All Roads Lead to Austen

by Amy Elizabeth Smith

  If he knew how many of my friends were struggling actors, writers, or musicians, he wouldn’t have looked so sheepish about the request. “I’ve only got a twenty,” I said, scrounging through my wallet.

  “That would be just fine!” he smiled.

  Starving artists, whether in New York or Bangkok or Guayaquil—God love ’em!

  Chapter Eight

  Ideally, I wanted to hold each Austen group late in my visits after getting time to familiarize myself with the place, the accent, the literature. But the Mrs. Gardiner group—so dubbed by Betsy—met every second and fourth week of each month. Since the fourth week of December is generally sacred to family in Latin America, the only option was to meet with them when I’d scarcely been in Guayaquil two weeks.

  Catarina was the hostess for the evening. When I arrived, part of the group was already waiting in her spacious living room, accessed from broad carpeted stairs descending at the far end of the foyer. It felt like stepping down into a movie set. As the house was located on one of Guayaquil’s many hills this structure no doubt emphasized a gorgeous view from the numerous windows, but darkness had descended and the curtains were closed.

  I thrust my hand out in greeting, but Catarina laughingly seized me for a kiss on the cheek. “This is what we do here, mi amor!” About fifty, stylishly coiffed and dressed, she was every bit the hostess of the elegant house. There was only one discordant note—a large musical Christmas tree shrilling merry tunes next to the sofa.

  “This is Yolanda. Poor thing, look at her arm! She can’t stay too late,” Catarina introduced a woman of about the same age with a drawn expression, no doubt owing to the cast and sling and attendant pain.

  “Catarina was called out to a meeting,” Ignacio José apologized, bowing as he presented me with a single red rose. “We’ve got to hold the group without her.” I did a mental double take. Okay—if not Catarina the hostess, then who was the elegant woman who’d introduced Yolanda and was now settled onto the sofa, waving a lacey black fan with such grace that her chestnut brown hair billowed without mussing?

  “You sit here, my dear,” she leaned forward and tapped an armchair commandingly with her fan. “Tell us about yourself.”

  I gave a nutshell version of my project, while Not-Catarina alternated between nodding at me and raking the noisy Christmas tree with icy looks. “I’ve done Pride and Prejudice once already,” I concluded, “with the group in Guatemala.”

  “Did you have to do it with a Christmas tree like this around?” she suddenly burst out, unable to stand one tinny song more. “Eso es infernal! Somebody, make it stop!” She punched each syllable of in-fer-nal—which translates just like you’d think it would—for emphasis.

  Ignacio José pulled a plug to silence the offending tree, and we heaved a collective sigh of relief.

  Reseating himself, he patted his pockets and cried out, “Oh, no! They took my keys, too!”

  “What do you mean? Were you robbed again?” Not-Catarina asked.

  “The bus I came on was robbed. They took my money and my cell phone and threw everything else on the floor. Again! Oh, my keys!”

  “You’ll have to find a girl and go sleep in a hotel, Ignacio José,” Not-Catarina teased. She turned to me and explained, “Ignacio José has very bad luck. He gets robbed a lot.”

  “You need to pass an egg over you!” Yolanda exclaimed.

  “A dozen eggs,” he said glumly, still searching his pockets.

  “It’s a folk belief people have here about luck,” Not-Catarina offered. “But not where I’m from, in Argentina.”

  “Here they are, here they are!” Ignacio José exultantly hauled them from the depths of a pocket.

  “You’re Argentinean?” I asked, trying not to show my excitement.

  “Leti’s from Buenos Aires,” Yolanda contributed as Leti, now properly named, smiled and nodded, fanning herself.

  Anybody with a knee-jerk against stereotypes is going to howl, but I’ve got to say it—that explained a lot. Ever since I’d set foot south of the U.S. border, I’d been hearing unsolicited jokes about Argentineans. Here’s Luis from Antigua’s favorite: “When there’s lightning in the sky, what do Argentineans think is happening? They think it’s God taking their picture.” Mexican and Guatemalan friends told me that what bugs them most about Argentineans is how, no matter where they are, Argentineans behave like they own the place (which sounds like another nationality I can think of…). Hence, my mistake over the hostess identity. How exciting, to meet a real live stereotype! Just as thrilling as the first time I heard a Frenchwoman say, in a Paris bank, “oooh la laaa!”

  As we got acquainted, new readers arrived—Oscar from Chile and Fernanda, a Uruguayan. I scanned my memory for additional stereotypes I’d picked up on my travels. Chileans, according to Mexicans and Guatemalans, are cultured but cold. Word is that they’re “the English of Latin America.” Isabel Allende, a Chilean, has seconded that in print in My Invented Country, a memoir about her homeland. The Chilean at hand was a man in his sixties with strong, handsome features, who kept his hair shaved close. Rather than cold, I’d call Oscar reserved, someone who spoke up when he had something worth saying and not much before. He took a seat on the far side of the sofa.

  As for Fernanda, well, I’d never heard a single stereotype about Uruguayans, so I was forced to deal with her as a real live individual. Brunette, fiftyish, and friendly, she was somehow either a little melancholy by nature or simply a bit down that night. She seated herself next to Ignacio José, opposite Leti. As the evening progressed, it was clear that this configuration was often ideological as well as literal.

  After more introductions and pleasantries, Oscar finally spoke up. “I think we should start,” he said quietly.

  Ignacio José cleared his throat and called us to order, turning to me. “We work together to decide which books we’ll read each month. Normally, we do a formal analysis of a book’s plot and we look freely at the moral framework and possible cultural interpretations of the text.”

  As he spoke, copies of Orgullo y Prejuicio were pulled from purses and satchels. Clearly, this was a more structured venture than what I’d done with friends in Antigua and Puerto Vallarta.

  “But you’re the guest,” Ignacio José suddenly reined himself in. “Is there some particular way you’d like to conduct the group?”

  “No, I’m fine with however you typically do it. I’ve only done two groups so far, and with the one in Mexico, we read Sense and Sensibility instead of Pride and Prejudice.”

  “They’re the same,” Leti pronounced with a snap of her fan. Perhaps having it was a change-of-life necessity, but she knew how to work that fan. “They’re exactly the same, with the focus on two sisters. And all of the obsession with gossip.”

  “Yes, the social critique,” Ignacio José nodded.

  “No, it’s not critique, it’s gossip. Everybody here in Guayaquil knows everybody else’s business, but it’s nothing like the gossip in this novel. And that mother—she’s in-so-por-table.” Once again, she hit every syllable as if to emphasize just how “unbearable” Mrs. Bennet is.

  “But she’s clever,” responded Ignacio José before Leti was quite finished. “She knows how to get what she wants.”

  “She’s a schemer,” Fernanda agreed, treading over Ignacio José’s words in turn. The cross-talking doubled my difficulties with comprehension but seemed to be good-natured, the rapid flow of conversation among people used to debating ideas together.

  “She’s got a strong motivation.” Oscar, despite not speaking loudly, tended to command attention. The overlap stopped, at least temporarily, as he continued. “They haven’t got money, so those girls need good marriages to avoid ending up with nothing.”

  “This is crucial,” Ignacio José agreed. “What do you all think of the social stratification presen
ted in the novel?” His formal tone reminded me suddenly that, according to Betsy, he was actually paid to conduct the reading group and, therefore, determined to earn his salary. “Nobody’s on the same rung of the ladder. Some are higher, some lower.”

  “Darcy’s the highest of all,” Leti nodded.

  “No, it’s Lady Catherine,” Fernanda corrected. “All the rest are fighting it out on the rungs below them.”

  A rash of simultaneous talking broke out on this theme until Fernanda changed the subject. “Despite the pettiness and gossip, it’s fair to say Austen is a precursor in the fight for women’s rights.”

  “No, no!” Leti leaned forward for emphasis as she spoke. “You’re mistaken. Jane Austen wasn’t a feminist at all.”

  The forcefulness of the assertion brought conversation to a halt.

  “Well, I think she is,” Fernanda countered after a pointed silence. “In some ways, she is.”

  “She’s not a sentimentalist, at least, but she’s not a feminist,” Leti repeated.

  Suddenly all eyes turned to me, seeking arbitration.

  I took a deep breath. “She’s not a feminist by our definition because she never said women should have the same rights as men. She wasn’t challenging patriarchy—although she often indicates that certain families need better patriarchs.” I struggled with the last word, not one I’d needed to use in conversation up to that point, falling back on the standard “pronounce the vowels like Spanish and put an ‘a’ on the end” strategy.

  Before I could continue with the “but” half of my statement to support Fernanda’s view, Leti ran with my comments. “Yes, yes, that’s right. There isn’t one moment in her work where she shows herself to be a feminist.” It was too bad we didn’t have Diego to weigh in with his perspective on feminism in Austen.

  “Well, it seems to me she is.” Fernanda stuck to her guns. “She’s writing social critique, she’s a well-educated woman, and that in itself was a challenge in her time period.”

  Ignacio José intervened just as a servant brought over a tray of finger foods. If this Mrs. Gardiner group had domestics, what would Lady Catherine be like? “Remember Lizzy and Mr. Hurst talking, when he says, ‘How can a woman dedicate herself to reading and not know how to dance?’ Austen’s offering different possibilities for women, different visions of what women might be. Yet women do have to adapt themselves to the masculine power structure to get what they want.”

  “And Austen shows that it shouldn’t be that way,” Fernanda maintained. “We’re talking about a village in England here, so of course it’s not exactly the type of feminism we’d recognize today. But she had an advanced outlook in general and definitely a progressive outlook on women.”

  I wanted to jump in and agree but Leti was faster. “No, no! By those standards, Louisa May Alcott is a feminist, too. Jo is a progressive character, but does that make Alcott a feminist? Not a bit!”

  “She’s not strictly a feminist, but she’s clearly interested in the cultured women of her time.”

  “Cultured women are always going to be at least somewhat progressive, that’s true.” Leti’s tone suggested that they were working toward a bit of a middle ground.

  “And it was hard for them—they really had to fight!” Fernanda said emphatically. “Look at what George Sand had to do to be taken seriously.”

  “She even dressed like a man,” Leti added.

  Ignacio José drew the line at cross-dressing French novelists. “Let’s get back to Pride and Prejudice,” he said firmly. “What do you think of how readerly expectations are established? I believe Austen has a wonderful talent for delicate foreshadowing. She does it from the very first lines—‘as we know universally, a young man with money needs to get married.’”

  “‘To one of my daughters!’” Leti’s Mrs. Bennet imitation was instantly recognizable; we all burst into laughter.

  But Ignacio José, not satisfied with his paraphrase, reached for his copy of the book to verify the line. Even without fluent Spanish I could tell that the translator’s choice, which Ignacio José then read, rang better and came closer to Austen’s immortal, oft-parodied opener: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It’s only when you hear a flat rendering of the familiar line that you truly appreciate the flair of the original.

  “So you see,” he continued, “she likes to hint at things, to set up some intrigue.”

  “But it’s not a book with a lot of surprises, really,” Fernanda shook her head, and Leti overlapped her to agree, adding, “It’s a very open, obvious book.”

  Yolanda, protecting her injured arm as she rose from her seat, chimed in for the first and last time. “Well, it’s got a happy ending, and that’s what I like. But now I’m afraid I’ve got to go—my ride’s outside by now.”

  Hugged, kissed, and told to take care of herself, she was helped to the door. Conversation drifted into a consideration of the merits of the various cookies and cakes our absent hostess had left for us.

  Ignacio José had barely called us back to order and opened a new line of discussion on the shades of distinction between pride and vanity when suddenly we were greeting a late arrival who rushed in with apologies for being held over at work. Meli was the youngest and most animated of the group. In her mid-thirties, she had light brown hair in a short, flattering cut and a dramatically husky voice.

  “I have to tell you, I’m in love with Mr. Darcy,” she greeted me playfully then shared warm hellos with the other group members. When Ignacio José pointedly raised his voice to continue, Meli hushed like a schoolgirl and settled in next to Leti.

  Ignacio José pursued the pride/vanity line of thought further then suddenly stopped himself. “Actually, why don’t you share your ideas on the book with us, since we don’t always have the chance to talk with a professor? We’d enjoy hearing more from you,” he prompted, as all the others nodded agreement.

  Shoot—and I was hoping they’d do all the work, especially since I still wasn’t feeling so hot.

  There were any number of threads in the conversation I could pick up, and I was especially tempted to circle back on the point made about Austen’s works being “obvious” in their plotting, to add some shading to that perspective. But rather than haggle, I decided that some context might be more interesting for them. “In British literature prior to Austen, heroines tended to be perfect beings, faultlessly beautiful, and multi-talented. Austen is the first novelist who really lets women be human beings. Her heroines aren’t idealized, fairy tale creatures. In fact, when her novels came out, some people assumed they were written by a man, for the realism.”

  Oscar spoke up again, nodding. “Her style is incredibly clean and frank, something people tend to associate with men. She’s direct, concise, with really good judgment. It’s very impressive.”

  Ignacio José agreed. “Yes, Austen writes incredible dialogue, and she really knows how to introduce a character, too—it’s very dramatic, the way we meet Mr. Darcy, for instance.”

  “Oh, I love that character, just love him!” Fernanda, Leti, and Meli layered over each other’s cries of enthusiasm.

  “And I love to picture him as that actor, the one from the older film, the really long one,” Leti said. Meli seconded with lascivious yummy noises as Leti continued: “But I didn’t like that new one much, because the balls were totally de medio pelo—low brow.”

  “But they were country families giving the balls,” Meli pointed out.

  “I don’t care about that.” Leti dismissed this with a “talk to the fan” flick of her wrist. “That older film had real elegance, real aristocratic magnificence. And Darcy, he’s any woman’s dream.”

  Back on common ground, Meli agreed emphatically. “I loved him from the first moment.”

  “Darcy is
detestable,” Ignacio José cut in, supported by nods and frowns from Oscar.

  “Darcy is not detestable!” cried Meli, while Leti and Fernanda rushed to declare him shy with strangers but wonderful, adorable, fabulous.

  “Maybe by midway into the book we can see that,” Ignacio José conceded. “But in that first scene, he’s awful.”

  “Es de matarlo a palos,” Oscar agreed. This is strong stuff, worth giving in the original. Translated literally, Darcy deserves to be beaten to death with a stick or “palo.” This phrase, however, is an extreme way of saying somebody deserves a serious beat-down but not actual death. Still, the sentiment earned Oscar the prize for “First Reader in Latin America to Want to Manhandle an Austen Character.” This was something I’d had my eye out for since leaving the States, given how often Larry and my California students mentioned wanting to shake or dope slap some of Austen’s more irritating literary offspring.

  The ladies rushed to Darcy’s defense and the gender gap widened. Ignacio José tried to mediate, first commuting Darcy’s sentence to a less severe beating with a stick—“Sí, es de darle palos”—then adding, “But all of his behavior is explained later, when we come to know him better.”

  “I like him just the way he is,” Meli insisted, unintentionally echoing Darcy’s literary descendent Mark Darcy of Bridget Jones fame. “I liked him from the first moment.”

  “But not that Bingley, ugh!” Leti grimaced at the thought of Jane’s gentle suitor.

  “He’s a big nothing,” Fernanda agreed.

  Wow! I’d never heard Bingley so maligned. I was reminded of the harshness of the women’s judgments in Guatemala on men perceived to be weak.

  “The one that’s really the worst,” offered Meli, “is that cousin, Collins.”