All Roads Lead to Austen

by Amy Elizabeth Smith

  Chapter Eighteen

  Shortly before my final Austen group I stopped by Edmund Gwenn’s bookstore, ostensibly to see if Cristina, my latest invite for the group, had come by for Emma. Good news—she had! When I mentioned wanting to visit La Boca, Hugo offered to take me on his day off. “You shouldn’t go alone. Some areas there aren’t safe.” I’ll admit it; that was just what I’d been hoping he’d say.

  A colorful dockyard neighborhood, La Boca was once infamous for seedy tango bars, brothels, and crime. Now with a noticeable police presence to protect the tourist dollars, it’s a hugely popular spot, with distinctive nineteenth-century architecture. Some buildings are renovated to period style, others decked with riotous pastel colors and enormous murals. As in San Telmo, tango dancers work the streets along with other entertainers, from roving Brazilian drummers to the inevitable artists dressed as statues who swing into motion for a coin.

  Before Hugo arrived I spent the morning primping in the tiny bathroom, trying to avoid the huge puddle dumped out by my shower. He came by at ten, and, after a lengthy bus ride, we had coffee in La Boca then visited a museum with a fascinating collection of ships’ figureheads. Later we found ourselves walking the full length of the docks, mostly out of service. A scattering of artists were there with easels set up to capture the picturesquely decaying warehouses and rusting hulks of abandoned ships.

  By evening we’d covered a lot of ground, verbally and on foot. We talked Gothic literature, Argentinean politics, and the 1960s vampire soap opera Dark Shadows, among other topics, first over coffee, then lunch, then dinner, then late-night ice cream. Somehow it was eleven o’clock by the time Hugo walked me back to my hotel.

  “Do you realize we just spent thirteen hours together?” I said, stopping outside the main doors.

  His expression softened. “Well,” he said with a smile, one of the few I’d seen from him. “That’s a record for me. I’m just not sociable. I’m very close to my friends, but I don’t have many. But with you, the day went by so fast.”

  And that was the moment he would lean in for a kiss. Everything about the day—the intense conversations, the meals, everything—had felt like a date. We locked eyes as the pedestrian traffic swirled past us. 11:00 p.m. is early for Buenos Aires; plenty of people would have barely finished dinner.

  “I’m looking forward to the group,” he said. His deep, richly accented Spanish made even the most mundane statement sound sexy. I caught myself leaning forward, ever so slightly.

  Then he said good night and turned abruptly to find a taxi.

  All right, then…no kiss. How could I have read him so wrong?

  ***

  My parting with Hugo a few days earlier hadn’t ended quite like I’d hoped, but I still had Austen.

  “This is Susie. She’s very excited to talk about Emma!” Teresa introduced her friend before taking a seat in the spacious basement of the Librería Romano. “But I’m afraid our other friend couldn’t make it.”

  My final Austen group, at long last, was underway.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to join you and Teresa for that film on Edith Piaf,” Susie said as she gave me a greeting kiss on the cheek. “I heard you had a nice time.” A pleasant-looking woman in her mid-fifties, she had dark eyes and extremely short, curly brown hair that made a striking contrast with Teresa’s blue eyes and long blond locks. In demeanor as well they were a study in opposites. Where Teresa was animated to the point of appearing a bit jumpy, at times, Susie was cool and collected. Both women were nicely dressed but more like the average American than some of the other women I’d met in Buenos Aires.

  “The movie was fabulous,” I admitted as I showed her to a seat in the circle. “The audience actually sang along with ‘La vie en rose’ and ‘Je ne regrette rien.’ They even clapped at the end.”

  Susie and Teresa had met when Susie’s husband and Teresa found themselves in the same Yiddish class, which Teresa had pursued to complement her advanced study of Hebrew. Buenos Aires has Latin America’s largest Jewish population, a community of approximately 250,000. Unfortunately, the city also has a history of anti-Semitism. Our gathering that evening fell on the anniversary of the bombing in 1994 of AMIA, an important Jewish cultural center. Eighty-five people were killed. Because the investigation was badly botched—on purpose, many suspected—no one was ever convicted for the massacre. Teresa’s Polish ancestors had immigrated to Argentina to escape anti-Semitism, but ugly ideologies cross borders.

  “Who else will be joining us?” she asked, pulling her copy of Emma from an attractive handbag.

  “The owner’s girlfriend Carolina should be here any minute,” I responded. “Also, a woman named Cristina who I met at another bookstore. Hugo, who works here, will be down shortly, too. He has to watch the shop until Ernesto and Carolina get here.”

  As if on cue, Hugo descended the stairs with a frown. “Carolina forgot which date we were meeting,” he said, unable to keep irritation from creeping into his tone. “She scheduled something else, instead. My boss is here now, but I’ll go back upstairs to wait for Cristina.”

  Next cue, Cristina: “Here I am! I’m here!” she cried from the top of the stairs. “You didn’t start without me, did you?”

  She descended, scooted past Hugo, and took a chair. Before I had a chance to make introductions, bang—we were off to the races. The readers jumped in to discuss Emma before I could even get the digital recorder on.

  “What really got my attention,” began Cristina, while twisting in her seat to take off her scarf and jacket, “is how the characters treated each other.” Now that I had more time to observe her, I could see that Cristina, attractively dressed and elegantly made up, was older than I’d first assumed, closer to seventy than to sixty. Her voice had a thin, reedy quality, but there was nothing feeble about her opinions and her capacity to express them.

  “I had a hard time keeping track of all those characters,” Teresa cut in. “I had to write them down to sort them out.”

  With that, the cross-talking began. I thought the Ecuador group had been rough in that respect. Now I was more thankful than ever I had the recorder. It was just as well I hadn’t invited more people and that two hadn’t shown up, after all—no one would have been able to hear anybody else for all of the eagerness to discuss the work. Everyone was speaking at once about the basic relations among the characters when Hugo cut across through sheer volume.

  “My favorite among the female characters was Jane Fairfax,” he said.

  The women stopped talking and observed him, curious. “Why?” Teresa asked.

  “She has all of the sensibility Emma lacks.”

  “Such as?” Teresa pursued.

  “Artistic sensibility, for instance,” he offered.

  “That’s right,” Cristina agreed. “Emma—”

  “She’s a kind of Celestina,” Hugo continued. This, I later discovered, was a matchmaking busybody from classic Spanish literature. “But she’s not as bad as Mrs. Elton, whose only motivation is social climbing. Emma is actually the opposite of her, because when she realizes she’s hurt someone, like when she messes things up by pushing Mr. Elton on Harriet, Emma tries to make it right. Mrs. Elton doesn’t feel anything for anyone.”

  “But Mr. Knightley, he’s a sort of protector,” Cristina began, leaning forward eagerly in her chair.

  “Almost like something from the Middle Ages,” Hugo agreed, picking up the idea. “What he feels for Emma is a kind of love that isn’t spoken about and isn’t really sexual. It’s almost metaphysical.”

  “Absolutely,” Cristina concurred.

  Hugo continued: “And it can last a lifetime, this kind of love. That’s what he has to offer Emma, since she’s obviously not going to fall in love with him sexually. In fact, when she fantasizes about men, it’s that younger one.”

  A lo
t of academic ink has been spilled on the subject of sexuality in Emma, since there’s something just a bit too parental in the Emma/Mr. Knightley pairing, in comparison to the obvious chemistry between Lizzy and Mr. Darcy. Hugo’s idea of respectful, courtly love was intriguing.

  “That’s right. Emma thinks about the good-looking one,” Cristina agreed, while Susie and Teresa nodded.

  “Exactly,” Hugo continued. “But in the end, like a good Englishwoman—” I turned to him, curious to hear where this was going, and Hugo cleared his throat and clarified. “Like any woman might, Emma chose intelligence over good looks. Something that lasts.”

  Raising the idea of what a woman wants in a man led to a discussion of Austen herself. Cristina asked if she had ever been married. I clarified some details about her life, especially in response to Teresa asking if Austen was a feminist, an issue that had come up in several of the other groups as well.

  With a look at her friend Susie, who was listening attentively but had yet to make any comments, Teresa stated, “I think Austen had an incredible intuition for the psychology of women. She was way ahead of her time. Almost all women have something of Emma in them.”

  “There’s universality, it’s true,” Hugo overlapped.

  “Our strengths and our weaknesses, they’re all there,” Teresa continued. “Women, all of us, we’ve got a bit of each of those different women Austen created.”

  Now it was official. Without any prompting from me—just like in Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, and Paraguay, to one degree or another—the readers in Argentina felt the connection between Austen’s world and their own.

  “That’s why we can still read her today,” Cristina agreed. “It’s definitely not traditionally feminine, the kind of rebelliousness in Emma’s character.”

  “When she’s talking about other women, for instance,” Teresa said, “I really get the feeling that she’s just saying out loud what lots of women would like to say but don’t. Maybe because of being raised to be ‘polite’ or our nervousness about being honest.”

  “The kind of things Emma says about Jane Fairfax, for instance?” I asked. And about Miss Bates, I was about to add, when Teresa responded, “Exactly.”

  “Emma does finally come to understand Jane Fairfax, though.” Hugo commented. “Everyone responds to her arrival in their closed-off little social circle. Some see her as an interloper, but for others, she’s a kind of mirror. She lets people see their own weaknesses or vices, which, until she showed up, they didn’t even realize they had. She forces people to understand themselves better.”

  I was struck by Hugo’s insight into the role Jane Fairfax performs in the novel. Sometimes being forced to look in the mirror is a daunting prospect, and she definitely sets off shockwaves around her. Teresa seemed to concur.

  “Emma responds by creating that fantasy, the idea that Jane must be the lover of her best friend’s husband,” she observed.

  “Jane was whose lover?” Cristina asked, surprised.

  “Nobody’s lover. It was just what Emma imagined,” Teresa clarified.

  Susie, nodding wryly, finally joined the conversation. “Well, that’s what happens at times among women.”

  “We speculate out loud with friends about things,” Teresa added.

  Hugo raised an eyebrow, apparently surprised to hear women repeating a less-than-flattering stereotype about their own gender. “Well, I’m at a disadvantage on this subject since I’m the only man here.”

  Before we could head further down that road, the sound of chipper electronic music made us all jump. Susie, looking embarrassed, made an apologetic gesture and reached into her bag to turn off her cell phone. Our conversation immediately fractured into two, with Cristina turning to ask me about other British literature while Hugo and Teresa began to debate the difference between what Emma says versus what the narrative voice reveals about her.

  After a few moments, Hugo seemed to realize that I was unsure how to refocus our conversation.

  “Ladies, please,” he interrupted, and after a beat of silence, we found ourselves making all of the introductions we’d bypassed earlier.

  “What’s your name?” Cristina asked Hugo. Teresa stepped in and introduced him, then herself, then Susie. “And you,” Cristina asked me, laughing at her own forgetfulness. “You know, I don’t even remember your name!”

  “Amy,” I said.

  “Emmy? Really?” Cristina exclaimed. There is no hard “a” sound in Spanish equivalent to what we use in English for the name Amy. In every Latin American country I’d visited people called me Emmy, and I had long since given up correcting anybody. On an Austen-inspired trip, I’d come to see it as kind of appropriate. “Emma, Emmy; Emma, Emmy!” Cristina repeated, giving me a wink.

  Hugo drew us back into the book with a new line of thought. “About this translation,” he began, reaching under his chair to set his copy on his lap.

  “I think this is a very good translation,” Susie spoke up.

  At the same time that Hugo agreed, Teresa shook her head. “Good? I don’t think it’s so good.”

  “It’s horrid!” Cristina concurred. Suddenly everyone was talking at once, with Cristina repeating “Horrid!” while Hugo tried to defend the translation.

  “I’m a translator—I know what I’m talking about!” As Cristina cut through the discussion with that declaration, it occurred to me that language and translation were hallmarks of this particular group, just as poets had predominated in Chile. Unlike Cristina, Hugo hadn’t published his work, but translation was a long-standing hobby. While his spoken English was weak his reading skills were excellent, and he’d been translating science fiction and Gothic stories from English into Spanish for decades. He’d passed several stories on to me, curious to have my opinion. Teresa didn’t publish translations, but she taught Hebrew lessons, which gave her a special sensitivity to language, as well. Susie and I were the amateurs that night.

  Hugo and Cristina continued debating the translator’s tendency to use a style that apparently comes out as stilted in Spanish. “He says in the introduction,” Hugo said, “that he’s trying to maintain the style of the period.”

  “You can’t reproduce an English style in Spanish,” Cristina declared flatly. “It’s impossible.” She offered up several examples of wording she thought was especially bad, including the sentence “La indudable convicción de lo sano que era comer gachas.”

  Susie made a humorous face. “What does ‘gachas’ mean?”

  Cristina threw her hands up in exaggerated confusion, as if to say, “That’s my point!”

  I’d certainly never heard the word “gachas” before, but considering the rest of the sentence, “the firm conviction of the healthfulness of eating gachas,” I realized that we must have entered Mr. Woodhouse territory.

  “I think it’s like porridge,” Hugo speculated, “but that’s a Scottish dish.”

  Having no idea how to translate “thin gruel” into Spanish, I explained instead that it was a bland dish nobody except a serious hypochondriac would eat voluntarily.

  Hugo nodded then cut me off to point out that one shouldn’t judge the translation by a few awkward words. Cristina cut him off in turn. “I can find you twenty or thirty like that!” Teresa, Susie, and I fell silent as the two argued on. Hugo asserted that Valverde, the translator, was one of the best currently working in Spain. Cristina conceded that he was better with dialogue than description. In no time they had sidetracked into a new issue, with Cristina claiming that Borges had translated Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Hugo arguing that his mother had done the actual work while Borges took the credit. They talked on simultaneously for several minutes, neither listening to the other, while the rest of us tried to follow along.

  “Well, one thing’s for sure—it would have been easier to translate from French or I
talian,” Cristina said, circling back to Austen. “But if this translation had been a bit freer, if he hadn’t tried to reproduce the structure of English sentences, it would be better. It’s just too stilted.”

  Teresa tried to jump in, but Hugo’s voice carried over hers. “That formality is part of the novel,” he insisted. “We’re used to much lighter, quicker writing today, but a translation like that of Emma would change everything. In Austen’s day you’d savor a novel like this, page by page, for a month. But we had to read this quickly to have it done for this evening, and that makes the weightiness of the style more noticeable.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Cristina agreed, “but—”

  “What I was trying to explain,” Teresa interrupted, “is that Austen’s formal style is more than a product of her time period. It’s a conscious choice. It’s her way of creating a specific environment, the slow pace, of that country village. It’s deliberate. But her way of balancing that, it seems to me, is her use of short chapters. That really keeps things moving, because—”

  Hugo and Cristina both talked over Teresa, Hugo to second her point about the effectiveness of the chapter divisions, Cristina to continue lambasting the translation. Susie and I exchanged glances as Teresa, impatient, weighed back in.

  “Look, if we all keep talking at the same time, Amy’s never going to understand a word of it!”

  Susie took advantage of the brief silence that ensued. “Yes, it’s a slow novel, but it’s about basic things, about little events, one after another. None are major, but they build on each other, as the days pass for Emma. One day some question arises, some little happening, a new personality surfaces who changes things, and that’s how we’re hooked.”

  Teresa nodded enthusiastically. “And if you’re reading carefully, you’ll realize that in those little details Austen offers, there are hints of things that will happen down the road.”