London Portuguese (Without Translation)
John Madrid
i.
The app says: ORDER ASSIGNED. The app says: CUSTOMER WAITING. The app says: You are 0.3 miles away.
I say: Coming now.
These are my three languages for the street.
ii. Glossary: Coming now
Not: I am coming now.
Not: I will arrive shortly.
Not: Já estou indo, espera um segundo que tô no sinal.
Coming now is a complete sentence in rider English. It contains an apology, a promise, and whatever is happening on Seven Sisters Road. It is the language of a person who has learned that brevity reads as competence.
iii.
At the restaurant counter I say: Sorry mate, order for— and show the screen. The cook doesn't look up. The bag is already there. He has done this a thousand times with a thousand people holding a thousand phones. We have a small shared language of efficiency. It doesn't require names.
I take the bag. I say: Cheers.
He says: Safe.
Both of us have managed it perfectly.
iv. How to say: the bag is heavier than I expected and my shoulder has been hurting since October
You don't.
v.
There is a second job, which is the other job. On the bus home, still in the jacket, I open a document and read other people's sentences. I cut a word. I add a comma. Someone in New York is paying me twenty dollars per thousand words to make their prose feel more considered. The rate has not changed in three years.
The bus goes through Finsbury Park. A man near the door is eating chips. The smell is specific — vinegar, warmth, something like kindness. I don't write this down.
vi.
A landlord text, received October, transcribed here exactly:
Hi can you let me know when rent going in this month as I have my own bills to pay thanks
The "thanks" is doing a lot of work. I have studied British thanks the way you study a warning sign: the polite ones are the most dangerous. I pay the rent. I do not explain that I paid the rent three days early. I write back: Hi — should be with you by Friday, thanks.
I use "thanks" too. I have learned.
vii. Glossary: All good
A phrase I use in English that has no equivalent in the Portuguese I grew up speaking.
In Portuguese there is tá bom, which means roughly: okay, understood, that will do. There is sem problema, which is warmer, more generous. There is pode deixar, which is hard to explain — something like: leave it with me, I'll take care of it, trust me.
All good is faster than any of these. It asks nothing of the other person. It closes the conversation without leaving a door open.
I say it many times a day. I have started to wonder what I mean by it.
viii.
The GP receptionist says: And is this urgent?
I say: I think it might be, yes.
She says: Can you describe the issue briefly?
I describe it briefly. She types. She does not look up while she types, which is its own kind of efficiency. She says they can offer me an appointment in three weeks. She says if it becomes an emergency I should call 111. She says: Okay?
I say: Yes, thank you.
She has given me nothing and I have thanked her for it. This is, I understand, correct behaviour. I go back through the glass door into the cold. There's a word in Portuguese — sufoco — that means a tightness, a difficulty breathing, but also the feeling of being pressed from all sides at once. I think of it on the pavement and then I stop thinking of it, the way you stop reaching for a word you've decided not to use.
ix.
CUSTOMER WAITING.
The intercom is broken. I press it anyway. I press it again. I type into the notes field: Buzzer not working, please come to door. I wait. My rating depends on the customer coming to the door. My pay depends on my rating. I stand in the rain on a street whose name I will have forgotten by morning.
The door opens. The customer is young and in socks and holds the door with one hand and reaches for the bag with the other without making eye contact. I say: Have a good evening.
The door closes.
I think: Boa noite. The phrase comes up in me involuntarily, like a reflex, like something the body still wants to say.
x. How to say: proof of address
A letter addressed to you at your current address, proving that you live where you live. This is circular logic built into a bureaucratic system, and it is also, in practice, something that does not arrive easily when you have moved four times in two years.
You take the bank statement to the council. You take the council letter to the bank. You take them both to the letting agent who says: this is a bit unusual.
This is not a translation problem. It is a documentation problem. The difference matters and also doesn't.
xi.
Voice note received from my mother, Sunday, 11:47pm her time:
[forty-two seconds]
She is telling me about something that happened at the market. Something about a woman she used to know. The story goes sideways, comes back, goes sideways again, finds its own destination. She does not edit herself. She is not performing for anyone. She says my name in the middle of the forty-two seconds for no reason except, I think, that she is still in the habit of saying it.
I listen to it twice on the bus, the second time without headphones by mistake, so the woman beside me can hear my mother's voice in miniature, filling the space between us. I don't find a way to feel embarrassed about this.
xii.
What I send home: Tá tudo bem, tô trabalhando bastante.
Which means: everything fine, working a lot.
Which means: I am not explaining the intercom, or the receptionist, or the thanks, or the twenty dollars per thousand words. I am giving you the edited version, the one that requires nothing from you at a distance of nine thousand kilometres. I am giving you tá tudo bem the way you hand a customer a bag: quickly, correctly, without incident.
xiii. Glossary: Heartburn
What I tell people I have when I don't want to say: a tightness in the chest that arrives in the evening and may or may not be physiological.
What people say: Oh yeah, Gaviscon is really good for that.
What I do: buy the Gaviscon, which works, mostly. The word is a good container. It holds just enough.
xiv.
There is a word my grandmother used — aperto — which is not heartburn and not anxiety. It is the feeling of being held too tightly by circumstances. Not squeezed to the point of pain. Just held. Just aware of the pressure.
She used it about money. About the rains that didn't come. About the particular loneliness of Sunday afternoons in a house where everyone had already left.
I have not found a use for it here in conversation. Not because the feeling is absent. Because the language doesn't have the slot for it, and I have not yet earned the right to introduce new containers.
xv.
On a Friday night in November, between one delivery and the next, I sit in a chicken shop and open the document again and read a sentence I wrote a week ago:
She said nothing, because there was nothing that could be said that would not cost her something.
I read it three times. I think it is good. I think it is about me and not about the character at all. I close the document. The app says: ORDER ASSIGNED.
I go.
xvi.
The thing that doesn't translate is not the word. It's the weight behind the word. Underneath there is a whole geology — family, class, region, weather, the specific smell of a kitchen at a particular hour, the way a particular person said your name on a particular afternoon.
You can translate the word. The geology stays where it is.
xvii.
Last thing before sleep: I check the app. I check the inbox. I check WhatsApp. I check the bank. The same four gestures, in the same order, every night.
I write three sentences in a document I will not send to anyone yet.
I think: saudade — and then I think: no. That's too easy. That's the word tourists use, the word that has been translated so many times it has become a souvenir of itself. It belongs on a tea towel now. It belongs in an airport.
I think instead of the forty-two seconds, the market story, the woman she used to know, the way it found its own destination.
I turn off the light.
In the dark, quietly, to no one: Boa noite. Not a translation. Not a performance. Just keeping the language warm, the way you keep a fire going not because you need it right now but because you might.
