All Roads Lead to Austen: A Year-long Journey with Jane

by Amy Elizabeth Smith

  “I’ve asked about that room myself,” Martín said as we toured the enormous, turreted nineteenth-century building. “They’ve shown me a different one each time, so I’m not even sure they know which one it is.” When I returned a week later, the room they led me to was so attractive I was willing to take it on faith Förster had met his end there.

  Places where people are born or die hold an intensity, a profound kind of energy. Austen fans have the misfortune to lack access to both of these places for her. Steventon Rectory no longer exists, and the house where Austen died in Winchester, her head on big sister Cassandra’s lap, is privately owned. As Austen’s health declined rapidly, the family had moved her there from Chawton to seek the help of a medical specialist, but in vain. I located the house on a visit to England in 2003 but joined the ranks of the disappointed when I saw the handwritten sign taped to a downstairs window: “THIS IS A PRIVATE HOUSE AND NOT OPEN TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC.” No doubt an attempt to stop devoted Janeites from knocking and pleading to be let upstairs, to see the sacred ground.

  There was nothing sacred for me about a racist like Förster; staying in his room was more akin to the impulse to watch horror films. I had to wonder, however, if Paraguayans knew anything about him, because it was clear that my sunny, balconied room with the adjoining turret adapted as the shower was a favorite honeymoon spot. The large antique armoire was full of lovers’ graffiti on its inside panels, some as old as I was:

  Entre estas cuatro paredes

  Y en esta cama de bronce chillona

  Hemos pasado nuestros tres primeros maravillosos

  Días de casados

  Oscar y Josefina, 7/5/64

  “Between these four walls, and in this squeaky bronze bed, we’ve spent our first three wonderful days as a married couple.” Jali and Folfi, equally poetic, left their own contribution: “Muchas veces la cama se convierte en cuna cuando se trata de felicidad, ella es testigo y es la única que puede relatar la inmensa dicha que experimentamos en ella.” Or in other words, “Often happiness can convert a bed into a cradle; this bed is the witness and the only one that can tell about the immense happiness we experienced here.”

  Numerous other messages filled the armoire. There was nothing especially romantic about the anatomically correct heart someone carved into the back panel (valves and all), but I enjoyed the thought of all this happy love energy exorcising the spirit of Förster.

  With Diego thousands of miles away, however, I’d have to make the best of the room on my own, so I decided to dig into more local literature. The most important, internationally known Paraguayan author, Martín and Dorrie had assured me, was Augusto Roa Bastos, and his most important novel, Yo el Supremo. Based on the life of Dr. Francia, a dictator who ruled Paraguay from 1814 to 1840, the book is a complicated combination of novel, essay, and poetic reflection on history and power. I quickly realized it was too complicated for me. As with Asturias back in Guatemala, I’d need much better Spanish to tackle Roa Bastos.

  Fortunately I’d also brought along La Babosa, published in 1952 by Gabriel Casaccia. In La Babosa (literally The Slug but in this context, The Gossip), the world Casaccia depicts is like the evil flipside of Highbury, the setting of Austen’s Emma. While Austen’s small town is cozy and friendly, Casaccia’s is the embodiment of a harsh Spanish saying: “Pueblo chico, infierno grande.” Small town, big hell.

  Austen offers the best face of rural life, but she doesn’t sentimentalize it. She shows how problematic gossip can be, for instance, and through the Miss Bates and the Mr. Elton storylines, she illustrates how we’ve got to treat our neighbors well, even if they’re irritating or rude. But her world is rosy indeed compared to what Casaccia dishes up. What if Miss Bates, instead of merely being a nuisance, were actually malevolent? What if she had it in for the Reverend Mr. Elton, trashed his reputation publicly, and hounded him to an early death? Angela, the gossipy “babosa” old maid, does just that with the local priest. And what if Emma, instead of loving her older sister, hated her because Mr. Woodhouse had preferred Isabella? What if Emma found every possible way to torment her, finally driving her to suicide? Angela the babosa manages that feat, too. And what if Emma, instead of having loving patience for her father’s quirks and weaknesses, exploited them at every turn to get what she wanted? That’s what pretty much every character in La Babosa does with pretty much every other character.

  Greed is a major theme as well. Ralph Waldo Emerson, not an Austen fan, once wrote, “I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate. Never was life so pinched and narrow. All that interests any character is, has he or she money to marry with? Suicide is more respectable.” Well, Casaccia would have given Ralph W. an instant coronary. I enjoyed how well written the novel is but was stunned by its fierceness. Could small town Paraguay really be that brutal? Plá’s novel shows the ugliness of war, but also, unity and compassion in the face of adversity. Austen shines things up a bit to show us the best a small town is capable of; perhaps Casaccia was deliberately darkening things to expose the worst.

  But I was certainly getting the fish-eye from the local women working at the hotel. I’d popped out on the balcony my second morning there to find three of the maids on the lawn, looking up at my window. They fell silent and scattered in three directions when they saw me. Something similar had happened over dinner the previous evening on the huge outdoor patio of the hotel. I got the feeling that a woman my age traveling alone, with no children or grandchildren in tow, was distinctly suspect.

  Maybe my stay in Honeymoon Central was beginning to work on me, or maybe feeling like an unmarried oddball factored in. Either way, after I’d settled back in with Martín and Dorrie again, I found myself thinking more and more about Diego’s desire for me to return to Puerto Vallarta. Living there, he’d pointed out, would certainly cost me less than being in California. The problem was I wouldn’t have my California salary in Puerto Vallarta.

  It dawned on me that I should think of this the way Emma and Mr. Knightley tackled their own “where to live?” dilemma. First things first—did I really want to be with Diego, regardless of location? Although Mr. Knightley lacks Darcy’s sex appeal, he has endeared himself to generations of Austen fans by declaring that what mattered to him most was being with Emma, even if that meant leaving his own home to humor Mr. Woodhouse. Love first, lodging second. So there was the question: did I love Diego?

  I knew I missed him. I missed his perpetual cheerfulness, his playful temperament, his sweet, dark eyes. I missed our long walks in the mountains outside the city, our lazy afternoon swims in the sea, our nights out listening to music and dancing. But there was only one way to know how much I was missing Diego versus how much I was missing being with Diego in a beautiful Mexican seaside town—and that was to invite him to visit California. We could get to know each other better, he could see how I lived, and I could see how he would fit in with my friends.

  He answered my email the same day: “¡Claro que sí!” Yes, of course!

  Diego had been to Arizona years ago but never California, and he liked the idea of seeing where I taught. “Maybe I can sneak into one of your Jane Austen classes,” he joked. There was no way of knowing quite how long it would take him to get a tourist visa, so we’d have to leave the plans open-ended, but if all went well, we could finally see each other again that upcoming fall. My home was no tropical paradise. If we got along just as well in California’s hot, flat Central Valley, well, that really would be love.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Emma movie night rolled around fast. The first guest to arrive was Erna, a close friend of Dorrie and Martín. The couple had spoken about her earlier with admiration, given that, among other talents, she was equally fluent in English, Spanish, and German. She was, in fact, a simultaneous translator. The only thing more impressive than a person who speaks three languages equally well is one who
translates at the speed of normal conversation. In 1993, when Jimmy Carter served as an independent observer of Paraguay’s first democratic election since the 1940s, Erna swapped his English into Spanish for the entire country (and the world) to hear.

  I assumed she’d be intimidating. Wrong again. I should have known that any friend of Dorrie and Martín would be just as pleasant as they were. She was, however, a little more…brash. With short, stylish hair and a huge winning smile, Erna was the kind of wisecracking woman people in the 1950s called “a pistol!” Think Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, but prettier and with a fouler mouth. I adored her immediately and couldn’t wait to hear what she’d have to say about Emma.

  The rest of the Austen party arrived soon after. There was Lili from the school, accompanied by a young German friend who smiled silently the whole evening; Victoria, a dark-haired, delicately pretty cousin of Martín’s who looked to be about my age; Paula, one of Martín’s nieces, a smart, pleasant woman in her early twenties who also was more of an observer than a participant; and finally Alicia, an elegant, well-dressed family friend in her fifties who swept in on a wave of delicious perfume once we’d already started the film.

  Dorrie and Martín bustled around making sure everybody had drinks and snacks until the others urged them to sit down and enjoy the movie. “Enjoy the movie” with this group meant livening it up with chat. Hardly an action passed without commentary, and Erna took the cake for candor. When Emma archly comments to Harriet Smith that she hadn’t noticed Mr. Martin in one scene, Erna blurted out, “Oh, right, deny it! You were hot for him the second you saw him!” Various comments erupted when Frank Churchill runs off for a haircut, and Erna cut through them all: “He’s gone off to chase whores, that’s all!”

  Austen would surely have been shocked, but the authors of Pride and Promiscuity, the so-called “lost sex scenes” of Austen, could have taken a few notes for a sequel.

  As the movie swept to a close with dancing, merriment, and marriages, the group began to clap and laugh. Lili called out, “Oh, I want to marry Mr. Knightley!”

  “You do?” Erna responded, raising an eyebrow. Mr. Knightley was, I suspected, pretty stuffy for her taste.

  “So was this book famous when it first came out?” Victoria asked, as Martín returned with another round of drinks.

  “Well, I can’t believe what Mark Twain said about Austen,” Erna said. “I read it on the Internet. Something like, ‘I wouldn’t have Austen on my shelf if there were no other books left in the world!’”

  “Was it because of the aristocracy?” Martín asked. “Twain was really a populist, so he probably objected to the decadence of their lives.”

  Surprised that Twain had surfaced again, as he had in Chile, I explained about the context of the private letters to his friends, who he’d been razzing about Austen.

  “And was Emma scandalous for its time?” Victoria asked, pursuing the original reception of the novel.

  “I don’t see why it would have been,” Lili answered.

  “But it seems to me that breaking the social barriers like she does must have been scandalous,” Victoria continued. “Look at that party at the end, where the classes are mixed.”

  “That’s how the movie ends but not the book,” I explained. Hollywood was basically making Austen more palatable, because the novel actually clarifies that Emma and Harriet can’t stay friends once she marries Mr. Martin:

  Harriet, necessarily drawn away by her engagements with the Martins, was less and less at Hartfield; which was not to be regretted. The intimacy between her and Emma must sink; their friendship must change into a calmer sort of goodwill; and, fortunately, what ought to be, and must be, seemed already beginning, and in the most gradual, natural manner.

  Students in California who’ve only seen the film are always surprised and disappointed when we discuss this passage since they like to think of Austen as revolutionary. But in this sense, she wasn’t. Separate spheres were the order of the day.

  “But that separation exists to this day here, too.” Dorrie said.

  Martín agreed: “There’s a very strong separation among the social classes.”

  “There’s no idea here, unfortunately, of a community that’s for everyone,” Victoria agreed. “With the arts, too. I’m sure there are a lot of people who’ve never heard of Jane Austen or even the movies.”

  “Or haven’t heard about any books,” Alicia added.

  “People here really don’t read much,” Lili said ruefully.

  Victoria nodded. “But it’s also so hard for people to get access to books here with everything that’s happened over the last thirty years.”

  Massive cross-talking broke out at once, and the consensus was clear: books were expensive and hard to get for most Paraguayans.

  “And aside from the Roosevelt, it isn’t like having the public library ‘down the street’ in the United States, where you can go and read what you want,” Erna pointed out, switching into English for “down the street.”

  “For really poor Paraguayans,” Lili added, “it’s not just about buying the books or borrowing them. You also have to worry about whether you can afford shelves to put them on or a place the books can be without getting dusty or dirty.”

  “Okay, who wants to eat ‘Happy’?” Martín suddenly called out, switching to a more cheerful subject: food. “That’s what’s left of Dorrie’s birthday cake.”

  “Who wants a piece of happiness?” Dorrie seconded, laughing. As drinks were refreshed and more food was shared, the talk became general for a stretch.

  Alicia was the one who brought us back around to Austen. “I liked Sense and Sensibility much better.”

  “You did?” I encouraged her, curious.

  “Much more profound, a lot more honest feelings all around. In Emma everybody’s covering, covering, covering,” Alicia continued. “There’s cover-up in Sense and Sensibility, too, even from one’s self, at times, but those people are really feeling deeply. Emma was just…sheeeeesh.” Her sentence turned into a sigh of frustration.

  “That’s what one of those Brontës said about her; I mean, it was scathing,” Erna offered. “No passion, she’s not capable of it, blah blah blah.”

  “Well, I liked Emma better than Sense and Sensibility,” Dorrie said. “Just marrying your daughters off, that’s not very interesting to me. But this is very romantic, because Knightley was suffering the whole time. And Emma couldn’t see it.”

  Martín tried to make a comment, but because he had a mouth full of “Happy,” it came out as a sound that set the group laughing.

  “I don’t think he was out there being honest either,” Erna dissented. “I didn’t see him suffering; I didn’t see him in love.”

  Two camps quickly formed on the issue, everyone talking at once. I struggled to keep up with the contest, half in English, half Spanish.

  “Well, look at the movie again!” Dorrie insisted. “The next time you’ll see that there are all these takes of him sighing.”

  Victoria agreed. “Why do you think that he keeps getting so mad at her?”

  “It’s because he cares,” Dorrie continued. “Why else would he send her to hell all the time?”

  “Well”—Erna leaned forward on the couch to take them both on at once—“he’s mad because she’s an ass, and that’s why I would send her to hell!” She punctuated the sentence by lifting her drink.

  “He sees her as someone who’s just immature, that’s all, but he cares!” Dorrie responded.

  “Then why the hell doesn’t he just jump her?!” Erna shouted in mock frustration.

  “Because he loves her!” Dorrie and Victoria cried in unison.

  The friendly dispute set the whole room laughing again. The conversation then moved into territory I had covered with the other groups, as people wondered, am
ong other things, whether Austen had published under her own name and was famous in her lifetime.

  “What a time that was!” Martín, a history lover, interjected. “You’ve got Admiral Nelson; the English were at the point of defeating Napoleon; they were beginning their real period as a world power. They were accumulating money at such a rate that they could maintain a Navy with 1,500 ships and, not too much later, send ships like the Beagle around the world.”

  Dorrie nodded agreement, then picked up the thread of Austen’s fame. “So if Austen was successful during her lifetime, more or less, and always has been, what is the attraction?”

  “Nothing has changed,” Alicia offered. “Jealousy, pettiness, all of those things. Somebody wants to hear some gossip about somebody else or to trick them. Well, it’s just the same today—nothing has changed.”

  “Definitely.” Several of the others agreed.

  “What’s appealing is that people can identify with these situations and the human emotions here,” Martín pursued, “and that’s why a novel of manners like this can manage to survive. It’s a portrait of its time, but it also goes beyond that, to basic human elements, so people now can read it and say, hey, these people are familiar.”

  While Dorrie and several others agreed, Alicia frowned and offered a dissenting opinion. “Well, there are values here that translate, but it really feels to me very much a story of its time. Anna Karenina is more about intense human emotions across time, but Emma seems, well, muy costumbrista, about their customs and manners.”