All Roads Lead to Austen

by Amy Elizabeth Smith

  Ahead of me was the beauty of Antigua, the challenge of more lessons at the language school, the hours I would spend with friends I’d met in December. For some people, travel is about adventure, something different at every turn, constantly seeing new places. But anyone who’s read an Austen novel more than once—or any good novel—knows the pleasure of treading familiar ground. With a book as good as Emma (or Great Expectations or To Kill a Mockingbird or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), you can pick it up knowing how it ends but still discover something fresh and engaging each time around.

  Mindful reading takes time and attention; so does mindful travel. A typical four-day stay just isn’t enough to begin to understand a city and the people who live there. Extended travel—time to really read a place—is a luxury of the best, most rewarding kind. A whole year of it now lay ahead of me.

  Antigua is about fifty minutes southwest of Guatemala City, so during the ride I caught up with Gustavo, the van driver I’d hired on my earlier stay as well. About my age, thoughtful, pleasant, and handsome, Gustavo is the proud father of three daughters. He updated me on his oldest, who was studying medicine. Getting into a university in Guatemala is tough; there aren’t affordable state schools and community colleges around every corner. For female students in a culture with traditional, sharply defined gender roles, the road is tougher still. Gustavo had plenty of reason to be proud.

  On this Austen-inspired trip, I couldn’t help but wonder how the history of literature would be different if Austen’s father hadn’t been equally thrilled with his talented daughter. What if, instead of doing his best to help her publish, the Reverend George Austen had pushed harder for more grandkids and told Jane to leave the writing to her brothers? Scary thought.

  “Are you back for more lessons?” Gustavo asked. He spoke slowly on purpose, his Spanish clear and easy to follow—he’d spent lots of hours ferrying students to and from the language school. I’d vowed to use only Spanish on my travels, and it was a pleasure to return to the fluid, beautiful language I wanted so badly to master.

  “I’m back for more lessons and for something special,” I answered (and since my own Spanish wasn’t exactly so fluid or beautiful yet, I’m touching things up here in English). “I’ll be holding a reading group with five teachers from the school, to talk about an English novel called Pride and Prejudice.”

  “Are you reading the book in English?” he said in surprise. Most of the teachers at the language school didn’t speak English, since language immersion is its specialty.

  “No, in Spanish. I want to see how well Austen translates.” There was much more encompassed in that word “translates” than I could explain to Gustavo in my gritty Spanish—I meant not only Austen’s language but her social vision, her fabulous casts of characters, her peerless ironic voice. How well would these flourish, transplanted to beautiful but troubled Guatemala, with a decades-long civil war in its recent past? Would readers here see themselves in Austen the way so many English-speaking readers do? Would they recognize these mothers, fathers, sisters, friends, and neighbors? Maybe even itch to manhandle a few of them, the way Larry and my California students often did?

  These were the questions driving my travel, not just to Guatemala but to every country I would visit over the upcoming year. And I was willing to follow—wherever the answers might lead.

  ***

  Settled into my hotel, the first order of business was a call to the States. There were several dozen ways grim fate could have snatched me up between my mother’s Pennsylvania living room and my Guatemalan hotel, so I had to demonstrate that I had survived them all. I’d recently celebrated my forty-second birthday. By that age, my mother already had a grandchild—but I was the youngest of four and as they say, once the baby, always the baby.

  “You have a good sun hat, don’t you?” she asked.

  The stores were full of them…how evil would it be to say yes, in the spirit of, “one is available if I need it?” Hopefully not too. “Yes, Mom.”

  “Please be careful! Don’t forget what happened to Albert’s sister,” she reminded me (again) as we hung up. Albert was one of my high school boyfriends, and his sister died of a tropical fever during a Christian mission somewhere in Latin America. Which country, we never heard for sure. I can’t imagine how his poor parents dealt with it; as for Albert, losing his younger sister was heartbreaking.

  Since we never did get the full story on the tropical fever, this local tragedy transformed the entire map of Latin America, in my mom’s concerned parental brain, into The Place Where Albert’s Sister Died. To her credit, she never once tried to talk me out of my plans. And anyway, my love of books was inextricably tied to spending hours in the small local library where she’d worked for more than twenty years. Mom had her hand in my desire to travel two continents with Austen, intentionally or not. But I knew she would worry about me nonstop, so lots of calls and emails were in order. If that seems juvenile for a forty-something, so be it.

  The next morning I had a warm reunion with Nora, my point-person for the Austen group. With some people you can pick up a conversation seamlessly even after months of separation; that’s how it was with Nora. At the language school, teachers are assigned by the week, and during my initial visit, Nora was my second teacher. Cheerful, curvy, and feminine, she had a mile-wide smile and a serious appreciation of harmless gossip.

  Before working with Nora I’d studied under Élida, a delicate, petite woman in her sixties with enormous, solemn eyes. With Élida, who would also be in our Austen group, I’d felt inspired to behave well. She reminded me of the “old-school” teachers I’d had back in Pennsylvania, ones who knew how to earn students’ respect without coddling or pandering. But with Nora I felt free to share details about our love lives, the love lives of other teachers and students, the love lives we wish we had, etc. All in the name of education—you’ve got to use a lot of Spanish vocabulary to describe people’s love lives.

  Nora had rounded up the other three readers for the Austen group, fellow teachers from the language school, which from here on out I’ll call La Escuela. Two months earlier, I’d mailed her five copies of Orgullo y Prejuicio, otherwise known as Pride and Prejudice, and she’d distributed them. Not Austen’s best, in my opinion, but as her most popular novel it seemed the natural point of departure for Austen’s Latin American travels.

  “Everybody’s excited about getting together for the group,” Nora assured me with a grin. “How do you want to organize it?”

  “Let’s save it for the end of my visit. Every lesson counts for me! I’ll be able to do a better job with our group if we hold off a bit. I know you’re all really busy, so let’s make it one session only,” I suggested. The relief on her face was obvious. American women have our complaints, but the average American guy who cooks and cleans would be worth his weight in gold-wrapped chocolate in Antigua. Pretty much every woman I met there told me that she automatically has two full-time jobs if she works outside the home.

  Classes would start up bright and early the next day, so Nora and I made the most of our time that beautiful Sunday catching up on gossip. After I found out how things were with her family and her daughter’s upcoming wedding, she quickly steered things around to my own love life.

  “So, are you dating anybody?” Her open, inviting gaze encouraged me to dish about Diego, even though I hadn’t meant to quite yet.

  “Yes and no. I’ve spent some time with somebody I really like, but it’s long distance, so I’m not sure where it’s going.”

  “How long is long?”

  I hesitated a beat. “Mexico.”

  “Aha!” she laughed. “So that’s why you’re staying less time this visit! You want to run off to see your honey in Mexico!”

  She had me there. I’d emailed Diego earlier that morning, knowing he wouldn’t worry if a day or two passed before I could find an Int
ernet café. He was the soul of contented cheerfulness. One day he’d pointed out, as we floated on our backs in the sea and I had been fretting about something, that the Spanish verb for “worry” is preocupar. In other words, to be “occupied” with something before you need to. I am my mother’s daughter; I fret. But maybe with more time around Diego when I got to Mexico, I could learn to lighten up.

  As Nora and I strolled toward the Parque Central, I was struck by how magically similar a July day felt to a January day—sunny, pleasant, no serious humidity in sight. Apparently it never gets too hot or too cold in Antigua, although there’s more rain in the summer. And green—always so achingly, beautifully green. If I had dreamed up the place, I couldn’t have done it better.

  There was a downside, however. Once upon a time, Antigua was the country’s capital. Then a devastating earthquake in 1773 killed a large percentage of the population and left many of the beautiful churches, government structures, and houses in ruins; the capital was moved to Guatemala City. While many structures in Antigua were rebuilt, to this day numerous buildings remain as they’d been left in the wake of nature’s wrath, silent reminders of the city’s past and the ever-present threat of more destruction. A 1976 earthquake killed more than 20,000 Guatemalans, wiping out entire villages in the mountainous areas, although the impact in Antigua was minimal.

  There’s nothing attractive about a deadly earthquake—but there’s something undeniably picturesque, at this remove in time, about Antigua’s eighteenth-century ruins. Catherine Morland, the heroine of Austen’s Northanger Abbey, would have adored exploring them. In Austen’s day wealthy Brits had a real taste for crumbling monasteries and shattered battlements, a fad Austen pokes fun at in her Gothic parody. Antigua is full of intriguing ruins of churches, convents, and other structures that time and abundant greenery have woven into the fabric of the city’s present life, among the stuccoed and brightly painted houses.

  The busy Parque Central is one of the prettiest, most inviting town squares I’ve seen. The climate allows for lush trees and flowers year-round, and attractive buildings frame the park on four sides, one of which is occupied entirely by police administrative offices. Upon inspection, the impressive colonial façade of the police station proves to be just that—a façade. View the building from the side and you’ll discover that it gives way, two rooms deep, to colossal piles of rubble, the remains of its pre-earthquake stature. From this base, roving police maintain order to the point of telling people to keep their weary feet off the numerous benches.

  As we settled by the central fountain for some people watching, a girl of seventeen or eighteen approached Nora with a bright smile of recognition on her pretty face. She was dressed in the universal teen costume of T-shirt and jeans. While she had the warm, dark complexion of many Guatemalans, the shape of her eyes and the lines of her cheekbones were somehow distinctive. Middle Eastern? After a noisy exchange of kisses and greetings, she and Nora began speaking at a pace I couldn’t follow. Then, with a parting kiss and a wave, the girl tripped off.

  Nora, who’s got four children, sighed like only a mother can. I had to ask: “Where is she from?”

  “Turkey,” answered Nora. “She was at La Escuela for a while. She moved here on her own because she didn’t like her home, but she’s had some troubles.”

  “Are her parents here? Other relatives or friends?” No and no.

  Wow. There I was thinking myself quite the adventurer for cutting loose in Latin America for a whole year, although with a university post awaiting at home—and here was a girl less than half my age cutting loose indefinitely, picking up and saying, “The heck with Turkey, how about Guatemala?” I looked around the park at the local girls in braids and beautifully embroidered clothing, people once referred to as “Indians” but now, more respectfully (and accurately) as indigenous. Their roots were in place well before the Spaniards showed up.

  How inconceivable this idea would be to most of them, to disengage from a tightly knit family and try one’s fortune in an alien country. According to what I’d learned at La Escuela, they would no more consider this than Austen herself would have. I’d spoken with some young indigenous women on my first visit who couldn’t grasp why I’d chosen to travel alone. “But your family? How can you leave your family?” they’d repeated, clearly distressed on my behalf, as if I’d somehow stepped out of my hotel without my head on my shoulders.

  Austen traveled very little in her lifetime—a move from her birthplace of Steventon to Bath, some beach vacations to Lyme Regis, a few trips to London—and always accompanied by family. Americans are so enamored of “finding ourselves” that it’s hard to imagine life in a culture where your place, who you are, is defined first and foremost by family. What would it be like never to feel driven to ask the questions that keep American therapists busy? To have a true and profound sense of belonging? You can find close communities in the States, but these days you have to look hard.

  Maybe Austen would translate just fine for Antiguans. Maybe they’d be able to understand her better than a restless traveler like me or that high-spirited young girl disappearing through the crowd in the Parque Central.

  ***

  Monday morning dawned—back to school! I was always one of those nerds who looked forward to school starting, to breaking in crisp new notebooks, color-coded by subject, to using shiny new pens. I remember with vivid intensity the childhood pleasure of stepping back into the classroom after a summer of sunburns and roughhousing. Returning to La Escuela that July morning felt the same, seeing the motivated morning bustle, checking to find which cubicle I’d been assigned, which teacher.

  If you seriously want to learn another language and can pull together the cash, attend an immersion school with one-on-one instruction. Finding a pretty one, while you’re at it, is easy to do in Antigua since most have outdoor classrooms. The grounds at La Escuela were idyllic. Neat cement paths wove between the beds of well-tended flowers and bushes that separated the three long rows of outdoor study cubicles. At capacity, the school accommodated dozens of students, but the layout and the semienclosed cubicles allowed for the sense of privacy you find in a well-designed restaurant. The school was enchanting—nothing like fresh air and flowers to make a classroom more pleasant.

  As for teachers, I’d requested Luis, a man known for both his profound love of literature and his bile, especially toward women. I’d seen him during my initial five-week visit back in the winter but had never spoken to him. Unlike most of the teachers at La Escuela, Luis, who was fiftyish, simply didn’t look friendly. His expressions were sharp, his features and the tone of his voice were sharp, the lines of his slender body, sharp, and his mind, as I came to see over the course of the week, sharpest of all. When students and teachers would gather for coffee breaks, he tended to hang back and watch the others—and I was intrigued.

  Thinking about Luis’s reputation led me to remember how one of Austen’s neighbors compared Jane to a fireplace poker: an ever-present part of the furnishings, silent, stiff and upright, sharp and dangerous. This doesn’t exactly square, however, with the many descriptions by Austen’s nieces and by friends who found her pleasant and fun. In all likelihood the comparison to a poker had less to do with Austen being a cold bit of hardware than with the neighbor in question feeling roundly and soundly jabbed by Austen’s now-famous wit.

  A colleague from my university who’d already studied with Luis had asked me to bring him half a dozen novels in English as a gift. Luis eyed the stack I placed on the desk between us with thinly concealed desire as I introduced myself. Clearly he was a book person to the core, no doubt thinking, “Mary, mother of God, why can’t I run home with these books right now? Why must I work for a living?” Every time I hear about somebody who wins a never-work-again sum in the lottery but keeps his or her day job I think, not a book person.

  I don’t fear death—I fear dying before I’ve r
ead Dickens end to end.

  Luis posed some standard questions and I worked through the answers: born in Pennsylvania, job in California, two brothers, one sister, mother living, father passed away. It was both a polite routine and a way for him to gauge my level in Spanish.

  “You have children?” he asked.

  “I’ve got nieces and nephews. That’s enough for me.”

  This earned me my first real smile from Luis, a confirmed bachelor in a child-loving land. “We don’t all need kids,” he nodded. When I explained about the Austen reading group, he looked more interested still.

  “Who’s in your group?”

  “Teachers from this school,” I explained. “Nora, Élida, Mercedes, and two other women.” At that point, I’d not yet met the other friends Nora had invited (or corralled?) to join. “Ani and Flor, I think.”

  “Which Mercedes?” Luis pursued, his eyes narrowing. “The fat one?”

  Now, I knew one Mercedes at the school was bigger than the other but neither was fat. He maintained eye contact, unapologetic for his question, watchful for my response.

  I decided on a frontal assault. “What a question! She’s not fat. Don’t you like her?”

  A little smile wrinkled one side of his lips and he shifted tack. “I’d be very curious to know how your group goes with those women.”

  I got the distinct impression from his tone that he wasn’t so sure they’d say much of interest. Sure myself that they would, I considered inviting him to join us. I had extra copies of Orgullo y Prejuicio. No doubt he could wolf it down fast, and I would love to know what such a widely read man would think of Austen.

  Then my better judgment kicked in.

  Just like the physical ruins in back of the administrative building on the Parque Central, that school had an ugly pile of rubble behind the façade in the form of the male/female relations. Various female teachers had let me know on my first visit that they feel disrespected by their male colleagues, and salary inequities were a big issue.