On that point, Cristina agreed. “The plot does draw you in.”
“But when it comes down to it, the surprises aren’t really surprises in the end,” Susie added. “Mr. Knightley, he’s really kind of a Pygmalion type, and when he’s always correcting Emma’s faults, it’s clear how things will turn out between them.”
“But it’s interesting how this novel destroys the myth of the fairy tale,” Teresa said. “Nobody marries Prince Charming. Everybody ends up with somebody at their same social level, somebody—”
“Everything in its place,” Hugo agreed. This set off a debate, however, about the Mr. and Mrs. Elton pairing, since she’s distinctly more vulgar even though she’s the one with more money.
“It’s important to clarify what you mean by levels—economics and culture are two different things,” Teresa pointed out. “We still have stratification to this day on both levels.”
No one begged to differ on that point.
“But on the cultural level, things get worse all the time here,” Cristina lamented. “I’ve got three daughters-in-law, and they never lift a book. They can’t understand how I can read all day. There’s no culture, no culture anymore…”
I immediately wondered about her sons—how often did they lift a book? As if reading my mind, Hugo said, “Well, the fact is, there are a lot more women than men attending universities here. Just imagine, knowing that before, women couldn’t even get in.”
Since we’d shifted so completely from Highbury to Argentina, I asked, “Is it true, historically, that women had better opportunities in Buenos Aires than in other cities in Latin America?”
Susie, typically quiet, didn’t hesitate to state, “Buenos Aires has always had a much higher level of culture than other Latin American capitals.”
I could imagine readers from my other groups—especially the Chileans—wincing to hear such a bald statement. And Luis, that sharp-tongued lover of literature from Antigua, what would he have said? I suspect he would have been forced to agree—then he would have capped off the point with a nice “arrogant Argentinean” joke (he’d been, in fact, my best source for them). But there were no arguments on that point in the room. Cristina added, “But from here, we’ve always, always been looking to Paris.”
“Always,” Teresa and Susi echoed, while Hugo raised an eyebrow and shrugged. He wasn’t disagreeing, but I knew that his cultural preferences lay more with Great Britain than France.
“I recently learned about the British invasion of Buenos Aires,” I said. “It was fascinating to think that the British tried to take over this country.”
“Some people here say the mistake was driving the British out.” Hugo smiled wryly. “Others disagree and are glad we stuck with the Spanish.” That topic got us back in the ballpark of Austen, but since everyone was still talking at the same time, Teresa once again blew the whistle on us. Susie stepped into the momentary quiet to ask about the social status of a governess.
After we spent some time talking about work for women and Jane Fairfax, Hugo asked, “There’s been kind of a revival of interest in Austen in the last twenty years, hasn’t there?”
“Definitely. It has to do with feminism, as one factor,” I explained. “And it’s been fascinating, because she’s really the only writer to have a serious literary reputation and a huge popular following.”
“That is unusual,” Hugo agreed, and the point sent him off into an anecdote about an episode of an American TV show he’d seen where a boy gives his girlfriend a copy of Pride and Prejudice as a birthday present.
“I want to get back to the characters again,” Teresa said, giving me a smile. “Emma and her sister. The one is so well delineated and the other is kept in the background.”
“The father definitely likes Emma more, you can see,” Susie added.
“That father is almost sinister, he’s so manipulative,” Hugo jumped in. Cristina rolled her eyes and gestured as he spoke, agreeing heartily as he continued: “With his invented sicknesses, he’s got Emma trapped, and he even manages to get Mr. Knightley under his own roof when Emma marries him. Anything that hurts the father will hurt Emma, and he knows it.”
As Susie added, “He’s an absolute manipulator,” Hugo capped off his own point by saying, “He’s so utterly passive that he’s active.”
“Austen’s secondary characters are really a marvel,” Teresa said. Cristina agreed, and the two began simultaneously offering examples that interested them.
“All of her characters, really, are just so well drawn,” Susie finally cut across their talk. “With each one, there’s a fine stroke to every line about them.”
Susie’s painting metaphor was dead on. Nodding enthusiastically, I explained, “Austen’s own vision of what she was doing, according to something she wrote in a letter, was painting on ivory, which was used for miniatures, with a very fine, with a fine—” I waved my hand in the air as if painting.
“Brush?” Teresa offered the word in Spanish.
“That’s it. Sir Walter Scott published a very positive review of her work and later wrote that it was a pity a writer with a true gift for fine detail had died so young.” I thought back to the moment I’d experienced in front of the church on the day it had snowed, with the young woman and her child. “Her portrait of Emma is extraordinary. Did you notice that part where Emma has gone to visit the poor, and she’s thinking about how moved she is by their plight, but yet, she knows—”
“That in a short while, they’ll fade from her mind,” Cristina finished the sentence for me, nodding in admiration for Austen’s skill. What a memory Cristina had—but the strength of Austen’s characterizations helps them stay with you.
“The portraits of those interactions are so strong in that small town,” Susie agreed.
“There’s something I’ve heard,” I said, “speaking of small towns. ‘Pueblo chico—’”
“Infierno grande!” cried all four in flawless chorus then burst out laughing. Small town, big hell was clearly not just a Paraguayan saying.
“But it’s not hell in Austen’s vision,” I quickly pointed out, and Susie added, “There’s more boredom than anything.”
“What’s so striking is how this small town,” Hugo offered, “isn’t just one place—it’s any small town in rural England. In fact, it could be any small town anywhere. The generosity, the problems, the love, the jealousies, all of these things are what we’ll deal with as long as human beings exist.”
“That’s one of the reasons the physical descriptions of the houses, of the countryside, are so vague,” I agreed, “because—”
“They’re practically nonexistent,” Hugo interrupted. “They don’t matter. Austen wasn’t interested in sketching the countryside. She was drawing psychological landscapes. It’s the opposite of a writer like Emily Brontë. The countryside is so central to what’s she’s writing about, it’s almost—”
“It’s a character, really,” I cut in.
“Exactly!” Hugo said. I began to notice, as he and I enthused over Austen’s skill on this point, that Teresa and Susie were giving the two of us speculative looks, while Cristina smiled knowingly. I’d certainly hoped that some chemistry was developing between Hugo and me—especially right before the-kiss-that-never-happened. Were the ladies clueing in to something here, or was that my imagination, too?
“Just look at the titles,” Hugo continued. “Wuthering Heights. The place is a character, it controls the characters. In Emma, it’s the woman who’s in charge.”
“Speaking of that name and her role, here’s something I noticed,” Teresa offered. “Emma actually means ‘mother’ in Arabic. And she’s really like a mother to people in that village.”
Hugo’s eyebrows shot up, and he nodded. “Interesting. But it must be a coincidence. It doesn’t seem likely Austen would have known that.�
�� The two debated that issue for several minutes, until Cristina drew us off onto another line of thought.
“Which of the two main women is Jane Austen? Is it Emma or is it Jane Fairfax?” The group wrangled over this subject. I thought back to the women in Guatemala, who’d been so interested in this topic, as well—especially Mercedes, who’d turned out to be the star of that discussion. After listening to their points, I cut in, as I had in Antigua and in Ecuador, as well, to suggest that writers in Austen’s time period didn’t necessarily have the same relationship modern writers often do with their work.
“That could be, mi amor,” Cristina nodded. “But you know what Virginia Woolf said—who am I going to write about, if not myself? But now, I have to tell you. I didn’t used to like Jane Austen.” She reached over and patted my knee affectionately as she made her point. “I was forced to read her too early. Austen really isn’t for fourteen-year-olds, you know.”
The others agreed, and Teresa took that moment to thank me. “We wouldn’t have all met each other if you hadn’t organized this talk! And I really enjoyed reading this Austen novel.”
Hugo suddenly looked at his watch and winced. “We’ve been down here for almost three hours! My boss is going to kill me!”
Since everyone had met Ernesto on the way in and could see that he wouldn’t hurt a fly, that set us all laughing.
“I want to take you all out to dinner,” I said. “No arguments on that! But please, let me get a picture first.”
Easier said than done. Cristina made a point about Russian novels that Hugo contested, and they were off. Getting everyone to look at the camera took numerous attempts because each time one of them would stop talking to smile and pose, the other would lean over and slip in a point about Dostoevsky or Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn, and I’d catch someone in profile, mouth open.
This struggle had everyone laughing again but finally, I got my shot. As Teresa, Susie, and Cristina gathered up their coats and scarves and books, Hugo put the chairs back where they belonged. Watching them so engaged in conversation, I experienced a sudden, intense swell of sadness.
Why sadness, when the group had gone so well? Because—after a year’s worth of meeting enthusiastic booklovers, of hearing what readers thought about Austen’s characters and plots and her distinctive talents, of watching readers draw endlessly fresh connections between their own lives and Austen’s world—after a year’s worth of finding new ways myself to look at Austen as I saw her through a kaleidoscope of distinctive perspectives—it dawned on me that this, finally, was it.
The last group was done.
***
I suggested a nice restaurant two blocks away. Hugo had to close the bookstore before he could join us, so I didn’t want him to have to travel too far. But it was not to be. Teresa named a well-known parrilla or “grill” restaurant in a distant neighborhood, and since tearing into each other verbally had apparently put them in the mood for tearing into meat, the ladies outvoted me. Teresa wrote down the name and location for Hugo. I’d spent enough time around him to realize he was masking impatience when he saw the address.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said.
We piled into a taxi. Teresa and Cristina began talking about reading in French as I leaned back against the seat. I watched the lights of the city slip past outside the window and thought back to Paraguay. I’d loved meeting with the teachers in Asunción, but they so disliked Emma that it completely colored the discussion. Given that I’d learned one of my best “arrogant Argentinean” jokes from those young women, they’d probably have a good laugh to learn that, even though Hugo preferred Jane Fairfax, all of the readers in Buenos Aires felt quite at home with Austen’s highbrow Emma.
One part of that evening’s discussion, in particular, continued to resonate with me—Hugo’s points about how the people of the village were the focus and the physical location, secondary. There’s a word in Spanish that can’t be fully translated: pueblo. No one word in English embraces every meaning that a Spanish speaker hears. Pueblo means “village,” but it also means “people.” When the Argentineans who adored Evita Perón referred to her as the “protectora del pueblo Argentino,” they didn’t mean she was out guarding people’s houses with a twelve-gauge; they meant she had the people of the country in her heart. The place can’t be separated from the people. People are what make a village (or a nation), not the houses and the fences, the hills and the fields.
Austen didn’t know Spanish, but it’s clear from her works that she knew, that she lived, a concept near and dear to the hearts of latinos and latinas. The landscapes of your life are the people around you. It’s true, you need to know the physical geography of your village—which paths lead where, which bridge to avoid, which houses have dogs that bite. But if you really want to get around well, study the people. If you’re Emma, you need to learn which matches will produce a stable marriage, according to the lay of the land. Harriet Smith with Mr. Martin works; Harriet Smith with Mr. Elton would produce a shaky matrimonial edifice. You need to learn who to trust. Any character in any Austen novel needs to learn to deal with obstacles that aren’t going away, like the Mrs. Eltons of the world or the Wickhams or the Willoughbys or the Lady Catherine de Bourghs.
I’d mastered the bus routes in Puerto Vallarta and the metro system in Chile. I’d learned the grid of cobblestoned streets in Antigua and the riverside walks in Guayaquil. But navigating the social waters in every country I visited was always more complex. We don’t know a place until we know the people, and that takes time, patience, and serious reading skills. If you’re not willing to see people on their own terms, you’ll wind up like Sir John Middleton, nattering on about hunting dogs, unable to imagine that people have interests and needs and desires—ways of seeing the world—that differ from your own.
If I’d heard someone at an academic conference give a talk on how place and people are intertwined in Austen’s world, I would have nodded and thought, “Sure, I know that.” But sitting in that taxi, watching the driver weave adeptly through traffic in a city I had come to love for its beauty and energy and arrogance, listening to the singing porteño Spanish of the three women around me all talking at once, I thought: pueblo. Place. People.
***
After a twenty-minute ride we reached the restaurant. Hardwood surfaces dominated visually—varnished walls, heavily framed windows, thick wooden tables. Upscale-hunting-cabin seemed to be the theme. Several railed dining areas throughout the room were set above floor level and reached via short sets of stairs, which created a sense of intimacy for diners and divided up the enormous space. We got one of the raised areas, thanks to how few people were there. “Don’t take that as a bad sign,” Teresa said as we were seated. “It’s not even eight yet. That’s very early for us.” Despite how heated the Austen discussion had gotten at times, there was clearly no ill will among the women, and we spent the hour before Hugo arrived gossiping about various things, including him.
“He’s quite insightful,” Cristina smiled. “And clearly a lover of literature. That’s worth a lot in a man. I get the feeling you like him. Am I right?”
“He’s very interesting,” I admitted, “but I’m sort of already in a long-distance relationship with a man from Mexico. Diego was in my reading group there. He’s a wonderful person, very sweet, very warm.”
The ladies eagerly interrupted each other with questions until Cristina raised her thin voice to cut through the talk. “Well, I don’t see a ring on your finger, mi amor. Until somebody puts one there, you’re free to do as you like.” My inner feminist balked at the implied possession, but I knew she meant well so I kept my thoughts to myself. Susie smiled, and Teresa raised her wine glass in salute.
When Hugo arrived, we ordered meat and more meat, which we washed down with wine and more wine. The beauty of city living is that nobody had to drive. Hours later as we made our
way out onto the street to hunt down taxis, I thanked everyone profusely for being in the group while they thanked me for meat and wine—and quality time with Austen.
Wine goes to my head very quickly, one of several reasons I typically stick with beer. Before I knew it, I was speeding away from the group with the vague sense that I’d made more promises for visits than I could possibly keep in the few days that remained of my trip.
***
Waking up the next day with a blazing headache sealed the deal. I was down for two days with some kind of superduper-hangover-bug. Since there was no accompanying fever, I kept from panicking about dengue. Still, I was left with only enough time in Buenos Aires to keep a lunch date I’d set with Nadine of JASBA and to spend one final evening out. Susie had invited Teresa and me to a dinner at her house. Cristina had invited me to a poetry reading. Hugo had invited me to go bookshopping.
I broke the Girls’ Honor Code: I spent the evening with Hugo. But not before a lovely farewell lunch with Nadine, who reminded me yet again about my promise to write a piece on Austen for JASBA’s newsletter.
“I have a little something for you, something I didn’t want Mr. Dudgeon to see.” From her purse she pulled a broad, laminated bookmark with a digitally altered sketch of Jane Austen drinking mate, a South American drink similar to tea but stronger. Mate is an herb that you steep inside a distinctive container that’s half thermos, half coffee mug, then sip through a metal straw. You can see Che Guevara enjoying it in the film adaptation of The Motorcycle Diaries. “A friend designed this for us, but we haven’t shown Mr. Dudgeon yet,” Nadine said with a naughty little smile. “I’m afraid he doesn’t find this kind of thing amusing, but I thought you would.”
Austen sipping mate—what a perfect souvenir of Argentina! I gave her a hug and promised not to tell on her.
After I made my apologies to Teresa, Susie, and Cristina by phone, I met Hugo in a café on Corrientes for one last book jaunt. Who knew how long it would be before I visited such a booklover’s paradise again? I had already sent five boxes of books back to the States. I felt sure, though, there was room in my bags for a few more treasures.
All Roads Lead to Austen Page 31