All Roads Lead to Austen (30 page)

Pride, I thought, studying his handsome face as he waited for my reaction—pride in the best sense of the word, in the sense that Austen celebrates. He was proud of his country, proud of their strong tradition of education and literature and opportunities for women (and yes, even of Nancy Drew). And why not? Pride and arrogance are not the same thing, after all.

“I've been very impressed by everything I've learned here about literature,” I assured him. “And I've never seen so many wonderful bookstores in any city, North or South America.”

As he nodded and lifted his chin a notch higher still, I thought—well, a
bit
of arrogance isn't such a bad thing, either.

As it turns out, there were Janeites in Buenos Aires well before I showed up. Poking around on the Internet, I came across a web page for JASBA—the Jane Austen Society of Buenos Aires. I emailed the contact address and that same day got an enthusiastic invitation for coffee from the president, Nadine.

It's human nature to fill in the visual blanks when you've exchanged mail but haven't met someone in person. I imagined Nadine was somewhere between forty and fifty, since anyone older was unlikely to use email regularly and anyone younger, unlikely to belong to a nerdy Jane Austen group, let alone serve as president. She'd have lovely dark hair and dark eyes and clothing that would make me jealous, and her scarf would be draped just so.

I got the stylish part right. Nadine spotted me quickly despite my best efforts to blend in and look chic in a scarf from Chile and some new clothes purchased the day before in Buenos Aires. Her carefully coiffed hair was an attractive shade of red, discreetly applied from a bottle—because she was clearly over eighty. So much for my assumptions about age and email. Nadine had the bright spirit, however, of a much younger woman.

“How lovely of you to contact us!” she cried, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek and drawing me to a table. She then switched into English, and I was surprised by her lack of accent until she explained that her father was American and her mother, French. “But I married a handsome Argentinean, and here I am, still! So, tell me all about your travels.”

It felt good to speak English but when the waiter took our orders, we found our way back into Spanish. “We're a small group but very sociable,” she explained. “How can you love Jane Austen and not be sociable? You must meet our founder, Mr. Dudgeon. He's not as young as he used to be, so we'll have to go to his house.”

Coming from Nadine, I had to wonder just how old Mr. Dudgeon was.

I got the answer a week later when he invited me to a JASBA meeting at his apartment: ninety-three. But he, like Nadine, had the energy of a younger person as he led his Austen guests into his spacious ground floor apartment in an immense nineteenth-century building. There was something Dickensian about the high-ceilinged rooms, a bit musty from age and ringed with overflowing bookshelves. Modern Buenos Aires bustled by outside, but Mr. Dudgeon's apartment felt suspended in time. A grave-looking print of a young Winston Churchill was prominently displayed in his dining room, and in the living room was a handsome portrait of Mr. Dudgeon himself done in the 1940s.

“That artist was quite famous in her day, my dear,” Mr. Dudgeon explained in English when I complimented him on it. “She exhibited it in Paris after the war, between a portrait of the Pope and someone else famous.” He gave a chuckle and added, “‘A Man of No Importance,' my label read.”

Mr. Dudgeon, who had emigrated from England in the mid-1930s, may have been “of no importance” compared to a pope, but he lay claim to a valuable literary credential in Argentina; he'd been a friend of Borges for years and had published in
SUR
, Latin America's premier literary magazine from the 1930s through the 1980s. His survey of British literature, written in Spanish and tailored toward Argentineans, still circulated in used bookstores.

That afternoon in Mr. Dudgeon's quaint apartment, I asked him about Borges, but he wanted to stick with Jane Austen.

“We have a very nice newsletter, you know,” he said proudly. “You must write something for us. Anything you like, my dear, as long as it's good. Promise me you will.”

As I gave him my assurances, Nadine added, “We try to get together once a month, but we don't always manage.” The two other members of the group sharing the couch with her nodded ruefully. “We do have a very nice Austen essay contest. You may have read about it on our web page.”

Mr. Dudgeon harrumphed. “Computers. I don't like them. I'm just as happy writing someone a card, you know.”

“If it hadn't been for JASBA's website, I would never have found you,” I couldn't resist saying.

“Yes, my dear, that's true enough,” he agreed. “These young ladies can handle things like web pages, but they're not for me.” The “young ladies” in question exchanged a smile. Susana, the only member present who was Argentinean by birth, was in her mid-fifties. Nadine was in her eighties and Doris, the group's treasurer, past seventy. “And now, let's eat,” he urged.

Mr. Dudgeon led us into his dining room for sandwiches, cakes, and tea. As we settled around the table, I asked, “Are you interested in the other types of literature about Austen, like the sequels and updates, or do you focus in your group on the novels themselves?”

“The novels are the most important thing, of course. But the films are crucial now, too, my dear.” Mr. Dudgeon observed, helping himself to a sandwich. “Unparalleled in number, even by Dickens, and so many of them first rate. Of course, nothing replaces reading. I've been enjoying Agatha Christie lately. Did you know there's no mention of her in the
Cambridge
History
of
English
Literature
? Simply disgraceful.”

Slowly clearing the table of satisfying food, we discussed Austen and Argentina and, after we made our way back into Mr. Dudgeon's living room, the beauties of Scotch, neat—although no one partook but our host. Perhaps the secret to his longevity?

“You can be very useful to us, my dear,” he said as he settled into a high-backed chair directly in front of his portrait, a striking contrast between youthful good looks and, as Austen might put it, respectable old age. “A link to the States, you see. Let's have you as our U.S. liaison, shall we? An Austen liaison.”

“What about ‘correspondent?'” Nadine suggested. “I think ‘U.S. correspondent' sounds better.”

The group debated which title would be more fitting, and when “correspondent” was finally deemed the best, I was happy to agree. As so often happened during my travels, I was touched by the openness of people in Latin America—whether or not they were born there. I hadn't known a soul in this room a week earlier, and here we were, enjoying each others' company and making plans to stay in touch.

When Nadine signaled that she thought Mr. Dudgeon might be tiring, we ladies rose to leave. “Don't forget that article you promised us, my dear!” Mr. Dudgeon urged as he gave me a parting peck on the cheek.

***

“Patrick Dudgeon is
still
alive
?”

Shortly after tea with the Janeites, Hugo—to my surprise and delight—invited me to lunch with two of his closest friends. Gabriela, a pretty woman in her thirties with short, curly brown hair and a sweet demeanor, owned her own bookstore. Roberto, an earnest, slender man a bit older than Hugo, helped her manage the place. Roberto read English well and was a huge fan of British and American lit. “I read Patrick Dudgeon's survey years ago, as well as articles he's published over the years,” Roberto explained. “I had no idea he was still around! How on earth did you meet him after just showing up here?”

I was marveling myself at how smoothly things had gone since I'd arrived, a bit of new place panic aside. Not only had I socialized with the friendly Janeites and their founder, but I had already been to a play and a movie with Teresa from the National Library. And here I was talking books with book dealers. I had to admit, however, that my interest in Hugo was becoming more personal than professional. I took it as a good sign that he'd invited me to meet some of his friends, but since they were fellow book nerds, maybe he was just trying to help with my project. When I'd met Diego, he made clear from the first that he was interested in me—but Hugo was another matter. I didn't know how to say “Friend Zone” in Spanish, but I suspected I was there.

And that was good, right? I was already making email plans with Diego for his visit to California. Even in a city where I'd had amazing luck meeting warm, welcoming people, I still missed Diego's cheerful energy. I could just imagine how thrilled Diego would be to walk the crowded streets of Buenos Aires and share in my excitement about the city. Hugo was a different story altogether. However much he knew about books (and vampire films and the U.S. library system), he was, in fact, a pretty grumpy guy.

Swapping bookstore war stories made that amusingly clear. When Gabriela and Roberto learned that I'd worked for years for a book dealer, first in West Virginia and later in Florida, they were curious about the book business in the United States. We exchanged stories about, among other things, difficult customers—and no one had as many doozies as Hugo.

“I could have been fired from the store immediately,” he said, tackling his second plate of entrees at the
tenedor
libre
style restaurant. This means “free fork,” or, as we'd say in English, all you can eat. “Argentineans are famous for arguing about everything, and it's no different in bookstores. Maybe it's worse in bookstores. Anyway, I threw someone out my very first week.”

The customer's offense? Losing his cool over C. S. Lewis's
Chronicles
of
Narnia
. Somehow they got on the subject and Hugo referred to the Christian allegory of the books (“The noble, merciful lion is killed by his foes and comes back in spirit, even stronger? Of course it's an allegory!”). The customer took offense and demanded that Hugo retract his offensive statement. Then it went something like this:

Hugo
: In my opinion those books
are
a Christian allegory, and you need to stop shouting.

Angry
Zealot
: You can't say that! That's blasphemy! And I'll shout if I like!

Hugo
: Not in this store, you won't. You need to leave.

Angry
Zealot
: Who are
you
to throw me out?!

Hugo
: The police can do it, if you'd rather—or I can do it with a few swift kicks.

Angry
Zealot
: I'm calling the owner! You're going to be fired!

Enter Ernesto, aka jolly Edmund Gwenn as Mr. Bennet. Since Hugo had worked there less than a week, he couldn't be sure how things would turn out, but Ernesto saved the day.

“My goodness, I'm so sorry!” exclaimed Ernesto when the customer returned the next day, demanding Hugo's head on a platter. Tsk-tsking like a disappointed grandpa, Ernesto set to work. “Poor Hugo is such an antifascist that he gets carried away with himself sometimes. It's really quite shocking! Come now, let's take a look at this over here…” Lulled by Ernesto's soothing manner and guileless, placid expression, the man didn't register that he'd just been called a fascist (kind of the same way he hadn't registered that Lewis's works are a Christian allegory). And so began a beautiful relationship between Hugo, dubbed on the Internet by one irate customer as “
el
tirano
”—the tyrant—and Ernesto, who could always put customers in their place without losing his perpetual smile.

“It's a vice of ours,” Roberto smiled, “this need to argue about everything. Remember, Hugo, the author who got mad because you were charging only five pesos for a used copy of his book? And Ernesto calmly walked the guy over to a five peso edition of Shakespeare? ‘Don't confuse price with value, my friend!' Ernesto bests people all of the time without ruffling their feathers. But when Hugo's riled, everybody knows it.”

As for me, I was thrilled to be in a place where people cared enough about books to duke it out verbally over allegory and literary value!

***

Wrangling wasn't limited to book clerks and their clients, I soon came to learn. There were rivalries between booksellers, as well. Shortly after my lunch with Hugo and his friends, I found my way into yet another bookshop.

“You've come all the way from California and here you are in my humble store? How lovely!” The owner was a handsomely dressed man in his late fifties with thick salt-and-pepper hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and a slightly rakish air. “Come and have a cup of coffee!” He led me to the back of the store where another woman, already enjoying a coffee, sat paging slowly through a book. Doing a double take, I saw that it was a Spanish translation of Claire Tomalin's biography of Jane Austen.

Seriously
.

I had fallen into a literary rabbit hole, with Austen readers popping out of every hedge. As the owner set about making me a coffee, the woman introduced herself as Cristina. Somewhere in her sixties with jet-black hair and a strikingly pale complexion, she had a refined way about her that reminded me of Leti in Ecuador.

“You're here doing a book group? I adore book groups!” She set Tomalin aside and invited me to sit beside her. “Of course it all depends on the people. Sometimes the conversations just turn into group therapy, and that's a bore. And so many people can't move past narrative when they talk about a novel. What fascinates me is language itself. My mother was French, and I do French-to-Spanish translations.”