Sandra Cuza's Blog
July 28, 2014
Life Imitates Art
After a total of six international moves in my lifetime, dragging around not just furniture but what currently totals some 42 boxes of books, I should know that this is a traumatic event and will involve shocks. Surprises. Lots of oh-my Gods and wails to say nothing of the searches for lost items that will never be found and I´ll never know what happened to them. Dramatic sobs over mildewed books. But this move, back to the States after 21 years in Brazil and a year and a half in France was totally different; the protagonist in my latest book, “Passion Fruit”, is an expat living in Brazil who repatriates to the U.S. after her life falls apart in the exotic tropics. The characters are fiction, the incidents true but I find that, in this case, life is imitating fiction and I totally admire and empathize with my protagonist.
Both of us are thrilled to discover that we completely understand the language in this country without taking a single lesson. One of my biggest ego-deflators was to venture out in Brazil after attempting to master the basics of Portuguese, only to be stopped on the street and asked a completely unintelligible question to which my usual response was a pained smile. The question would be repeated and, despite the notorious São Paulo crime rate, I would lean a little bit closer to the stranger, as though proximity would bring some kind of simultaneous translation. And my tormentor would repeat even more rapidly and – it seemed to me – more impatiently the question while I continued to grin idiotically and began to edge away. Finally he or she would lift an arm and tap the space on the wrist where a watch would normally be and finally I got it!! The time. He wants to know want time it is! And I knew, more or less, how to answer this one.
It did get better but it was slow going, and in pre-cell phone days everything was difficult. After I’d lived in Brazil for a couple of years, an American expat friend and I drove to Campinas, a small city about 100 kilometers from São Paulo to visit a very talented young jewelry designer who lived and worked there. The highways in Brazil are great but there aren´t too many of them – most roadways are two lane, often dirt, with massive pot holes that fill with water when it rains becoming invisible axle breakers. Layout of the cities – all of them – is a nightmare and the drivers are maniacal. Well, you can’t stay home all the time, so off we went down the highway, into Campinas and promptly got lost. We asked directions in our butchered Portuguese, eliciting puzzled frowns and tiny grimaces, an expression any ex-pat knows and dreads when trying to communicate in a country where the language is a new one. We passed the same group of men hanging out in front of a barzinho for the fourth time and they waved, we knit was time to go home. But how? Wandering around, asking questions and failing to understand the answers, we suddenly and miraculously found ourselves driving out of town, unfortunately not on the highway but two lane road with no towns, houses or buildings in sight. It was getting dark, there are no road lights or markers in the country but plenty of road robberies at night and our jolly good humor had segued into hysteria. We might as well have been on the moon as far as human habitation went until a gas station suddenly appeared on the horizon. Carefully, we practiced asking directions and then realized we wouldn´t understand the answer: in desperation, we decided that I would listen to the first part of the answer and my friend would concentrate on the second half. And it worked. Somehow we got it. After a couple of hi fives, we shot down the road – or rather bounced over craters and rocks, straight to the highway.
One of the pleasant shocks on returning to the U.S. was finding that, fortunately or otherwise, here I understand everything that´s said.
Both of us are thrilled to discover that we completely understand the language in this country without taking a single lesson. One of my biggest ego-deflators was to venture out in Brazil after attempting to master the basics of Portuguese, only to be stopped on the street and asked a completely unintelligible question to which my usual response was a pained smile. The question would be repeated and, despite the notorious São Paulo crime rate, I would lean a little bit closer to the stranger, as though proximity would bring some kind of simultaneous translation. And my tormentor would repeat even more rapidly and – it seemed to me – more impatiently the question while I continued to grin idiotically and began to edge away. Finally he or she would lift an arm and tap the space on the wrist where a watch would normally be and finally I got it!! The time. He wants to know want time it is! And I knew, more or less, how to answer this one.
It did get better but it was slow going, and in pre-cell phone days everything was difficult. After I’d lived in Brazil for a couple of years, an American expat friend and I drove to Campinas, a small city about 100 kilometers from São Paulo to visit a very talented young jewelry designer who lived and worked there. The highways in Brazil are great but there aren´t too many of them – most roadways are two lane, often dirt, with massive pot holes that fill with water when it rains becoming invisible axle breakers. Layout of the cities – all of them – is a nightmare and the drivers are maniacal. Well, you can’t stay home all the time, so off we went down the highway, into Campinas and promptly got lost. We asked directions in our butchered Portuguese, eliciting puzzled frowns and tiny grimaces, an expression any ex-pat knows and dreads when trying to communicate in a country where the language is a new one. We passed the same group of men hanging out in front of a barzinho for the fourth time and they waved, we knit was time to go home. But how? Wandering around, asking questions and failing to understand the answers, we suddenly and miraculously found ourselves driving out of town, unfortunately not on the highway but two lane road with no towns, houses or buildings in sight. It was getting dark, there are no road lights or markers in the country but plenty of road robberies at night and our jolly good humor had segued into hysteria. We might as well have been on the moon as far as human habitation went until a gas station suddenly appeared on the horizon. Carefully, we practiced asking directions and then realized we wouldn´t understand the answer: in desperation, we decided that I would listen to the first part of the answer and my friend would concentrate on the second half. And it worked. Somehow we got it. After a couple of hi fives, we shot down the road – or rather bounced over craters and rocks, straight to the highway.
One of the pleasant shocks on returning to the U.S. was finding that, fortunately or otherwise, here I understand everything that´s said.
