All Roads Lead to Austen (27 page)

There was no disagreement on this point—Lorena and Ana María seconded the sentiment as Alicia continued: “Was she jealous of Harriet? Was it because she liked to have power over others? The psychology of it all is very complicated, because she's also a good person in some ways.”

Although I understood their sentiments, I felt the need to weigh in on the social context. “Emma was important in her village. It wasn't unusual for a woman of her social class to be looked on as the person who dictates taste and guides the lives of others ‘below' her.”

“She felt it was her right?” Ana María asked.

As I answered yes, Lorena burst out, “But all the same, she thought she was better than other people. And when she'd step in and make decisions for somebody, she'd say, ‘What a great thing I just did! That was wonderful! That was my good action of the day!'” Alicia and Ana María broke into laughter at Lorena's mincing Emma imitation: “‘Boy am I great!' But she always had to feel like she was doing something good because what she was
really
doing was nothing, she did
nothing
!”

“She couldn't work, though,” Ana María pointed out, reining in her laughter. “So what could she do?”

“Run other people's lives, I guess!” Lorena shrugged and smiled.

“There's a great job for you!” Alicia gave Lorena a pointed look, breaking into laughter again.

“Just like
La
Babosa
,” I offered.

“Yes!” they all cried at once. Apparently everybody reads Casaccia's novel in school—they knew it well. “And that's just what we're like here, to this day!” Lorena added. “We all know each other in this city. My cousin always turns out to be the friend of somebody else's cousin, and so on.”

We spent a while discussing Casaccia and other Paraguayan authors, and they unanimously agreed that the most important woman author was Josefina Plá.

“Her son is a high school teacher somewhere around here,” Alicia shared. Eventually, we circled back around to Austen, and I asked them to all 'fess up about how far they'd made it in the book.

They exchanged guilty looks, and Lorena admitted, “I didn't get much past the point when Emma talked Harriet out of marrying that farmer.” The others nodded ruefully.

“So you did read scenes with Mr. Knightley. What did you think of him?” I probed.

Another exchange of looks, and this time Alicia stepped up. “He was a dummy.”

“Definitely,” Lorena seconded. “He was really thick.”

“I didn't like him.” Ana María shook her head, making the thumbs down unanimous. Ouch! Poor dull, respectable Mr. Knightley!

“He was a dummy for wanting to be with Emma,” Alicia added, and I was reminded of the earlier conversation at Martín's house where the sentiment was the same, Dorrie excepted. “I'm not in very far, but you can see where that's going.”

“Maybe he sees something in her we haven't seen yet,” Lorena suggested.

On that hopeful note I said, “Will you all send me an email when you do finish? I really want to know what you think of how things turn out!” I passed around a sheet and got their email addresses, giving them my own on slips of paper; back in Chile I'd run out of my snazzy official “Dr. Amy Elizabeth Smith” cards from the university.

I invited the three of them out for dinner to thank them for their time, but they all had family waiting at home. We spent another twenty minutes in pleasant gossip then prepared to go our separate ways—but not before I got them to promise that they'd email me when they finished
Emma
.

“Now that we've talked about the book, I
am
more curious about the ending,” Alicia assured me as we made our way out to the street. “This was fun!” The others agreed.

“We'll have to do book groups with our own students,” Ana María added as we exchanged hugs and promises to stay in touch. “Thank you for the inspiration!”

I was happy to provide inspiration, but I wanted to do more than that. On the taxi ride home it dawned on me that a bit of cash could help that inspiration along and cover the price of some books for their students. But I knew I'd never get them to accept cash, so how could I manage this?

The next morning I got my answer. Despite the fact that I would have done my Austen talk for free, the school was paying me for the event. Lili emailed to ask if I wanted the money in U.S. dollars or Paraguayan
guaranís
.

“Neither,” I answered. “Sign it over to Ana María, Alicia, and Lorena.” That would cover some books—and chips and soda for their first meetings. A good book is its own reward, but I suspected that Paraguayan teenagers, just like Americans, would find a little extra inspiration in any event that included snacks.

***

Once again, my time in a fascinating new country was rushing to a close. On the positive side, every passing day brought me closer to seeing Diego back in the United States, closer to the visit that would help us decide what we wanted out of our relationship. But I regretted not having more time to explore Paraguay, and I couldn't leave without seeing the Jesuit missions.

Beginning in the early seventeenth century, Jesuits established extensive missions on land now divided across Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. The Jesuits sheltered
Guaraní
Indians from Brazilian slave traders, educating them and teaching them trades. When other Spanish colonizers envied their economic success, the missions were attacked (with a nod from the Spanish crown, which expelled the Jesuits). By the 1770s any
Guaraní
who couldn't escape were enslaved. The extensive ruins, those within Paraguay's borders mostly falling within a hundred-mile radius, were now one of the country's prime tourist attractions.

I arranged for a two-day tour with an overnight hotel stay in between. The driver was a brusque, burly man named José, who spoke fluent
Guaraní
. But I couldn't seem to retain a single word he tried to teach me, even the entertaining insult for Argentineans that means “bloated-pigskin-that's-good-for-nothing” (could my experiences in country number six
ever
live up to all of this anti-Argentinean buildup?). We arrived at
Jesús de Tavarangüe
to find the employees had all gone off to lunch, leaving the site unguarded.

“Let's go in anyway,” José said with a shrug. “If they show up, we can pay.”

A pair of adventurous young Germans had made the same call. They were teetering along the west wall of the ruined cathedral, completely roofless, with a three-story drop in either direction. “
Idiotas
,” José snorted, studying them for so long I got the nasty feeling he was hoping to see them fall.

Daredevils aside,
Jesús de Tavarangüe
was breathtaking. A rural site, its isolation allows you to experience how that mission became the whole world to the generations of people who spent their lives there. Fields stretch for miles around the crumbling church structures. Just as in Antigua, Catherine Morland would have adored exploring the picturesque ruins. Where stained glass had once been located, beautiful vistas of the nearby countryside were now framed. Only traces of statuary and relief carvings had survived; stone faces, arms, sometimes torsos, softened by time and exposure to the elements, appeared randomly like spirits trapped in the walls of the church that had seen so much life and death pass through.

Several hours later the same Germans appeared at our next stop,
Trinidad
del
Paraná
. Since a guard was on duty, they were scolded down from their balancing act before they could provide any entertainment
à la
“two dead young ladies” on the Cobb at Lyme Regis. The buildings that made up the compound of
Trinidad
del
Paraná
were more structurally intact, but the site had less luck avoiding encroaching modernity. Someone had decided that visitors to a richly historic religious site would like nothing better than to cap off their day with a few hours at an amusement park; build it next to the mission, and folks can use the same parking lot! Ferociously chipper Paraguayan polka music from the carousel (or maybe it was the food court) provided the jarring soundtrack for the entire visit.

The tourist agency had assured me that José was knowledgeable about the Jesuit sites. He wasn't. The only subject he showed any enthusiasm for was
Guaraní
, and when that hadn't panned out, he brooded. He wasn't a bad teacher, I assured him as we set off again in the car—I simply can't learn new words unless I see them written down. By the time I'd left the States nearly a year earlier, I'd made so many Spanish flash cards that I organized them in a twenty-four-drawer tool shop unit intended for nuts and bolts and screws.

Night finally rolled around. There'd been several hotels I could choose from through the agency. In keeping with my Morbid Tourism Theme in Paraguay, I'd selected the sprawling jungle complex outside of Encarnación that supposedly harbored escaped Nazi Josef Mengele for years. I didn't ask which room he'd favored—that was going way too far—but I did insist on my
own
room when we discovered that the agency had booked José and me into the same one.

The guide's humor was no better the next morning. I couldn't bear to spend one of my last Paraguayan days in silence, so I began scraping the bottom of the conversational barrel, asking what kinds of tourists he liked best (“They're all the same to me”) and what roadkill he sees most often (“Dogs”). Jane Austen's name produced a shrug, but he did perk up briefly when I asked him if he had pets.

“When my dad died he left me three birds, four dogs, a hamster, and a monkey. Very nice birds. But the monkey, he played with his organ in front of my guests.
Muy
grosero
, that monkey. Very rude. I got rid of him.”

He punctuated this last sentence with a satisfied grunt. I pondered the monkey's fate for a few moments, finally deciding that maybe silence was okay for a while. We visited two more missions,
San
Cosme
y
San
Damian
and
San
Ignacio
, both beautiful and, fortunately, both with guides on duty to share details about their history and architecture (and no amusement parks in sight or sound).

On the long drive back to Asunción, ready to give conversation one more try, I threw caution to the winds and broached politics.

“This country used to be safe, you know,” José gave me a hard stare before returning his eyes to the road. “We had order around here.” He didn't have to add “when Stroessner was in power”—that was understood. “You could walk the streets. Now there are criminals everywhere. And all this talk about ‘human rights.'” He spat out the last phrase as if it were something filthy. “Democracy. It just doesn't work.”

“Don't you think there's room for something between dictatorship and too much freedom? Some kind of middle ground?” I asked.

He eyed me again. “Maybe,” he shrugged, but his tone said, “
Hell, no
.” Two feet away from each other in the front seat of the car, dusk settling around us, we were worlds apart. José looked about my age, which would make his birth date 1964-ish. At that point Stroessner had been in power for ten years and would stay there for another twenty-five—most of José's life. Could he really imagine a different system, especially if he had suffered no firsthand experience of what it took to maintain “order?” Maybe if his mother had been kidnapped and tortured the way Emilio's had in Chile, he might feel differently about things.

But order of a kind does have its advantages—just ask Austen. My students in the United States often skim past that very important paragraph at the end of
Emma
with the comment about Harriet returning to her place since “the intimacy between her and Emma must sink; their friendship must change into a calmer sort of goodwill.” Film adaptations gloss over this, implying that of course Emma and Harriet will remain chums. But that's not what Austen herself tells us. Emma is Harriet's superior; she can't be her friend. She can't hang around with the wife of a farmer, certainly not one dependent on her own husband. She just can't.

I've had various students over the years try to argue that the separation the book calls for has nothing to do with social class. Surely it's something else—maybe Emma and Harriet will just be too busy to hang out? Or maybe they're worried about those gypsies and don't want to get caught too far away from home? We love to think of Austen as our contemporary, and in the United States, that means she's not supposed to be a “snob.” Isn't this what Emma has to learn?

Actually, it's not—and I never felt the message as sharply as I had in Paraguay. Emma learns that she's got to read situations and people more carefully and that she should be kinder to her inferiors, like Harriet and Miss Bates. Cher in
Clueless
may learn that her buddies should be free to date stoners from the grassy knoll (especially ones willing to donate a bong to a good cause), but that's 1995. In Regency England, Emma is near the top of the social order, and the only way for her to stay there is to
stay
there. Order has its advantages, but mostly for the people at the upper end or for those more afraid of change than they are of oppression.

I didn't debate José, because I wasn't naïve enough to believe I understood a complex land like Paraguay after only a month's stay. But I know that Martín or Dorrie could have taken him on. A cause dear to their hearts was Martín's self-sustaining agricultural school, which I had visited before my reading groups. Instead of focusing on top-down order, they believed in bottom-up growth.