All Roads Lead to Austen (19 page)

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 joven 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.

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 all 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.

“That's what makes it so timely now,” Fernando offered. “That's what they say in the book itself in the opening materials.”

“It's so lacking in context,
that
becomes the context.” Carmen Gloria gestured for a moment as she struggled to articulate her thoughts. “It's another way to see history, because basically what she's showing is that there are coexisting worlds that
don't touch
each other.”

Marcia joined in. “The bourgeois life they live
is
the context. They've got so much leisure, so much time on their hands to do the stupidest things. Their whole lives are centered around social activities—their own lives, and nothing else. That little nucleus of upper-class people was disconnected from the social events and the politics of the period.”

“Unfortunately, there are people just like that today,” Carmen Gloria added, to general consensus. I was curious to see how far she might pursue this connection with contemporary Chile, but talk quickly swung back to Austen's original context.

“There's a part in the novel,” Marcia said, “when Elinor says that the men always enrich the conversation, specifically because they talk about politics. Just think about it—how cut off they were from life.”

“It wasn't until I got to page 182 that I found a reference to somebody actually working,” Carmen Gloria pursued. “I kept asking myself, what part of the year is this, anyway? Are they all on vacation? Surely by December or January somebody was going to have to get moving with
something
!”

With a smile I thought back to Juan in Puerto Vallarta, so put out by Austen's shiftless male characters.

“Well, things in general aren't represented in much detail,” Silvia joined in. “There's very little concrete detail, even about things like what they eat. It's all very distancing, somehow.”

As the others concurred, Carmen Gloria directed a glance at me. “I realize this is your specialization and that this is the only Austen novel I've read, but I have to say that it doesn't seem like there's much detail on the characters either. I've read lots of Russian novelists that I adore, who really leave me stunned with the depth of their descriptions, but with Austen I feel like something's left hanging.”

Silvia, eager to agree, overlapped with Carmen Gloria's thoughts: “I feel the same way. The sisters themselves can't even ask each other things directly. I haven't read any other Austen novels either, but maybe it's the English character, to distance themselves from profound emotions. Supposedly, to this day that's a notable difference between our cultures.”

Isabel Allende's comments about how Chileans are “the English of Latin America” came to mind, but before I could form a sentence to share the idea, Carmen Gloria added, “There's also a difference in reading between Latin Americans and North Americans here, too. I don't feel like I identify with the characters, and I'd actually be ashamed to say, ‘Hey, my brother is just like that character.' When we were talking about Austen before this meeting, it surprised me when you mentioned that in the United States it's common to do that.”

“Look,” Marcia interrupted, “I agree on the issue of distance in the novel. Also, I see a real poverty in this world, in spite of the reading they discuss, the painting and music—although actually, I'd love to have one tenth of the free time they've got to dedicate myself like crazy to those things! But how horrible to be subjected to such controlled relationships. I really find that Austen's got a very broad understanding of female psychology within this framework, the sort of tricks women play on themselves to keep up the illusion of being in love, or the attitudes about how to handle commitments. I found it really contemporary—it works for any context.”

“Does that mean, then, that you identified with a particular character or recognized one as familiar?” Carmen Gloria asked.

“No,” responded Marcia, “I recognize our gender, in general. Both men and women, actually.”

That led to a line of discussion about Austen's style as a woman. I took a moment to explain her anonymous publication and the fact that some readers, owing to her clean style, assumed her to be a man.

“A cold style, even flat,” Marcia said. “Especially with respect to emotions, very flat. It interested me, it really grabbed me. It's very precise, clean, and distant. Austen's distant from her own story.”

“She uses very precise words.” Silvia picked up the line of thought. “But it's as if she's not involved. She describes, she shows, but doesn't put herself in there.”

“Personally, I think she really does,” Fernando contradicted politely. “What she does—and this has to do with the English character, I think—is use a screen of humor between what she says and how she says it.”

I was struck by how often these readers were commenting on the techniques Austen used to delineate the characters more than on the actual characters. But they were writers themselves, after all.

“It's irony, yes,” he continued, as someone raised this point. “That makes the story colder, but it also makes it less obvious from what perspective the story is told, although I'd say Elinor emerges as the heroine. But one thing that really struck me was how cut short the end of the book feels, as if at some point she just got tired of writing,” Fernando finished, to nods all around. No doubt they could all identify with the desire to wrap up a work, but not at the expense of quality.

“Yes, because Marianne spent most of the book saying that Brandon was a
pichiruchi
—there you go, Amy, there's some good Chilean slang for you!” Carmen Gloria laughed over the word that, as far as I could make out, best translated in that context to something like “geezer.” “And Elinor wasn't as perceptive about Edward in some ways as she should have been.”

Elvira, silent up to this point, finally joined in. “Not about Edward, but with her sister and with herself, she was. Elinor is very perceptive—either Elinor or it's the narrator who's perceptive. The irony and the criticism of their social environment are very important.”

“I looked for that sort of criticism,” Carmen Gloria countered. “I really looked, but I didn't find it.”

“I did,” Silvia responded, “but it's subtle.”

“There's actually a passage that's not even irony, because it's so direct,” Fernando pointed out. “Lady Middleton feels discomfort around Elinor and Marianne because they read books that are satirical. She doesn't know what satire
is
, but it makes her feel offended and suspicious all the same. There are lots of criticisms in the book, but that one is the most direct, because it has to do with the very act of writing and of reading.”

“There's also the situation of how dependent women are and the issue of the first born inheriting,” Elvira said. “The first born is supposed to improve the family fortunes by marrying well, but when the money is taken from Edward, it's given to the brother who won't spend it wisely, since he's a reckless type and he married Lucy. That's satire.”

Elvira paused for a moment but with the air of having more to say. She hadn't spoken up much, so the others waited for her to continue—a striking contrast with the lively verbal dog-piles of the Ecuador group.

“Austen's narrative style is distant,” she added, “but the characters communicate their world. The physical world of the novel isn't very concrete, but there's an internal world you enter. There's the Colonel, for example, and the nature of the love he feels for Marianne, one that seems somehow diluted and might even be closer to what we'd call friendship here. And there's all of the busywork that defines the women, embroidering, making comforters. The whole world of the novel is very rigid, very closed. The richness of it all for me is the analysis Austen provides of their feelings.”

Elvira spoke slow, clear Spanish, but I still struggled a bit, mostly because I was trying to pull together the threads on Austen's depiction of feelings. If I understood correctly, the consensus seemed to move in the direction of Austen not showing her character's feelings directly but rather filtering them through an interesting narrative voice.

“I have to say that Elinor seems to me to be a lot older than she's described as being in the book,” Carmen Gloria said suddenly.

“And just think,” Silvia added, “the Colonel says he's old and he's only thirty-five or so.” Thirty-five was at least a few birthdays back for all of us in the room that evening, and a wave of laughter and agreement met her comment.

“Death's approaching!” exclaimed Marcia.

“Oh, my back hurts!” Carmen Gloria cried, pretending to be an ailing old Brandon. Then she turned to me and said, “And what led you to choose Austen as a specialization? What drew you to her?”

“To be honest, in part it has to do with the entire cult of Austen we've got in the States. It's fascinating to see how many people are crazy about her.”

“But I read a criticism by Mark Twain that was incredibly harsh!” Carmen Gloria countered. “Something like, ‘if you've got a library with a book in it by Austen, then it's not worth much.'”

We could certainly have used Ramon right about then—chances are he'd have known the exact quote, which runs as follows: “Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.”

“There are writers who hate her and writers who love her,” I said.

“Supposedly Rudyard Kipling loved her,” Carmen Gloria returned, nodding.

“Virginia Woolf, as well. And so did Vladimir Nabokov, especially for her clean, pure style. But Charlotte Brontë, the author of
Jane
Eyre
, didn't like her at all. She thought her world was cold and her characters, insignificant. She was very hard on Austen for the distance she maintained.”