The magic words

A progress report from Portuguese class and on our existential state.

A member of the staff at Eddine Gelados in Setúbal smiles for a photo. Our favorite gelato shop was closed over the winter. We survived those dark months, and when Eddine reopened this spring, everything was once again right in the world. Tudo bem.

It’s report card time again.

A few months ago, after my wife and I finished our first 11-week session of Portuguese lessons, I concluded that we’d acquired the language skills of toddlers. We’ve just finished another session and we feel much more sophisticated now. Like second graders, perhaps.

We’ve learned more verbs, even some irregular ones. We can form non-complex sentences on a wider range of topics. The other day, I ran into a non-English-speaking neighbor with whom, last fall, a discussion about whether it was raining or sunny was a major accomplishment. Now she and I had enough of a conversation for me to understand that she’s furious about the U.S. and Israel starting a war in Iran.

I’ve also started to crack the code involving sounds undetectable to mere mortals when Portuguese people speak at their usual warp speed.

“They just drop syllables and vowels,” we’d whine to our teacher.

“They say them,” she would reply calmly. “You just don’t hear them.”

This session, when we worked on new sentences, I’d sometimes ask her to repeat them fast like a regular speaker. She did, though probably still a bit more slowly out of compassion for us. We’d be disappointed by these examples of everything we still couldn’t hear. But acceptance is the first step, and now we’re unafraid to face reality.

If you want to hear some Portuguese, this is a delightful video about traditional Páscoa (Easter) foods and traditions. It’s even subtitled, so you can try to follow along and see how many sounds you aren’t hearing.

Before our next session begins in a couple of weeks, though, I need to get a grip on something from our previous session that still eludes me: how “em” (pronounced “I’m”), a word that does triple duty for “in,” “on” or “at,” combines with articles such as “um” (“one”) or “a” (“the”) for a contraction such as “na” or “no.” Don’t ask me to explain or provide examples.

I’m still struggling with another thing from our earliest sessions last fall: present tense (because we’re beginners) conjugations of the verb “to be” when it applies to a permanent state of being.

This should be easy because the “to be” verbs (at least the infinitives) are the same in Spanish, which I studied in high school and college. In both languages the “to be” verbs are some of the first things we learn, so we have lots of opportunities to recognize and practice.

• To be, when it refers to something temporary such as the weather or one’s mood = estar.

  Conjugations:

  • I am = estou

  • you are/informal = estás

  • you are/formal = está

  • we are = estamos

  • they are = estão

• To be, when it refers to something permanent such as one’s name or nationality = ser.

  Conjugations: I blank out.

This is not a metaphor. My inability to remember the easy word for a permanent state of being is concrete psychological resistance based on how our experience over the past year has proven nothing is permanent. Dog ate homework.

A greater confession is that instead of everything we’ve learned in the most recent session, I’ve been thinking mostly about a two-word phrase we learned on the first day of our first session back in October. It’s one corrective to my permanent+to-be problem.

The phrase is “tudo bem.” It means “all is well.”

First word is pronounced too-doo. Rhymes with doo-doo.

Second word, “bem,” sounds nothing like an English speaker thinks it should. The e makes a hard y sound, like “eye” or “buy,” and, as our teacher frequently says for words that end in m, lips don’t touch. It’s a nasal sound, like if “buying” were just one super-fast syllable and with a barely perceptible g at the end.

I’ve also heard it pronounced more like “bane.” Such variations do not trouble me because I understand what people are saying. It might just be their accent, which I’m starting to detect. It was a glorious day, a couple of months ago, when I was in line at a café and realized I could tell that the barista talking to another customer was speaking Brazilian Portuguese rather than European Portuguese.

Given the reward at the end, nobody really minds waiting in a line at Eddine Gelados. Tudo bem!

Here are some beautiful things about tudo bem.

It can be, and often is, both question and answer. A complete conversation can be:

Speaker 1: “Tudo bem?”

Speaker 2: “Tudo bem.”

We’ve had this conversation many times now with a neighbor who manages our apartment building. She speaks zero English, so in our earliest days we conducted all business through translated WhatsApp messages. But whenever we’d see her in the hallway she’d give us a big smile and say “Tudo bem?” Her question seemed multi-layered, like she was asking if everything was OK in the apartment at the same time as she was asking if we are existentially OK while also giving us a standard Portuguese greeting. “Tudo bem!” we replied.

“All is well” can feel like a meaningless cliché, but tudo bem seems to do real work. It’s something more than the polite but superficial (or insincere) exchanges so common with colleagues, acquaintances and strangers in the States. All those variations of “Hey, how you doing?” followed by variations of “Good thanks, how’re you?”

Lori discovered the power of tudo bem one day last fall at a store in Lisbon where another American had clearly worn out the shop owner’s patience. By the time that customer left with her purchases, Lori was embarrassed by the other American’s boorish behavior and nervous to be another American next in line. When she got to the counter, language-class-wisdom kicked in and Lori knew what to say and how to say it with genuine care.

“Tudo bem?”

The shop owner visibly exhaled and her demeanor changed. “Tudo bem,” she said warmly as she rang up Lori’s purchases. And Lori was happy to hand over some euros.

I had a similar experience a couple of weeks ago at a hospital. Establishing a relationship with a new primary care doctor here has involved a stream of routine tests. That day’s appointment was in the early evening on a warm spring day, and, unlike in the U.S., the hospital did not have air conditioning set to freezing. The waiting room was stuffy, and the man behind his computer at the check-in desk seemed cranky.

When he called my number, I remembered Lori’s experience.

“Tudo bem?” I asked.

He softened, took a deep breath and gestured toward the west window beside him, where the sun was setting outside.

“Está calor,” he said. It’s hot. (He said the first syllable of “está” so quickly that I couldn’t hear it; it sounded like “da calor.” But by then I knew that I never hear the first syllable of estar words; once you know that, you hear them everywhere.)

I didn’t have the skills to say I hoped his shift would be over soon. But I could nod and agree — “Sim sim” (“yes yes”; lips don’t touch with the m at the end of sim, more like “sing”).

(For those of you who are wondering: the hospital is as clean and high tech as any in the U.S. and the procedures were the same except that the doctors, nurses and technicians were more empathetic and seemed less rushed even though they were just as efficient.)

Tudo bem has worked well for us, but we are not naïve about its limitations. While the phrase seems to articulate something quintessential about the Portuguese way of life, we are acutely aware that all is not well here or anywhere else in the world. The phrase is not an expression of rosy optimism. Rather, at this stage of our life here and our understanding of the language, it feels to me like a way to emphasize what is truly good right now, right in front of us.

A native European Portuguese speaker might be puzzled, might roll their eyes, at an American growing all philosophical about this most basic of phrases. Someday far from now, after many more classes, maybe I’ll try to explain to a native European Portuguese speaker why I was so moved by these two words and ask whether I was making too much of them.

Or not. Maybe one of the cosmic gifts of this new language is allowing it to explain things to myself that I couldn’t comprehend in my native language, and letting that be enough.