All Roads Lead to Austen (21 page)

***

“404” wasn't a highway. It was an edgy, fusion-style restaurant featuring live music. Clean lines, metal, and glass dominated the décor; the contrast with the Guatemalan restaurant where I'd dined with the ladies, cheerfully cluttered with wooden furniture, photos of happy diners, and enormous plants, couldn't have been greater. Despite my fussy fears, the hostess was happy to find us a table well past our reservation time. The smokers in our group, respectful of the nonsmokers, agreed to seating on the first floor. This made conversation a good bit easier since the musicians, also fusion oriented in a bluesy rock sort of way, were on the upper level surrounded by an immense cloud of smoke.

After settling in at our table, we quickly found ourselves back on the topic of Austen, as Silvia suggested that the translator appeared to be Chilean.

“There really are a lot of Chilean phrases in the book,” Marcia agreed.

“The language seems really contemporary, too,” Elvira added.

“Speaking of contemporary—” This was a great opening to ask my standard question about whether Austen could be transposed neatly into their contemporary culture.

The group pondered for a moment, then Fernando responded first. “As far as I'm concerned, yes, I think Austen could be transposed here to Chile.”

Feeling a little wicked, I pursued, “So, you'd say there are Chilean women like Elinor?”

He studied his hands resting on the table for a moment, looking a little nervous that I'd expose his Elinor secret. Then he smiled. “I think so. Certainly among the big landowners of the countryside, I'd say so.”

“I think so too,” Silvia said. “The politics, the social classes, all of those marriages of convenience, those things seem universal.”

“But one important difference here,” Fernando said, “is that, instead of titles being so important, family names are what establish a person's social status.”

“Very good point,” Elvira said, while Marcia added, “I think that's true of Latin American countries in general.”

“Names here,” Fernando continued, “actually function like a barrier against race mixing. Clarifying that I'm from, let's say, the Undurraga family of Concepción, and not the Undurraga family of some other place, since we're the ones who are—”

“White,” Silvia finished his thought. “As in, we haven't got any indigenous blood.”

“This really is a ‘whitened' country,” Marcia explained. “The nature of the conquest was different, and more indigenous people survived in places like Bolivia and Peru. But here they deliberately tried to ‘whiten' things up, to the point that you hardly see indigenous features in the streets like you do in Brazil and other countries.”

“Not pure indigenous,” Fernando clarified. “But the fact is that all of us here are mixed race.”

If there were a good Spanish equivalent I'd use it, but since there isn't, I'll go for the French:
déjà vu
. Somehow I hadn't expected this theme to surface in the Chile group, but while it took longer than it had in Guatemala, here was the race question once again.

“There's even a kind of pride people have in not being indigenous,” Fernando added with a sad shake of his head.

As good Chilean wine arrived and then, eventually, our food, we talked about the difficulties of getting poetry published in Chile (conclusion: very difficult). As the talk moved further away from Austen, I also couldn't resist verifying if we, as a group, were an enormous statistical anomaly—six childless people over forty. I already knew Carmen Gloria didn't have children, but since the subject had never come up, I'd assumed the others didn't either.

Lo and behold, both Marcia and Silvia were mothers, proud to say so when asked. I was struck by the difference with the Mexican readers of
Sense
and
Sensibility
—children were front and center in the discussions with both groups, especially with Salvador and Soledad. Then again, readers in Mexico had been much more focused on drawing connections between their own lives and the novel. That merited some thought when I had less wine in my system.

At the hour when the staff in any self-respecting American restaurant would be upending chairs onto vacated tables and sending pointed glances at lingering diners, we talked on, and 404's hostess was busier than ever ferrying in new arrivals. Oscar, the Chilean from the Ecuador
Pride
and
Prejudice
group, had hosted a dinner for the book club shortly before I left Guayaquil. He'd invited us to his place for 9:00 p.m. While he had plenty of appetizers, the first course didn't hit the table until 11:58 p.m. Still weak from dengue, I was nearly fainting with fatigue by the time the mousse topped off the six-course menu at 1:00 a.m. Clearly, Chileans loved their late dinners, even on a weekday.

Dengue-free, I could completely enjoy this dinner and wonderful
sobremesa
, that warm, fitting
latino
tribute to lingering over good food and good company.

“Well,
amiga
,” Carmen Gloria said, sipping her wine then gesturing toward my tiny little recorder on the table, silently taking in our conversation amid the glasses, dishes, and rumpled napkins. “With this group, I think you've got enough material for five books. We've covered
everything
!”

Although Austen faltered somewhat at the end of
Sense
and
Sensibility
, as the readers had pointed out, the beautiful pacing of the rest of her novels shows that she was an admirer of good timing. Slowly but surely, I myself was spending more time responding to local rhythms and less trying to impose my own. To smiles and laughter all around, I dramatically hit the off button and picked up my wine glass.

For pretty much any day of the year, my mother can name at least two birthdays. She has the entire extended family down—aunts, cousins, nephews, great-grandkids, and all. This is no mean feat, since my German grandmother was the youngest of fourteen. One of my aunts hoped to top that number until my uncle, happy with eight, snuck out and got a vasectomy (my poor aunt cried for a month). I have twenty-eight first cousins, and once they got to reproducing, we quickly hit triple digits. My mother knows
all
their birthdays, along with those of her four children's friends, coworkers, and coworkers' children (plus most of my ex-boyfriends' birthdays, although at my request she finally stopped mentioning those).

Knowing her affinity for dates, when the anniversary of my father's death comes around in April, we all call—my oldest brother David from Pittsburgh; Laurie from Gettysburg; and Shawn and I from wherever on the planet we happen to be. You'd think Chile would win me the long-distance prize, but that year Shawn beat me again: he called from Bangkok, Thailand. He's dubbed the anniversary Welshman Day, in honor of our father's ancestry.

My mother and I were able to enjoy longer, more comfortable calls from Santiago since I had a home phone and didn't need to hunt down a booth on a dog-filled street or in a noisy Internet café.

“Now that your group is done,” she asked when I reported in for Welshman Day, “what else are you working on?”

“I'm reading a lot of Chilean literature. I'm also giving a talk on Austen at one of the other universities here. In Spanish. I'm pretty nervous about it.”

She and my father had supported me through every band concert, every role in every play, every recital in college during my music years, and through doctoral exams when I switched to English. “You'll do just fine,” she said confidently.

“I'm keeping an eye on my students, too. One of them has started to miss a lot of class, and I'm concerned about her.”

While Mom commiserated over my student, the word “concern” set off her maternal alarm bells.

“You haven't had any new problems with your health, have you? Nothing since you've been in Chile?”

I could only hope the Gods of Travel would forgive me a lie of omission. While my dengue was finally gone, I hadn't told my mother about the ringworm incident. The secretary for the study abroad program was also a registered nurse, and when I'd reported for duty in January she'd greeted me, handed over orientation materials, and pointed at the large, puffy purple circle on my right calf visible below the line of my Capri pants.

“You know that's ringworm, right?” she asked dryly.

Hell's
bells
. I'd noticed the circle growing on my leg midway through my time in Ecuador, but I'd decided that if I ignored it, it would certainly go away.
Ringworm?
I bolted off to a clinic, freaked that I'd brought a stowaway to Chile. Once I named it Pepe, however, I started to feel better about the whole situation. By the time the doctor told me ringworm was a fungus and not an actual worm, I felt kind of cheated.

I vacillated over my mother's question, since she'd been so direct. But technically Pepe wasn't a Chilean problem, because I'd smuggled him from Ecuador.

I settled for a downplay. “Nothing major. Just a skin thing on my leg way back in January, and that was easy to get rid of. Oh, you know what! My friend Cheryl will be coming down in the beginning of May!” No, I was also not above the change-the-subject dodge. “We're renting a car and touring around once classes finish up.”

“I'm so glad that you're getting this opportunity,” she said. Her voice took on a wistful tone. There were two closets in her bedroom, and I was willing to bet that right then, she was looking at the one that still held some of my father's clothes. And his reading glasses.

“I know. Dad would have loved to have heard about it,” I answered. Ringworm and all, in fact.

***

The
Mansfield
Park
talk was my academic debut in Spanish, so naturally I got the worst cold I'd had in years two days before. If only Diego were there to help nurse me and laugh my nervousness back into perspective!

I'd scripted the talk, fearing I'd freeze up in front of the audience, so with enough tissues the delivery itself was manageable. I spoke on how Patricia Rozema's very liberal film adaptation explores issues of race and class. I'm partial to the film for the excellent directing and the way it challenges just how the rich get rich. But it's also a catalogue of every sexual subject Austen delicately ignores, from girl-on-girl to incest to rape. There's even a scene that prompted one of my students back in the States to blurt out, during a class viewing, “Lady, get your hands off that PUG!” When I spoke on it years earlier at a conference in England—the same one where I spotted the fabulous
Northanger
tattoo—I spent twenty minutes afterward calming an important Australian scholar who was literally shaking with rage over Rozema's liberties with Miss Austen's most morally profound novel.

A bit of sneezing aside, I made it through the talk just fine. But the Q&A with smart, competitive graduate students and professors was another matter. I have enough trouble deciphering what certain academic types are saying in English, let alone a second language, and some of the questions that night left me slack-jawed.

Thank god for Carmen Gloria. She'd arranged the invitation for the talk in the first place and was a huge help, fielding questions for me and helping translate. But there must have been a few folks who went home shaking their heads over the stuttering, sniffly
estado
unidense
. Well, I did my best. I just had to pray I hadn't soured anybody on Austen!

***

Maybe I wasn't up to academic jargon in Spanish, but I was certainly doing better than when I'd arrived and had my first conversations with the doormen. Ever since the laundry room liplock I'd been slipping past the post quickly when Don Alberto was around, but now there seemed to be several new faces. The handsome Emilio, who'd become so agitated over the subject of the coup, hadn't been there for more than a month. Curious, I finally asked Demetrio the Spaniard if he knew why.

His expression turned deeply sad. “His mother committed suicide last month. Apparently, not long after the coup she went to get milk one evening and didn't come back.” I'd read enough Chilean history about “detentions” to know where this story was heading. “Some neighbors found her months later, lying in an alley. She'd been tortured and also—well, she wasn't the same. I guess she couldn't take it anymore, even after all these years. Emilio's helping out with his family right now.”

Good god. I thought back to how I'd stood there early in my visit, chirping on about how pretty it was to walk along the river. No wonder Emilio couldn't look at it without thinking about the bodies dumped there, about people hunting for their loved ones. I was glad that I could see the beauty of Santiago—I couldn't be sorry for that. But this was one of those reminders that I was only skimming the surface there. Even months of familiarity couldn't make me or my students, for that matter, capable of seeing the city the way Chileans do.

Still, that's no reason not to
try
to see the world through another perspective—and this is exactly what good students do when they study abroad. Over the course of the semester my students went through a powerful range of experiences in Santiago, which they bonded over—relationships with Chileans, spiritual awakenings, increased political awareness.

As predicted, one did go native. It wasn't Anne, the smart, reserved young woman who already seemed half Chilean; it wasn't sharp, slender Brooke, the fellow Pennsylvanian; it wasn't even Sarah with the Colombian boyfriend. It was adventurous hippie chick Taylor. She'd fallen in love with Valparaiso, about an hour and a half away on the coast, Chile's funkiest student town and the San Francisco of South America. So much in love that she didn't make it back to Santiago too often for class. I'd noticed her increasingly long absences, and her fellow students were also concerned.

Immersion in a new culture can inspire huge changes, but so can reading. Any bookworm knows how a truly powerful book can motivate us toward major change. Give a woman an Austen novel and, if she takes it to heart,
seriously
takes it to heart, how will she behave? She'll soul search about what she wants in a partner; she'll evaluate how well she behaves toward her family; she'll consider her role within her community and how well she treats people, no matter what their status in life; she'll acknowledge the value of being true to herself, while being respectful of others; she'll go out dancing once in a while; maybe she'll even learn to sew.

But as a teacher, as a mentor, I hadn't given Taylor
Sense
and
Sensibility
. I'd handed over Che Guevara's
The Motorcycle
Diaries
, the record of his youthful adventures exploring South America, a trip that spurred his political awakening. When Taylor finally resurfaced and I sat her down for a talk, she was apologetic for the missed classes but brimming over with enthusiasm for her summer plans: hitchhiking from Valparaiso, Chile, to Denver, Colorado.

All of the students in the travel literature class had read Guevara, but Taylor was the one who took his narrative to heart,
seriously
took it to heart. She wanted to explore more of Latin America, like Guevara. She wanted to put her faith in the kindness of strangers, like Guevara. She wanted to see if she had the fortitude to survive a lengthy, uncertain, wandering existence, like Guevara.

I was extremely impressed. And alarmed. Reading that particular book was only one part of what was driving Taylor to want a richer, more personal travel experience than what a well-run study abroad program could provide. Her time in Chile was central, as well as her own inquisitive, passionate nature. But clearly, the book was a catalyst. How could I explain the difference between Guevara's world and ours? Guevara was a man in a
machista
culture, traveling with a trusted friend, using his native language. Taylor was an attractive young woman wanting to travel alone, using earnest but weak Spanish, and heading slowly home toward the country that—in some measure thanks to Che Guevara himself, after the Cuban Revolution—many
latinos
and
latinas
view as Public Enemy Number One.

“I really think I can do it,” Taylor said, her eyes bright with imagined adventure. Reading the skepticism on my face, she nodded vigorously. “I can do it!”

I consulted with well-traveled Sarah on the subject shortly before classes ended. “It scares the hell out of me just thinking about it,” she said, shaking her head. “I've been around Colombia with my boyfriend, and I'm no coward, but hitchhiking through that country would be
suicide
.”

“Please tell Taylor that, okay?” I urged. It's not my job to discourage intrepid students from learning experiences, but I was feeling responsible for having introduced her, so to speak, to Guevara.

As classes wound up, Ramon hosted a farewell pizza party for the students at a Santiago restaurant, where we colonized the entire outdoor seating section. This was exactly the sort of gathering of noisy Americans (plus one Canadian) that I avoid like the plague while traveling. But we had a lot to celebrate—a wonderful semester, new friendships, and for the students, an imminent return home to their loved ones. I ditched my squeamishness about offending the locals for one night and joined the party, happy for the opportunity for personal good-byes. Matt the friendly Alaskan took a lot of ribbing as the student Most Frequently Robbed in Chile (grand total: three times). The poor guy really seemed to have had a sheet of paper saying “Mug me!” taped to his back, despite being tall and sturdy.

I made a point, as the revelry began to wind down, of taking Taylor aside again.

“I've got addresses of people in Ecuador you could probably stay with,” I told her. “If you email me, I'll give them to you.” I'd recommended an abbreviated tour up the Pacific coast through Peru then back down to Santiago, to pick up the return airfare she had already paid for. Whether she would take that suggestion,
¿quién sabe?
But I wanted to make sure she would take the initiative and pursue the contacts. The ball was in her court. Reading the right book at the right time can be a life-changing experience—so I had to hope for the best for her.

***

Saying good-bye to students is something you get used to as a teacher, comforted by the knowledge that the ones you've really influenced have a tendency to pop back up again, one way or another. Saying good-bye to Carmen Gloria was harder. She'd been a rock for me in Santiago, a warm, loving, hilarious, smartly dressed rock. She'd shown me around Santiago, she opened her home to me, and she'd even opened her parents' beach house to me, as well. One of my nicest trips had been a long weekend of sight-seeing and gossiping at their home just south of
Isla
Negra
, the site of Pablo Neruda's fanciful shoreside home.