All Roads Lead to Austen

by Amy Elizabeth Smith

  While I empathized, I wouldn’t allow gender politics to prevent me from working with a teacher who interested me, and Luis interested me. But I also couldn’t allow the Austen group to implode by inviting him and his incendiary jibes to join us. The ladies, I felt sure, would be outraged.

  “I’ve got an extra copy of the book,” I offered. I could discuss Austen with him, if he’d like, independent of the main group. “I brought a film version, too. Do you think they’d let us watch it here?”

  For a teacher who spends seven hours a day, five days a week across a desk from foreigners butchering his beautiful mother tongue, watching a film could be a welcome change. We were due for a coffee break anyway, so we made arrangements. Wednesday, any and all interested parties could join us in the main office of La Escuela to see Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, dubbed into Spanish, with Keira Knightley as Lizzy Bennet and Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Darcy.

  As we resumed our conversation, refreshed with caffeine, Luis asked me about Austen and her novels. Lapsing in English was a serious no-no, but given the lack of subtlety in my Spanish, I quickly snarled up trying to show why Austen was worth discussing in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America. Not wanting to spoil Pride and Prejudice for him, I launched into a description of Emma.

  “Emma’s a rich girl, you see? And she’s a, a”—drat, “matchmaker” was not in my Spanish vocabulary—“a person who finds husbands and wives for other people to marry.” A simple statement can drag out endlessly as you pile up ten or twelve words you do know to substitute for the one you don’t. “She’s got a young friend, well, who’s not really a friend because she’s poor, but Emma wants to find a husband for her anyway, because that’s the way she is, and when she finds a man who can be her husband, a husband for the friend, that man falls in love with her instead. With Emma.”

  Wow—stripped down to the plot, this sounds pretty sappy! “It’s not just about what she says in the novel, it’s the way she says it,” I added, struggling to ignite some interest in Luis’s critical eyes. “It’s the way she sees things, the way she says them, it’s her, her…voice.”

  It’s not about the plots, I wanted to cry out. It’s about the subtle commentary of the narrative perspective, the cutting inflections, the linguistic smirks! It’s about those twists of the satiric knife that you can read right past unless you’re really attentive—it’s about the ostensibly innocent reporting of dialogue that nonetheless directs how we interpret that dialogue through the seamlessly clever framing. All of this I wanted to say, and so much more.

  “Su voz.” In Spanish, this was all that came out. “Her voice.”

  What a long way I had to go. There was so much I wanted to tell Luis about Austen, all of it trapped in my head in English and unable to make its way out along the extremely thin, badly rutted pathway my Spanish provided at the moment between my thoughts and my speech. Maddening!

  I needed a nap. Spanish made my brain hurt.

  ***

  I’ve already mentioned how beautiful Antigua is architecturally, but what makes it the loveliest place I’d ever been is that the city is completely ringed by green mountains, among which are two enormous volcanoes. Real live volcanoes! Well, one of them is live, anyway—the other, dormant.

  Volcán Agua, the dormant one, is visible from any point in Antigua, a city without skyscrapers. Even my mother—the most directionally challenged person I know, bless her heart—could steer by this landmark. Volcán Fuego is about the same height as Agua, but since its base is situated lower, it appears shorter. It wins back the edge, however, by periodically growling and belching threads of smoke. During my first stay, early one morning shortly after lessons had begun, Fuego let out a series of low rumbles. I had never heard a volcano before, but I didn’t have to ask what that immense, biblical sound was. Impressive. Very impressive. Involuntarily I shot to my feet as had every other student in sight. The teachers, volcano veterans, smiled and kept their seats.

  When I returned for my second visit, I’d requested a room with a view of Volcán Agua. After checking in, I’d mentioned my Austen project to Roberto, the hotel manager. He was interested, since he’d been a high school teacher before going into the hospitality business. But when I mentioned that I also wanted to learn about his country’s literature, to see if Guatemala had its own Austen, he lit up like a pinball machine.

  “We’ve got so many great writers! Come, come here!” Warm and open, Guatemalans pretty much lack most Americans’ shyness about touching strangers. Roberto seized my arm and hauled me to a table, patting his pockets with his free hand in search of a pen. “These are authors you’ll like. You’ll learn about Guatemala from their books.” His eyes were full of the pleasure one booklover takes in sharing recommendations with another.

  On the back of my flight itinerary, he wrote down several names, among them José Milla and Ana María Rodas (and if you know Guatemalan literature and are wondering about Miguel Asturias, rest assured; we’ll get to him). “You won’t have any trouble finding these authors here,” he added.

  Antigua has several bookstores on the main square and others near The Arch, a beautiful Spanish colonial structure that spans one of the streets bordering the cathedral La Merced. A signature landmark, The Arch was left standing—some say, miraculously—after the 1773 and 1976 earthquakes. There are a few coffee shops that allow people to swap books in English, a common practice in cities frequented by gringos y gringas, but finding Spanish books in such places is hit or miss. There’s also an enticing used book fair on Fridays and weekends outside of the buildings that front the Parque Central.

  Of the three authors on the list, José Milla, whom Nora and Élida had also recommended, was the most famous. Milla, born in 1822, came up most often when I asked Guatemalans about classic writers. I decided to read Historia de un Pepe when Roberto told me how he and his boyhood classmates had to recite it aloud in school, round robin. In the United States, school kids who’d rather be anywhere but in class are tormented with Pride and Prejudice or Oliver Twist—in Guatemala, with Historia de un Pepe.

  Milla is a grand painter of tableaus, dramatic and unforgettable; reading him made me aware that I can rarely picture specific static images from Austen. Her work for me represents constant, typically gentle, motion—the passage of a polite visit, a fluid exchange of dialogue, the unfolding of ideas in the mind of a protagonist. Stylistically, Milla is more of a Sir Walter Scott. Scott himself acknowledged the contrast between his style and Austen’s after her death:

  That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!

  A pity, indeed—although as history would have it, another famous writer came along a bit later to say, “It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.”

  But that’s a story for later.

  Chapter Two

  The day for our school viewing of Orgullo y Prejuicio rolled around quickly. One of the administrators surrendered his office, and we set up our impromptu cinema. Pride and Prejudice is such familiar ground for Austen lovers that it brings back a certain thrill to view the movie with people who don’t know if Lizzy and Darcy will manage to get together. When I saw the Knightley/Macfadyen version in the theater in California, I was seated behind two men and a woman in their fifties who could have been any of my more colorful Pennsylvania relatives or the grown-up equivalent of the fist-fightin’ rednecks from my high school. The three treated the outing like a trip to a Steelers game, shouting encouragement and insults at the appropriate spots. I’m usually the first person to shush noisy viewers, bu
t it was worth the ticket price to hear them respond to the story with such unreserved gusto.

  “Who the hell does he think he is?!” barked the woman when Darcy snubs Lizzy at the dance.

  “Ha! Guess she told you, buddy!” hooted one of the men when Lizzy takes him down a peg or two a few scenes later.

  Every major plot twist prompted noisy feedback. “Oh yeah, Missy,” cried the woman after Bingley has proposed to Jane and Lizzy sits outside, contemplating the proposal she rejected. “Yeah, that’s right. Now you know you blew it!”

  Imagine the surprise of all three when Darcy reappears to give it one more try—they were so happy they clapped and hollered. I felt like hugging them.

  The teachers and students who clustered around the TV in La Escuela weren’t quite so vocal, but they were clearly caught up in the Lizzy/Darcy battle. One of the teachers blurted out, “Ay, no, no!” in distress when Lizzy rejects Darcy and another actually flung her hands up and cried, “Al fin, al fin!”—“Finally!”—when Darcy makes his dramatic reappearance at the conclusion. Male and female alike had writhed in agony at Mrs. Bennet’s machinations, the teachers elbowing each other to make comments in rapid Spanish that I couldn’t entirely follow, beyond the sense that they’d seen her kind around Antigua. Mrs. Bennet translates particularly well across cultures, as anybody knows who’s seen the mother dance down the steps in Gurinder Chadha’s fabulous Bollywood adaptation Bride and Prejudice.

  After the viewing, Luis and I made our way back along the garden path and sat down to debrief. “Bien hecha,” he began. “Well made. Really a beautiful film.” But the utter shamelessness of Lydia’s behavior came under his fire, as well as her lack of repentance for the landslide of trouble her elopement caused. My hackles went up over the notion that Lydia was shameless when Wickham is the bigger wanker, for my money. But then Luis reached for a loose page of the meticulous notes he kept during each of our conversations and wrote down two words: una mulada and una cabronada.

  “Austen’s clearly interested in depicting shades of bad behavior,” he explained, “not in drawing black-and-white portraits. As for this pair, they both ran off, but Lydia went off expecting to get married, and Wickham went off expecting to get laid. Her behavior was una mulada but his was una cabronada.”

  There’s no way to translate these words exactly, but for starters, una mula is a mule and una cabra, a goat. The basic idea is that Lydia behaved like a stubborn mule, acting without a sense for the consequences, but Wickham behaved like a horny goat, with deliberate malice. One of the fun features of Spanish that English lacks is the capacity to create nouns that express behaviors out of other nouns or verbs. So, a dog is un perro, and behaving like a dog to somebody (see how many words that takes?) is una perrada. Behaving like un burro (donkey) translates into una burrada and un cochino (a pig), una cochinada.

  “Very interesting, how the casting was handled,” Luis continued. “There’s nothing in the novel about Collins being short, but his height immediately conveys how small he is in character. A film can never provide the subtlety of characterization you find in a great book—and now that I’m reading it, I can see how subtle Austen is—but good casting helps.”

  As I agreed, he added, “Seeing a depiction of women’s lives from that period was interesting. What do you think about the situation of women in Guatemala?” He leaned back against his chair and crossed his arms, watchful.

  I could hardly think of a more loaded question from a man who hadn’t exactly displayed the best attitude toward his female colleagues. I could also feel that late afternoon headache settling in, the one I got most days from struggling through hours of Spanish conversation.

  Hell, I’m paying for this, I thought, so I went the easy route. “What do you think of their lives?”

  The wry tilt of an eyebrow showed that he knew a dodge when he heard it, but he obliged me. “We got our independence from Spain in 1821.” He leaned forward and wrote the date on our page of notes for that day, full on both sides with words, phrases, a few random sketches. “Where are Guatemalan women now?” He wrote another date: 1822. “Maids—that’s what their parents raise them to be, maids. They’re raised to do chores, not to use their minds.”

  Fascinating. A man so harsh on individual women nonetheless had a bead on what academic types call “social construction.” The problem is not women per se; it’s how women are raised. But Nora and Élida and their friends were obviously capable of using their minds, whatever social pressure may have tried to stop them from doing so, however much of their time was eaten up by “women’s work.”

  Austen wasn’t raised the same way as her brothers. She and her sister Cassandra only received about two years of formal education, while older brothers James and Henry were sent to Oxford. If Jane begrudged them a privilege her gender prohibited, no real trace of this sentiment survives. Disappointingly for scandal-seeking biographers, Austen’s family seems to have been a happy one, inequities notwithstanding. Austen’s determination to see her works in print bore fruit not only because her family supported her efforts but also because of her own determination not to let her talent go to waste, despite the constraints of her era.

  Luis remained poised for my response. Judging from his expression, he was interested in knowing more than whether I could pull the words together in Spanish. Somehow I hadn’t seen myself getting into a conversation like this outside of my Austen group, and I hadn’t expected to encounter such harsh criticism of latino gender roles from a Guatemalan man. But what prompted me to think that way? What sort of assumptions was I making about Guatemalan men? Still I wondered: would Luis have spoken so openly on the subject with a Guatemalan woman?

  Any Austen reader knows the dangers that lie in making assumptions and judging too quickly. Before setting foot off U.S. soil I’d given my feminist self an earnest talking-to: “Seriously try not to jump to conclusions about women’s rights in Latin America! At least for a week or two.” Now here was somebody who wanted to dish on the way women are shortchanged—and somehow, I balked.

  Fact is, I’d already become defensive on behalf of the women I’d come to know in Guatemala, and I stared down at the date Luis had so provocatively written. 1822? Were Nora, Élida, and their friends nearly two centuries behind me, somehow? No way. On the other hand, they were the first to point out the exhausting struggles they faced to be taken seriously.

  Arrgh! I so wanted to have this conversation, but I was torn on the subject and incredibly frustrated, yet again, with lacking the capacity to explain my thoughts properly.

  “Complicated,” I said at last. “The roles we play, taught to play.” My head felt the size of a watermelon, and my Spanish decomposed into phrases and single words.

  I fell silent, and we studied each other across the desk. Was I letting down women everywhere? Was I disappointing Luis? Could he see how hard this was for me, running the dull edges of my Spanish up against his sharp insights and questions? The bells of the nearby church began to toll.

  “Enough for today?” I asked.

  “Enough for today,” he nodded, with a slow smile.

  Okay. He saw.

  ***

  After a lengthy nap I woke up, headache gone, then dressed and set off from the hotel feeling reinvigorated, ready for some nightlife. Antigua is full of wonderful restaurants, but for some reason that night, I didn’t want any of the local fare, despite the quality of every meal I’d had in a Guatemalan restaurant across the price spectrum. I wanted something different. Something…

  German. I stared at the sign, tickled to find a German restaurant in that decidedly laid-back, non-Teutonic setting. Johnny Cash was playing on the sound system as I took a window table across from the bar. A nearby wall was plastered with an eclectic mix of decorations: a scarf with the colors of a German soccer team, various cartoons cut from newspapers, magazine ads with busty young women
, a photo of Che Guevara with Fidel Castro. A waitress eventually came by with a menu, and I ordered the tempting “buffalo chili.”

  “Oh, the buffalo chili—very good!” The distance between my table and the bar wasn’t large, and a smiling man seated there, tall and burly for a Guatemalan, bridged it with talk.

  “I’m Osvaldo. Emmy? You’re Emmy?” Spanish pronunciation, charmingly, turned me into an Austen character. “So, where are you from? The U.S.? That’s nice! California? I like California!”

  As he talked on, my buffalo eventually arrived and with it, a foamy stein of Gallo, a tasty Guatemalan beer I’d chosen because “gallo” means rooster. “Look at this!” Osvaldo said, slickly helping himself to the empty seat across from me. “Look at this stein!” The Gothic German script on one side read: “Comedia Alemana.” I pondered the words while Osvaldo waited, an expectant look on his face. “Get it? Eh? Not comida—comedia! Not German food, it’s German comedy!”

  D’oh! And somebody had spent good money on those hefty steins.

  I could follow most of what Osvaldo said as he chatted about his farm outside of Antigua, how good the local food is, how lovely the mountains are, his friendly flow of words interrupted only when other customers passed by and exchanged handshakes and greetings with him. Given the local norms, he had a wife and numerous children; if so, they got edited out of that evening’s version of his life.

  I wasn’t the youngest or the prettiest woman in that restaurant, but I did have something special: a reputation. Many latino men, I’d been warned, assume that American women are “easy” in general and that when we’re traveling, watch out—we’re insatiable! At the risk of offending the delicate sensibilities of certain types of Austen fans, I’ll admit I have had a foreign affair or two when the circumstances were just right. This was not one of those moments. But as I suspected, Osvaldo made his way around to his pitch. Really, pretty lady, the little towns outside of Antigua are so lovely, yes, and do you know how pretty your eyes are? How can you visit, pretty lady, and not see these lovely towns?—maybe this evening?