Philip Graham
Spends a Year
in Lisbon.
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Philip Graham, a writer who teaches at the University of Illinois, will be spending a year in Lisbon, Portugal. He will be reporting to us from there.
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D I S P A T C H 5
Bread, Bread;
Cheese, Cheese.
By Philip Graham
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I wake to the szizz of the apartment's buzzer. Someone must be standing outside the lobby door, trying to get in. It's early, and one glance at Alma's quiet outline under the covers tells me that she's at least an hour away from waking, so I hustle into jeans, a shirt, as the buzzer goes off again, and then again. Before I can make it to the door, there's knocking on our window—one of the side benefits of living in a ground floor apartment, I suppose. Who is this? We don't know anyone well enough to occasion a morning visit unannounced, and—there's that knocking again—we certainly don't know anyone rude.
I glance out the window. It's the mailman, I think. I've never met him before, and though he's not wearing a uniform (one minus check), he is holding a stack of letters and bills, magazines and a package (one plus check), and he's standing outside the door to the apartment lobby, where the mailboxes are kept. He's speaking earnestly but I can't make out a thing—ribbons and curls of dream still cling to and escape from me. He seems official enough, so I nod, walk to our door, and push the button that will let him in.
It doesn't seem to work. I can hear him still rattling that door outside but no go, the thing's still locked. I hurry down to the lobby's glass-walled entrance.
"Obrigado"—thank you—he says, as I hold open the door, and then he unfurls a Portuguese wordscape that speeds by with only one little landmark that I recognize: tocar, which means "to ring." Ah, he must be telling me that the buzzer connection for the lobby entrance doesn't seem to work, probably wants me to tell the manager, but I can't even squeak out "Eu sei"—I know—or "Eu compreéndo"—I understand—much less construct a proper sentence as I stand there, struck dumb. I even forget to introduce myself, because I'm in Other Language Freefall. It's the linguistic equivalent of a Wile E. Coyote moment, when, rushing headlong off your butte of choice, you stand in the sky and recognize your dilemma, just before the air reasserts its traditional relationship with gravity and you begin your long, swift journey to becoming a puff of dust on the ground below.
I've lived in extended Other Language Freefall before, in African villages, and then I had a decent excuse—Alma and I were living among a people who spoke a virtually unrecorded language, Beng. There were no books written about it to prepare us, no common words shared with English (and don't even get me started about how, in Beng, pronouns are conjugated), so we just had to jump in and hold on. But I've been studying Portuguese on and off for years, can do a creditable job of reading the newspaper (with help from my faithful sidekick, the dictionary). So, when the mailman stares with growing curiosity at silent me, I blush with embarrassment and finally squeak out "Fala divigar, faz favor"—Speak slowly, please—an idiotic request, because even if he speaks at the pace of paint peeling I'll be lost.
He smiles—mystery over. My words have placed me in the category of Foreigner Struggling With the Local Language, and he realizes he'll simply have to tell someone else about the broken buzzer. I'm off the hook.
Depressed and humiliated, but off the hook. Living in a country where you're still tackling the language adds particular, small dramas to each day, where ordinary speech is a mysterious puzzle. Little moments like The Doorbell Incident are not meant to weaken one's resolve but to strengthen it, so I suck it up and, over breakfast (buttered and toasted dark bread from the Serra da Estrela, and black tea from the island of São Miguel, in the Azores; I am nothing if not a completist in my admiration of Portuguese culture), I dig into the local paper, elbowing my way through sentences with a dictionary, if necessary. It's sometimes slow work, trying to decipher "O Caso Mateus"—a soccer scandal involving three lower-ranked teams fighting a nasty legal battle for a berth in the premier league—or following the reports of an alarming string of forest fires sweeping the Portuguese countryside.
Yes, slow work, but I can always take a break and search in the dictionary for intriguing idiomatic phrases, the kind of nuggets that'll sparkle up a sentence. The first to catch my eye (probably because it's the name of a restaurant down the road from us) is "dizer pao, pao, queijo, queijo"—to say bread is bread, cheese is cheese—which means to speak the truth, to pull no punches. Then I find "a galinha do vizinho é sempre mais gordo"—the neighbor's chicken is always fatter—which is the Portuguese way of saying "The grass is always greener ..."
Ah, I'm on a roll. I take in the last sips of my tea and find "Ele não apita [apitar means 'to whistle'] em nada em casa," which roughly translates as "He doesn't have a say about anything at home." I suspect that this "whistle" isn't meant to be the common purse-your-lips-together kind, but instead what a soccer referee blasts out when announcing a foul. But who would I ever dare say that out loud about? My favorite discovery is "cair das nuvens"—to fall from the clouds—a great way to describe being astounded.
All this mining of phrases is my way of warming up for the big game ahead: speaking actual sentences in actual conversations with actual Portuguese. I repeat the words, try out the sounds in my mouth, imagine speaking them and astounding friends and family. (But who am I kidding? I've never in my entire life said "The grass is always greener" in English.)
At the sound of these verbal pushups, Alma walks into the living room and smiles her I-love-your-weirdness smile. Alma's style is different, and probably better: she's an anthropologist and doesn't mind jabbering away in public, making tons of mistakes but somehow getting her point across. She learned this in the rough-and-tumble world of fieldwork, and she's great at it. I'm a worrywart of a writer who obsesses over the teeniest nuances of words when I write, so I have a horror of blurting out a doozy of a mistake.
Just like the mistake I commit later that afternoon when I greet our neighborhood grocer, newly returned from a short vacation. From my mouth escapes the beginnings of "Boa viagem" (Bon voyage) before I manage to switch in midgear to "Bem vindo" (Welcome back). Our kindly grocer shrugs off my embarrassment, but even my bones and the white corpuscles in my veins briefly blush red. I buy some potatoes and onions for dinner, then walk to a nearby park, where two windmills on a hill look down on gardens, a pond, winding walkways. I wouldn't mind a breather from my past few hours of noodling on a novel passage, so I sit on a shaded bench, close my eyes, and simply listen to the speech of people passing by. I love the sound of Portuguese, I really do—it's more than music to my ears. It's such an indefinably delicious sonic feast that I imagine I'm falling from the clouds.
But, for all my infatuation with the language, I do have a complaint—oh, do I—the kind of complaint that insists on calling bread, bread.
The Portuguese swallow their syllables.
It's almost a national pastime. They can take a perfectly fine sentence and, when they speak, reduce it to a half or a third of its original length. When it comes to spoken Portuguese, what you don't hear is as important as what you do. "Estas certo!"—You're right—becomes "Sta cert!" A 50 percent linguistic reduction is impressive, but when "Eu estou"—I am—can be snipped to something that sounds like "Tou," we're talking a 75 percent drop in syllabic reality. I imagine that if the Portuguese dictionary were written as the language is truly spoken, the book would be the size of a pamphlet listing the late-blooming flowers of North African mountaintops. I'd bet the barn that if Abraham Lincoln had been Portuguese, he could have delivered the 286 words of the Gettysburg
Address in about 12 seconds.
I sit under this tree in a well-manicured corner of the park and work myself up into a particularly despairing and mean-spirited mood about my linguistic progress, so when I hear the keening of a distant ambulance, I imagine that paramedics are rushing to the hospital some poor gasping Portuguese soul who swallowed too many syllables at one time. There must be, after all, a magic cutoff point where, if you go too far, you choke on one final indigestible syllable. I wouldn't be surprised if each hospital here in Lisbon has a special Phonetic Reclamation Unit, with the best units boasting a gleaming, state-of-the-art syllable pump that draws out with gentle care from failing patients the severed sounds of too many words, phrases, sentences.
Maybe, when Portuguese gather in small crowds on street corners and chat away, they're taking part in a secret competition, where every conversation is actually a dangerous game—skirting right up to the edge of the syllable that might do you in, but not crossing the line. Challenging each other's syllable-subtraction prowess, they admire hearing a sentence gulped down to its basic components, they salute the best devil-may-care ingesting of a word's rightful sounds.
I walk back to the apartment, along streets that must be littered with the ghosts of syllables left unspoken, an invisible cemetery of the latest Portuguese parts of speech fallen in battle.
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After dinner, Alma, Hannah, and I stroll to a free open-air concert of fado music. It's billed as a grand pairing of Carlos do Carmo, one of the grand old figures of fado, and a younger singer I'm not familiar with, Camané, with a small orchestra. What I'm really excited about is that Ricardo Rocha will accompany each singer on Portuguese guitar. Rocha is the Ornette Coleman of the instrument, drawing out odd harmonies and creating aptly unexpected solos, and he should certainly keep the evening more than interesting.
A temporary stage has been set up before a vast lawn beside the Torre de Belém—the great 15th-century architectural monument perched in the shallows of the Tagus River. The tower is lit up against a clear sky and a hefty fraction of rising moon. Alma, Hannah, and I manage to find ourselves a place in the huge, standing-room-only crowd spread across the lawn, and the fact that this lawn is also dotted here and there with huge inflated rubber Sagres beer cans is something I allow myself to ignore.
When Carlos do Carmo walks onstage, a family standing beside us murmurs among themselves what sounds like concern for his health, and if I'm hearing correctly it's not surprising—he looks frail, even from a distance, and his voice, as he begins by reciting a poem about Lisbon, is hesitant, hoarse. I wonder if he can possibly sing, but I'm also on his side—he's speaking so slowly I feel a rush of gratitude that I can understand almost every word.
He falters a bit in the first song, but somehow regains form by the second, and while Ricardo Rocha churns out his inventive, spidery filigrees, Carlos takes ever more confident turns with the smoother, more polished Camané. By the time the orchestra settles onstage for the final part of the concert, the white-haired master could almost be a young man again, if you closed your eyes.
Camané exits, leaving the stage to Carlos, whose repetoire includes "Canoas do Tejo" ("Canoes on the Tagus River") and "Lisboa Menina e Moça" ("Lisbon Girl and Maiden"). I can only make out about a third of the lyrics, but one thing is certainly clear, as Alma jokes: Lisboetas have a nearly bottomless pit of songs celebrating their city. That's all right by me; I love the place, too (especially its literate soul: questions about poets and novelists are regular features on TV quiz shows, collectible coins featuring José Saramago and Fernando Pessoa come free with the morning newspaper, and streets are named after poets, playwrights, journalists; in America, it's cause for celebration if the president can bring himself to parse a simple sentence).
By now the audience is singing along, misty-eyed at tunes they clearly grew up with. Carlos catches the mood and stops before his last song to thank us all for coming, to thank the organizers of this espectáculo.
Except that he says "spec-tac-l," which I count as a drop not of five syllables to three but of five to two and a half—or maybe even to just two, since that ul at the end barely makes it past his lips. For a moment I wait for him to clutch his throat and stagger across the stage as that ul parks itself in his esophagus. But, no, he bestows a few more thanks, the violinists in the orchestra raise their bows, and Carlos do Carmo belts out the last song of the evening.
As we return home, following along with the happy, saudade-besotted crowd, I decide that I don't care if the Portuguese aren't hooked on phonics. That half-gulped ul, after all, was kind of cool. So if I'm calling bread, bread, then I should also call cheese, cheese. Maybe my neighbors are so fond of the lovely particular notes of their musical language—the ooshes and oishes and aows—that they clip as many intervening syllables as possible in order to get to each oosh faster. It's actually all this confounded swallowing that creates the wave of sound I love, the words melting their discrete borders into a collective enterprise that rises and falls together, like the houses dotting the hills of Lisbon.
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