All Roads Lead to Austen (15 page)

“No,” Oscar responded, “but the psychology of their actions, what's happening under the surface, that really seems the same to me. It's got nothing to do with the landscape or their religion. Not having a dowry in the early nineteenth century, whether in England or in Chile, was a serious matter, so people are going to react more or less the same anywhere that's true. The culture dictates that you've got to get married, and for a woman, you needed money or beauty to do it. Otherwise, you were between
la
espada
y
la
pared
.”

In other words, a penniless young Chilean would find herself between the sword and the wall, while her English counterpart would be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Same underlying idea, different detail—rather like the point Oscar was trying to make.

“Europe is one thing,” Fernanda took up the line of thought, “but if you're talking about the Americas, it's different. Uruguay and Argentina during this period were very different culturally from Spain or England. The English were much more rigid about class.”

“In our countries,” Ignacio José directed his comments to me, “things were more free, more fluid.”

“The people who came here weren't the real aristocracy. Those people already had what they wanted and stayed put in Spain,” Fernanda added, as the others nodded agreement.

Ignacio José carried her point to its logical conclusion: “Some people don't like to admit that. The ones who came were the social climbers, trying to move up the ladder.”

“My ancestors came as tax collectors, to make money,” Fernanda continued. “Latin America just doesn't have the same history of aristocracy Spain does. Virtually all of the immigrants were from the middle classes on downward.”

“They earned their money first,” Meli agreed, “then used it to get titles and names.”

Ignacio José gestured dramatically. “Exactly! There's a case here in Guayaquil—the illustrious
Conde
Caca
” (translation: Count Crap). “He made a fortune collecting crap from Las Peñas, along the Malecón. Thirty-five years collecting crap, if you please, gets you wealth and seven married daughters. Think how happy Mrs. Bennet would have been married to him! He bought a string of names: Don Pedro López de—”

“
Caca!
” Leti sang out, to laughter all around.

After several minutes of small talk, Oscar brought us back to Austen: “If you gave me this book without letting me see the cover and told me it was a modern novel, I'd believe you—I'd have had no idea this was written two hundred years ago. Her prose has such grace, such clean agility. This must be
marvelous
in the original. I've got to buy it in English.”

Instant cross-talking rang approval of this statement, with Leti fanning herself and nodding energetically, Ignacio José praising the dialogue, and Fernanda repeating, “She's like a painter—a painter!”

“There's no one quite like her.” I was pleased that
they
were pleased, overall, with the book. “Is there any writer with this kind of popularity in Ecuador? Someone focused on customs and relationships from that period?”

Brows were furrowed and heads were scratched.

Oscar finally spoke up. “There weren't any novelists that I know of writing about society in Ecuador during Austen's lifetime.”

As the others concurred, Ignacio José added, “Ecuadorian literature didn't establish itself firmly until the beginning of the twentieth century. That's the age of the Guayaquil Group and the Realists, but they were working less with city customs—they consciously wanted to give value to the life of country people, of
campesinos
.”

I suddenly remembered the copy of
Cumandá
still in my purse. I pulled it out, curious to have their opinions.

Ignacio José caught sight of the cover first and shrieked (yes, he actually did), “Juan León Mera! She's got
Cumandá
!”

Fernanda, Leti, and Meli reacted as though I'd just pulled a handful of the
Conde
Caca's
stock in trade from my purse. If the Christmas tree had still been on, its din would have been drowned out by the universal groan of horror.

“
Dios
mío
, what a book!” Leti exclaimed. “It's
fatal, fa-tal
, tacky as can be—don't waste your time on that novel!”

“Give me some paper, something to write with,” Ignacio José cried, eager to save me from
Cumandá
.

As the others chipped in titles, he began writing. But silently I resolved to try at least a chapter of
Cumandá
. Any book generating such outrage had to be worth looking into.

While Ignacio José finished up my Approved Reading List, Fernanda asked, “Was this discussion similar to the ones you did in Guatemala and Mexico?”

“Yes and no.” My energy level had begun dropping sharply, and that always led to a breakdown in my Spanish. “We talked, we did talk about prejudice, but it was about…not the same types of prejudices.”

“The prejudices against women in Guatemala are very strong,” Ignacio José offered helpfully.

“No, actually, the issue was indigenous people—about racism and prejudices against people of indigenous origins.”

I dug into my purse and pulled out my fancy-pants Dr. Amy Elizabeth Smith cards from the university, handing them all around after penciling in the phone for the room where I was staying.

“The email there's good, but not the phone number—that's my office in California.”

“Oh, you live in California; how nice!” Fernanda studied the card. “Are you married?” All eyes turned, polite but expectant.

“No—I've never been married.”

“Jane Austen's situation,” Leti said with a smile.

Sometimes I look at it that way. Like Austen, I'd had my proposals, some of them seriously tempting. Did my work stop me? Fear of commitment? Failure to find a man I believed would truly love me 'til death did us part, as it parted my father from my mother? Could Diego be that man? They say that negative parental role models can make relationships hard for people later in life—but I'm here to say that positive ones can be tough to live up to as well.

“I was dating somebody wonderful in Mexico, but long-distance relationships are complicated.”

“They're the best thing in the world!” Ignacio José exclaimed. “Somebody there when you want them—but at a distance.”

Leti laughed heartily, and somehow, the end of our wonderful talk had been signaled. It was time to stand and stretch, search for purses and bags, say our good-byes. I couldn't believe my luck in having found this wonderful group, thanks to Betsy. They all handed over email addresses and phone numbers, insisting that we needed at least one more get-together before I moved on to Chile.

“Thank you so much, all of you!” I said. “This group has been just
wonderful
!”

Meli led her wagon train of passengers—Leti, Ignacio José, and me—out to her car. Leti was deposited at her house first, sweeping away in a wave of kisses, kind words, and expensive perfume. By the time we finally reached my part of town, the full weight of my tiredness was hitting me, and all I could muster by way of communication were stupid smiles and nods.

“Fabulous—then it's all settled!” Ignacio José was saying, his head jutting out the window as I shut the car door. “I'll see you Monday at noon.” What on earth had I just agreed to?

Damnation. I simply
had
to stop nodding and smiling when I didn't understand what somebody was asking me.

The lively Austen discussion landed me in bed for two days solid.

“What did they tell you at the clinic?” Emilia, Betsy's sister-in-law, asked over the phone. “Nothing's wrong with you? Well, something's wrong with
them
. I'm making you an appointment with a real doctor.”

She called back shortly to tell me it was arranged—after the weekend, I'd be seeing Dr. John Anderson, M.D. Quito, it seemed, was now out of the question. I'd wanted so much to travel to the country's capital, famed for both its natural and architectural beauty, but if a mere book group was enough to lay me out for two days, travel to a city of Quito's dizzying elevation would probably push me into that early foreign grave my mother kept nervously envisioning for me.

Well, at least that gave me time before the next Austen group to brave the horrors of
Cumandá
. Who among us can resist something we've been so emphatically warned away from?

Cumandá
, published in 1879, is the most over-the-top novel I'd read in years. It's pure, undiluted schmaltz. One of the more astute characterizations of Austen's work is from Nancy Pannier: “Austen isn't an opera, she's a string quartet.” Well,
Cumandá
is an opera. Cumandá and Carlos are the requisite star-crossed lovers—she, a daughter of the jungle and he, a son of Europe. When her father discovers she's given her chaste heart to a
blanco
, he sets her brothers on Carlos. They repeatedly fail to kill him, so her father promises her in marriage to an aged chief who already has six wives. What are the poor young lovers to do?

I could see why Mrs. Gardiner had tried to steer me away from the book. It has about as much to do with the realities of indigenous life in Ecuador as Baz Luhrmann's
Moulin
Rouge
has to do with
fin-de-siècle
Paris. But I adored
Cumandá
just as much as I adore
Moulin
Rouge
—they're luminous fantasy worlds, pure spectacle, outrageously beautiful.

I did feel obligated, however, to balance things with a group-approved recommendation.
Don
Goyo
by Demetrio Aguilera Malta, published in 1933, was first on Ignacio José's Anything-but-
Cumandá
list. The contrast with Mera's novel was night and day. Life in
Don
Goyo
ain't opera—it's raw, ugly, intense. The novel is arguably the earliest example of Magical Realism in Spanish-language literature, predating Rulfo's
Pedro
Páramo
by decades. On the nationalist level, it's also important for its portrayal of
cholos
, mixed-race Ecuadorians who suffered severe discrimination and economic exploitation by upper-class Ecuadorians and foreign investors.

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? On 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.