AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Good,” Giovanni said, and kissed him on each cheek before bidding him arrivederci.
6
IT WASBRON’S INTROVERTEDtruth that the house, with its high ceilings and its many rooms to inspect, was at best a spacious dwelling in which to perch and ruminate, and at worst, filled. He had never thought so much could happen in one household. For no matter the day of the week, there was always something going on around him. Someone here, someone there, Lord this, Mrs. that, to whom he was introduced but never saw or heard of again. So many occasions, so many dinners to which he was encouraged to present himself, but many he insisted on avoiding. He’d quite frankly had enough of it.
When he awoke in the early hours one Tuesday morning, to a moment of calm, he snuggled up in his bedsheets and scrolled through Facebook for something to do. He refreshed his timeline, the ads renewing themselves into previously searched skincare products he couldn’t afford, and for a moment succumbed into the inevitable spiral of stalking an ex-classmate whom he had no real feeling toward but whose life updates brought a flicker of amusement to his morning. After a light release of endorphins, he opened his laptop to scroll the “Top Picks for You” category of Netflix. A favorite had recently been added to the list:Pride and Prejudice, 2005.“Austenmania,”Giovanni had said, but this particular period drama offered him not justa two-hour, nine-minute run of escapism, but a much deeper feeling of displacement.
He was familiar enough with the story, but it was the musical composition that brought it all to life, that settled him somewhere other; the sound of wind accompanying the protagonist’s walk with book in hand, through fields of mildewed grass and filtered sunlight. This was home. Not the sound of a loving mother calling his name, nor the scent of roast dinner and gravy on a Sunday afternoon, but English mise-en-scène and set pieces, beautiful period-inspired fashion and the crescendo of song that transported his senses to a place on screen where he felt an undeniable kinship to these places and these actors. His wish to have been born in some other time and place fed by a multimillion-pound budget and actors toiling away on a cloudy day made sunny in a specified location hired out for the week. The ability to inhabit these lives had always been possible through reading, and he’d always been able to find a sliver of himself there—found the connection between himself and Jane at boarding school all encompassing—but while the great Victorian novel took up time, this adaptation, the first he’d seen of the sort, took up space, forcing what beforehand had only been illusion into reality, into the very fabric of his memory. If he could see it, he could remember it. And if he could remember it, he could relive it.
It had been Harry, the almighty tech whiz, who’d introduced him to these Americanized versions of Britain, where the glass of the screen worked as a mirror, reflecting to him that which existed only in his mind as absolutely possible.
He’d tried to get Harry to read the British classics, and at one point Harry had agreed to reading the book his friend had so adored. Ultimately, he claimed, it just wasn’t to his taste.
“I thought it would be about dancing and marriage and other girly things like that. With that guy everyone seems to name their dog after?”
“You’re thinking aboutPride and Prejudiceby Jane Austen. This isJane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë.”
“Way too many Janes. Isn’t it all kinda the same?”
“No. It’s not. What did you think, really?”
“It’s all a bit much, I think? A bit dull.”
“Much? Dull?”
“Wordy. Depressing.”
“No!”he’d retorted.“It’s romantic—it’s beautiful.”
“Romantic? How? The main guy’s a bit suss, isn’t he? Like …”
They were sitting alone in Star of the Sea. Harry had just finished an afternoon game of rugby and was flicking through the pages of the book with cautious fingers. Bron had been marking up a diagram of a plant cell’s structure, having already labeled the cell wall, the nucleus, the mitochondria, the cytoplasm, and the chloroplast. There was something still missing; he wasn’t sure what.
“I don’t know why you’d say that. It’s the best book in the world.”
“To you it’s like it’s theonlybook in the world. All I’m saying is, I don’t get your obsession with it. It’s always the same book, over and over again.”
“That’s not true!”
“Well, if it’seversomething else, it’s still something ancient written by dead people. Why not try something new?”
He remembered it like any fleeting moment, the impact it had on him: the snatching of the book from Harry’s hands and his refusing to let him have it back, which only made Harry laugh. How Harry quickly came over to ruffle his hair, and told him his diagram was missing the ribosomes, how he’d dotted them in in pencil.
Harry had never been encouraged to finish readingJane Eyre, but what he did do was teach Bron how to torrent the film versions of his favorite novels on the school computers, little digital files they kept stored on a memory stick or sometimes burned onto CDs. Harry enjoyed the illegality of downloading at the school’s expense, and Bron was fascinated by what Harry explained to be a peer-to-peer network, a process where millions of people shared little bytes of the same file through the internet. How wonderful, he thought, for a group of people to be connected bythe love of the same story, each offering up little bits of different pieces to create one and the same whole.
“So every file is like Frankenstein’s monster. Lots of different parts creating one and the same thing.”
“Uh, yeah, something like that. Why not?”
And once, Harry had shared a Tumblr post suggesting a phase through which every adolescent would pass, a time where they would have to choose between being a “Brontë person” or an “Austen person,” and that this life-defining choice would make up one’s entire personality. Bron certainly considered himself a “Brontë person” through and through, would often cast himself in Jane Eyre’s role like some readily available actor, see his face reflected at a window that could have been Thornfield Hall’s, and read theyouin “you strange—you almost unearthly thing” as a prophetic description of himself by some destined future lover. Jane was but a host, and he the parasite drawn from her blood and working its way into his bloodstream.
But then, Harry had said,“It’s obviously clear which you are. But what about me? Would that make me an Austen person?”
“I don’t know.”
And having declared that he would“absolutely, under no circumstance, read any more of that trash,”Harry downloadedPride and Prejudiceoff the internet as the film that he would watch with Bron.“Keira Knightley, now her I can look at. She’s way too hot for this kind of movie.”
Bron remembered that sudden shift in his perspective, how the book that he’d read became almost secondary to the film, how all the microelements together transported him to another place and made him, by some miracle, a bigger fan of the Austen narrative.
