All Roads Lead to Austen (29 page)

Finally, one of his eyebrows moved upward. “Why
Emma
? Why not
Northanger
Abbey
?”

I gawked.

“You've
read
it
, of course?” he asked, a second bushy eyebrow rising to join the first, misreading my silence.

“Of course! In fact, well, it's my favorite. Of course I've read it. I'm just surprised that…you have.” Fabulous—Amy's Big Parade of Assumptions, coming to a city near you. I blundered on. “It's just that her other books are more popular.
All
of her other books.”

“English Gothic literature is very interesting to me, and
Northanger
Abbey
is an important parody from the classic period.” As he leaned back against his seat and crossed his arms, my stomach gave a funny little lurch. In his handsome, challenging gaze I saw a flash of Luis, my long-lost sparring partner from Antigua.

I'd come to the right place, that was clear.

We talked books for a stretch, then I realized I'd better let him get back to work. He never cut loose with anything resembling a smile, but he seemed interested in the conversation and agreed to give
Emma
a try, despite its lack of Gothic horrors. I promised to drop off copies of the novel the next day. On impulse, as I was pulling the door shut behind me, I looked back to see if he was watching me leave.

He wasn't.

***

Day two of the hunt for Austen readers also went well. Enough time had gone by since I'd been attacked in my bed by a mosquito in Asunción that I believed I'd live after all. I spent the morning wandering around an open-air book fair in the Plaza Italia, and although I didn't sign on any new readers, I bought so many books I had to get a taxi to haul them back to the apartment.

The only dark cloud over the day passed when I returned to the
Librería Romano
to drop off three copies of
Emma
just as Hugo the clerk was trying to put a “Back in Five Minutes” sign on the door to run an errand. I'd secretly been looking forward to seeing him again, but he seemed distinctly cross at being interrupted, so I handed over the books and bolted before he could change his mind about the group.

Following up on an inspiration to try for more readers, I went to the National Library. Something of an eyesore in the Recoleta, an otherwise attractive, upscale neighborhood, the library was designed in the 1960s and built on land cleared by the demolition of Juan and Eva Perón's personal residence. “Evita” and her husband remain beloved to this day by millions of Argentineans (and by lovers of musical theater who don't really know who the heck they were), but others hate them like poison, and as soon as the 1950s post-Perón government got a chance to flatten Juan and Eva's house, they went for it. From the ruins sprouted the library, looking for all the world like a concrete mushroom with windows.

With a mother who's a librarian, I know where the nerve center of a library is: reference. The person who greeted me there was a petite blue-eyed blond who introduced herself as Teresa. She only let me get partway through my Austen spiel before she interrupted.

“Oh, I adore book groups! And I've already read some Austen. That would be lovely!” She promised to bring along two friends who she was sure would want to join in. All three, she told me, were Jewish and interested in Hebrew language and literature. We arranged to meet later that week for lunch so that I could deliver the books and learn a bit more about these newest
Emma
recruits.

Slipping back into librarian mode, Teresa reached for a pen and began writing down Argentinean authors I should read, before I could even ask. “Borges, of course you know him. Borges I'm not even going to write down,” she said with a wave of her hand. Aside from Shakespeare, there are few authors who dominate their country's literature the way Jorge Luis Borges does in Argentina. Despite having died in 1986 at age 86, he still rules the world of the essay and short story the way Colombia's Gabriel García Marquez dominates the novel. Borges is arguably Latin America's most important literary intellectual, and he and his circle of writers are a prime reason for the literary fame of Buenos Aires.

Teresa handed me the list. “All of these authors are good,” she said, “but my favorite, I have to tell you, is Bullrich, Silvina Bullrich. If you like Austen, I know that you'll love her novels!”

The name sounded familiar, and when I returned to the apartment, sure enough, I already had
Teléfono Ocupado
(“Line's Busy”) by Bullrich, which I'd bought at the Plaza Italia book fair because, quite frankly, I liked the cover. Judging books by their covers is seriously underrated, and any book nerd who claims never to have done it is probably
lying
.

“Austenesque” is a seriously abused term in the United States, one mostly employed to sell books just as one sells knockoff perfume: “If you like Chanel No. 5, you'll LOVE [insert ‘item for sale' here]!!!” The latest variation on this old ploy is “If you like Austen, you'll LOVE Austen with [insert ‘zombies/vampires/yeti' here].” Numerous writers touted as “a modern-day Austen” have nothing more in common with her than the fact that somebody ends up married by the novel's conclusion.

If
Teléfono Ocupado
were one of today's ubiquitous Austen updates, it would have Emma married to Mr. Knightley in a comfortable, passionless marriage, sitting around all day taking boring phone calls from Miss Bates or Harriet Martin or her sister Isabella, people for whom she has affection but from whom she feels alienated. Then things would heat up when John Knightley's secretary calls to blackmail Emma, threatening to reveal her torrid affair with Mr. Knightley's brother prior to her marriage, back when Emma had gone off to London to discover herself and wound up working as a dancer in a nightclub. So…not very Austenesque.

Still, it's an interesting novel, good for someone learning Spanish. If you took
Teléfono Ocupado
's theme of “too much time on the phone not really connecting” and substitute “too much time on Facebook, etc.,” then the translation into the twenty-first century is pretty much seamless.

***

After a pleasant lunch with Teresa I decided to celebrate the fact that I now had five readers, all with
Emma
in hand. The San Telmo district is a magnet for tourists from abroad and from Argentina's other cities, thanks to an open-air market with stalls for antiques, handmade jewelry, and other types of crafts. There are dozens of small shops in the blocks surrounding the plaza with similar wares. The area is not as upscale as Palermo, a shopping hot spot more dedicated to clothing. San Telmo is rougher around the edges, a little more old Buenos Aires, tango and all.

That nippy winter day the pedestrian areas were packed. Street performers, each with a strategically located tip jar, competed for attention. A man in his sixties glided across the cobblestoned streets, tangoing languidly with a life-sized stuffed doll strapped to his body, marking a large circle of territory with his dips and turns. When a young woman tried to dodge through rather than fight the crowds around him, he tangoed her into a doorway on one side of the narrow street, rubbing against her in a way that would have been extremely lewd if there hadn't been a third party (albeit made of cloth) between them. Yet he never once made eye contact, pretending archly as though he hadn't seen her at all and was simply occupied with his faithful fabric partner.

Other tango dancers worked style rather than humor. Within a five-block radius, at least four different handsome couples glided across the cobblestones, dancing first with each other and then, after whetting the public's appetite, drawing new partners from the crowd and posing for photographs, all the while keeping an eye on their tip jars. Despite enjoying the display I couldn't help but feel sorry for the women, gorgeous in their billowy black skirts and tight-fitting, cleavage-enhancing tops, but ill-dressed for the chilly weather.

Stopping into a café bathroom, I interrupted a street dancer adjusting her stockings with one sleek, muscled leg propped up on the sink. Dressed all in black with a red scarf at her waist and beaded red feathers holding her dark hair slicked down in a tight bun, she wore dramatic makeup that would have looked cartoonish on the average woman—but she was anything but average.

I'm not in the habit of complimenting strangers in bathrooms, yet I couldn't stop myself. “You look so beautiful,” I blurted out.

“Yes, it's true,” she smiled, straightening her leg and smoothing down her skirt. There was no arrogance in her statement, no coyness—just unflinching confidence. “But, you know, I'm freezing my
tail
off out there.”

I rejoined the crowd in San Telmo's small central square and was examining some handcrafted necklaces when I casually exchanged a glance with the woman next to me. Then we exchanged noisy cries of “Oh my
gaaawd!
” and big hugs. It was Tabitha, one of the students from Chile. She hadn't taken classes with me, but she was a close friend of Emily, the Canadian student.

“Emily's here, too. Sneak up on her!” Tabitha urged, giggling. Many of the students had had post-Chile tours planned. It was inevitable that some would wind up in a touristy part of alluring Buenos Aires, but I was thrilled we'd managed to cross paths.

Emily was checking out earrings several stalls down, and when I tapped her on the shoulder, she exclaimed and gave me a big surprised hug as well. After browsing a bit more, we took a taxi to
El
Ateneo
. Originally a theater, the enormous, ornate structure had been converted into a bookstore, apparently the largest in Latin America. We exchanged school gossip in the store's café, set up where the former stage had been, and they caught me up on their recent travels through Bolivia and Peru.

“What about Taylor?” I asked. I hadn't had any email from her since Chile, and I'd been wondering what she'd decided about her hitchhiking venture.

“I heard that she stayed in Valparaiso after classes ended then went home,” Tabitha said. “I think the plan is to improve her Spanish then come back for another trip.”

I felt both relieved and a little sad. Hitchhiking straight through to Denver would have been madness—yet she had been so energized, so inspired by her time in Chile, that going straight home must have been a letdown for her. But if the spark that had been lit by her time in Chile (and by
El
Che
) was really still burning, she'd find a way back. A true traveler always does.

***

“Silvina Bullrich?” Hugo snorted with disgust. After playing tourist I'd returned to the
Librería Romano
, despite my less-than-warm reception when I'd dropped off the
Emma
's for him and the owner's girlfriend. I was still writing faithfully to Diego back in Mexico, and in the cold of an Argentinean winter, I fondly remembered steamy hikes in the jungle and lazy days floating in the sea by Diego's side. But I couldn't put Hugo out of my mind, distant (and grumpy) though he was. I went back to the bookstore with the flimsy excuse of wanting more reading recommendations and to update him on developments with the group.

“Bullrich—well, it's your time.” He dismissed Teresa's recommendation with a shrug. “But there are lots of women writers here better and more important than Bullrich. Victoria Ocampo, for one. And if you're interested in classic literature, you need to read nineteenth-century women authors. Juana Manso, Eduarda Mansilla, Juana Manuela Gorriti. We have so many.”

At long last, I'd finally found a country where women writers were making names for themselves in the same century as Austen. None of them is famous today, but Argentineans serious about literature, Hugo assured me, know who they were. They laid a foundation the best women writers of the twentieth century could build on, just as Austen carried forward (and bested) the successes of predecessors like Fanny Burney and Ann Radcliffe.

Along with their own talents, an important factor supporting women's success in Argentina was the intellectual climate fostered by that nineteenth-century president who, according to the bookstore's sign, was still in charge more than a hundred years after his death—Domingo Sarmiento. A scholar as well as a politician, Sarmiento, born in 1811, published on travel and other topics and made education a priority during his presidency, opening numerous schools and public libraries. His core idea that true democracy depends on an educated public seems obvious today but horrified the powerful, wealthy class, who preferred to keep their workers poor and ignorant.

And, scandal of scandals, Sarmiento dramatically improved women's education. Learning about him went a long way toward explaining what's distinctive about Argentinean culture. Women writers and artists from all over Latin America headed to Buenos Aires if they wanted to get published and be taken seriously, well into the twentieth century.

Then Hugo hauled out the heavy artillery for a nerdy American—Nancy Drew. I'd been hunting for translations of Nancy Drew since Guatemala, with no trace of the girl sleuth.

“Spaniards love to pretend they're the first to translate foreign literature into Spanish,” Hugo said, pulling a face. “But along with lots of other works, Nancy Drew mysteries were translated here in the early sixties, well before they were in Spain.”

When I finally got my hands on some copies later on, I was amused to see how Nancy's cup size magically plumped up south of the equator. The cover art for the translation of
The
Bungalow
Mystery
even has her in a nightie.

“Spain spent decades under a dictatorship after their civil war in the late 1930s, and that affected what works could be translated,” Hugo explained. “But it's no excuse for them to ignore Argentinean literary accomplishments and pretend we have no culture except for Borges.”