All Roads Lead to Austen

by Amy Elizabeth Smith

  Flabbergasted, I scanned the room for a security camera. God forbid Demetrio the Spaniard and Emilio had witnessed that outrageous scene, me in my “everything’s dirty” laundry clothes and early morning bed-head, and Don Alberto acting like a teenager. No camera in sight. At least I was spared that embarrassment.

  I decided to debrief the episode with Carmen Gloria. Smart, well read, and endlessly curious about American culture, she was a huge fan of Sex and the City and adored girl talk. In my five months in Chile I never once saw her when she wasn’t dressed to the nines, looking fabulous.

  We met up at Santiago’s Central Market. Built at the end of the nineteenth century to shelter the traditional seafood and produce markets, it was eventually converted into shops and restaurants. Santigueños (and clever tourists) flock there for the high-quality food and lively atmosphere.

  After we’d caught up on the latest gossip at the university, I shared my Don Alberto story. Carmen Gloria shook her head most of the time I was talking.

  “Puchas!” she exclaimed when I’d finished. A softening of the ever-popular word “puta” (whore), “puchas” means anything from “Oh, boy” to “Holy crap!” depending on how you inflect it. “You’re pretty dumb for a smart woman, sabes? First of all, don’t ever tell this story to anybody at the university. Promise me.”

  “I promise, Carmen Gloria.”

  “Good. You can tell me this kind of thing because I’m open-minded, you know.” Suddenly, I got the sense that there was more to this story than I’d realized. I’d been wondering how I’d managed to send the wrong signals, but clearly, it went beyond that.

  “Okay,” she continued. “First of all, you can’t be friends with Chilean men. Period. Any Chilean man asking you anywhere, unless it’s strictly work related, is coming on to you. Telling a man you’ll have coffee with him means you’re giving him the okay to try for more. Second—and here’s the real reason you can’t tell anybody else this story—you’re a university professor.”

  Since I already knew that, I waited to see where she was heading.

  “University professors do not date doormen,” she said, giving my hand a squeeze across the table. “I’m not saying this is right—I’m just telling you how it is. This Alberto knows that university professors don’t date doormen, so he naturally assumed that if you were willing to go out with him, it’s because you were looking for some fun. You know—something physical. You’re not offended that I’m telling you this, are you, querida?”

  I wasn’t offended, but my sense of order was—this was Emma territory, and Chile was supposed to be about Sense and Sensibility! Class is an issue in all of Austen’s novels, but the precise ranking of who is above whom (and how far) and who can be matched with whom is more appropriate for a conversation between Emma and Mr. Elton or Emma and Mr. Knightley. Apparently, if I magically landed in Emma, my being a professor means that Robert Martin, the kind farmer who loved Emma’s protégé Harriet, would be off limits—except for a roll in the hay.

  “I guess I need every bit of help I can get with the Chilean dating scene, Carmen Gloria. So no, I’m not offended!”

  She laughed and patted my arm. “What a sweetheart you are! Now let’s go walk off some of this big lunch, so that we have room for ice cream at La Rosa!”

  ***

  Blundering into class issues made me decide that it was time to try Martín Rivas. In Guatemala, practically everybody I’d spoken to had read José Milla’s Historia de un Pepe as a student. Martín Rivas is the book Chileans tend to remember from school. The author, Alberto Blest Gana, was born in Santiago in 1830 to an Irish father and a Chilean mother, which makes the Father of the Chilean Novel half Irish, just like Bernardo O’Higgins, the Father of Modern Chile.

  I could see right away why Orgullo y Prejuicio brought Martín Rivas to mind for Oscar. I wish I had the book in electronic form, to search the number of times the word orgullo is used. “Lo que predomina en el Santiago es el orgullo,” proclaims a major character: “What rules in Santiago is pride.” Martín arrives in the capital seeking help from his father’s former business partner. Naturally, the wealthy man has a daughter worth falling in love with, who is pride itself—the lovely Leonor. Every man in Santiago pursues her, but she decides that nothing would be quite so pleasurable as bending poor but proud Martín to her will. When her flirting gives way to real affection for him, she is mortified.

  Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice wasn’t crass enough to mention money in her plan that Darcy should marry her daughter Anne, but Lady Catherine wanted business as usual—the rich marry the rich. What keeps Austen’s novels from being preachy or predictable is how she shows that pride isn’t restricted to the wealthy and also that some forms of pride can be a real strength. Lizzy’s pride in herself and her family is what keeps her from backing down in the face of Lady Catherine’s demands that Lizzy leave Darcy be. Blest Gana’s work is equally subtle on the subject of pride.

  While he acknowledged Balzac as his biggest literary influence, I couldn’t help but wonder if Blest Gana hadn’t gotten a peek at an Austen novel or two, somewhere along the line. I emailed Oscar in Ecuador with two big thumbs up for his recommendation.

  ***

  Dating blunders aside, I’d passed some happy months so far in Chile by the time the evening of March 28 rolled around. Dengue was in my past. Missing Diego had settled into a dull ache, rather than the daily sadness I’d felt in Ecuador. My students had adapted well to their studies and their new cultural environment, fortified with the occasional field trip. One of Carmen Gloria’s students, in fact, had jumped in with both feet and joined a local reggae band, so we braved the chain-smoking crowd in a Bella Vista bar to go and hear him. I still had my eye on my own students to see if any would “go native.” Ramon, the study abroad coordinator, had delivered copies of Sentido y Sensibilidad to four of his friends, all poets. Carmen Gloria, although not a poet, had promised to join us for a mid-April group. So, all was going smoothly. After an evening spent reading a vintage Chilean children’s magazine I’d found called El Peneca, I fell asleep, content that things should turn out well in April for Austen.

  Two hours later, the bomba jolted me awake. The second (and third and fourth) kept me awake for hours.

  Late-night explosions weren’t a common occurrence in Santiago; they’re more like a biannual occurrence. Chile is politically stable, student protests aside, but twice a year like clockwork, Santiago bursts dramatically into riots. September 11, the date of the coup against Allende, is rung in with illegal fireworks and bombas, making the city as noisy (but not as festive) as Antigua at Christmastime. The other date is March 29, known as “el día del joven combatiente,” the day of the young combatant.

  I lay awake for hours, nervous about the intermittent explosions, fretting over whether things would get bad enough to hit the U.S. news and, therefore, my mother’s living room/kitchen/bedroom TV sets. Best to call her tomorrow and see if she brought it up first.

  Ramon had warned me and the students to avoid the city center on the 29th, and since I’m a big chicken, I did. But I couldn’t resist getting out in my own neighborhood, so I headed to a nearby mall of secondhand booksellers. I’d already spent plenty of Chilean pesos there over the last few months, so I figured that the sellers, accommodating with questions about local literature, would fill me in on the background to the disturbances.

  I figured wrong. One after another said, “Oh, it’s about some boys who were killed,” and when I asked who killed them, one after another said, “Well, they were killed on the streets. Have I shown you this nice book yet?”

  At last I entered a stall packed from floor to ceiling. Enrique, the owner, always gave me a wink with my purchases, so he might be more forthcoming. He fetched us both coffee from a tiny hot pot. “So,” I began, after we’d talked books for a bit, “why do they call this el día del jov
en combatiente?”

  “Because of two young men killed on March 29, 1985.”

  “Who killed them?”

  “The police,” he said evenly. “They weren’t armed, but who knows what they were doing. Maybe nothing. You didn’t have to do much during the military regime to get in trouble.”

  There I was, breaking my own rule—don’t bring up the coup. I hadn’t thought of an event twelve years after as connected, but of course it was. No wonder I’d been getting the cold shoulder from the other booksellers. Would I ever learn to stop putting my foot in it, one way or another?

  Apparently not. Unable to resist, I continued: “Carabineros killed them?”

  He nodded. Carabineros are Chile’s police force, famous for their discipline. According to world corruption indexes, Chile has less corruption than any other Latin American country (and less than France and Japan). Bribing a policeman in Mexico or Ecuador is not only smart, it’s often expected. Try bribing a carabinero, and you might land in jail. The carabineros joined the military in the coup, so while many people respect them, others see them as government enforcers.

  “Read this,” Enrique said, handing me a report by the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos—the Group of Families of the Detained and Disappeared.

  When I pulled out my wallet, he frowned. “Just bring it back when you’re done. And stay out of the city center today.”

  As I tucked it in a bag with some earlier purchases, his smile returned. And I got my wink. He was definitely attractive—but ten bucks said he was married, too. I’d better just read the book, bring it back, and stay clear of men in Santiago. With Diego still on my mind, surely that was the best course?

  ***

  At our next session of the travel lit class I saw there was no chance we’d be able to talk about our upcoming exam until we’d swapped día del joven combatiente stories. Quiet Anne, a “most likely to go native” candidate, was looking suspiciously red of skin.

  “Did you get soaked?” asked Taylor, the good-natured hippie chick, my other prime candidate. She was alluding to the tank-mounted police water cannons known to Chileans by the ironically affectionate nickname, El Guanaco. A guanaco is a shaggy Andean beastie that shares the talent of its cousins the llama and alpaca for spitting vengefully (and accurately).

  Anne confessed that she’d ventured into the middle of the mess and couldn’t escape a patrolling Guanaco. Apparently the carabineros put something in the water so that along with the punishing pressure, anybody hit comes away with burned skin.

  “I hear they use acid,” somebody offered.

  Anne shook her head. “It’s probably just pepper spray. The whole thing was crazy. It was crazy.”

  All the news reports had concurred—this was the worst “celebration” of the anniversary so far. Amazingly, nobody was killed, but real chaos had erupted. All public transport, including the metro, had to be shut down, and shops, cars, buses, and police vehicles citywide were attacked and burned. Nearly thirty carabineros had been injured, several seriously, and over nine hundred people arrested. Aside from my short trip to the book mall, I’d stayed put in my apartment, watching the coverage on TV. It felt surreal to know that the social breakdown unfolding on the screen was less than a mile away.

  When things had settled back to normal a week later and my mother had been assured that order was restored, I went to visit the church of San Francisco, the oldest in Santiago, its original portions dating back to the 1580s. The adjacent Franciscan monastery houses a museum where you can see the Nobel Prize for Literature won in 1945 by the poet Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American to receive this honor—Chile truly is a land of extraordinary poets, male and female.

  The monastery gardens were my retreat from big city tension. I spent many happy hours there reading, relaxing, and visiting with the tiny resident rooster, Uriel. Every time I arrived, he courted me with a charming rooster dance, spinning and trailing one wing seductively along the ground. If I ignored him for too long, he would peck my feet possessively.

  That day, after quality time with Uriel and some Chilean literature, I was surprised to find the doors locked as I tried to leave the monastery. “I can let you out now if you want,” the guard said, “but something’s going on. The carabineros are gathering again.”

  Curious, I decided to take my chances; he immediately locked the enormous wooden doors behind me.

  There must be a height requirement for carabineros, judging by their looks. The only thing more intimidating than a towering carabinero is a row of towering carabineros mounted on horses—the sight that confronted me as I stepped out of the sixteenth century and back into the twenty-first. An armored vehicle pulled up in front of the church, and out spilled more carabineros in full riot gear, shields and all. Although the air was thick with tension, nobody was burning or breaking anything, so maybe the carabineros had been called out on a preemptive basis.

  Heading for the metro, I hit the eye of the storm one block westward. A large group of young Chileans, many with scarves hiding their features, were converging on another armored vehicle, but this one had a mounted water cannon. The infamous Guanaco!

  I thought back to my class, to Anne’s angry red skin after her encounter, and decided it would be best to keep my distance. But then again…it wouldn’t hurt to get one photo or maybe a bit of video footage. How fast could this thing move, anyway? And the water canon was pointed in the other direction, so I was safe.

  I waded into the group of shouting, jostling students, some of whom were darting forward to throw things, more a gesture than a menace. Rocks and bits of brick were no match for plated steel. The people on the opposite side of El Guanaco were the ones in trouble, anyway, as the punishing spray disbursed them, squealing and dodging. Then, through the lens of my camera, I saw the swell of bodies that had been surging toward the tank abruptly change course. Realization dawned at that precise moment: although the tank couldn’t turn on a dime, the water canon could. And did.

  So much for my photo op. I was swept back in the opposite direction by the panicked crowd, unintentionally catching footage of my own pounding feet for half a block. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d run so fast. I’d certainly never done so dreading I was about to get soaked with high-pressure, riot-strength pepper spray.

  What was the scariest thing that ever happened to Jane Austen? I couldn’t help but wonder. Stephanie Barron’s fabulous mystery series assigns Austen numerous adventures, but if she had any in real life, she kept them to herself (or dutiful Cassandra burned the evidence). Certainly she’d never had to flee a guanaco, but she probably managed at some point to fall out of an apple tree or anger a neighbor’s bull while crossing a field. Come to think of it, I got myself into hot water with British livestock when I climbed the fence into the field next to St. Nicholas Church at Steventon, hoping for a photo of the illusive well pump, supposedly the only surviving trace of the house where Austen was born. Angry cows appeared out of nowhere and chased me right back over the fence for my shameful incursion.

  You’d think I would have learned my lesson about chancy photo ops.

  Chapter Eleven

  As the evening set for the Austen group drew closer, Ramon would periodically tell me, “My friends are all enjoying the novel!” When I asked if he were, he’d dodge. “I’m just about to start it…” The day before we’d arranged to meet at my apartment, he called me aside after one of my classes. “Amy, I’m so sorry. I can’t make it to the group. But the others are still excited about it.”

  I was sorry, too. There went my chance to win the Twain lover over to Austen’s camp! But así es la vida.

  We planned the meeting at my place for 7:00 p.m., which I assumed meant that folks would begin to arrive around 7:30. To my surprise, the first eager Austen reader arrived early. Fernando was soft-spoken and pleasant and, like a
ll the readers Ramon had invited, a poet by nature with a day job. He was tall, with light brown hair and an apple-cheeked aspect that made him look youthful, despite being about my own age.

  Elvira arrived next. She was a fascinating woman, quiet and composed. We’d barely made introductions when our small talk turned to literature, and at my request, she recommended several Chilean authors: Antonio Gil, Marta Brunet, and Cristian Barros. If I had to match Elvira up with a U.S. writer, I’d say she was the Emily Dickenson of the group, solemn, intense, and passionate about literature.

  Silvia, Marcia, and my friend Carmen Gloria arrived more or less at the same time. Silvia, tall and slender with enormous dark eyes, had an elegant air, without the hauteur. In another era I could see her gracing a Paris café, poet and muse all in one. Marcia, smiling and cheerful, reminded me quite a lot of Carmen Gloria. A Bolivian who had transplanted herself to Chile, she was smart and energetic and, somehow, the least “poet-y” of Ramon’s friends, taking stereotypes into account. I wasn’t surprised to learn that her creative writing branched out into prose as well.

  The odd-person-out was Carmen Gloria. While a writer, her genre was history. She published frequently on the mining trade between Chile and Bolivia, exploring, among other themes, the exploitation of workers.

  “I’ve got a lot of things to say about Sentido y Sensibilidad, although I’m a bit out of your literary environment,” Carmen Gloria commented as we jumped into the discussion. “But what surprises me are the absences.”

  Registering our curious looks, she continued. “They talk about servants, for example, but they don’t even name them. I tried to think about other works from this time period that address social class issues, like works on the French Revolution. But this novel just doesn’t seem to have a historical context. I read it, thinking that if I didn’t already know what period it was written in, I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out.” Oscar in Ecuador had also noted the timelessness of the text, but I don’t believe Carmen Gloria, as a committed historian, meant it as a compliment.