Doomed Yet Happy:
What Fires the Portuguese Heart?

Bem-vindo de volta! Welcome back!

Suppose a person came up to you with a microphone and a cameraman in tow. Then she asked, “in just one single word tell me who you are; what one single word describes you exactly, to a tee”? Most of us, if not everyone of us, would be hard-pressed to answer. And among those that could answer, no two answers would likely be the same. That is unless you are Portuguese.

Quintessentially Portuguese

Nearly every, if not every, Portuguese person would immediately offer, without much hesitation, saudade. Right on the heals of this answer, further explanation would certainly follow. “Saudade is not something that you could possibly understand if you are not Portuguese.”

Saudade is the Portuguese national identity; people claim it with pride and fierce devotion. Saudade is like their language that they believe too nettlesome and too difficult for other people to speak. For the Portuguese, saudade is their heart and their soul, therefore, how could anyone else understand it, really?

I agree with my friends here in Portugal that saudade is what defines them. In addition, the sentiments and the emotions tied up into saudade are not easy to untangle nor to express, in words at least. I part with my Portuguese friends, however, that somehow both saudade and they are alien from the rest of us.

Saudade, far from making the Portuguese different, I think it makes them more recognizable. Saudade just may be the reason why everyone enjoys visiting Portugal; why we fee safe and at home when we arrive for our first visit and then every time we return. Perhaps we find in the Portuguese people, their culture and their language something both familiar and lost to us.  

What Is Saudade?

Saudade is the inscrutable “something” that we all feel and that we all recognize; it is common to all living beings. Portuguese history and geography have perhaps forced the Portuguese to hold it closer and tighter than the rest of us. Nonetheless, saudade dwells deep in all of us, in everything.

Because saudade is so darn hard to put into words, I would like to share a couple of stories with you. Two of these stories are momentary observations of people and place that I bump into consistently in Santa Luzia; the third is personal. The first story is about Portuguese people and the second is about Portugal the place. The third is about my great-great-grandmother. Please bear with me, if you will.

Between Past and Future: The Calm Diggers

Santa Luzia is a small village of about 1,600 residents. The majority of the residents are Portuguese and many are older; however, a sizable minority are like myself, expats, both seasonal and year-rounders although most seem to be seasonal. There are a handful, five or so, of the Portuguese residents, whom I see and encounter regularly; they are the principals in my first story.

The handful are all men. Each is in his forties, but I am only guessing from their appearances. They are all fit, that is, thin and taut; they are each quite handsome in that worn, 1960s American Western movie kind of way.

I have only said bom dia or boa tarde to them when we have passed on the street. Whenever we have been close enough to exchange greetings we have always been headed in opposite directions. Mostly, however, I have seen them from a distance. Then they are working in the tidal mudflats, digging for the small clams in the Ria Formosa.

Rhythms of Tide and Time

They and their work follow the rhythms of the ria and its tides. Low tide is when they can work so I have seen them out just before dawn, in early morning, in mid-afternoon and in early evening. Each time the tide has ebbed with the moon. In winter’s chilly dim light and in the blistering summer sun they are working the few available hours they can.

When I have seen them up-close they have passed me on their bike. They carry small, heavy bags bursting with the tiny clams. They are on their way into Tavira to sell their catches to one of the restaurants that cater more to locals than to the tourists. I know because I have seen one or another of them outside one or another such restaurant. Jauntily posed against a high table, they enjoy a beer in muddy splendor.

These are men born between the Carnation Revolution in 1974 and the beginning of the EU Generation in 1986. Their work is the subsistence type reminiscent of 1950s Salazarismo  isolationism although Portugal now leans hard into 21st century hi-tech and green-innovation. These men live, essentially, between the past and the future, while part of neither.

Between Land and Sea 

My second story brings us back to our daily walks on the rutted dirt roads behind our village. There is a point along one of these roads where the view is of rolling farmland cascading right down into the ocean. This is a mirage in fact. Where you stand is at the crest of a small hill. It tricks the eye by obscuring the road, the river and the barrier island that lay before the open ocean.

While I know that this vista is a deceit, nothing, however, says as much to me about Portugal and its people than this view across the land directly into the Atlantic. The essence of Portugal and the Portuguese is the sum of this sliver of land and the vast ocean beyond. The country is not an island floating in vastness, but the thin, sharp edge of a massive continent. It is the boundary between land and sea, between here and out there.

The Edge of the World

Portugal was once considered the end of world, to Europeans at least. Geographically, it is not far from the truth. Lusitânia is the Latin name for Portugal and it was the furtherest west that a Roman legionnaire could be posted. Under the Moors Portugal was a world away from the opulent courts at Córdova and elsewhere in al-Andulus. Lisbon is a long way from Bonn, Brussels and the Hague, further than all other European capitals. Well, that is, except Athens, which is a just several hundred kilometers further. Nonetheless, others we might think of as far-far away, like Kyiv, Sofia and Bucharest, are closer to Europe’s power-center than Lisbon.

Historically, Portugal has always faced toward the Atlantic with its back to the rest of Europe. It grew wealthy and powerful — much more so than its bigger neighbors of Spain, France and England — because it cast itself into the Atlantic to reach Brazil, Africa and Asia. Separate, it has made its own way and its own history by eschewing engagement, that is, war, with its neighbors.

As a result of geography and history, Portugal is an introverted, pensive and self-reflective country; and, so are its people. Country and people seem, simultaneously, intimate and familiar as well as distant and diffident. The people embody in equal parts the intimacy of a small, confined land and the remoteness of the vast ocean. They seem, to me, like that boundary between land and sea.

This Is Saudade

I am not Portuguese and perhaps I cannot and should try to define saudade. Yet I feel a great affinity for the Portuguese people despite the short time that we have lived here. Our move to Portugal has felt to me, in some respects, like a homecoming, at least psychically and emotionally. Possibly this is because I recognize bits of saudade within myself.

For me, saudade is the place between differences, whether the past and the future, whether the land and the sea, or, whether the “who you are” and the “who you will become”. Saudade is the habitable space between two worlds. It is a threshold or a doorway where turning back or moving forward inevitably involves both loss and hope. 

Saudade is, as well, the many simultaneous feelings you experience when on this threshold. It is the yearning after and mourning for what is left behind as well as the yearning for and the dread of what lay ahead. Saudade values what you leave behind as much as what you hope to find next. It also understands that you cannot hold on to one while moving toward the other, you must let go. 

Saudade and the Summer of 1865

This last story brings saudade home for me. It helps me understand saudade because it is a personal story, part of my story. It is about my great-great-grandmother, Margaret Mary, who was known as Maggie, of course. She stands on the docks of Cobh in the summer of 1865. She is just 19. Her left hand cups firmly but gently the head of her toddler daughter, also Maggie, my great-grandmother. In front of her bobs a great wooden hulk of a ship, bigger than anything she has seen before.

At her back is the entire and only world she has ever known, County Cork. If Maggie dared look back over her shoulder, she would see the morning mist and the wee-bit of sun poking the emerald green hills. Behind is her village, her sisters and her brothers, and her friends and her neighbors. Back there is also the churchyard where countless generations of Murphy’s lay at rest with her mother and her father.

Maggie is overwhelmed with grief and sadness for all that is behind her. She also throbs with equal parts excitement and fear as she stands on the creaking pier waiting to board. Maggie will never return to Cork, she will never see her sisters or brothers again. She will never walk the path through the meadow and across the field to her sheep as she did everyday before this morning.

Five years earlier, on one of those everydays, she first spotted Cornelius mending a fence in the field. He was then a boy of 15 who came from Youghal to find work in Cobh. She had just turned 14. Now with her husband she will make a new life in America. Cornelius will find better work, her daughter will go to school, they will have a house and, perhaps, a small garden. At least these are her dreams.

Looking In The Mirror

This is saudade, or how I understand it. I think it is the heart of the Portuguese. They are a people on the threshold, that is, in between one side and the other. They carry loss and sadness for what they have left behind under one arm. Under the other arm they tuck optimism and dreams for what might be. Their national personality has not shaken off one in favor of the other, as other nationalities seem to have done.

What many visitors to Portugal ascribe to its people — friendliness, openness, patience, deference, generosity, a wide-armed welcoming of strangers — is attributable to saudade. The Portuguese hold the “in-between” in balance. That is, they feel mournful loss and wide-eyed optimism simultaneously. They do not seem to wrestle with themselves in order to give one the upper hand over the other.

Moreover, saudade allows the Portuguese to see their own face mirrored in the face of the other in front of them. Perhaps they are just a bit less able to ignore the commonality with, the familiarity of, the stranger than the rest of us. Why? Because they are forever the stranger who leaves behind, then weeps, and then smiles with expectation for what lay across the threshold.

The friendliness and easy openness of the Portuguese people, I think, derives from their history, their geography and their cultural adaption to both. Saudade enables a capacity to welcome the stranger, because the Portuguese feel themselves to be strangers. It enables them to make the guest feel at ease and at home because they themselves are ill at ease with where they are. They understand the migrant because themselves recognize their own hopes and dreams that push them away from the familiar into the unknown.

Beyond Saudade

I do not want to get carried away with over romanticizing the Portuguese. They are not the highest rank of angles but just human. Besides, while saudade is the Portuguese national identity not all Portuguese carry it with the same charm and good humor. Some Portuguese, like the leader of Portugal’s extreme far-right party, are cantankerously unwelcoming and infinitely unable to see themselves in the face of a migrant or a fellow citizen who’s views or lifestyle might be different.

Moreover, saudade carries strengths and weaknesses. I have enumerated the good qualities it bestows on the Portuguese, which wash over the rest of us as beneficiaries. Saudade can also make the Portuguese seem reticent as well as needlessly self-deprecating. Are they too hesitant to act, to defend or to lead? These are all questions the visitor might be left parsing over. One wonders as well why the economy of a country, which is full of such good, intelligent, capable and hardworking people, ranks well behind every other Euro Zone country.

I am going to hold off blaming the challenges of Portugal’s economy on saudade or its people. I hope as well that the EU Generation, now in its early and mid-30s, sees the challenges for what they are, opportunities. Portugal, in the next 30 to 50 years, has the ability to assume economic leadership with the type of innovation it exploded out to the world 500 years ago. Because it missed the Industrial Revolution and the Post War Boom it is not as tied to dirty industries and consumerism. Portugal has the opportunity to lead with green without undoing the messes of the past. Hopefully, it can and will. We will see. Vamos ver.

Abraço e até breve! Cheers and until next time.