All Roads Lead to Austen (23 page)

I also explained my book group project and spoke a bit about each country, showing photos of the readers from Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, and Chile. I was not above pandering to keep them awake, so I worked in a few cheesy shots—one of a noisy rooster outside my house in Puerto Vallarta, another of me petting an iguana in Guayaquil, which struck them as thunderously funny (laughing with me or
at
me?
Quién sabe
…).

They especially liked selections from my graffiti collection, and that was where I let the cows out. I explained that Chileans were very political on many levels and offered up photos of two spray-painted approaches to vegetarianism. The first was a sweet, big-eyed cow saying, “
No
me
coma
”—don't eat me!—and the second, a fierce cow draped with an ammo belt, Pancho Villa style, armed and ready to defend herself from carnivores.

From my vantage point on the stage I could see that I had put some of them straight to sleep, iguanas and killer cows notwithstanding. There were also some decidedly sullen expressions out there. But many students looked alert and interested, so with any luck I was winning over some Janeites or, at the very least, piquing their interest in reading groups.

I asked if there were any questions as I wrapped up, but remembering the teacher's warning, assumed there wouldn't be any. Wrong again.

“Why do you think so many people like Jane Austen?”

“Why didn't Jane Austen have babies?”

“Can we get Jane Austen books in Spanish?”

“Why on earth did you come to Paraguay?”

This last question raised an enormous howl of laughter—they didn't think of their homeland as being on the typical
gringa
tourist beat.

“Your country has a very interesting history,” I told them. “And I was invited here by my host.” A dead silence hit the chattering students when I referred to Martín by name. Then they erupted into whispers and gasps, repeating his name. Any high-profile politician has both friends and enemies, I suppose; no way to know if they were impressed or taken aback.

“That was really wonderful!” One of the teachers approached the stage as the multitude, many questions later, finally headed back to their classes (perhaps they'd cottoned on to the equation more questions = less class time?). She shook my hand and said, “A book group would be a great way to get some of our shy students to talk more to each other.”

Another teacher joined us and introduced himself as Tony. “Have you already got an Austen group arranged for Paraguay?” he asked. A number of students had followed him up. With a hopeful smile, he added, “We would love to be in an Austen book group with you.”

Talk about luck! “That would be fabulous,” I said quickly, as pleased as could be. “I'd love for us to read
Emma
together. How does that sound?”

He looked to the students for approval, and one of them answered in slow, careful English, “We would like that very much!” The boy smiled broadly when the sentence came out the way he'd planned. My previous groups had been heavy on women, but here was a male teacher and six teenagers, half of them boys. This would be interesting.

“I'll deliver copies of
Emma
tomorrow, in Spanish,” I promised, “then we can set a date for the end of the month.” After my initial panic over Lili getting the book in English, I'd remembered that I already had the copies I'd planned to use in Argentina. Well, I needed them
now
, so I'd just have to hope I could get my hands on more Austen next month in Buenos Aires.

Emma
was back on!

***

I wasn't pandering to the students when I'd said that Paraguay has a very interesting history. Fascinating is more like it. Once upon a time, Paraguay was one of the most prosperous, advanced countries in South America. With a range of geographic features and climates within its borders, it had solid agriculture and industry, strong education, and the best rail system on the continent. Then in 1864, apparently anticipating an invasion by Brazil over long-standing disputes related to Brazil's relations with Great Britain, President Francisco Solano López sent troops across Argentinean territory to avoid being caught in a pincher move, not realizing that Argentina had already signed an alliance treaty with Brazil and Uruguay. López suddenly found himself at war with more than half the continent.

Paraguay held out for five bloody years then succumbed to its enemies, who made off with a high percentage of the country's original territory. While U.S. intervention has been a source of grief in many Latin American countries, in this case, it was a major reason Brazil and Argentina didn't swallow Paraguay whole in the decades after the war. During my visit several Paraguayans brought up the important man responsible, very surprised I hadn't heard of him: President Ay-yeas. Ay-yeas? I was at a loss as to who the heck this could be until I saw his name on a road sign, since quite a number of things are now named for him: Hayes. As in, Rutherford B. Not a chart-topping president in the United States, but fondly remembered in Paraguay.

The war also devastated the population, military and civilian. The prewar count of Paraguayans was nearly a million. By the end of the war the figure was closer to 200,000—fewer than 29,000 of them men. That's a lot fewer guys than you'll find on a crisp fall weekend at my
alma
mater
at a West Virginia University football game, to give a little perspective. Poland was steamrolled by Germany in WWII, but that massacre pales in comparison to what happened to Paraguay.

The country has never really recovered. A tragedy on that level leaves its mark on a nation's literature, and Paraguay's best writers have dedicated themselves to the subject, directly or indirectly. When I visited bookstores in Asunción and asked about women writers, every bookseller gave me the same name: Josefina Plá. With a bit of research I learned that she was actually born in Spain, but she moved to Paraguay young, married a Paraguayan, and lived there until her death in 1998 at age ninety-five. She claimed Paraguay, and it claims her.

I was bowled over by her novel
Alguien
Muere
en
San
Onofre
de
Cuarumí
(
Someone
Is
Dying
in
San
Onofre
de
Cuarumí
, cowritten with Angel Pardella). The main narrative thread is the slow death of one of the village women, but the backdrop is the War of the Triple Alliance, just ended. There's not even a coffin maker left in San Onofre, so when one of the few surviving men dies, he's squeezed into a trunk. Two young boys drag him to a shallow grave then accidentally drop him in face first. “
El
día de juicio le va costar para salirse
,” opines a local woman dryly—“He won't get out of there easily on Judgment Day.”

Despite the heaviness of the theme and the dark humor, the novel is surprisingly positive. The women it focuses on are survivors. In the face of destruction, starvation, the loss of their husbands and sons, and attacks by thieves and rapists who pass through their village in the postwar chaos, they stick together as a community. They keep their pillaged church clean, and, as they reminisce about their lives before and during the war, comfort their dying friend. War has disrupted every facet of their lives, but it can't break their spirits. Austen would no doubt admire these women, but she never would have dreamed of putting horrors like what they experienced on paper.

***

Shortly after my school talk, Martín and Dorrie took me on a Sunday drive to see some of the most important battlefields of the war. We also visited the pretty little town of San Bernardino, where moneyed folks go for a lakeside getaway from Asunción. Before we left I booked a room in the
Hotel
del
Lago
for the next weekend, partially because of how charming it was, partially to fulfill a Morbid Tourism Wish—to stay in the room where Bernhard Förster committed suicide in 1889.

If the average person knows anything about Paraguay, it tends to be, unfortunately, the Nazi connection. Förster is one of the reasons that link was forged. He was a raging anti-Semite married to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth. Nietzsche, despite the Nazi appropriation of his concepts, was no anti-Semite. He loathed his brother-in-law and wanted no part of Förster's plans to found a pure “
Nueva
Germania
” in Paraguay. When the colony failed, Förster checked himself into the
Hotel
del
Lago
, drank for six weeks, then poisoned himself. Nietzsche's sister apparently had to sign away most of the colony land to pay his hotel bill and have him buried. In the 1930s, Hitler sent a delegation to spread some German soil on Förster's grave, walking distance from the hotel.

“I've asked about that room myself,” Martín said as we toured the enormous, turreted nineteenth-century building. “They've shown me a different one each time, so I'm not even sure they know which one it is.” When I returned a week later, the room they led me to was so attractive I was willing to take it on faith Förster had met his end there.

Places where people are born or die hold an intensity, a profound kind of energy. Austen fans have the misfortune to lack access to both of these places for her. Steventon Rectory no longer exists, and the house where Austen died in Winchester, her head on big sister Cassandra's lap, is privately owned. As Austen's health declined rapidly, the family had moved her there from Chawton to seek the help of a medical specialist, but in vain. I located the house on a visit to England in 2003 but joined the ranks of the disappointed when I saw the handwritten sign taped to a downstairs window: “THIS IS A PRIVATE HOUSE AND NOT OPEN TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC.” No doubt an attempt to stop devoted Janeites from knocking and pleading to be let upstairs, to see the sacred ground.

There was nothing sacred for me about a racist like Förster; staying in his room was more akin to the impulse to watch horror films. I had to wonder, however, if Paraguayans knew anything about him, because it was clear that my sunny, balconied room with the adjoining turret adapted as the shower was a favorite honeymoon spot. The large antique armoire was full of lovers' graffiti on its inside panels, some as old as I was:

Entre
estas
cuatro
paredes

Y
en
esta
cama
de
bronce
chillona

Hemos
pasado
nuestros
tres
primeros
maravillosos

Días de casados

Oscar y Josefina, 7/5/64

“Between these four walls, and in this squeaky bronze bed, we've spent our first three wonderful days as a married couple.” Jali and Folfi, equally poetic, left their own contribution: “
Muchas
veces
la
cama
se
convierte
en
cuna
cuando
se
trata
de
felicidad, ella es testigo y es la única que puede relatar la inmensa dicha que experimentamos en ella
.” Or in other words, “Often happiness can convert a bed into a cradle; this bed is the witness and the only one that can tell about the immense happiness we experienced here.”

Numerous other messages filled the armoire. There was nothing especially romantic about the anatomically correct heart someone carved into the back panel (valves and all), but I enjoyed the thought of all this happy love energy exorcising the spirit of Förster.

With Diego thousands of miles away, however, I'd have to make the best of the room on my own, so I decided to dig into more local literature. The most important, internationally known Paraguayan author, Martín and Dorrie had assured me, was Augusto Roa Bastos, and his most important novel,
Yo
el
Supremo
. Based on the life of Dr. Francia, a dictator who ruled Paraguay from 1814 to 1840, the book is a complicated combination of novel, essay, and poetic reflection on history and power. I quickly realized it was
too
complicated for me. As with Asturias back in Guatemala, I'd need much better Spanish to tackle Roa Bastos.

Fortunately I'd also brought along
La
Babosa
, published in 1952 by Gabriel Casaccia. In
La
Babosa
(literally
The
Slug
but in this context,
The
Gossip
), the world Casaccia depicts is like the evil flipside of Highbury, the setting of Austen's
Emma
. While Austen's small town is cozy and friendly, Casaccia's is the embodiment of a harsh Spanish saying: “
Pueblo
chico, infierno grande
.” Small town, big hell.

Austen offers the best face of rural life, but she doesn't sentimentalize it. She shows how problematic gossip can be, for instance, and through the Miss Bates and the Mr. Elton storylines, she illustrates how we've got to treat our neighbors well, even if they're irritating or rude. But her world is rosy indeed compared to what Casaccia dishes up. What if Miss Bates, instead of merely being a nuisance, were actually
malevolent?
What if she had it in for the Reverend Mr. Elton, trashed his reputation publicly, and hounded him to an early death? Angela, the gossipy “
babosa
” old maid, does just that with the local priest. And what if Emma, instead of loving her older sister,
hated
her
because Mr. Woodhouse had preferred Isabella? What if Emma found every possible way to torment her, finally driving her to suicide? Angela the
babosa
manages that feat, too. And what if Emma, instead of having loving patience for her father's quirks and weaknesses, exploited them at every turn to get what she wanted? That's what pretty much every character in
La
Babosa
does with pretty much every other character.