My Brazilian Portuguese Got Me Laughed At, Kindly, All the Way Up the Coast

The First Sentence I Got Wrong

The immigration officer at Maputo airport asked me where I was staying, and I answered him in my best, warmest Recife accent. He looked up from my passport, paused, and then burst out laughing. Not unkindly. He laughed the way you laugh when a child says something adult.

"You sound like the television," he said, in a Portuguese that was clipped and careful and completely unlike mine. "My mother watches you every night."

He meant the Brazilian telenovelas. I would hear that sentence, or some version of it, perhaps twenty times over the following ten days.

I had been living in Cape Town for six years by then, working as a dental hygienist, married to a South African engineer named Craig who speaks exactly four words of Portuguese and pronounces all of them like a rugby commentator. For six years I had been the only Portuguese speaker in every room I walked into. I missed my language the way you miss a person. Mozambique was close, it was lusophone, and I had built it up in my head as a place where I would finally be understood without effort.

I was wrong about the effort part. I was right about the understanding.

Why We Went At All

The trip was Craig's idea, really. My father had died the previous winter in Recife and I had not been able to fly home in time. I spent months afterwards speaking Portuguese to nobody but my sister on the phone, crying in a language my husband could not follow. One evening Craig put his laptop in front of me with a page of Mozambique beach resorts open and said, "Go somewhere they speak like your dad. I will carry the bags and keep quiet."

He did not keep quiet. But he did carry the bags.

I remember being nervous in a way I could not explain. I think I was afraid that even the language would feel foreign, that I would arrive and discover there was nowhere left on earth that sounded like home.

Learning That Mine Was Not the Only Portuguese

On the drive from Maputo, our driver, a man called Arsénio with a gap in his front teeth and an encyclopaedic knowledge of football, corrected me gently and constantly. When I said "você", he smiled. When I dropped my final syllables the way people do in the north of Brazil, he repeated the word back to me with all its letters restored, like returning a lost earring.

"In Brazil you sing," he told me. "Here we speak."

He taught me words I had never heard. Words borrowed from Changana and Ronga that had slipped into everyday Portuguese, words for food and for weather and for the kind of tiredness you feel after a long day in the sun. I wrote them in the notes on my phone, phonetically and badly. Craig, in the back seat, kept asking what was so funny. Arsénio and I kept not telling him.

At a roadside stall we stopped for cashews roasted in a tin drum and bread rolls the woman called pão. She asked where I was from, then called her sister over to listen to me talk. The two of them giggled and asked me to say "saudade." When I did, they both put a hand on their hearts in mock swoon. I laughed so hard I had to sit on the low wall beside the road.

That was the first time since my father died that I had laughed in Portuguese.

The Place by the Water

I will not pretend I chose where we stayed carefully. I had read through a dozen lists with titles about Mozambique luxury resorts and honestly, after a while, they all blurred into the same turquoise photograph. What I wanted was a bed, the sea and people to talk to. We got all three.

What I remember most is not the room, though it was lovely and smelled of salt and clean linen. It is the evenings. The staff would gather near the bar at the end of a shift, and once they discovered the Brazilian woman who talked like their grandmothers' favourite soap opera, I was invited into the conversation every night.

There was a waiter, Celso, who wanted to know if people in Recife really danced in the street during Carnival or if that was just on television. There was a young woman at reception, Nilza, who was studying tourism by correspondence and wanted to practise her English on Craig while I practised my Mozambican Portuguese on her. Craig was delighted. For once, he was the one being asked for help with language.

We swapped words like trading cards. I taught them "cafuné," the Brazilian word for running your fingers through someone's hair. They taught me "machimbombo," which is what they call a bus, and which I refused to believe for a full day because it sounded so much like a joke.

The Night I Talked About My Father

On the sixth night, a storm came in off the water. The power flickered and the staff lit candles along the bar. Nilza asked me, in the easy way young people ask enormous questions, why I had really come.

I told her about my father. That he was a fisherman's son who became a schoolteacher. That he had read Portuguese poetry aloud to me at dinner, Drummond and Bandeira, until I was old enough to roll my eyes. That I had missed his funeral because the flights were impossible and the money was not there and the timing was wrong, and that I had not said a single sentence about him in his own language since, except to my sister, through tears, on a bad phone line.

She listened. Celso listened. Arsénio, who had come by to drop off another guest, listened. And then Celso, who it turned out loved poetry too, recited the opening lines of a poem by José Craveirinha, the Mozambican poet, in a slow, low voice while the rain hammered the thatch.

I did not understand every word. The accent, the rhythm, the references were all slightly different from what I knew. But I understood enough. I understood that my father's language was bigger than my father's country, and that it had travelled across an ocean and taken root here and grown into something with its own shape. I had come to find something that sounded like home and I had found something better. Something that sounded like a cousin.

I cried, of course. Craig held my hand and did not ask what anyone was saying. He knew.

What I Brought Back

When we got home to Cape Town, I sat down and wrote my sister a long voice note, in Portuguese, about everything. I used Arsénio's words. I told her about the machimbombo. She laughed at me down the line exactly the way the immigration officer had.

I started reading Craveirinha that winter, slowly, with a dictionary. I joined a small online group of Portuguese speakers living in South Africa, mostly Mozambicans and Angolans with a couple of lost Brazilians like me. We meet on video once a month and argue about grammar.

A colleague at work asked me recently where she should go for her anniversary, and whether I thought the best hotels in Mozambique were worth the trip compared to somewhere closer. I told her I could not speak to which hotel was best. I could only tell her that if she let people talk to her, really talk, she would come home with more than a tan.

Craig still says "obrigado" like a man ordering a beer at a braai. But he has learned "saudade," and he uses it correctly, which is more than I ever expected. Some nights, when I go quiet, he asks if it is saudade. Usually it is. And for the first time since my father died, that feels less like a wound and more like something I am allowed to carry.