This is a love story
Dinner silhouetted by a Portuguese sunset.
Despite having lived in the south of Portugal all my life, my love affair with it only began a few years ago. Our relationship had been rocky as I grew up. There were things I half-heartedly liked: the sun, the gritty coldness of the sea. A little older, and I liked the fact that you could get into clubs, dance to Brazilian funk you only vaguely knew the words to, and then sit and smoke cheap cigarettes, feeling cool and oh so grown up. Portugal was hot, and everything seemed to be free and possible, and nothing was against the rules. These played important factors in its likability. But the thrill of its summer was fleeting.
A number of expats live in the Algarve, but upon starting school I realised quite quickly that being a foreigner was totally and completely uncool. The school was split: the international side, and the national side. We learnt in English, they learnt in Portuguese. We didn’t like each other, for no discernible reason. In fact, I have a clear memory of the two sides fighting in year three, a majestic display of clashing sticks that culminated in one of my classmates getting a rock to the eye and needing stitches.
The chasm that existed between us wasn’t addressed, and only grew as the years went by. Feeble attempts were made for us to interact in joint music lessons, during which we sat at opposite ends of the classroom and didn’t speak. They were cool and athletic, and I would stare enviously at the girls cartwheeling across the grass. We, the internationals, made friends with each other. They, the nationals, did the same. We skirted around one other, oil and water in the same toxic space.
I desperately wanted to replicate their Portuguese-ness. The fact that the language did not come naturally to me (I still have a faintly queasy recollection of primary school Portuguese lessons) felt like a rejection. Our inability to interact with each other felt like another. I wanted to speak like them, to be able to reproduce the drowsy, hushed sounds of their voice. To tan, not freckle and burn. I violently and viciously wanted to be less of a bifa, the name they give to tourists prone to roasting in the sun. I even wanted to go to England, to the country of my first language, where me forgetting the word for something would simply mean I had lost my train of thought, and was not the tell-tale sign of being a foreigner. I remember, in fact, learning the word for foreigner: estrangeiro. I had found it insulting. Strange, it sounded like to me. Foreign, strange. The words mingled in my mind, became one and the same.
I began to resent the place. Decided I hated the slowness of it. I was a mosquito in amber, it seemed, and time was trickling past me in a way that made the sun spin the days on for eternity, and people, words, waves all seemed to move at the same slow, lapping pace. I wanted to leave and propel myself somewhere where everything was rapid and exciting and where life didn’t end with the summer. I went to a school abroad at sixteen and for three years was lifted into a whirlwind of what I felt was real life, a feeling abruptly cut short with the pandemic forcing a dejected landing home mid gap year. I was back, this time for months, with no movement or excitement in sight. It was me and my thoughts and the dust in the air that seemed to drift as slowly as everything else.
My affection started tentatively: a mildly embarrassing teen crush. I was going on a lot of walks, and often found myself stumbling to a halt and gazing with faint surprise at my surroundings, confused as to why I had previously used walks to think rather than look. But now I stopped, from time to time, and slowed my pace to an amble. I let my thoughts of covid and the future flit away in favour of an absent glance at the eucalyptus trees. At a lizard that skittered across a peeling wall. I aimlessly picked a few lemons to bring home, just because the colour was a happy one. By accident, I let the country start to seep into me, in a way I hadn’t done before.
The coy flirtation didn’t last long. I had started noticing, now, and was heart-struck by everything I had not noticed for so long. I felt a blossom of warmth every time the morning revealed a blue sky. My father took me down a dirt track and through a wall of brambles that hid a field of wildflowers, drying and gem-like and shocking against the crumbling earth. He showed me the footprints of wild boars that had waded through the muddy beds of streams. Pushed aside wiry, unforgiving shrubs that grew in a sort of fierce protest against the heart. We passed someone on the road as we walked back, and the Bom Dia that greeted us was soft and gentle, it curled under the sun. It did not possess the challenging harshness I had remembered. I was smitten, well and truly in the honeymoon phase.
The feeling became familiar. My walks lengthened, became afternoons of propping myself against whitewashed stone, crunching through yellowing grass, gazing at turtles that swam in earthy clouds of water. Watching as my skin finally, finally, took on a tan. We got a puppy, and I liked the way the sun soaked her fur. Portugal was kind to her, I thought, she likes it here. I started loving it.
The pandemic prompted a shift in me, slow and gradual, in true Algarvian style: I was as Portuguese as I was estrangeira. I could be both, I realised, foreign and native. The south of Portugal faces prejudice, and I find myself getting defensive, retorting at northerners who comment on the work ethic of the south. Things may get done slower here, I heard myself telling a girl at work from Viseu. But only because we’re content taking our time.
I’ve grown to love, then, its drowsiness, and have come to realise that there is movement here, albeit a different kind of movement. Not in the sped-up comings and goings of a city, but in the cars that rev erratically across the uneven tarmac. In the dogs that limp the streets with dusted paws. In the oranges that balloon on swaying branches, and in the wasps that swarm over them when they fall and rot. The movement is a rhythm as familiar as my heartbeat. When my brother worked in Porto, he asked a co-worker what he thought of the southerners. The man had given a dismissive shrug. Heads baked by the sun, he had said.
The open prejudice of the man made me laugh, and I laugh at it now. Everything in the south is baked by the sun, I think, terracotta-like: cracked roads and tanned skin and bicas, beetle dark, fiercely strong coffee. It is, in my eyes, still not perfect. The slowness still frustrates me occasionally, stirs up the old restlessness. This comes in the form of perpetual road works, the impossibilities of Portuguese bureaucracy, and buses that do not ever arrive for no apparent reason. (Do other countries have non-urgent ambulances?)
But it’s mine, with its sun-baked imperfection. I looked up the word estrangeiro. It comes from the Latin extraneus, with extra meaning ‘outside’.
I realise now, I was outside for a while. I like to think I’ve come in.
All images belong to Clementine Lussiana, unless otherwise stated.
