Image: Our family photo taken in Oregon, August 1997 before leaving for Portugal. 

The dark character of the Portuguese soul was evident everywhere we turned in Lisbon. The shoe stores only carried stiff leather shoes in black or brown. The standard Lisboeta breakfast was consumed standing up at a little metal booth on the street. Dressed in brown or black the dark haired Portuguese consumed a bica, equal parts bitter coffee grounds, white sugar and just a smidge of water so that you could stir it manically with a tiny tin spoon. In your other hand you held a smoldering cigarette. And on a plate in front of you – a greasy cream filled donut. I wondered at the gloomy personality of the Portuguese. Despite straight white teeth, they seldom smiled. It could be the centuries of oppression by the Spaniards. Or the fact that the BBC always insisted in calling them “the poorest country in Europe.” I think part of the problem was gastrointestinal reflex disorder. The Lisboeta never eats dinner before 10PM. And this heavy meal is consumed with a cigarette between every course and a vinegary glass of vinho de mesa always at hand.

My first language tutor was a diminutive balding school teacher named Luis who could only fit me in after 8PM and continually tried to take me out to dinner. The first words I learned from him were deprimido and deprimento, “depressed” and “depressing.” He was a nice guy but kind of gloomy. I was thrilled to discover that my fluency in Spanish allowed me to understand the wrong half of anything he said. The principal problem was the vowels. In Mexican Spanish I had mastered the cardinal five: AW EY EE OH OO, El Burro Sabe Mas Que Tu. But in Portugal, evolution had rendered all five of these sounds obsolete and the Portuguese did all their communicating with a single back unrounded UH. In our first Sunday in church, the leader sang, Enche me de te e eu serei teu para sempre, “Fill me with yourself and I’ll be yours forever.” But with all the vowels shifted to the back it came out, “UNCHUH MUH DUH TUH…” Beyond the difficulty of the vowels, our immediate problem was that the Portuguese refused to speak anything but English with us. My LAMP language manual had taught me to say, “This is all I know how to say” as one of the language power tools. But with the help of my dictionary I pieced together another phrase, “I’m sorry I don’t speak English. I’m from Iceland.” Being Icelandic had the advantage of shaking my interlocutors for a moment, long enough for me to try out some of my other stock phrases.

I had cheated before coming to Portugal. I had the cassettes from the Living Language learning system but they were unfortunately recorded in Brazil. And I could sing along with a large collection of Roberto Carlos and Caetano Veloso songs. But Brazilians speak Portuguese like Americans play cricket. The rules are incomprehensible so they just make up their own. But the Brazilians are fun. They love to party. They smile all the time and have great music. Portugal is kind of like Brazil’s grumpy uncle. It was only in Portugal, after a college degree and quite a few stamps in my passport that I discovered that I speak English with an accent. I had always thought that people in strange places like England and Texas speak English with an accent while most people, specifically myself, spoke the language in its pure form. So even though I didn’t speak Icelandic, the Portuguese found my version of English to be just as incomprehensible as if I had been from Reykjavik. It didn’t sound anything like the cassettes that they were listening to while trying to learn English. This proved a big advantage on the comboio, the train that ran along the coast between Lisbon and Cascais, since although everyone could eavesdrop on what my family was saying, and they were sure we were speaking English, they couldn’t tell what we were talking about. Had they understood they might have heard us saying things like, “Sit down.” “Stop pushing your brother.” “It’s your turn to change a diaper.”

Diapers. Although my wife and I had been sent to Portugal to learn the language we had a secret agenda: To not crack up. Or at least, “Only one spouse can crack up at a time and it’s my turn!” While other future missionaries were traveling on the subway, attending classes at the Univ, and staying up late hanging out at the fado bars for Portuguese “immersion,” we were changing diapers, and the few times we managed to get all three babies out the door with two in a double stroller and one on my back, we attempted to not get run over in traffic.  Thanks to our adorable blond babies we learned lots of Portuguese vocabulary like “fofinha” –adorable, “"louro” –blond, and bebés ‘’babies.” Our LAMP manual, “Language Acquisition Made Practical” was quickly rendered impractical because it depended largely on going out in the neighborhood and trying out monotonous phrases over and over on friendly natives. Trouble was, we had no neighbors. They were all gone in the morning commute by 7AM and never home from dinner until after midnight. Despite the failure of the LAMP method, I somehow became internationally known as a LAMP expert and I still get occasional emails from people seeking my advice on this method.

We did have some neighbors in the flat above us. We lived on the ground floor of a marble-floored icebox of a house with a compact little yard just perfect for our small kids to play in. Ellie and Henry took to climbing the pepper tree and hanging from the branch until they dropped down like gymnasts at the end of a routine. This scared our upstairs neighbors, or neighbor, I should say. Isabella was a florid, friendly loud-spoken geriatric. She shouted most times because her husband, a wizened old man whose face was concealed beneath an enormous pair of peppered eyebrows, was stone deaf. They didn’t seem to mind our baby Andrew crying, or the two older kids crashing through the house and sliding around corners on their socks. But Isabella was deathly afraid that the sun was going to give our kids constipation. Constipação it turned out was the common cold but also a dread illness that strikes down children who don’t wear their hats when the sun is out. Our marble mausoleum of a house was a perfect echo chamber and every sound from upstairs channeled itself down in sometimes surreptitious ways to the lower floor. For several weeks, Ellie suffered night terrors and woke screaming in the night and would only be consoled if an adult was sitting on her bed close enough to touch. The problem, she assured us in wide-eyed terror was lions. We prayed. Cast out demons. Sang lullabies. Bound territorial spirits and just about anything else in hopes of making these lions go away. It was only when Isabella and her husband went on a trip to visit family in Coimbra that Ellie slept through the night. Maybe the lions were the old man’s snoring.

Although we were virtual prisoners in our house living in splendid isolation from anyone that might actually speak the language, fate worked in our favor because Jim, the mission representative who was supposed to evaluate our progress, was called back to the US for family reasons and only came back to Portugal once. He was a grandfatherly fellow with a penchant for giving out evaluation forms and asking about our progress. He only visited for five days and happily my only other memory of him is taking me out to lunch at an ancient restaurant in downtown Lisbon with cracked and hand painted azulejo tiles on the walls and the only decent bacalhau I ever ate. Bacalhau. BAW-CALL-YOW. That about says it all. Norwegian codfish hypersaturated with salt that had somehow established itself as the national dish of the Portuguese. The runner-up was probably migalhas, breadcrumb soup. More reasons why the Portuguese are so grumpy. The national cuisine, according to my second Portuguese teacher a stern, fiery no-nonsense lady, was second to none and far superior to the awful food in France. Such is patriotism.

No one seemed to notice that we weren’t actually attending a language school, so Hilary and I got into a routine of having a young lady come by and tutor us several mornings per week. We had four tutors, all lovely ladies and different from each other as the four seasons. Lourdes, Amelia, ZZZZZZZZ and Antinea all tutored us on and off depending on their availability. Lourdes was a lovely Portuguese lady who had married an American music producer who had some sort of mission involving producing music. Lourdes was kind enough to enlighten us on why the Portuguese never invite Americans to their homes. Being invited to a Portuguese home for dinner was a holy grail of enculturation for language students like ourselves. For some reason, we all desperately wanted to get invited into a Portuguese home. I’m not sure what we thought we would do once we got there. Eat, I suppose. After a year of living in Portugal, many of us had still never done it. We were on the outside wondering what we had to do to link up with real Portuguese people.

Sure, I interacted with Portuguese people every day. Mostly at the office supply store. I developed a bizarre compulsion to buy ever more complicated and expensive fountain pens. Three imposing Portuguese women stood behind the counter daring me to speak to them in Portuguese. I turned it into a LAMP-style language learning opportunity. Since in Portugal you couldn’t actually pick up and handle the merchandise without it being handed to you reluctantly by a clerk, I had to ask for each pen by name. And since my tastes were becoming increasingly arcane this resulted in some amazing opportunities for deepening my vocabulary regarding words like “nib” and “ink.” These ladies were probably nice. And if I had a chance they might have invited me and my wife and three small children to their house for a late-night dinner. We never got past the, “Can I see that pen over there on the left. No not that one. Up higher” level, so our relationships remained necessarily formal and superficial.

Formality is something that we as Americans were not good at. We didn’t know that at the time. But our every gesture, our carefree bonhomie and our continual stupid grinning freaked the Portuguese out. If we had known, we would have grinned less, worn more brown, maybe smoked a few packs of cigarettes at the dinner table. Anything to somehow ingratiate ourselves to the cold inscrutable Lisbonites.

Instead of writing a novel this month I thought I would write a memoir of the last ten years or so. I’m unsure how much I can tell you without getting seriously in trouble. Would you like to hear more or should I just go back to ranting about cats?