotic, judgmental, cranky self without feeling that it would bring him down—because he was prideful, combative, and grumpy himself. As for the nerd thing—Barnabas Collins? Come on. Anybody who loves Dark Shadows is a hopeless nerd. Johnny Depp is poised to put Barnabas Collins on the media radar again with a new film adaptation, but swashbuckling aside, Johnny Depp is actually the world’s best-looking nerd.

  Okay, so that was settled—Hugo was Mr. Darcy, and Diego was Mr. Bingley.

  I wrote to Diego and admitted that I’d met somebody else. After a slightly longer than usual silence, he responded just the way I would have expected him to: “This makes me very sad, Amy, but what I want most of all is for you to be happy. You know my life is here, and if you’ve found somebody who can be with you in California, then I’m happy for you.” His generosity made me feel even worse about how I may have hurt him. But with his warm heart, good looks, and perpetual optimism, somehow I didn’t think he’d stay single too long.

  So I’d come clean with myself (and Diego) about Hugo. The real problem remained. I’d found somebody I wanted to have with me in California—but judging from Hugo’s behavior when we said good-bye, he didn’t want me. And he lived in Argentina. Yet even without knowing Hugo’s feelings, once I knew mine, I couldn’t carry on with Diego.

  But hope dawns eternal. When I’d arrived back in the States, there’d been an email message from Hugo awaiting me. “This is my first message to you from Argentina. I hope when you read it you’re set up in your new house. Un beso, Hugo.”

  Un beso—there was my kiss. Then again, everybody runs around kissing everybody else in Buenos Aires, including guy-on-guy. Madonna, delicate flower that she is, was rumored to have been offended at how often she got kissed on the check by strangers when she was filming Evita. Still, I decided to be optimistic. I just couldn’t get the idea out of my head that Hugo felt the same about me as I did about him, despite evidence to the contrary. Did that make me a cross-cultural stalker? As long as I wasn’t hanging around outside his window and threatening other
women who talked to him, I supposed I was still on safe ground.

  The months passed, and we wrote to each other regularly, notes that got longer and more personal. As spring arrived, I decided to go for it—I asked him how he’d feel if I visited again in July. I also asked, only half joking, if he had a girlfriend or a wife hidden away somewhere (I wasn’t seriously concerned about his having a boyfriend; that had just been wounded vanity on my part).

  After I sent the note, I paced my apartment. What had I done? What if I scared him off and ruined our budding friendship? What if he did have a girlfriend? I checked my email compulsively that evening, to no avail. Was a delayed answer a good sign or a bad one? Typically if I have trouble sleeping, I relax by watching Universal horror films from the thirties and forties. That was a two-Mummy night.

  Finally, Hugo’s answer arrived the next afternoon. I was so anxious to read it I could hardly remember to breathe.

  “I would love to see you again this summer. But here’s what’s going to happen if you come down here,” he wrote. I could picture him typing away at the computer in the bookstore, where he often stayed on after hours, heavy brows knitted as he dove into a note that took up two full pages when I printed it. “If we see each other again, we’re going to fall in love. That’s what’s going to happen. So you need to think about whether you want to come back here, because everything for us is going to get complicated.”

  So there it was. Once I tipped my hand, we both had cards all over the table.

  I don’t know how I made it through the weeks before I could finally set foot again in Buenos Aires and eyes, again, on Hugo. Having saved up during the year, I made reservations for a month in the Emma apartment on Juncal rather than my old Miss Bates option on the Avenida de Mayo.