All Roads Lead to Austen (32 page)

And what about my circle, my people? I'd been so far from them for so long. I traversed several blocks before I found a cybercafé with both computers and phone cabins. First, I wrote to Diego, telling him how much I missed him, despite feeling conflicted with guilt over my growing interest in Hugo
el
tirano
. I told Diego how cold it was, just so he wouldn't feel too badly about not being there. More than half a year back, in what now seemed like another world, he'd told me, “I'm glad you don't live in Pennsylvania anymore. I'm not cut out for cold weather. Not even for a visit. I need the sun!”

Then I called my mother. I was feeling dangerously needy but was saved from having her detect that in my voice (and cycle into concern for me) by the fact that she'd been watching golf, which always sent her into a happy monologue. “Angel Cabrera is Argentinean, you know. Have you talked with people about Angel Cabrera? He won the U.S. open. I think he's the first Argentinean to win it. I don't like it when anybody beats Tiger, of course, but this Angel seems like a gentleman. Very handsome, too. But not as handsome as Tiger.”

My reserved, extremely modest mother had, after my father's death, developed a sort of schoolgirl crush on Tiger Woods (before The Fall). A woman who never cared about sporting events aside from sacred Steelers games, she'd begun spending hours in front of the TV learning shot types and club preferences.

If that made her happy, so be it. Hearing her voice, birdies and bogeys and all, made me happy.

I returned to the new room determined to count my blessings and focus on the positives: the great central location and, best of all, the balcony. Stepping outside, I surveyed the crowded Avenida de Mayo below, then gazed up at the sky. I'd made it home in good time since it clearly was about to rain.

As the sky opened up I realized, suddenly, that it wasn't rain falling at all. It was
snow
. Snow in Buenos Aires. I was under the impression that it didn't snow here, although the day certainly felt cold enough for it. As the thick, wet flakes fell faster, people on the sidewalk two stories below began to exclaim in surprise.

I went to the phone and called reception. The woman was laughing as she picked up the receiver.

“Does it usually snow here?” I asked.

“It
never
snows here!” Reception had a view of the glass double-doors facing the street, so I knew she realized my question wasn't hypothetical.

When I stepped back out, the couple with the adjoining balcony were outside embracing, gazing up at the whitening sky. They turned as they heard me appear and greeted me with delight in their voices.

“It's just so beautiful!” the woman said, stretching out both hands to catch flakes. “I've never seen snow!”

On the streets below, happy chaos was erupting. The usual hectic pace of traffic slowed as people grappled with the strange new weather condition. The shops and cafés emptied, the sidewalks suddenly full of adults-turned-children, running, laughing, and trying to scrape together snowballs. For a native Pennsylvanian, it wasn't much of a snow—too wet for effective snow warfare, too thin for a serious accumulation. But this wasn't Pennsylvania.

In 1918, Rudyard Kipling was reading Jane Austen novels aloud to his family to ease the pain of the Great War. In 1918, the first scholarly edition of Austen's novels by Oxford's press was still five years in the future. Virginia Woolf was eleven years shy of publishing her famous description of Austen in
A
Room
of
One's Own
. Austen herself had been dead for 101 years; Mr. Patrick Dudgeon was four. And it snowed in Buenos Aires.

That, according to the evening news, was the last time it had.

Yes, I had a wet shower floor. My room smelled sewage-y. The slits and gouges in the wallpaper formed themselves into creepy patterns if you looked at them long enough. And yes, people would go hungry or homeless (or both) that night, and I couldn't do a damned thing about it. All this was undeniable.

So was the snow outside my balcony and the noisy joy of the people on the street below, people who no doubt had their problems, too.

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 lot 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.