All Roads Lead to Austen

by Amy Elizabeth Smith

  When I next saw Ignacio José, I kept mum on the forbidden Cumandá, but he was happy to hear that I’d enjoyed Don Goyo. He arrived with photocopies of several of his published short stories, plus a novel—El Pintor de Batallas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. “You’ll love this book, too,” he promised. “The author, he’s a Spaniard, so talented. It’s what we’ll discuss with the next group.”

  I was taken aback. “We’re not reading Pride and Prejudice?”

  He heaved a huge stage sigh. “I’m afraid there’s been a mix-up. El Pintor de Batallas was chosen instead. But wait until you see where we’re meeting, outside of the city. Our hostess’s house is just one step away from that mansion, what’s it called—Pemberley!” That sounded like a proper setting, at least, for the group Betsy had dubbed “Lady Catherine.”

  As for Pride and Prejudice, well, so be it. Así es la vida. I’d already had one incredible discussion of the novel. If nothing else so far on my journey, I’d learned to stop trying to control everything around me—or, more accurately, I’d learned to try to stop trying.

  ***

  You can never take ethnicity for granted in South America, so I didn’t assume Dr. Anderson, who Emilia sent me to for my lingering illness, would be Anglo. It hasn’t been too many years since Señor Fujimori was president of Peru, and Chile’s homegrown George Washington was named Bernardo O’Higgins. But Dr. Anderson returned my Spanish greeting in brisk U.S. English.

  I explained about my fever, the body aches, the pounding head, the persistent weakness, plus that I’d seen a doctor in Mexico who couldn’t pin down the problem, ditto the local clinic.

  “Did you have any other symptoms that might not have seemed related?” he asked with a frown.

  I pondered. “There is one thing. I had a rash. It was weird, too, because—”

  He held up one hand like a cop stopping traffic. “Let me guess—bright red, appeared on one part of your body, disappeared, and then reappeared on different parts?”

  “That’s it exactly! Itchy and painful, too.”

  He snorted and shook his head in disgust. “Dengue!”

  “Dengue?” I had a vague memory of seeing some poster somewhere about the dangers of mosquito bites. Maybe that had been…in a bus. In Puerto Vallarta.

  “There’s one disease only that manifests that kind of rash. Dengue. You get it from a mosquito—the Aedes aegyptus. How on earth could a Mexican doctor in a tropical zone fail to diagnose dengue?” He sounded genuinely angry. “I’ll bet he just gave you antibiotics, didn’t he?” When I nodded, he went on: “And that’s what they did in the clinic here, too?” Double nod at the flashback to that evil injection.

  Muttering under his breath, he wrote up a script for blood work. “Let’s confirm that this is what you had. You must be in recovery by now or you wouldn’t be out of bed, but full recovery takes months. It’s a serious illness, and there’s no vaccine, no treatment. You just have to ride it out. But since some strains are fatal, consider yourself lucky.”

  I headed for the door with the lab script, feeling shell-shocked. “It’s not contagious,” he called out, “so don’t worry about giving it to anybody. And one more thing. Take aspirin for the headaches, not ibuprofen. Ibuprofen will make you worse.”

  Dengue entering the picture somehow made me feel twice as bad as before. Dengue—good god! This was exactly what my mom had been worried about—an evil malady from the tropics that poisons your blood and turns you into a zombie! Should I tell her and give the evil a name, or just leave it be until I was safely back in the United States?

  When I returned to the apartment, still reeling from the news, I chucked the almost-empty bottle of ibuprofen I’d been eating ever since the headaches began. So I’d damaged my liver a bit. Maybe I’d grow another.

  As stunned as I felt, this was good news on one front: I wasn’t a big whiney Austen Loser, after all! There had been something wrong with me—I was no carping Mrs. Bennet or mewling Mary Musgrove. Dengue was serious business. Now if only I could find every person I’d been rude to and explain it all to them.

  ***

  Whatever my disappointment at not reading Pride and Prejudice with Lady Catherine, I found Pérez-Reverte’s book riveting. But I began worrying about Ignacio José. One day passed, and then another, and no call. I’d have to trust that he’d show up Thursday morning to take me to the group, since I’d lost the contact information Betsy had given me. And even if he’d lost my number, he knew where I lived.

  Thursday morning dawned, transformed into afternoon and then evening without a peep from Ignacio José. How dare he go to Pemberley without me! Turning my room upside down and plowing through the scraps in my purse, I finally unearthed the paper with the contact numbers and by evening reached Carmen, one of the group members.

  “We’re really sorry! We’d been looking forward to meeting you earlier today,” she said warmly. “As for Ignacio José,” her voice dropped a few degrees colder, “he never showed.”

  “Do you think something might be wrong with him?”

  “Who can ever say? Ignacio José is fascinating, such a talented writer—but he’s not reliable. Anyway, we’re meeting again in early January and you’re welcome to join us. We spent more time this morning exchanging presents than discussing Pérez-Reverte’s novel, so we’ll cover it again. And maybe we can work in a little Jane Austen discussion.”

  I happily told her to count me in for January. I fell asleep speculating about Ignacio José, wondering if I could imagine anything half as lively as whatever tale he’d surface with.

  In the meantime, Jane Austen’s birthday rolled around just like it does every December 16. I decided to celebrate it with the iguanas. I stopped by the grocery store and bought as much lettuce as I could carry.

  “Do iguanas like this kind of lettuce?” I asked the clerk. He was the same unfortunate man I’d snarled at earlier about the grocery divider. I wanted to mend fences, but he wasn’t buying it; he nodded, still avoiding eye contact. Well, I tried.

  Every December when I teach my Austen class, we hold a Jane Austen Night near her birthday to showcase student projects. This December my celebration would be more solitary, but given my sour mood, it was probably for the best. Reaching the park, I settled on a bench, wondering why the iguanas were all still up in the trees.

  “It’s chilly for them, after the rain,” explained the man who had stealthily invited himself to sit next to me, correctly interpreting my tree-ward gaze.

  Sheesh. A “Do you mind if I join you?” might have been nice. When I nodded stiffly but remained silent, he settled for a more standard introduction. “I’m Rafael. And you are…?”

  “Violeta.” It simply popped out.

  “Violeta! What a beautiful name!” he smiled.

  Why thank you, I just made it up myself.

  “Have you been here before?”

  “Never. I arrived in Guayaquil today.” I capriciously deleted my bookstore trips, talks with Betsy, the Austen reading group, the previous visit to the park with Ignacio José, all with a single sentence.

  My students’ projects for Austen Night often include recasting her works in fanciful ways, but up until that moment, I’d never been much myself for fantasy improv. What had come over me? But this must have been exactly how Austen felt creating her juvenilia. In those short stories, written between ages twelve and eighteen, she matches, maims, and kills off characters with the zeal of a child improvising scripts for her favorite dolls. The juvenilia is Austen’s wildest, most outrageous work. Here’s a sample from “Sir William Mountague”: “Mr. Brudenell had a beautiful niece with whom Sir William soon fell in love. But Miss Arundel was cruel; she preferred a Mr. Stanhope. Sir William shot Mr. Stanhope; the lady had then no reason to refuse him.”

  Where else has Austen ever resolved conflicts with such dispatch? O
n that December morning, I gave in to the birthday spirit of Austen, the wicked little teenager Austen. If that man couldn’t leave me in peace with my lettuce, so be it.

  “Have you got family here?” he asked. “Children?”

  “No, but I’ve got nieces and nephews. Twenty-eight, in fact.” I cavalierly transformed my numerous cousins into my siblings’ offspring. “Eighteen of them are my godchildren.”

  “So you’re not married?” If he could tell I was lying shamelessly, he didn’t show it.

  I lowered my head and sighed. “I was married.”

  “But now you’re divorced?” he pursued, sounding hopeful.

  I decided to kill my husband. “Widowed.”

  “That’s terrible!” he exclaimed. His look of genuine concern gave me my first pangs of conscience over lying to a stranger who was, after all, paying me a compliment through his interest. When his hand inched over and stroked my leg—consoling me for my loss, no doubt—the pangs went as dead as my spouse. Let’s see, how had he died, my husband Roger? No, wait, Roberto. Car accident? Bank robbery gone bad? Maybe a disease—in honor of Austen’s birthday, I could give Roberto a wasting disease.

  At that thought, given the slow, difficult nature of Austen’s decline into death, all of the fun went out of the game. “Good to meet you, Rafael. Have a nice day.” I gathered my lettuce and moved. From the corner of my eye I saw him consider one more run at the Widow Violeta, then leave the park. Well, Rafael could attribute his brush-off to my painful memories of poor, doomed Roberto.

  Eventually, the day started its typical climb toward hot weather, and the iguanas descended for their lettuce. Since Ecuadorians don’t assume all strangers are out to kidnap their kids, I gave handfuls of greens to several happy children, who were thrilled to feed the prehistoric-looking beasts—no matter whether they realized it was all in honor of Miss Jane Austen.

  ***

  The Bookstore Mystery had been resolved in Guayaquil, and now, so was the Case of the Cantankerous Professor.

  “This is incredible,” said Dr. Anderson, staring at the lab results he’d received. “You didn’t have dengue when you were in Mexico.”

  “I didn’t?” I felt oddly disappointed at the sudden loss of my exotic disease.

  “It’s not past tense—you’ve got dengue, right now. An acute case.” He leaned across the desk to study me, disbelief in his voice. “But you’re up doing things! Don’t you feel terrible?” His gaze was almost accusing.

  Of course I do! That’s why I’m here! I wanted to scream. Okay, calm down—this is the nice man who just identified the problem, after all. “I do feel terrible. Some days I can make it out of bed; others, I just can’t.”

  “Stop pushing it! Good lord! That’s probably why you’re still sick.” He leaned back hard against his seat, shaking his head in amazement. “Dengue lasts from four to twelve weeks, and from the time it’s out of your system, you’re still going to be weak for up to three months. Give it a rest!”

  The next morning in an Internet café, I called my sister Laurie to consult: tell Mom or not tell Mom about the diagnosis?

  “Mom is tougher than you think,” she answered. “Bring more peanuts! They’re climbing the screen door again! Sorry,” she laughed. My call had interrupted one of the daily squirrel-feeding frenzies on her deck. She and her husband live by a woodlot and keep generations of local squirrels in chow, winter and summer. Her enormous, shaggy dog Katie was trained not to chase them, even when sharing the deck with the fearless nut moochers. “Tell Mom the truth,” Laurie advised. “I’m sure she’d rather just know.”

  My sister was right. An illness with a name was more reassuring for my mother than a Mystery Illness, just as it was for me. I could hear the relief in Mom’s voice when I called.

  “Make sure you do what the doctor tells you,” she advised. “You have bug spray, right? And you don’t leave your windows open? They say that perfume attracts bugs. You’re not using perfume, are you?”

  I was glad I’d shared the truth with my mother. But I hadn’t told her or my sister the whole truth. From sheer embarrassment, I held back the fact that…contracting dengue might well have been my own clueless fault. Leaving Dr. Anderson’s office after the first visit, I’d wracked my brain about when a mosquito might have bitten me. It could have happened at any time, given the many long walks I’d taken with Diego, the time we spent on the azotea, the lack of glass in the windows. But as I thought back to those happy days in the rambling, work-in-progress house, I unearthed a memory from my first week there.

  The memory of a man who’d come to my door. A man with a mask over his face, a plastic cap over his hair, and a tank strapped to his back. A man whose rapid Spanish, muffled by the mask, was beyond me and whose sci-fi get-up alarmed me. He pointed at the house’s interior and tried to enter, so I shooed him away and slammed the door. He stood on the landing for a minute or two, gesturing in frustration with the spray nozzle of the tank, then trudged off.

  When Diego returned from work I proudly told him how I had saved the house from a sinister invasion. He pondered a moment, then his face lit up with comprehension. “They come to spray for bugs during the rainy season. It’s a city program.”

  “So I should have let him in?” I asked in dismay.

  He laughed and kissed me on the tip of my nose. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  And there it was. Thanks to my paranoia about unregulated Mexican chemicals and my panicky failure to ask the man to take off his mask and slow down a bit, I was mosquito bait. Maybe there was an Aedes aegyptus out there with my name on it, whatever move I would have made—¿quién sabe? But I couldn’t help but think that my fears had gotten the best of me. For what it’s worth, Mr. Woodhouse, Emma’s querulous father, wouldn’t have behaved any better. He would have sent a servant out, for good measure, to make sure the masked man hadn’t pilfered any of the Woodhouse poultry. But I certainly aspired to higher models of behavior in the Austen world.

  Well. Live and learn.

  ***

  When Christmas Eve arrived, I got an unexpected gift. Perhaps the Dengue Gods thought I had suffered enough. Whatever the case, Ecuadorian TV offered up the most heartwarming and best-est Christmas movie ever—Die Hard. I love the Grinch and Charlie Brown and A Christmas Story, but nothing says “Merry Christmas!” like John McClane busting up Hans Grüber’s yuletide heist, one kill at a time. It’s a big Steel Town favorite.

  Hearing it dubbed into Spanish was an experience; the biggest loss is Alan Rickman’s voice. Janeites who’ve only seen him mooning after Marianne in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility need to see him in Die Hard. Unfortunately, a lot of the humor drains out of the dialogue in translation. “Yippee ka-yay motherfucker!” naturally has to go, but instead of something lively in Spanish, it becomes “We’ll see who’s the best!” American John McClane tries to “fire down a 1,000-year-old Twinkie”; Ecuadorian John McClane “eats an old cake.” In the fire truck scene, “Come to papa. I’ll kiss yer fuckin’ Dalmatian!!!” becomes a courteous “I’ve always appreciated you guys!”

  Still, it’s fun in any language, and I munched my way through a bag of Galapaguitos, tiny animal crackers in the shape of tortoises, penguins, iguanas, and other delicious animals from Ecuador’s Enchanted Islands. At last, good triumphed at the Nakatomi Plaza, and the credits began to roll.

  Suddenly, intensely, I was broadsided by the worst kind of homesickness: holiday homesickness. With the sound of Perry Como’s familiar voice, undubbed, singing “Let It Snow,” happy Christmas memories overwhelmed me. And there I was, so far from my loved ones, wasting away from a tropical disease. I could just imagine the fake tree in my mother’s living room in Pennsylvania at that very moment, hung with the ornaments we four kids had loved to unpack each December, some inherited from departed Welsh ancestors, some we’d made in school. Under
the tree would be the mechanical Crazy Train my dad treasured from his own childhood—placed all the more lovingly now since he was no longer there to do it himself. The huge, scary string of lights he’d spliced together decades earlier with electrical tape would be glowing in the windows, and my mother’s gruesome date-and-nuts bars, made with so much love but still so hopelessly yucky, would have pride of place on a food-laden table.

  The credits rolled, Perry crooned, and I burst into noisy, miserable tears.

  World travel—what the hell was I thinking? Here I was, eating goddamned Galapagos animal crackers in bed while my loved ones half a planet away were enjoying each other’s company and dodging the date-and-nut bars. Of course Betsy had invited me to the beach house—she’d practically begged (“Christmas is no time to be alone!”). But wary of my dengue temperament, needing more quiet than the beach house could offer, I’d stayed on my own. And now look at me. Pathetic!

  Austen did very little traveling in her lifetime; it’s true. She never got to hear a volcano rumble in Guatemala. She never sweated out a crowded Mexican boxing match or fed lettuce to tame iguanas in Ecuador. But there are compensations to being really, truly grounded. There are compensations to living solidly within a family circle, one that contracts with deaths and expands with births but remains, reliably, your family. Reading was a resource Austen valued—but every one of her novels makes clear that the most important resource of all, bar none, is family.

  I slipped out of bed, ditched the wreckage of the cookies, and stared out the window at the festively lit buildings, at laughing couples and families passing on the streets below. This is a fascinating place, I told myself. How many Americans will ever get the chance to visit Ecuador? I had to make the most of it. Sure I’d need to rest, but there was plenty for me to do here, and I promised myself I’d buck up and do it.