Saudade*

*(pronounce the first d but the end sounds like the end of sausage)

I knew Saudade long before I set foot on Portuguese soil, before I read Saramago, before pasteis de nata settled in my belly and left a mustache of powdered sugar behind, just above my upper lip. She was not my oldest friend, the soul on earth I had known longer than anyone other than family. That distinction belonged to David from kindergarten and Saudade and I were fresher than that. She had left Northampton with me and stayed by my side in Boston. Once I returned to Long Island as my teaching career began, I didn’t hear from her for a number of years but by the time I stepped foot on School Street in CT, she had traveled to London, Paris, Bali and back with me. When hospice wheeled my father’s body out of the front door of 1552 North Street, we were finishing each other’s sentences.

Saudade is one of those foreign words Americans who love language and literature crave for their unique combinations of denotation and connotation to make meaning. German, for example, is a goldmine for such gems as the more commonly known schadenfreude (misfortune joy or pleasure derived from the troubles of others), and the lesser known but equally expressive kummerspeck (grief bacon or a particular form of stress eating after a breakup), and of course, weltschmerz (world pain or depression and weariness caused by world events; see 2020-?). These are words that can take fluent English speakers multiple sentences to explain and define. Like so.

With no direct English translation, saudade’s gist is an exquisite melancholic longing for those you have loved who are absent, not necessarily dead, and for the places you have loved that are distant, a homesickness for a home which you cannot remember, a lovesickness for a lover you cannot ever have again or may never have in the future. Longing, yearning, doing without combined with simultaneous grief and warm nostalgia. Saudade is what we sometimes feel when we think of elements of the before pandemic time that we deeply miss and believe will not return.

Before I even knew the Portuguese word saudade, circumstances conspired to introduce us. The socially lonely but intellectually stimulating time in graduate school, a settling into a small seaside town that became a haunting in which an ex-boyfriend’s ghost appeared prominently, though I only ever saw him in person at the Big Y twice in ten years. Commuting to work daily gave way to saudade when I crossed the bridge over the CT river and could clearly see home, Long Island, out the driver’s side window but from 20 years in the future. When my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and I was coming out of my skin with rage, my mother was coming out of linear time, and we were both coming out of reality as we knew it, I could not flee saudade.

In my office at work I placed pictures of a wide sandy beach I had never been to, a one bedroom apartment with 180 degree ocean views for sale on a cliff I had never climbed, and a world of intricate calcada pavement designs I longed to tread upon. These were the cultural and geographical trappings of the Portugal I met online, in books, and in collected travel guides galore. Though I lived in a community with many Portuguese immigrants and seafarers, those with Portuguese ancestry and ties, I knew very little Portuguese history, even less about what being Portuguese meant. So I researched.

I read novels set in Portugal. I tried to read Pessoa’s poetry. I listened to melancholic and expressive fado music. The Portuguese were explorers, emigrants, economic refugees, realists and dreamers, practical and extravagant. When flattened by a massive earthquake and decades of a dictator, they were rebuilders. The Portuguese began to feel like they might be my people and Portugal my place.

Years before while in Amsterdam, for more than just a few minutes, I was convinced that I looked Dutch, felt Dutch, was Dutch and that the Netherlands was my place. Usually, I identified as an impostor, an interloper in the places I frequented. Closed adoption adoptees, those born into secrecy and unknowing, often feel like we never quite fit in where we are, forever lurking on the periphery. There is no instant recognition of one’s own features on someone else’s face, no genetic trail of inheritance, no explanation for the traits and quirks the typically born commonly attribute to family. It’s difficult enough for those fully aware of their parentage to navigate self-hood, but what about when you don’t know whose eye color or nose you have inherited?

Or when questions of ethnicity and ethnic traditions in your family arise and you hesitate because your answer might not be honest or accurate and you want to be both?

I was Schmidt, Schmidt was German, but was I really German Schmidt? I felt Jewish, but who could say? Now Portugal felt like it might be the home port I had never known, but there remained the Dutch incident. Could there be two such home ports and both on a continent across the sea?

Compelled, I traveled solo to Portugal twice in four years, once to Lisbon on the mainland and once to the largest of its Azorean archipelago, Sao Miguel. It was not on the mainland that I felt the strongest pull of place, but 1000 miles off the coast on a tiny island in the vast Atlantic ocean among otherworldly volcanic formations, cliffside gardens, feral cats lovingly fed at immaculately landscaped view points and rest areas, cows and ubiquitous evergreen cow pastures. It was both familiar and strange.

Thermal pools, brooks, and streams pulsing with heat pervaded tropical gardens of giant cycads, stands of camellias, and blue hydrangeas which lined the roads and where wild azaleas also bloomed, hot pink. My little rental car climbed conical peaks to crater lakes before descending towards the ocean while frequently stopping on the main road for cow crossings.

Verdant, with an endless clean fresh water supply and year round temperate climate perfect for growing and harvesting, Sao Miguel, technically an autonomous region of Portugal, is a gardener’s paradise. Though I didn’t look Azorean, didn’t feel Azorean, couldn’t claim Azorean, I knew autonomous and I knew gardening. Together sovereign, there I could freely tend to my heart’s delight in the garden for many more months of the year than in New England, as well as read, write, work remotely and not have to quarantine my two aging cats upon entry. Better still, I wouldn’t have to lock myself away during the high humidity months in the air conditioning as I waited for menopausal heat to pass. Windows could be open, breezes were nearly guaranteed, as were frequent though short rain showers, and the penetrating cold of the mainland wouldn’t be an issue come winter.

Most challenging would be the language, which while listening to I found difficulty in distinguishing individual words, but nearly everyone under the age of 40 spoke English and those over 40 had learned French in school. I had enough French to get by and felt proud when a native Azorean told me my Portuguese had a French accent. This was no Amsterdam Dutch embodiment moment in that it wasn’t a spiritual recognition of from whence I must have come but instead seemed to suggest to where I must someday go home.

There were certainly easier and more affordable scientific ways to prove the macro geographic origins of my microscopic DNA but I was less interested in those than in how my body and mind responded while rooted in place in the Netherlands and in the Azores, to the felt connection between earth, architectures man-made and natural, the atmosphere, and quality of life. I had experienced an instantaneous incarnation in Amsterdam. In Sao Miguel, it took about 15 minutes.

Walking from the plane across the tarmac to the small customs area in the airport, literally on the edge of the earth and sea, utter calm and ease struck me and rode along in my rental car while on the coast-hugging road into Ponta Delgado, and throughout my stay. Immediately after the trip, Portugal and the Azores peppered my life, showing up on television shows, in the news, on Netflix, on my social media feeds, and even manifested in a person I became intimate with who was Portuguese by birth and of Azorean descent. Stateside, Portugal was now fully on my radar as each blip served like a homing signal reactivating directions to home.

What was last accessible two years ago remains out of reach amidst the pandemic — borders closed, flights cancelled, trips postponed. For the lucky, home means safety, ease, comfort, desires met, nerves calmed, anxiety squashed. When ill, often the place we most want to be is at home. After business trips and vacations, many of us long for its familiarity and comfort. Whose heart has not melted when hearing “I want to go home” uttered by tired young children or those in more advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease? A return to home is the most fundamental of urges, especially in times of distress. When that home is right, when that home nourishes, protects, provides a base from which one can thrive, felt sense deeply ingrains. Without it, we lose our way. Forced to wait out a global pandemic in the isolated home infected by a cabin fever we can no longer stand, if we’re lucky, like a Portuguese seafarer stumbling upon an Atlantic paradise, we recalibrate, navigate anew. I see in the distance the home for which saudade makes me homesick.