All Roads Lead to Austen (13 page)

“You beautiful, beautiful!”

I bought only half of what I wanted just to get the hell home before I bit somebody's head off. I placed the checkout divider between my items and those of the man behind me. The clerk reached over and placed it back in the slot running along the counter. “That's to show the counter is closed,” he said.

I picked it up and set it behind my groceries again, pointing to the side that now faced him, which said “
cerrado
.” “
This
side means your counter is closed. The side with the cigarette ad separates your groceries from the next person's.”

“People don't understand. They'll think I'm closed,” he answered, reaching for it. I slapped my hand onto the divider, glaring until he looked away, then turned to the man in line behind me.

“You understand that this divides our groceries, correct?”

Clearly in the presence of a
loca
, a pasty white fiend from the north, the man simply nodded, also refusing to make eye contact. The clerk silently resumed ringing up my goods.

And I walked out of the store and straight into a nearby emergency clinic I'd noticed that morning, groceries and all.

***

“How long have you been sick?” the doctor asked me, shining a tiny light into my ears.

“More than five weeks. My head is pounding, and I have no energy.” And no patience.

Looking into my throat, he grunted one of those “this doesn't look good” noises. He felt the glands in my throat and said, “You've got a
really
bad infection. Your entire throat is swollen and covered with pus. I'm going to give you an oral antibiotic and an injection, too, to get something into your system as fast as possible. I want you to come back tomorrow for blood work and a throat culture.”

Armed with antibiotics, my tail end throbbing from the shot, I headed back to the office for my nap. On the bright side, they hadn't leeched or bled me. Watching Ang Lee's
Sense
and
Sensibility
, my students always groan when they see poor fevered Marianne at the mercy of early nineteenth-century medicine. I tried to be optimistic that the antibiotics would work this time, but it was hard not to be worried after so many exhausting weeks of illness. Could this possibly be the same fever that had floored me in Mexico, or had I picked up something new?

Or maybe…it was travel stress. Maybe I just didn't have what it takes, after all, to spend a whole year on the road.

That was a grim thought.

Whatever my problem was, I had to keep any complaints from my mother. She'd definitely make herself ill, too, if she knew I was still in such bad shape. Sleep—that's what I needed. I was out as soon as I hit the bed, still clothed.

***

Waking hours later, I felt a little stronger and less panicky. I was in an intriguing new country, and if I didn't exactly feel like strolling the streets, I had books.

Among Betsy's recommendations was a historical novel by Alicia Yánez Cossío:
Sé Que Vienen a Matarme
(
I
Know
They're Coming to Kill Me
). Born in 1928, Cossío is one of Ecuador's most respected novelists.
Sé Que Vienen a Matarme
traces the life of Gabriel García Moreno, president of Ecuador between 1861 and 1875. While the Catholic Church has wielded political power throughout Latin America for centuries, Moreno established the only full-fledged theocracy, stripping non-Catholics of citizenship. He tortured and killed political enemies with a fury he felt was backed by the wrath of an angry god, although he also made important improvements to Ecuador's educational system. Still, his cruelty was so severe that when several would-be assassins converge on him on the same day—working independently, no less—you're rooting for whoever gets there first. Turns out it's the man wielding the machete rather than the ones with pistols.

I called Betsy to let her know I was enjoying her recommendations so far but had to bow out on spending that weekend at the beach with her family.

“I'm so sorry you're feeling sick! Keep in touch by phone so we know how you're doing.”

I was determined to see more of Guayaquil, illness notwithstanding. A few days later I made arrangements to meet Ignacio José, the literary guru who coordinated the two reading groups and who was, according to Betsy, “quite a character!”

Arriving ten minutes early at the agreed-upon spot in a square facing one of Guayaquil's historic churches, I circled the area, noticing the contrast between the beautiful façade of the church and the uninspired mid-twentieth-century architecture of the surrounding buildings, including some U.S. fast-food chains. The Malecón area is striking, but the farther you get from the water, the more things seem to be built for use, not style. Then again, I was probably being harsh by comparison—Antigua is famous for its beautiful colonial architecture, and Puerto Vallarta had been completely colored by the rosy glow of Diego's company.

As I paced the square I began to realize I was drawing stares, so I found a spot on a bench next to two older women sharing a newspaper. They returned my “
buenas
tardes
” with curious looks. I was the only
gringa
in sight, as I had been in the grocery store. Antigua and Puerto Vallarta are tourist destinations; Guayaquil is not. It's the jumping off point for the Galapagos Islands, but few tourists spend time hanging around the city, which has a reputation for more crime than Quito and other parts of Ecuador. More than once I was followed for blocks by taxis honking and persistently offering their services, the drivers apparently unable to believe I
meant
to be on foot, alone.

I waited forty-five minutes past my meeting time with Ignacio José then, growing tired of the stares, some idle, some flirtatious, some less friendly, I gave up. I stopped by the clinic to see if the blood work I'd had taken on my second visit was done yet. No such luck.
Grrr
. An hour after I'd popped more ibuprofen for my pounding head, the phone rang. Ignacio José, apologetic, with a strange and rambling excuse for his lateness. Would I give him a second chance?

He came to fetch me at the apartment, and I had no trouble recognizing him from Betsy's description. He was Starving Artist incarnate—tall, thin, shoulders stooped from hovering over books and writing desks, with light, thinning hair, a lopsided smile and bright, burning eyes. If I hadn't known he was Ecuadorian, I'd have sworn he was Dutch; while the indigenous population of the country is very large, there are Europeans in the mix, and not just Spaniards.

“What a pleasure to meet you! I know you'll forgive me when you hear what happened!” He was off to the races with a story, different from his original phone version, about having slept in after being awake all night writing—surrounded by silence, in the throes of literary passion, consumed by the drive to create, etc.

Aside from a few practical tidbits about plots and settings, we don't know much about Austen's thoughts on writing as a vocation, but it's pretty clear she wasn't a suffering
artiste
type. Compared to colorful contemporaries like Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, whose extremely public private lives were as dramatic as any of their literary creations, Austen was very dull indeed. From what evidence we have, she treated writing as a craft to be mastered, not a painful primal drive. She was an artist, not an
artiste
. The romanticized modern image of a writer as tormented by creative urges has its origins in the era when Austen was publishing, but I could well imagine the sort of cutting witticism she'd drop on the subject:
If
one
finds
it
so
draining
to
write, a search for a more invigorating profession might be in order. Clergymen seem to live comfortably enough
.

The erring Ignacio José promised me a sight that would erase any lingering pique over being stood up, and he delivered. He took me to the Parque Bolivar. Flanked by Guayaquil's cathedral and national museum, this park is better known by its nickname—Parque Iguana. Hanging from the trees, lounging in the sun, iguanas populate the park in the hundreds. How Diego would have loved the sight of them! If a park had that many squirrels in it I'd think twice about entering, as much as I adore squirrels. But iguanas are mellow creatures, and while they'll accept lettuce if you offer it, they won't chase you or mistake your fingers for food. They will, however, pee (or worse) on the unwary, so you need to be on your guard when passing under trees.

Ignacio José quickly won me over with good-natured banter, exciting tales of travel, and descriptions of his work. Whether more artist or
artiste
, I couldn't say, but he was endlessly entertaining. “I adore performance art. Would you like to hear about my Clitoris?” Laughing at his own mischief, he continued, “The clitoris is wise, so in my piece, I was an Oracle. I dressed as a clitoris and answered the burning questions of all the spectators!”

Ignacio José took photos of me with various accommodating iguanas. Handing the camera back with a flourish, he cleared his throat and said, “Well, there's something I have to ask of you, too. Forgive me for being so presumptuous, but I've been having a little, well,
trouble
lately. I was robbed, you see. It was horrible! I was wondering if you could, um,
help
me a bit until I get paid for some work I've done. Perhaps, ten?”

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!

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 presented 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.”