All Roads Lead to Austen by Amy Elizabeth Smith

laughed. A hammock strung between two cement pillars and a punching bag suspended from the ceiling—not much guesswork there. Diego had been an amateur boxer for years and still served as a trainer and sparring partner in a local gym. This was the best part of the house! I could lie there with a book, catching the sea breezes and watching him work up a nice, attractive sweat.
    â€œSo does this mean you’ll stay here and keep me company?” We hadn’t discussed a joint living arrangement, but I’d been secretly hoping he would just move in with me for the three months I’d be there.
    As I settled into the swinging hammock, he gave me a hand-in-the-cookie-jar smile. “I brought a bag of clothing over before you got here.”
    ***
    Diego headed off to work the next morning and suddenly, the house felt huge and empty. As much as I love to explore new places, over the years I’ve been prone to panic whenever I relocate. It’s a sort of traveler’s stage fright, an intense anxiety that always goes away but not before I spend anywhere between a day and a week hiding in my bedroom, typically with a book, thinking, “What the hell am I doing in this place?!” It had hit me the hardest when I lived for a year in Prague, owing to the huge language barrier, but it happens whenever I find myself in new surroundings. On my first visit to Antigua I’d lived in closer quarters with other people, so it was less intense than usual.
    Now I was rambling around a three-story structure—alone.
    I abruptly stopped seeing the house through Diego’s eyes and saw it through a different pair: my mother’s. Not a window on the ground floor had glass. There were bars to keep out prowlers, but all sorts of things could fit through bars, you know . The second-floor passageway between the bathroom and the bedrooms was gated at either end but had no walls or glass either. That just can’t be safe! And how on earth will you keep things clean? As for the outdoor cement staircase leading to the roof patio, it had no railing. My maternal grandmother, born in the United States after her parents emigrated from Germany, had died a decade earlier, but the sight of that spectacular two-story drop from the roof patio down to the back yard would have led my mother to channel an extra generation’s worth of maternal concern: Gott in Himmel—it’s a death trap! Don’t they have a law against people moving into houses that aren’t done yet?!
    So I wouldn’t be sending any photos of the house to my mom. Except maybe a nice close-up of the flowers over the entryway. But the least I could do was venture out and find a pay phone to call her—that would keep me from hunkering down in the house all day like a ninny. She had no doubt been staring at her phone since an hour before my plane took off for Mexico, perhaps wondering if there had been a crash so devastatingly horrible they were afraid to talk about it on the news.
    As I dressed and set out for the bus stop to the center of town, I felt my panic receding. I’d been here twice already, for Pete’s sake; I knew my way around. No call for alarm. After finding a pay phone and assuring my mother that I was indeed still alive, I went to hunt for fotonovelas .
    Anyone who wants to learn Spanish should know about fotonovelas . Some Mexicans turn their noses up at these popular works, but they’re hugely helpful for learning the language. Essentially they’re novels told via sketches (not photos, despite the name), similar to comic books but the size of small paperbacks. There’s an infamous subgenre people used to call “Tijuana Bibles,” cheesy porn with lurid sketches. While the porn business is still booming, the other main genres are romances and westerns.
    For romance, there are three biggies: El Libro Seminal (Weekly Book), Amores y Amantes (Love and Lovers), and Libro Sentimental (Sentimental