All Roads Lead to Austen

by Amy Elizabeth Smith

  Dorrie and Martín are alumni of the university where I teach—Martín is a Paraguayan and Dorrie, a central California girl. They met while he was studying abroad in the eighties, fell in love, and now, three children and twenty-six years of marriage later, there they were in Asunción, welcoming me into their home for the month. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, and boyishly handsome, Martín had energy to burn; he somehow managed to convey a constant sense of motion, even when sitting still. Dorrie, blond, blue-eyed, and beautiful in a classic, unostentatious way, was soothingly calm, practical, and centered—the perfect complement for Martín.

  Located on the outer edges of Paraguay’s capital, their house was large and tastefully decorated yet welcoming, with a lived-in feel. A high stone wall surrounded the grounds outside, and when I wandered out before dinner, I was surprised to catch sight of two immense turtles on the lawn. How on earth had they gotten in? I bolted inside for my camera, wanting a photo before they escaped, then returned to find the turtles had each moved an entire centimeter. Pets, I discovered, not Paraguayan wildlife.

  I emailed later that day to assure Diego I had finally made it in one piece, and I called my mother.

  “I was looking at your dad’s globe, and I see that Paraguay doesn’t have a coast,” she said, as I gave her a briefing on that month’s new country. “Does that mean there are fewer mosquitoes?”

  I wanted to say yes, but I was finally getting the idea, especially after talking with my sister Laurie, that fudging reality for my mom when she asked a straight question was disrespectful, even if I did it out of good intentions. She was no Mr. Woodhouse; she wouldn’t use information to twist my arm with guilt.

  “No, I’m afraid it doesn’t. But I’m soaking myself with bug spray all the time, so don’t worry. I’ll be careful!” That was no lie—I’d done a little checking on the Internet and discovered that if you catch a different strain of dengue after you’ve already had one, the infection is distinctly worse. Or fatal. I’d noticed signs in the airport about protecting against dengue, and Martín and Dorrie, knowing I’d already suffered a case, warned me to be very careful. Several people in rural zones outside of Asunción had died of dengue earlier that month.

  No need to tell me twice. I’d learned my lesson the hard way. My dad always claimed that he got bit more often by mosquitoes because of his tasty Welsh blood. Even if I drove off locals with my personal chemical cloud, I wasn’t leaving an inch of temptation exposed.

  ***

  The morning after my arrival I got a troubling email from Lili, the staff member at the Paraguayan cultural foundation that was sponsoring me for talks on Austen at two local libraries. Martín had asked her to take charge of finding readers for the Emma group. “Check with Martín,” her latest note said. “I’ve got the copies of Emma in English, but he’s getting your readers.”

  Uh-oh. We needed the novel in Spanish—but then again, maybe he’d invited readers who could handle it in English. I scanned back through my mails and found the one, cc’d to both Lili and me more than a month earlier, where Martín explained that he wanted her to invite the members. Then I found the one where I’d asked for copies of the book in Spanish.

  Nervous but not wanting to stampede, I waited until after dinner to raise the subject. Dorrie headed off to her office on the ground floor to work. The local representative for an international nonprofit organization, she had the advantage of working at home but the drawback of very long hours. As Martín and I cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, I found an opening to ask about the readers, desperately hoping he and Lili had discussed some change of plans that hadn’t made it into the email exchange.

  “Lili’s taking care of getting the readers,” he reassured me, bustling around the kitchen’s central island with his usual animation.

  “She emailed this morning and told me you were doing it. I think this means there’s no group arranged,” I said, crestfallen.

  Martín stopped in his tracks at my distressed expression. “We can fix this,” he assured me, giving my shoulder a pat then pulling out his cell phone.

  Despite my controlling nature and tendency to panic, I was immediately relieved. Martín was a problem solver. Like Dorrie, he worked for a nonprofit organization, but as the director. Prior to that, he was the mayor of Asunción. A progressive reformer in a country that had lived under an ultraconservative dictatorship for more than thirty years, Martín had run the capital while dodging assassination attempts and keeping his children from being kidnapped (a not uncommon strong-arm tactic in Paraguay). When the vice president was assassinated during Martín’s term in office, all hell broke loose. Numerous students were killed in the ensuing demonstrations, and opposition forces attempted to take over the congress building.

  Lacking military vehicles to defend it, Martín called in all of the city’s garbage trucks and construction vehicles to surround the congress and shelter the demonstrators, preventing further casualties. The man who could think on his feet with such creativity in the midst of a genuine life-or-death crisis could surely solve my little Jane Austen problem.

  Cell phone cradled between his ear and shoulder, speaking rapid-fire Spanish, Martín reached into the refrigerator, offered me a bottle of beer, then opened one for himself. It was a thing of beauty to watch him in action, pacing the kitchen, talking and laughing into the phone while smiling at me reassuringly.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” he began, three calls later. “I found a group of women who are going to be talking about Pride and Prejudice together two weeks from now, and you’re welcome to join them. Will that work?”

  I didn’t want to look a gift-group in the mouth, but it really was time to move on to Emma. “I’d love to join them—I really appreciate it! But since I’ve read that novel with groups in Guatemala and Ecuador already, I was also hoping to discuss Emma…”

  He nodded thoughtfully, took a pull on his beer, then asked, “What about a film viewing? There’s time for that. Did you bring the movie with you?”

  Fortunately, I’d brought along the Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam version. “Great!” Martín responded. The dialing and pacing recommenced. Five calls later, he was smiling more broadly than ever. “Done!” he cried. “Right before you meet with the Pride and Prejudice group, we’ll watch Emma together here!”

  No liberties or lives had been saved, but I was certainly grateful—crisis averted. Still, I was disappointed that reading Emma would have to wait until Argentina. Unless maybe I could think of another plan myself? I was so ready to move on to Emma. Something would come to me. I’d have to sleep on it.

  ***

  In Austen’s day libraries weren’t public; they were private businesses, like movie rental stores. You paid a membership fee and a charge per book. This is one of the reasons novels of the period were often published in multivolume format—booksellers and libraries charged per volume. Sense and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume first edition, you can hit your nerd buzzer and say “wrong!”). The unwashed masses of England didn’t get free, regular access to books until later in the nineteenth century.

  These days, Americans take libraries for granted. Pretty much every town, no matter how small, has one. And if you can’t find what you want in your town, you can request it from your county library, right? Not in Latin America. From Guatemala onward, I was saddened by the poor state of public libraries in places where buying books was also out of the reach of many people. If Antigua had a public library, I never found it, and the library in Puerto Vallarta, a city of 250,000, was smaller than the one where my mother had worked in Donora, Pennsylvania, population 6,000. I’d located a privately funded library in Guayaquil, but you needed to read the books on-site, and—I swear I’m not making this up
—the books were organized by publisher just like in the bookstores, despite someone having hand painted Dewey Decimal numbers onto the edges of the wooden shelves.

  Paraguay was by far the poorest country I was visiting during my year, and given what I’d seen in more prosperous places, I braced myself for my visit to the school/library complex where I’d been invited to give a talk on Austen shortly after my arrival. But I’d allowed assumptions to set up shop again and thus was pleasantly surprised at the attractive, well-stocked Roosevelt Library, housed within a public school sponsored by the Centro Cultural Paraguayo Americano. And it warmed my heart to see a photo of good old FDR himself above the circulation desk. You can say all you like about cultural domination from the north—but, along with classics from around the world, the shelves were stocked with Latin American authors.

  One of the teachers took me around for a tour and showed me the auditorium where I’d be speaking. While I had a library talk in Spanish planned for later in the month at San Lorenzo, a small town nearby, this one would be in English, since the students needed practice listening to native speakers.

  “They’re going to be shy,” the teacher warned me, “so don’t be offended when they don’t ask questions. They’re always like that with foreigner visitors.”

  Sound check checked, I sat down in the front row and waited, trying not to feel too anxious as the noisy crowd of more than a hundred filled the auditorium behind me. I’m not used to addressing middle and high school kids, but I’d done my best to plan the talk toward their interests, while getting in my pitch for Austen.

  “This,” I began, reining in my rapid Pittsburghese when I took the stage, “is where Jane Austen was born.” The house itself no longer exists, unfortunately, but I showed them PowerPoint photos of St. Nicholas Church at Steventon, where her father served (I left out the part about getting chased by cows in the adjoining field). I briefly explained who Austen was and why she was important, assuming that most of them would have no idea. That turned out to be a legitimate assumption, for a change.

  I also explained my book group project and spoke a bit about each country, showing photos of the readers from Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, and Chile. I was not above pandering to keep them awake, so I worked in a few cheesy shots—one of a noisy rooster outside my house in Puerto Vallarta, another of me petting an iguana in Guayaquil, which struck them as thunderously funny (laughing with me or at me? Quién sabe…).

  They especially liked selections from my graffiti collection, and that was where I let the cows out. I explained that Chileans were very political on many levels and offered up photos of two spray-painted approaches to vegetarianism. The first was a sweet, big-eyed cow saying, “No me coma”—don’t eat me!—and the second, a fierce cow draped with an ammo belt, Pancho Villa style, armed and ready to defend herself from carnivores.

  From my vantage point on the stage I could see that I had put some of them straight to sleep, iguanas and killer cows notwithstanding. There were also some decidedly sullen expressions out there. But many students looked alert and interested, so with any luck I was winning over some Janeites or, at the very least, piquing their interest in reading groups.

  I asked if there were any questions as I wrapped up, but remembering the teacher’s warning, assumed there wouldn’t be any. Wrong again.

  “Why do you think so many people like Jane Austen?”

  “Why didn’t Jane Austen have babies?”

  “Can we get Jane Austen books in Spanish?”

  “Why on earth did you come to Paraguay?”

  This last question raised an enormous howl of laughter—they didn’t think of their homeland as being on the typical gringa tourist beat.

  “Your country has a very interesting history,” I told them. “And I was invited here by my host.” A dead silence hit the chattering students when I referred to Martín by name. Then they erupted into whispers and gasps, repeating his name. Any high-profile politician has both friends and enemies, I suppose; no way to know if they were impressed or taken aback.

  “That was really wonderful!” One of the teachers approached the stage as the multitude, many questions later, finally headed back to their classes (perhaps they’d cottoned on to the equation more questions = less class time?). She shook my hand and said, “A book group would be a great way to get some of our shy students to talk more to each other.”

  Another teacher joined us and introduced himself as Tony. “Have you already got an Austen group arranged for Paraguay?” he asked. A number of students had followed him up. With a hopeful smile, he added, “We would love to be in an Austen book group with you.”

  Talk about luck! “That would be fabulous,” I said quickly, as pleased as could be. “I’d love for us to read Emma together. How does that sound?”

  He looked to the students for approval, and one of them answered in slow, careful English, “We would like that very much!” The boy smiled broadly when the sentence came out the way he’d planned. My previous groups had been heavy on women, but here was a male teacher and six teenagers, half of them boys. This would be interesting.

  “I’ll deliver copies of Emma tomorrow, in Spanish,” I promised, “then we can set a date for the end of the month.” After my initial panic over Lili getting the book in English, I’d remembered that I already had the copies I’d planned to use in Argentina. Well, I needed them now, so I’d just have to hope I could get my hands on more Austen next month in Buenos Aires.

  Emma was back on!

  ***

  I wasn’t pandering to the students when I’d said that Paraguay has a very interesting history. Fascinating is more like it. Once upon a time, Paraguay was one of the most prosperous, advanced countries in South America. With a range of geographic features and climates within its borders, it had solid agriculture and industry, strong education, and the best rail system on the continent. Then in 1864, apparently anticipating an invasion by Brazil over long-standing disputes related to Brazil’s relations with Great Britain, President Francisco Solano López sent troops across Argentinean territory to avoid being caught in a pincher move, not realizing that Argentina had already signed an alliance treaty with Brazil and Uruguay. López suddenly found himself at war with more than half the continent.

  Paraguay held out for five bloody years then succumbed to its enemies, who made off with a high percentage of the country’s original territory. While U.S. intervention has been a source of grief in many Latin American countries, in this case, it was a major reason Brazil and Argentina didn’t swallow Paraguay whole in the decades after the war. During my visit several Paraguayans brought up the important man responsible, very surprised I hadn’t heard of him: President Ay-yeas. Ay-yeas? I was at a loss as to who the heck this could be until I saw his name on a road sign, since quite a number of things are now named for him: Hayes. As in, Rutherford B. Not a chart-topping president in the United States, but fondly remembered in Paraguay.

  The war also devastated the population, military and civilian. The prewar count of Paraguayans was nearly a million. By the end of the war the figure was closer to 200,000—fewer than 29,000 of them men. That’s a lot fewer guys than you’ll find on a crisp fall weekend at my alma mater at a West Virginia University football game, to give a little perspective. Poland was steamrolled by Germany in WWII, but that massacre pales in comparison to what happened to Paraguay.

  The country has never really recovered. A tragedy on that level leaves its mark on a nation’s literature, and Paraguay’s best writers have dedicated themselves to the subject, directly or indirectly. When I visited bookstores in Asunción and asked about women writers, every bookseller gave me the same name: Josefina Plá. With a bit of research I learned that she was actually born in Spain, but she moved to Paraguay young, married a Paraguayan, and lived there until her death in 1998 at age ninety-five. She claimed Paraguay, and it claims her.
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  I was bowled over by her novel Alguien Muere en San Onofre de Cuarumí (Someone Is Dying in San Onofre de Cuarumí, cowritten with Angel Pardella). The main narrative thread is the slow death of one of the village women, but the backdrop is the War of the Triple Alliance, just ended. There’s not even a coffin maker left in San Onofre, so when one of the few surviving men dies, he’s squeezed into a trunk. Two young boys drag him to a shallow grave then accidentally drop him in face first. “El día de juicio le va costar para salirse,” opines a local woman dryly—“He won’t get out of there easily on Judgment Day.”

  Despite the heaviness of the theme and the dark humor, the novel is surprisingly positive. The women it focuses on are survivors. In the face of destruction, starvation, the loss of their husbands and sons, and attacks by thieves and rapists who pass through their village in the postwar chaos, they stick together as a community. They keep their pillaged church clean, and, as they reminisce about their lives before and during the war, comfort their dying friend. War has disrupted every facet of their lives, but it can’t break their spirits. Austen would no doubt admire these women, but she never would have dreamed of putting horrors like what they experienced on paper.

  ***

  Shortly after my school talk, Martín and Dorrie took me on a Sunday drive to see some of the most important battlefields of the war. We also visited the pretty little town of San Bernardino, where moneyed folks go for a lakeside getaway from Asunción. Before we left I booked a room in the Hotel del Lago for the next weekend, partially because of how charming it was, partially to fulfill a Morbid Tourism Wish—to stay in the room where Bernhard Förster committed suicide in 1889.

  If the average person knows anything about Paraguay, it tends to be, unfortunately, the Nazi connection. Förster is one of the reasons that link was forged. He was a raging anti-Semite married to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth. Nietzsche, despite the Nazi appropriation of his concepts, was no anti-Semite. He loathed his brother-in-law and wanted no part of Förster’s plans to found a pure “Nueva Germania” in Paraguay. When the colony failed, Förster checked himself into the Hotel del Lago, drank for six weeks, then poisoned himself. Nietzsche’s sister apparently had to sign away most of the colony land to pay his hotel bill and have him buried. In the 1930s, Hitler sent a delegation to spread some German soil on Förster’s grave, walking distance from the hotel.