ALTERNATIVE ROUTES
Calle MĂ©ridaânorthbound
Around six in the evening, when that last layer of daylight begins to detach itself from the objects in our living room and the electric light only serves to blur the somewhat unclear outlines of things even further, I feel an urge to leave the apartment. I donât know if itâs because matter itself becomes restless with the first shadows of nightâas if darkness allows objects to overflow a little beyond themselves and things are on the point of breaking their pact of silence with the worldâor if itâs just I who canât find peace at that tranquil hour. And itâs around that time too that Sara comes back from work and takes out her painting materials. The apartment fills with kettle murmurs, barefoot steps, the pine-forest smell of oils and thinner. I put on the old hat Iâve taken to wearing, get on my bicycle, and go out into the streets of the Colonia Roma.
A few blocks later, I chain my bike to a lamppost and go into the LibrerĂa del Tesoroâone of the few bookstores left in the neighborhood. I look for a Portuguese dictionary, which, once again, I canât find. I shall have to continue putting off my good intentions to learn Portuguese the proper way. Instead, I buy two books of Brazilian poetry and a postcard for forty-seven pesos. Iâm beginning to suspect that what I like about Portuguese is misunderstanding it.
Some years ago, I attended a conference in which two experts were discussing the Portuguese term saudade. It was one of those events where the speakers establish a hierarchical relationship between themselves and the audience, the members of which come away with the sole idea that they havenât really understood what was being discussed. The first ladyâwhom I had trouble taking seriously as she vaguely resembled a wrinkled version of the child Shirley Templeâargued that saudade is one of those untranslatable words that can only be understood by those who love, experience pleasure, and suffer in Portuguese. If you are not a lusophone, the other speaker declared, you have no right to borrow saudade. Could be. But then, why not just steal the word?
Itâs started raining outside, so I grab a stool and sit down between two sets of shelves to take a look at my new books. I search for any trace of the word saudade among their pages. Nothing. But some lines I half understand jump out at me:
calçadas que pisei
que me pisaram
como saber no asfalto da memoria
o ponto em que comença a fantasia?
Iâm not sure what the lines say, though the words ponto, asfalto, memoria, and fantasia form a dim constellation of possible meaningsâperhaps all connected to saudade. When we have only a partial knowledge of a language, the imagination fills in the sense of a word, a phrase, or a paragraphâlike those drawing books where the pages are covered with dots that, as children, we had to join with a crayon to reveal the complete image. I donât understand Portuguese, or I understand it as partially as any other Spanish speaker. If I say âsaudade,â it will always be joining the dots of a foreign page.
Turn left at Durango
Saudade isnât homesickness, lack, or longing. The Finnish kaihomielisyysâthough it contains smooth, mellifluous soundsâexpresses only its most desolate sense. The German Sehnsucht and the Icelandic söknudur seem to suck out the meaning of the word; the Polish tesknota sounds bureaucratic; the Czech stesk shrinks, cringes, cowers; and the Estonian igatsus would come closer if spoken backwards. Maybe saudade isnât saudade.
Circle Plaza Rio de Janeiroâclockwise
Although saudade is loosely related to melancholy and nostalgia, the origins of the word are unclear. Itâs possible that it was the name of a Portuguese sailing ship, the SĂŁo Daede, which, in 1497, preceded Vasco da Gama in the exploration of the Indian Ocean. It may be derived from the Latin solitudinis or the desert saudah of the Arabs. It could also have been a musical instrument from the coast of Mozambique, or just as possibly the name of a voluptuous woman from the jungles of Guinea Bissau.
Left again at Orizaba
Melancholy used to be a humor, an excess of black bile. Aristotle thought it was a divine gift, only given to men of true genius. In the Middle Ages, melancholyâs fetid vapors were thought to dim understanding and perturb the soul. Of the four bodily humorsâphlegm, yellow bile, blood, and melancholyâthe last was the coldest and driest. The melancholic person had sunken eyes and a taciturn expression: he was circumspect, stern, and solitary; insomniac and given to nightmares; passionate and jealous. He had a waxen complexion, was flatulent, his excretions were painful, his urine colorless and sparse. The cause of melancholy, according to popular wisdom, was poor diet, and it was cured by purges, unguents, poultices, and bloodletting.
With time, the number of causes of melancholy grew and became less worldly:
The planet Saturn
Idleness
Excess of knowledge
Witches and wizards
The cures, however, remained terrestrial. In 1586, in a letter to an imaginary melancholic patient, Dr. Timothy Right recommended that he avoid:
Cabbage, dates, olives
Leguminous plants and chickpeas
Pig meat, mutton, and goat
Seals and porpoises
Continue along Orizabaâride on sidewalk to avoid traffic
Bastard daughter of melancholy, the term nostalgia inherited the characteristics of black bile but never achieved its former divine status. The magic humors of mother melancholy evaporated in the three dry syllables of her aseptic daughter: nos-tal-gia. Like other such âalgiasâ as cephalalgia and neuralgia, nostalgia was, in the seventeenth century, firmly fixed as a clinical condition. Itâs no surprise that its appearance coincides with the era in which âafflictions of the soulâ became âpathologies of the psyche.â
Nostalgia was the invention of Johannes Hofer, a military doctor. Hofer treated Swiss soldiers who, after long periods in foreign lands, suffered from a set of common symptoms: headaches, sleeplessness, heaviness of heart, hearing voices and seeing ghosts. The exiled soldiers took on a gloomy, almost phantasmagorical aspectâthey walked around as if absent from the world and in their imaginations confused the past and the present.
Hofer made note of every one of the soldiers who came into his consulting room during the year 1688, and as the number of nostalgic cases on his list grew, so too did his impatience to organize that series of coincidences into a single pathology. Like someone who awaits the passage of a comet in order to be able to place his name on the celestial map, Hofer waited for the arrival of the very last soldier to christen his hypothesis. Then, satisfied, he closed his casebook and began his Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia.
Nostalgia, according to Hofer, is an illness that expresses itself in a specific symptom: pain (algia) for the home (nostos). And like any other illness, remedies can be found to treat it. If the nostalgia is a longing for something concrete, it may perhaps be weakened by eclipsing the memory of what was with the overwhelming presence of what is. Leeches, for example, may distract the mind from the abstract pain of the loss of home by the very real pain of their bites. Opium constructs inebriating scenarios that mist the memory of the past.
But the soldiers eventually became immune to such palliatives. After many experiments, Hofer concluded that nothing produced better results than sending them back home.
Turn right at Tabasco
There is no such thing as a nostalgic or âsaudadicâ child, but there are melancholy ones. When I was about five years old someone told me you could dig a tunnel all the way to China. We were living in Central America and I thought I could save my family the expense of the plane fare by digging my way home. If someone had got as far as China, I could surely get to Mexico, which was much closer. I asked my father to tell me the exact direction of our house there and he drew me a map. I started digging a tunnel in a corner of the garden.
The tunnel project dragged on for several weeks, until I began to get bored.
I was on the point of abandoning the holeâby that time quite deepâwhen I suddenly hit something solid: a possible treasure chest. The three following mornings, I dug around that hard surface and completely forgot the original plan. Then I extended the treasure hunt. In the end, I made holes all over the garden, but never found anything more than a few earthworms and the water tank. Naturally, my parents began to lose patience. They ordered me to call a halt to the excavation. I obeyed, but it seemed to me that I should put the holes to good use by burying something in each of them. In one I hid some marbles, in another a toy train, and in a third a horrible paperweight with a snowscape. In the main hole, where the treasure that turned out to be a water tank had been, I placed the map my father had drawn for me. I thought that some future childâwho, coincidentally, would also be Mexican and living in that same houseâcould reconstruct the story of the holes. Making use of more modern instruments than mine, that child would find the map and come to visit me in Mexico. And if too many years went by and I died, there would at least be a trace of my passage through that garden. From that moment, the garden stopped being an invitation to return to Mexico and became instead the promise of the future discoveries of that other child: I was cured of my precocious melancholic temperamentâlike a patient in the Middle Agesâby a bit of earth.
Ride on sidewalk for one block
Saudade, whic...