doing penance

On Wednesday, Lisbon got out of town. Picked up and left, just like that.

I can’t blame her. The mercury in the thermometers is bubbling towards 40 and the ocean breeze doesn’t make it this far inland.

Wednesday, you’ll recall, was August 1^st – a day revered by many Lisboetas as The Day to Skip Town for a Month of Summer Holidays. It’s a yearly migration as faithfully observed as July 1^st Moving Day in Montreal. For one month each year Lisbon is abandoned by its inhabitants, left at the mercy of the cameras and fanny packs that fill in the gaps in Europe’s Most Charming Capital!

As everyone else who could was heading towards friendlier sun and lazier days, I was trundling in a half-empty 31 bus towards the un-air-conditioned classrooms of the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Letters. Lisbon’s August visitors include a particular subset of students, of whom I am part. A hundred or so people, from places as varied as Morocco, China and India have given up their Augusts to the dangerously seductive Portuguese Language. Dangerous because her pronunciation is treacherous, her spelling deceiving and her grammar obscene. Seductive because – well, the reasons are many. Each of the eight students in my superior class has their own. Some, like the art instructor from Madrid or the German teacher from Italy, have made Portugal an annual vacation spot. A few, including a dark and handsome laywer from Galicia and a Czech girl, are on Erasmus hangovers – university students who came for a semester and never left. One girl from Macau is on a scholarship to learn the language, earn her law degree, and go back home to make sense of the legal system the Portuguese left behind in that former colony.

I’m there to do penance.

Like the other Portuguese kids in Abu Dhabi – we were only a handful – I was subject to weekly language classes. I whined my way through a decade of Portuguese lessons, through six tenses of verb conjugation (and I was getting off easy, there are more), memorization of royal dynasties (including each King’s nickname), and countless compositions (usually finished on the way to class). I finally whined my way out in grade 12, but by then enough of it had sunk in.

When my professor called roll on the first day he laughed when he got to me. Between the overflow of consonants that is Petra’s Czech name and the difficult transliteration of Hidemi’s Japanese name, my three very run-of-the-mill Portuguese names must looked a bit out of place. I have Portuguese stamped all over my face, my accent, my ID – I couldn’t pretend to be something else if I tried.

I don’t feel out of place, though. It’s all a bit déjà vu – rules I once knew, blanks I once filled, questions I once answered. Over the years the grammar I once knew has been replaced by a very hazy sense of things ‘sounding right’ – which is not always good enough. I’ve been impressed by how well my classmates speak. And they’re forcing me to stop eating my vowels and explain the bizarre proverbs and idiomatic expressions that I’ve inherited from my mother. Most of them have excellent grammar, product of university-level drills in the stuff I’ve learned – incorrectly – from the way that people speak. At the end of the four weeks we will all take the DUPLE – the universally recognized test of Portuguese as a second language. Because I have a bit of an edge, I hope to kick its butt. Then my penance will be complete.