All Roads Lead to Austen (16 page)

***

The Bookstore Mystery had been resolved in Guayaquil, and now, so was the Case of the Cantankerous Professor.

“This is incredible,” said Dr. Anderson, staring at the lab results he'd received. “You didn't have dengue when you were in Mexico.”

“I didn't?” I felt oddly disappointed at the sudden loss of my exotic disease.

“It's not past tense—you've
got
dengue,
right
now
. An acute case.” He leaned across the desk to study me, disbelief in his voice. “But you're up doing things! Don't you feel terrible?” His gaze was almost accusing.

Of
course
I
do! That's why I'm here!
I wanted to scream. Okay, calm down—this is the nice man who just identified the problem, after all. “I
do
feel terrible. Some days I can make it out of bed; others, I just can't.”

“Stop pushing it! Good lord! That's probably why you're still sick.” He leaned back hard against his seat, shaking his head in amazement. “Dengue lasts from four to twelve weeks, and from the time it's out of your system, you're still going to be weak for up to three months. Give it a rest!”

The next morning in an Internet café, I called my sister Laurie to consult: tell Mom or not tell Mom about the diagnosis?

“Mom is tougher than you think,” she answered. “Bring more peanuts! They're climbing the screen door again! Sorry,” she laughed. My call had interrupted one of the daily squirrel-feeding frenzies on her deck. She and her husband live by a woodlot and keep generations of local squirrels in chow, winter and summer. Her enormous, shaggy dog Katie was trained not to chase them, even when sharing the deck with the fearless nut moochers. “Tell Mom the truth,” Laurie advised. “I'm sure she'd rather just know.”

My sister was right. An illness with a name was more reassuring for my mother than a Mystery Illness, just as it was for me. I could hear the relief in Mom's voice when I called.

“Make sure you do what the doctor tells you,” she advised. “You have bug spray, right? And you don't leave your windows open? They say that perfume attracts bugs. You're not using perfume, are you?”

I was glad I'd shared the truth with my mother. But I hadn't told her or my sister the
whole
truth. From sheer embarrassment, I held back the fact that…contracting dengue might well have been my own clueless fault. Leaving Dr. Anderson's office after the first visit, I'd wracked my brain about when a mosquito might have bitten me. It could have happened at any time, given the many long walks I'd taken with Diego, the time we spent on the
azotea
, the lack of glass in the windows. But as I thought back to those happy days in the rambling, work-in-progress house, I unearthed a memory from my first week there.

The memory of a man who'd come to my door. A man with a mask over his face, a plastic cap over his hair, and a tank strapped to his back. A man whose rapid Spanish, muffled by the mask, was beyond me and whose sci-fi get-up alarmed me. He pointed at the house's interior and tried to enter, so I shooed him away and slammed the door. He stood on the landing for a minute or two, gesturing in frustration with the spray nozzle of the tank, then trudged off.

When Diego returned from work I proudly told him how I had saved the house from a sinister invasion. He pondered a moment, then his face lit up with comprehension. “They come to spray for bugs during the rainy season. It's a city program.”

“So I should have let him in?” I asked in dismay.

He laughed and kissed me on the tip of my nose. “I'm sure it'll be fine.”

And there it was. Thanks to my paranoia about unregulated Mexican chemicals and my panicky failure to ask the man to take off his mask and slow down a bit, I was mosquito bait. Maybe there was an
Aedes
aegyptus
out there with my name on it, whatever move I would have made—
¿quién sabe?
But I couldn't help but think that my fears had gotten the best of me. For what it's worth, Mr. Woodhouse, Emma's querulous father, wouldn't have behaved any better. He would have sent a servant out, for good measure, to make sure the masked man hadn't pilfered any of the Woodhouse poultry. But I certainly aspired to higher models of behavior in the Austen world.

Well. Live and learn.

***

When Christmas Eve arrived, I got an unexpected gift. Perhaps the Dengue Gods thought I had suffered enough. Whatever the case, Ecuadorian TV offered up the most heartwarming and best-est Christmas movie ever—
Die
Hard
. I love the Grinch and Charlie Brown and
A
Christmas
Story
, but nothing says “Merry Christmas!” like John McClane busting up Hans Grüber's yuletide heist, one kill at a time. It's a big Steel Town favorite.

Hearing it dubbed into Spanish was an experience; the biggest loss is Alan Rickman's voice. Janeites who've only seen him mooning after Marianne in Ang Lee's
Sense
and
Sensibility
need to see him in
Die
Hard
. Unfortunately, a lot of the humor drains out of the dialogue in translation. “Yippee ka-yay motherfucker!” naturally has to go, but instead of something lively in Spanish, it becomes “We'll see who's the best!” American John McClane tries to “fire down a 1,000-year-old Twinkie”; Ecuadorian John McClane “eats an old cake.” In the fire truck scene, “Come to papa. I'll kiss yer
fuckin'
Dalmatian!!!” becomes a courteous “I've always appreciated you guys!”

Still, it's fun in any language, and I munched my way through a bag of
Galapaguitos
, tiny animal crackers in the shape of tortoises, penguins, iguanas, and other delicious animals from Ecuador's Enchanted Islands. At last, good triumphed at the Nakatomi Plaza, and the credits began to roll.

Suddenly, intensely, I was broadsided by the worst kind of homesickness: holiday homesickness. With the sound of Perry Como's familiar voice, undubbed, singing “Let It Snow,” happy Christmas memories overwhelmed me. And there I was, so far from my loved ones, wasting away from a tropical disease. I could just imagine the fake tree in my mother's living room in Pennsylvania
at
that
very
moment
, hung with the ornaments we four kids had loved to unpack each December, some inherited from departed Welsh ancestors, some we'd made in school. Under the tree would be the mechanical Crazy Train my dad treasured from his own childhood—placed all the more lovingly now since he was no longer there to do it himself. The huge, scary string of lights he'd spliced together decades earlier with electrical tape would be glowing in the windows, and my mother's gruesome date-and-nuts bars, made with so much love but still so hopelessly yucky, would have pride of place on a food-laden table.

The credits rolled, Perry crooned, and I burst into noisy, miserable tears.

World travel—what the
hell
was I thinking? Here I was, eating goddamned Galapagos animal crackers in bed while my loved ones half a planet away were enjoying each other's company and dodging the date-and-nut bars. Of course Betsy had invited me to the beach house—she'd practically begged (“Christmas is no time to be alone!”). But wary of my dengue temperament, needing more quiet than the beach house could offer, I'd stayed on my own. And now look at me. Pathetic!

Austen did very little traveling in her lifetime; it's true. She never got to hear a volcano rumble in Guatemala. She never sweated out a crowded Mexican boxing match or fed lettuce to tame iguanas in Ecuador. But there are compensations to being really, truly grounded. There are compensations to living solidly within a family circle, one that contracts with deaths and expands with births but remains, reliably, your family. Reading was a resource Austen valued—but every one of her novels makes clear that the most important resource of all, bar none, is
family
.

I slipped out of bed, ditched the wreckage of the cookies, and stared out the window at the festively lit buildings, at laughing couples and families passing on the streets below. This is a fascinating place, I told myself. How many Americans will ever get the chance to visit Ecuador? I had to make the most of it. Sure I'd need to rest, but there was plenty for me to do here, and I promised myself I'd buck up and do it.

But I also promised myself that next year—I'll be home for Christmas.

***

New Year's rolled past in a noisy orgy of fireworks screaming off from practically every house and street corner, giving Guayaquil, from the vantage point of my windows, the aspect of a city once more under siege by pirates. Shortly thereafter I met with the final group. The women of Lady Catherine proved infinitely more pleasant than their namesake, although our meeting place did qualify as the Rosings Park of tennis clubs. Located in an upscale development on the edges of greater Guayaquil, this was clearly where the moneyed Ecuadorians came to play. The central gym was designed in the shape of a sailing ship, complementing the riverside location, and the other buildings conveyed a similar sense of movement and modernity.

Carmen introduced me to the other five women, whose names I promptly forgot. I'd met the Mrs. Gardiner group members more or less one at a time, but five women's names at a stroke short-circuited my memory. Only one name stuck with me—because Silvina had brought a large tray of tempting holiday sweets. I mentally dubbed the ones who hadn't come bearing food as Tall, Youngest, Very Nice Necklace, and Short, hoping their names would resurface in conversation so I could avoid having to ask.

“Ignacio José is supposed to join us,” Carmen said after ordering a soft drink from a hovering waiter, “but I'm not optimistic.”

And I wasn't optimistic about seeing my twenty bucks again, either. Betsy had recently given me the scoop on him. I'd managed to squeeze in one short but very pleasant visit with her and her grandchildren at the beach house, largely spent chasing sand crabs on the shore, enjoying long meals with the family, and reading. Betsy had learned through the telephone extension of the Guayaquil grapevine that Ignacio José was offering a colorful explanation for the missed Pemberley visit. The stairwell entrance of his basement apartment, he claimed, had been blocked by careless construction workers dumping immense piles of concrete—he'd been trapped for two and a half days, forced to survive on canned goods and artistic inspiration. “But he probably just got locked in by his landlord for not paying his rent,” Betsy had concluded. Both options were eyebrow-raisers for me.

With Ignacio José and his guidance both AWOL, our poolside conversation ambled from Austen film adaptations to
El
Pintor
de
Batallas
and other random topics and back again. Youngest was the only one who'd actually brought her copy of Pérez-Reverte's novel, and Short leaned over to me and said in a stage whisper, “If she were one of your students, she'd have straight A's every time!” I kept hoping names would surface, but no such luck.

“We're typically better organized than this,” Very Nice Necklace explained apologetically after a long sidetrack into family gossip. She was the oldest of the group, approaching seventy, flawlessly coiffed, and poised yet warm and pleasant. “We really can stick to one topic at a time!”

“The holidays have gone to our heads,” Tall agreed as she passed Silvina's sweets over to Short. “We need Ignacio José to keep us honest.”

We chatted for a while about California, my travels, the holidays, and Silvina's outrageously good sweets, each member urging the others to take the last of them home. As the sun finally set spectacularly over the water, Very Nice Necklace offered to drive me back—or, more precisely, offered for her driver to drop me off on her way home.

“Oh, thanks, Chela!” Carmen said, suddenly saving me the embarrassment of asking her name so late in the conversation.

“I hope you're not disappointed in us,” Chela said as we settled into the backseat of her enormous SUV. “Conversation is harder to maintain during the holidays, but this really is a good group.”

As I insisted that I wasn't disappointed at all, I realized, silently, that I kind of
was
. But not with the group. It was clear they were intelligent women whose lack of focus was a combination of hooky-playing holiday spirit and losing Ignacio José's guiding hand. Without him, Mrs. Gardiner might well have devolved into a
melee
between the We Heart Darcy women and the Beat Darcy With Sticks men. I was disappointed, however, not to have gotten Lady Catherine's perspective on Austen. But the first group had gone so well that I simply had to consider this pleasant conversation (plus holiday snacks) as a bonus.

Chela leaned forward to explain something to her driver then turned back to me. “Our group's been going on for more than twenty-five years now, although not with all of the same members, of course. But I've been here since the beginning.”

“Have you read any of Alicia Yánez Cossío's novels?”

“Several, yes.
Sé Que Vienen a Matarme
, that novel will stay with you. For our twenty-fifth anniversary celebration we invited her down from Quito. She's an incredible woman, simply incredible.” She gazed out the window for a moment then turned to me with a smile full of memories. “This group has been important for me,
really
important for me, over all these years. If you don't fight for space in your life for art and conversation, so much will pass you by—for anybody, but especially for women, since we're always taking care of others. My life is richer because of this group.” She patted my hand with a wry smile. “That sounds sentimental, but it's true.”