Jane Austen Society of Buenos Aires

The Jane Austen Society of Buenos Aires, as I discovered today at 5 o’clock, could only loosely be described as a society. The President, Publicity, and Writing greeted me at the door of the President’s apartment, their backs hunched over but eyes bright. The first thing they said to me when I opened the door was, “Gwen? Ah! You are a baby!” And then, amid welcoming chatter in English and Spanish, I was welcomed in to take tea.

I found the JASBA online, which is amazing considering that the youngest member is probably 60 and the other two must be in their mid-80’s. However, despite their age, all three regularly use e-mail and the 60-year-old even does graphic design. As head of Publicity and Design, she puts together the publication that this tiny group produces every year. She also makes fliers about their teas, printed on hard stock paper. I was given a flier to take home—it had a tastefully stenciled Victorian woman seated in front of a handsome gentleman; “she did it in Draw!” the President proudly informed me. I also got five back issues of their publication. Showing me each small, stapled pamphlet, Writing told me that this coming August should submit a small article on Austen. Because the theme this year is film adaptations, Publicity gave me some DVD’s she had burned for me to watch.

The tea itself was a wonderful hybrid of English tradition and Argentine amenities. We had Lipton lemon tea in our ancient tea cups, shared a strawberry tart, and ate various facturas. A few of these Argentine pastries even resembled scones, but I missed jam and clotted cream. The President insisted on doing everything herself, from carrying the large tart and plate full of facturas to managing the heavy tea pot. She was amazingly animated—I admired how youthful her speech was, and how old. Her English was excellent but dated, full of antique expressions that matched the yellowing paper and photographs in her apartment. Whenever Writing made a comment she disagreed with, she would flap her hand, and say, “But, my dear!” And when tea was an hour late getting started, she said that we would just have to “bare up.” Yet, even though she was so animated, there were moments when all youth dropped from her face and her eyes would rest, blankly looking to the side. It is amazing how vacant and still the eyes of old people can be, like they have lost the energy to exist every moment of the day and come back only when called. Maybe when you are that old you have spent enough time with yourself. As the President walked down the hall to fetch more hot water, she adjusted her dress, pulling it up to her waist and revealing her wrinkled thighs and short slip. It reminded me of a little girl adjusting her dress at a birthday party, pulling it over her head to arrange her underwear. The gesture was just as unconsciously done.

Two hours after I arrived, I kissed their cheeks, thanked them again, and stepped out onto the street, where shop lights on Avenida Santa Fe were slowly flickering on. As I began the thirty minute walk home, I realized that no one had ever really said why it was the Jane Austen Society. Why not the Dickens society or the Borges society? Of course, I had asked how the club began. They told me that once they had all been pupils of the same teacher in a literature class. These women are all born and bread Argentines, but they love British literature. One day, the future President and future Writer wrote an essay together on Pride and Prejudice, and their teacher suggested that they start a club. It seemed like it had been the suggestion that they could start a “literary society,” more than a particular work of Austen, which had excited them.

Being in the presence of so much age and, as with these women, so much learning, always makes me want to reach out and touch it. I wanted to extract their stories and understand how they think; I wanted to know how they combine the world they live in today with the world they were expecting or the world of Austen. But as so often happens, and as it did tonight, the very age that fascinated me created a difficult barrier. They began to answer my questions but quickly diverged, stuck on an unimportant place name or date, unable to see the greater arch of the story they had started. They asked me questions about myself and seemed very interested, yet I felt like I was talking to them about a world not only miles but dimensions away from their own. They could not tell me why Austen and, if they had asked me, I probably could not have said why either. For whatever reason, Austen always seems like a handy excuse to bring women together.